Bridger Pennington explains his father's advice to ride technological waves instead of fighting them. He sees multiple shifts converging around 2025-2026 in internet, mobile, and cloud, and is building investment funds to capitalize on emerging categories.
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My dad, who ran a massive multi-deca-billion-dollar family of funds, taught me this great lesson in life. He said, Bridger, when there's a tidal wave coming, he goes, I used to put up my arms and I would try to fight the wave. Sometimes, you know how we do that? I don't want that thing to happen. I don't want this to happen. He goes, I've learned over my age, just go with the wave. Get a boogie board, go with the wave, and adopt. He goes, when the internet came out, I kind of fought it. When mobile phones came out, I kind of fought it. When cloud computing came out, I didn't even know what cloud meant, I kind of fought it. I should have just grabbed my boogie board and gone with the wave. Right now we don't just have one wave, we have about 5 waves all hitting at once, and this doesn't happen all the time. This is— the last one was the internet about 25 years ago, and we are sitting in a moment right now, 2025 to 2026, where these waves are hitting. So how do you capitalize on these waves? There's a lot of ways you can do it. You guys can obviously think about your own business. What I do is I build funds. I want to build a fund that can actually aggregate capital to go invest in these categories.