Eric Siu explains how to find investment opportunities that work: obsess over learning and hunt for contrarian deals that look weird to conventional private equity investors. The best opportunities are non-consensus and dismissed by everyone else.
So far in my career, I've been fortunate to find a number of investment opportunities that had the perfect ingredients of they were different and they were right. In order to continue to find those opportunities, you have to be obsessed with learning in general, but also to trying to seek out those opportunities. Now, these opportunities are usually not sent to you by someone in a private equity firm in a nice polished deck. They usually look really weird. They usually look like something that the private equity firm doesn't want to touch. And so one of the challenges in finding these opportunities is You find them, you have very high conviction, but you bring them to other people, and because they are non-consensus or contrarian, people say, that's crazy. What are you doing? I'm not investing in that.
