Shane Battier - The No-Stats All-Star - [Invest Like the Best, EP.304]

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Today's episode is a special one in a format that may turn into a series. It is a conversation between Ravi Gupta and Shane Battier. Ravi is a partner at Sequoia, one of our most popular past guests, and a good friend. Shane is Ravi's friend and one of the most successful basketball players ever, having won championships and awards at the high school, college, and NBA levels. I spent 10 years as a purely quantitative investor, so naturally I was obsessed with data in sports when I was meeting with prospective investors. Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, which chronicled the data analytics revolution in baseball, was my go to analogy to explain what I did. Moneyball, but for investing, I used that line for years. I've learned firsthand that it's wise to follow your curiosity, no matter how strange or different it may be. The podcast is just my curiosity tour, and years ago it led me to Sam Hinkey, who is himself on the Mount Rushmore of analytics in sports. Sam introduced me to Ravi. Then Ravi sent me Michael Lewis's article written about Shane called the no Stats All Star. I highly recommend you read it all. This serendipity around friends, data, investing and sports gave me an idea. Why not ask Ravi to interview Shane? There were so many valuable ideas in the Michael Lewis article, I thought we'd get even more in a real taped interview with someone that knew Shane well. And that's exactly what happened. Ravi likes the idea of playing for the front of the jersey, not the back. It's hard to imagine someone that's lived that more than Shane. Shane shares his story, lessons learned from various coaches and using data as an advantage. He also explains the four kinds of teams that he's encountered, which I found simple and memorable. I hope you enjoy this great conversation and if you have ideas for other iconic duos we could bring on in a similar format, DM me on Twitter. Thank you so much to Ravi and Shane for kicking off Thanksgiving week us all.

Shane, here we are Podcast. Looking forward to it.

I'm so excited. So excited. It's been a long time coming, baby. Let's do this.

That's right. I can't wait. All right, where to begin? We're in a bunch of topics today, but we got to start at no Stats All Star. And for those of you that don't know, it's an article that the one and only Michael Lewis wrote about my good friend Shane. And the article is a gold mine. I would encourage everyone to read it, but I'm going to Pick a quote for us to get started. Here it is. It involves a little dis of you, Shane, but it ends up pretty strong. Here we have a basketball mystery. A player widely regarded inside the NBA as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars, and yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win. I mean, it's a pretty cool sentence. So tell us about the article. Tell us about what people typically measure in basketball, and tell us what actually matters to winning.

Well, it's frigging Michael Lewis, all right? So I'm not taking any grief, any crap from anybody, but since it's Michael Lewis, I'll take that. Look, back in 2009, I got traded to the Houston Rockets. And the Rockets were interesting because they were the first team in the mid-2000s that used analytics as an organizational philosophy pejorative for basketball. Now, this had been happening in baseball for many, many years with Billy Bean and Theo Epstein, but no one had dared cross the analytic line in basketball until my good friends Darryl Morey and Sam Hinkey. Now, famed investor Sam Hinkey.

That's right, another investor. Like the best guest in the past. We just got to get Darrell on.

These guys are so smart. They changed the way that I looked at basketball. I had always been a player who made my living by doing the small things. Very, very unsexy things like running back on defense, diving for loose balls, taking charges. The plays that never, ever sell any jerseys in the merch store but are essential for winning basketball games. And for the first time ever, using analytics, we actually were able to measure the value of all these innocuous plays that before were just deemed intangible. And wouldn't you know it? That in Daryl and Sam's models and their algorithms, which was brand new to me, I popped as a tremendous player because I produce outsized value at a very reasonable cost.

All right?

I was very cheap. Cheap labor. Something we all aspire to find.

We all aspire to be as high ROI as you were, Shane.

Yeah, but not the person who actually is the high ROI player. Well, Michael Lewis found this very compelling, so he wanted to follow me around. He followed me around for a year, and he sort of dove into the story of why I did what I did. And it was interesting because it's like basketball's different than baseball. In baseball, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Okay, What I mean by that, if I wanted to maximize my incentives and my financial potential, I'm going To try to hit as many home runs as I can, I'm going to swing for the fence every single time. Because there is a definite correlation between dollars earned and home runs. Every team's trying to score runs, every team's trying to put points on the board, do that. But hitting home runs in basketball, if I want to maximize my financial impact for my life, I'd shoot the ball every single time. Because there's a strong correlation between points per game and your paycheck every two weeks. But we all know that if I'm shooting the ball every single time in basketball, we're not winning any games. As good a shooter as I was, Michael Lewis, who I love, I love spending time with him because I love to hear how he thinks. He was trying to get me to explain why I valued all of the little plays at a level that really no one else was doing in basketball. You know, much at the chagrin of my career, people did not think I was but an average NBA player. I wasn't very athletic. I was kind of slow, really good looking. But, you know, most fans didn't appreciate that. And so Michael Lewis wrote this article called the no stat all star. And it basically broke down the reason why every team I played on, when I was on the floor, the teams played at a championship level. And when I was off the floor, those same teams, they played at a.500 record level, barely a playoff team. And what we found was through analytics, through the stats, there's tremendous, tremendous value in all of the little plays that with big data now we're able to measure. And for whatever reason I had this special skill when I was on the floor, my teammates rebounded better, Even though my rebounding numbers were very, very modest, about four rebounds a game. When I was on the floor, my teammates shot better for some magical reason.

One of the things I always found was they describe almost basketball as a math problem and the points per possession and what the difference is when you do the right thing versus the wrong thing. Talk a little bit about some of those plays that you're mentioning and the impact on the points that ultimately matter in the game.

Well, it's kind of funny. When I met Darrell and Sam in Houston, they explained analytics to me and this is all brand new. And I was insanely curious about their methods. I think it's the reason why I had so much success, because I was so curious. They explained basketball math to me like I played blackjack in Vegas. They told me, like, hey, Shane, when you go to the blackjack table in Vegas and you get dealt pocket aces. What do you do? Well, you always split them. Why? That's what the book says. Well, why does the book say that? Well, that gives you the best chance, mathematically speaking, to have a positive expected value on that single hand. Does it mean you're going to win that hand? No. But if you sit at that shoe, you sit at that table for hours on end and always split aces, you're going to come out on top. Well, the same holds true for basketball. There are certain plays in the game of basketball that if you do repeatedly what the mathematically pure decision is over the long run, you will have success. You will stack all these positive ev plays again and again and again. Well, what do I mean by that? I was a really good defender and I knew that the toughest shot in the game was a two point elbow jumper which was 10 to 15 foot shot away from the rim. It was only worth two points on average. The average NBA player only made that shot about 42, 43% of the time. In a vacuum, if I allowed a guy like Kobe Bryant to shoot that shot a hundred times, all right, I can expect him on average to make it about 42, 43%. He's going to score about 80 to 85 points. Well, if I allow Kobe Bryant to get to the basket, which is the worst shot I can allow Kobe Bryant and what makes it great, it's like a 60% shot.

Oh wow.

In a vacuum, if I allow Kobe Bryant to get to the basket, he's going to score 120 points. So the math is pretty simple for me. I want Kobe Bryant to do the thing that will net him 82 points and not 120 points. So basketball for me became this one giant decision tree full of trade offs. And I was always trying to make the trade off that gave me the best chance of success and hurt my opponent to the fullest extent. And I knew over a large sample size, whether that's a game, whether that's a season series, whether that's over a course of a career, those numbers will bear out. Yeah. And so I became so obsessed with process, I cared not about result. Kobe Bryant put big, big games on my head and I left the game. I said I did exactly what I wanted him to do. Yeah, I just on the wrong side of variance. I but over the course of my career, the numbers always bear it out. And that's why a slow guy like me was able to have a 13 year championship winning career.

It's awesome. I mean the idea of in something that we watch so closely with so many people paying attention to it, that there's still places to find value that's not obvious to everyone and to put numbers against these plays that feel like you said intangibles. And the fact is like, no, it's actually quite tangible. One of my favorite examples you've given me is the fact you didn't foul very much. The fact that the worst thing you can do is foul somebody because even if they're a 70% free throw shooter, that's 1.4 points on the possession. And you told me an average possession is one point. All right, so then you mentioned this obsession and the other thing that comes out in the article is preparation. They talk about the fact that Darryl and Sam would give you a 30 page binder of information and you'd study it for hours before the game. And so that kind of bears the question of do you think you prepared more than your great teammates or do you think you prepared differently or both? Because there is this question of the role that preparation plays in doing something different than everybody else.

I prepared smarter. Look, it was a big learning curve to understand analytics, understand the trade offs between, okay, allowing a corner three point shot was worth 1.2 points and allowing a three pointer from the top of the wing, it's 1.1. So we're talking hundreds of points here, tens of points. Once I understood sort of the rubric of where all the trade offs were, I knew exactly where to look in a scouting report so I could get 30 pages of scouting report and in 10 to 15 minutes before a game, I had my routine and I could distill all of that information and apply it. So I wasn't reinventing the wheel every single night. There were some certain no no's that were stuck. Don't foul anybody, don't give them a transition shot, don't allow them an open three point shot. Okay, across the board, any NBA player, that's where they really, really hurt you. Now you get into the nuance of look, I knew when Kobe Bryant went to his left hand it was a 42% shot, but when he went to his right hand it was a 62% shot. So understanding to that granular level of advantage, it pays off. I knew that. And so I was always voracious about left right splits and jump shot splits. I wanted the fire hose and I knew after much practice what was applicable and what wasn't. And I wasn't very fast, but my skill was, I could think every single play I could think every single second. And that sounds kind of stupid, but my awareness of where I was in the court, who I was guarding, what the game situation was, was something that came very, very natural to me, and I was able to leverage that to create huge, huge advantages when I was on the court.

That doesn't sound stupid. You think about. You and I both play golf. I mean, think about when someone tries to tell you to change something in your swing and then how hard it is to get out of your head when you're trying to change it. I think the skill of being able to put that stuff into practice right after reading it and then changing your behavior when you're in the midst of a game, that's pretty unique. One thing that comes up, Shane, that I think about for investing or business or whatever, the curiosity point, that's a big deal. And then another thing that's catnip for an investor is when you find somebody who is running a business or whatever, who's just obsessed with the details, who actually goes and spends all the time to make it second nature. So there are a lot of parallels, and it's interesting to hear it. Yeah.

What don't I know that's terrifying to me? If I'm guarding LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, the greatest players in the world, I want to know everything about them. I want to know what they had for breakfast. I never wanted to go on the floor because they're so good that I always felt if I didn't have every piece of information on them, I'm in trouble. It's no different than Sequoia. And so the greats are voracious. Voracious about information.

Yeah.

Voracious about having an awareness of what do I lack in terms of knowledge and how can I correct that? And look, I wasn't naturally talented enough to overcome that. My advantage was large amounts of data being able to process that. So give me the fire hose, baby.

I love that. I think also to your point, on, like, it being like, investing or being like Sequoia, I do think there's a paranoia of, oh, my gosh, if I haven't done everything that I can do to get to the right answer or give myself the best chance of success, I mean, what am I doing? This game is hard enough as it is, and I think that there's, like, a respect for it that's evidence that comes through, that preparation. All right, so this is something else that's interesting. You talked a bunch. You were a role player, but you embraced that and you embraced it because you believed it would help the team win. And that was the best thing you could do. You've also told me before that Coach K of our shared alma mater that you probably have a bit more of a distinct relationship with him than me as a fan. But you said that he talked about how everyone's a role player. I think that's a fascinating concept that applies outside of basketball. Talk about that, talk about what he told you and talk about what it felt like to be a role player later. Given that kind of discussion from Coach

K. Well, I joke that I was a modest player. I averaged a very modest stats. But people forget I was the national high school player of the year back in 1997. I was the National Defensive Player three times, National Player of the Year 2001, as well as being like one of the best role players of all time. So I've seen every role. Yeah, I've lived every role. I waved the towel, I've hit winning shots, I've done it all. The mentality never changes. It never changes. It's what can I do to help my team win? And when I got to Duke in four years, our record was 131in Duke 15. We won a lot of games. When I retired, we were the winningest four year period in college basketball history. We had a lot of talent. We had 10 to 13 McDonald's All Americans, which is the highest level of high school player at any given year. And Coach K's message to us was, look, you guys were all great high school players, but when you come to Duke, you are all role players. Now there's a difference. Your role may be to go out and score 20 points and grab 10 boards, but that role is no more, no less important than being the sixth man being called upon when we have an injury going and start, it's no more or less important than the walk ons who have to practice and be in shape and know the scouting report better than I have to know it so that we're the most prepared team out. So if everyone plays their role, it's amazing what gets accomplished. We had a lot of star power, but there was never a star system at Duke. We all looked at each other as, look, we're Duke and you wrote an amazing blog on your play for the

the front of the jersey.

The front of the jersey and not the back. And I've played for so many great coaches. The great Shuby Brown from the Memphis Grizzlies hall of Famer, like a grandpa to me, he Said, listen, Jack, when you win, you all ride the same train uptown.

I love that.

What he meant by that is, like, look, when you win, people just want what you have because you're part of a winning team. No one gives a crap about your stats or your titles. They just say, oh, man, you won. Let me wear your ring. So I tell young people all the time, the way you create value for yourself is being part of winning teams, winning cultures. And people will naturally want you on their team because they think you have some magical ability to make their teams better. It's not the other way around. It's not the Instagram world where it's me, me, me, me, me, and someone's going to recognize I'm so great and just pluck me away. No, be a part of a winning team, because when you win, you take the same train uptown.

And Shane, the thing that's so interesting about that, and there's two big takeaways for me from there. One, I think the expression and the language of everyone's a role player, there is so much value in that. As you think about companies appreciating different people and getting everyone to get going and buy in. You and I talk about buying in all the time, but that's such an important element. And this idea of everyone's a role player, it's just different roles that each person's playing. There's real value in that outside of basketball. And then the second thing on the winning team was you got to sacrifice something in basketball or in sports, sometimes to be on the winning team, you got to play a different role. The crazy thing about business is if you're on a winning team, you actually make more money, too. Think about it. The only way you get paid in the NBA is if you win a championship. That's how it is in my world. And so part of the thing to me, when I try to get people to, like, play for the winning team, play for the front of the jersey, I'm like, that's the way to be selfish. And it also happens to be a hell of a lot more fun.

Absolutely. You have to have a game at some point. You have to have faith in, do I have the talent? Do I belong here? And look, for a long time I thought I was an imposter and didn't belong until I sort of calm myself down. And once you reach that point, you say, you know what? I belong in the game. Here I can add value. That's amazing. What you can let go of and really give yourself to the team. And the journey for the championship cause.

Well, this is a great segue to one of my favorite stories as well as my favorite things about you. You are obsessed with being a good teammate, obsessed with winning. I told people this before, but the first time that we had lunch together, I went to the bathroom as soon as we got sat down. And as I came back, you had picked up a napkin from the table and you were wiping my chair because you had noticed a little bit of moisture or something on the chair. And I remember thinking, I was like, that's like something my mom would do. It's just not like a behavior that happens all the time. It's not just on the basketball court. It's the most esteemed honor of being the commissioner of our fantasy football league. Shout out to the goat bar and all the work you do for that. But where does that come from? Where does this obsession come from of being a good teammate of winning? Mike Moritz from Sequoia has this idea of everything that influences you and endures happens before you're 14 years old. Is that true for you?

Absolutely. So blessed to have amazing parents who sacrificed everything to give me every opportunity. And so I was always super grateful for any opportunity. And not only opportunity for me, but opportunity for us. And look, growing up in Detroit, I had a very unique childhood. My dad passed away a few years ago. Big Ed, big black guy, only black guy in town, and a white mom. So I had no role models. There was no one like me who was mixed. No one I could talk to. My parents understand. We didn't have much money. You know, I had iron on patches on my clothes, and I couldn't buy Jerbo jeans.

I love the shout out to Jabot. I couldn't buy Jerbo jeans either. And I remember being so envious.

But 1990, I mean, just not cool. And I was, like, super tall. I didn't fit in with my friends because I looked like I was a foot taller than everybody else. So I always stuck out. I was poor. I looked funny and big ears, and I was mixed. And so I was an outcast by 4th, 5th, 6th grade standards. I was an outcast. But I realized that, look when my teams won at recess, on the basketball court, on the sand lot, and I helped my friends win. They loved me and wanted me on their team. And so I became obsessed with not what do I need to do to stick out, but what can I do to help my friends win. And it was really the seminal lesson that I carried throughout my career that it's Always, always been about the team. What are we doing? And I wouldn't have it any other way.

That's so good. That insight from Moritz of the before 14 being the enduring motivation. It has never failed. And that was so cool to hear. All right, you talked about Big Ed, obviously an amazing coach of yours. You've kind of alluded to Hubie. You've alluded to Coach K. Svolstra. Most people on this podcast are never gonna get to play for coaches like that. Hopefully we're fortunate enough to be around leaders who inspire us. What are some of the things that those folks did to inspire you and to identify what mattered to you and whether that's specific to you or generalizable? What were some of the things that they did? And be as specific as possible, because none of us are ever going to get to play for those folks.

You know, look, the hall of Fame coaches I play for, Eric Spoelstra, Rick Adelman, hall of Fame, Mike Fratello, Brown, Coach Keener from Country Day, Coach K, Big Ed. They were all amazing CEOs of their team. They all exhibited competency. I'll never forget Mike Fratello. Every time he walked into a game, there was, like, writing that was about a centimeter high on the board, just filled with everything other team might do. There were no like, if, ands or buts. Like, there was no gray area on the scouting report. We knew exactly what our job was to do that night, and we trusted him because we knew that he put the work in and he was competent. We talk about benevolence. Shuby Brown was an amazing, amazing coach. He was really hard to play for. There were days where he would swap spit with every player and call him, you know, MFer and all this stuff. But he had a rule. He said, no matter what happens today, we'll always start new tomorrow. Which is, like, a tremendous, tremendous thing to do for a leader.

Totally.

He may cuss you out and call you every name in the book, but next morning and say, hey, how are the dogs doing? How's your kid? He would live, that he would never carry over something the next day. And it's hard not to love a person that does what he says he's going to do. You know, all these coaches show tremendous integrity. Coach K never showed up unprepared, and he never showed up without enthusiasm. Sure, he had bad days, but he was always, hey, let's get better today. Let's be a team. Let's talk. Let's play to the standard of Duke basketball and if we didn't match his level, we heard about it. And so it was a habit that is ingrained in us. We need to show up every single day. Look, when you play for great coaches like this, I was so blessed to play for hall of Fame coaches. And there's a belief that leaders can instill in a team. And sometimes it's like an irrational belief, but it's the difference. And it reminds me of back in 2001, on my senior night, we were the number one team in the country, one of the favorites to win the national championship. And my senior night against University of Maryland, we lose the game. Our starting center, Carlos Boozer, breaks his foot and like you would have thought that, like, we're done. And I threw a pity party that night. My teammates threw a pity party that, like, here we are, national champion favorites, and we may lose our next three games. We had to go to North Carolina for the season finale, go to Atlanta for the ACC tournament and then the NCAA tournament in a few weeks. And Coach K brought us to the gym and he actually kicked us out the next morning because we sulky. And he's like, you're not my team. This is not Duke basketball. So when you're ready to come practice, come back in the gym. We have the cliche team meeting, like, all right, coach, we're ready to practice. We trudge out there. And everyone had written us off at this point. No Carlos Boozer, no chance. And to a man, he goes down the line to each of us and says, do you believe in me? And we all said, yes, if you believe in me, we will win a national championship. We're all like, is he joking? But he was so convicted. He was so convicted, have so much confidence that at our lowest moment as a team, we had the most self doubt. He said, if you listen to me and execute my new plan, we will be national champions. So he had developed that trust and that integrity, said, all right, let's do it. And so great leaders are able to change more. So at that point, said, look, we're going to try to shoot 50 three pointers per game. This is kind of before the three point revolution.

This is 20 years ago. Yeah, 20 years.

So he's way ahead of his time. We're going to overwhelm these teams with our speed and our three point shooting. We're like, all right. And so we go to North Carolina, we're, I think, like 10 point underdogs. We beat them by double digits, go to Atlanta, win the ACC championship miraculously. Carlos Boozer gets healthy enough to play. We go to Minneapolis. We actually win every game in the NCAA tournament by 10 points, beat Arizona in the finals, and go down as one of the greatest teams of all time in college basketball. And three weeks prior to that, we had our lowest moment where we thought we may lose the next three games and just be a skid mark in the underwear of history.

That's quite a visual, Shane.

I lived it. And the power of belief and the power of those bonds that are forged. And that's not something you wake up and say, okay, today we're going to be a team. No, those are all the habits you develop over the year. All the adversity, all the highs, the lows. When your team's in trouble, that's when you lean on it.

Yeah.

You don't just invent that that day. And so that's the power of coaching. Power of coaching and the power of belief.

Oh, that's so awesome. I think even the most fervent Duke hater can learn something from that. I think there's this concept of leadership, of believing in the team more than they believe in themselves, and that's that. I mean, he was there. You know, you talk about what leaders can do with a team. One of my favorite things that I think you should be doing as a TED talk is the four types of team. You have this idea of there's trust and mission and the different quadrants. Talk about that and talk about those four different types of teams and what kinds of teams respond and what kind of teams don't. But I think describing that will be valuable for people.

I've studied a lot about teams and championship dynamics and in my opinion, the two most fundamental aspects of any team are trust in each other and mission focus. What's our goal? Why are we here? And every team that ever played, whether it's a corporation organization, a board, a basketball team, they sort of fall in sort of four types of buckets. First team is characterized by low trust and low focus. Low mission focus. We call that a disastrous team. That's just a bad team. They don't trust each other. When times get tough, they give up. They say it's too hard. This is a non starter. And if you were part of a disastrous team, you may need to find a new team. That's not true. I was part of a disastrous team when I was a rookie with the Memphis Grizzlies. I got drafted by the Memphis Grizzlies, sixth pick in the NBA Draft, 2001, and I left Duke, which Was the winningest program over a four year period. And I got drafted by the Grizzlies, which had the lowest winning percentage of the four North American sports. Baseball, basketball, football, hockey. So literally I went from the penthouse to the outhouse and I saw what a disastrous team was all about. Yep, first day of the mile run, a one mile run. We had guys who couldn't even finish a mile run as preseason conditioning. In the NBA. In the NBA. I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm. I'm in the NBA. I gotta be the best shape. And so I run like five minute mile. I'm not very fast, but I was like fast. And there were guys who could not run four laps around the track. And I said, whoa. Wow. And so I learned what a disastrous team was. Lack of trust, lack of communication, lack of focus. And we won 23 games that year and it was a disaster. The next type of team is called a lagging team. And a lagging team is characterized by a team that actually has high trust and they like each other, but low mission focus. And on paper, this is great. There's no drama, there's no clicks. Like everyone kind of gets along, but there's not really a drive. And that was sort of the next chapter for my Memphis Grizzly team that we actually sort of got rid of the bad eggs. But we didn't have guys who understood how to win. So we liked each other. And an interesting phenomenon that happens in lagging teams is rate busting, but the negative connotation. So if Larry is on the assembly line, Larry's a very subpar riveter. But Larry, great softball player, we love his kids. He's clean up on the softball team. He's a good time, but he is a inefficient worker. What actually happens is people who work on his line will slow their rate to protect Larry because they trust him and like him so much as a manager. That's a losing team in the long run. Now the opposite of that team is what's called the brittle team. Like peanut brittle, these teams are characterized by high mission focus, but low trust. And on paper, again, this is awesome. I got a bunch of absolute killers who just want to create EBITDA and just lay waste the competition. And I'm going to go get it. But the problem is when stress is introduced to the system in the form of a recession or a competitor, teams that lack trust fall apart. They're brittle because all of a sudden everyone will start trying to go Kobe and solve the Problem themselves. And again, in any group, the strength of your team is always together of a solo effort. Well, that leads us to what does a championship team look like before you get there?

I think a lot of investment firms end up falling victim to either the lagging team or the brittle team. They all like each other, but they're not focused on performance. Or they're all focused on performance, but they hate each other when the times get tough. And I think that there's real failure modes in both those. And that's true for a ton of companies.

Yeah. So what does a championship team look like? I call them coherent teams or gelled teams. How do you know you're part of a gelled team? Gelled teams have a shared accountability. Whether the results are good, bad, and different. They know that this outcome was a result of process and protocols that we all contributed to so we can accept the consequences. Good, bad, indifferent. There is a shared cognition. Gel teams just sort of know, like, what each other need. They don't look at feedback as, I'm being attacked. Get off my back, bro. They look at feedback as like, my teammate's trying to help me, and he's trying to help us reach our goal. There's a shared resilience. Teams that often face adversity actually get better. They invite adversity. They are antifragile, and they look at the market and say, no, we're ready for this. We're prepared, and our competition's falling apart because they're brittle. We're lagging. We're better. There's a shared enjoyment. You just love coming to the office. You love being part of this group. A shared eliteness, a shared identity, you know, And I played for the Miami Heat. You know, we go out and we'd play a game in Charlotte on a Tuesday night and say, look, guys, we got bigger goals than the Hornets. They just want to play off the season. We want to be immortal. Our goals are different. And there's low turnover to gel teams. There's the thought that, like, you'd be crazy to leave this team, this organization, because who has it better than us? Nobody.

Yeah, nobody.

Yeah. That's the goal of every leader, every group, every department. You want your team to have accountability and resilience and cognition and sense of identity and low turnover. You got that? Hold onto that, baby. That's money right there.

I love that so much. And I think anyone who hears about the coherent or the gel team, they want to be on one. And if they're on one, they're thanking Their lucky stars and they're not on one. What can you do to move? Let's just leave the disastrous team out. But what do you do if you're on a brittle team? So you got the people, they got the mission orientation, but they don't trust each other. How do you go from one of the other quadrants into the gelled team? And what role does coaching or leaders play? Because like, is it the players that make that happen or the teammates, or is it the coach or is it everybody?

It can happen two ways. It can happen from top down and from the bottom up. When I played for the Memphis Grizzlies, it was both. But like, I'm super proud that we took that team that was the worst team in North America and three years later we made the playoffs. How'd we do that? Well, it started with just identifying a few people who cared, who had high trust and who had a high mission focus. And you know what? Those people, for me was my good friend Paul Gasol and I, who cared and wanted to be part of a winner. Now he's a Hall of Famer. And we started doing the right things. We started staying late, we started to support our teammates. We didn't make excuses, we didn't throw people under the bus in the media. And it's funny, like people who are sort of on the fence and maybe not leaders, guess what? Their behavior started to skew towards being part of a gel team. Yeah, you could see the behaviors and the habits just change. It didn't happen overnight, but the repetition and positivity. We started to win a few more games and we said, you know what? We got something here, we got something here. And all of a sudden in the locker room, the malcontents, they were so obvious. They were so obvious who was holding us back. They kind of self select and they weed themselves out. And they became so apparent that like, these guys are not with us. Get them out of here. And the pure pressure of a group is so strong, it can turn people bad. It can also really positively impact a team. And so from the bottom up, creating that positive social peer pressure and expectation that this is what we're about when we come to the office. This is why we try to win championships. And obviously it's the job of the leadership from top down to reinforce that every single day, every single day, Coach K. Every single day. We knew what it meant to play for Duke basketball. There was not a day we said, man, I wonder what our standards are. Our standards are we communicate more than everybody Else, we look each other in the eye when we're talking and we don't lie to each other. Those are the three standards to do basketball that we talked about every single day. And it's exhausting for a leader, but the great ones do it, man.

There's so much in there. I think that the positive peer pressure, the be part of the we, the self selection, the everydayness of the everyday grind that comes from leadership, but then the possibilities that come from that. And then the other thing you mentioned that you and I, I think, share a lot of love for is this concept of antifragility and just for everyone. Shane does live this where he extends it outside of everything. It's in the friendship. I mean, when Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017 is now five and a half years ago, I called Shane, I said, man, this is a big one. What are we going to do? I was trying to make sure we were there and we could make something work. And Shane sent me an email I still treasure to this day. And I'll read you guys. There's this paragraph that it closes with. It's something that's always meant a lot to me, but it ends with, you have a chance to become antifragile. You remember sending this, Shane?

I do.

How lucky you are. You get better with chaos and adversity. Staying with your plan, keeping the troops morale, high reinvention, but strengthening your pillars and foundation. You'll come through the other side galvanized. We'll look back and say, yeah, no shit. Of course Ravi had everything under control. He's a boss. But we'll laugh because you're just doing what you're there to do. And then we'll go to Napa and drink the really expensive shit. The concepts of that coherent team and gelled team, that's one of my favorite things to aspire to and to be proud of when you're part of one.

Yeah, the line is thin, my brother. The line is thin. And winners read the history books. Champions write the history books. But in any championship journey, there's always that line where you're like, oh, shit, we may not make it in 2012. I go join the Miami Heat. I'm playing with LeBron D. Wade, Chris Bosh. You know, we won two championships and people are like, yeah, of course it was inevitable. Yeah, people forget we were down 3 to 2 to the Boston Celtics playing Game 6 in Boston in the Eastern Conference finals. There are articles written that morning saying when the Heat lose tonight to Boston, who is the first player to get shipped out. So we all know this. We know it like, if we lose this game, they're blowing up this team. We all have new addresses next year. The grand experiment, the big three, it fails. So we're talking like major mud on all of our resumes. And there's no like big rah rah speech. But lucky when you got a guy named LeBron James pretty good. I don't know if you've heard, LeBron goes out and he was like, he looked possessed. He looked possessed because he knew his entire legacy was based on that single game.

Yeah.

And so that was how thin the line was. He goes out, scores 45 grabs, 15 and 6 assists, couple blocks, dunks on Jason Terry, almost kills him. Like historic, historic performance given the most pressure he's ever had his entire life. We go on beat Boston Game 7, go on to win the NBA championship, and people don't realize how small that line was, how thin that line was between ubiquity and immortality. Now we can laugh about it and say, yeah, it was inevitable. Well, it wasn't inevitable at that point. That is what you appreciate. You appreciate going to the edge and questioning everything and saying, no, no, no. The process has been pure. It's been right. We're about the right things. We just need to continue to do what we do. Coach K said, you don't need to reinvent yourself in championship games, but you do have to be the best version of yourself. That's how you get through adversity. You don't need to reinvent and start going yolo and changing what you do, but you need to be the best version of who you are in the toughest times. That was true. Thank you, LeBron. I love you.

Well, let's talk about that same thing. You talk about the team and I know you're not going to want to do this, but talk about yourself. That same journey of the thin line between the championship and irrelevance, because that happened, that happened for you in that playoff series against the spurs. That happened in that entire playoffs. And I think it's a good microcosm.

Yeah, well, I've also lived it personally. In 2013, I was the starting power forward for the Miami Heat. All 215 pounds of me. And so every night I guard guys 30, 40, 50, 60 pounds heavier than me, and they just beat the hell out of me. Well, I could do one thing. I could shoot that rock. And so I shot a career best 43% in a few point line that year going in the playoffs. We're the favorites, feeling good, making threes, but I'm exhausted and something happens. I go through the worst slump my entire career, can't hit a shot and I'm embarrassed. I feel I'm letting the team down and I'm getting beat up. I'm just like trying everything come out of this rut to a point where I'm 4 for 30 from the 3 point line. They're writing articles about me in Miami. Twitter's talking about me. So before game seven of the Eastern Conference finals against our rivals Indiana Pacers, I go to Eric Spoelster our coaches. I coach like I know. I've been horrible. This is what I'm built for. Game seven, you put me in that game, I'm gonna do something. And Coach Spo says yes. Shane. Well, I go to the gym that night, I don't play in the first quarter. Halftime rolls around, no playing time. Third quarter, still have all my warmup stuff on. Fourth quarter up, 40 points going. Last four minutes of the game. It's apparent we're going to beat the Pacers, go back, play the spurs in the championship. Who was the only player not to get in the game? Me. Oh, it was the first time on any level from YMCA ball to the NBA, I had the words dnpcd, did not play. Coach's decision. First time a coach said to me, without saying to me, shane, our best chance of winning does not involve you one second on the court. And so I'm crushed. So we're going back to the finals. But I'm thinking to myself, is this it? Am I done? Am I washed? You know, I've had a heck of a run here. Is this how my career ends? So I had a pity party that night. The next morning I said, you know what? That's not who I am. If I'm not playing, I'm going to be the most prepared, the most enthusiastic. I'm going to help my teammates prepare, and if I get my chance, I'm going to produce. So I don't play for the first half of the series. Game five, I get in the game, bank in a three, you know, I get the Bronx cheer from the crowd. Game six, I make a couple threes. Well, here we are, Game seven of the NBA Finals in Miami. Something every kid dreams about. So I don't need to make a speech this time, but if I get in, I'm letting it fly. It's going up. Start the game, five for five from the three point line, end the game. NBA Finals. Game seven record six for eight from the three point line, score 18 points and we win the championship. And when the clock hit zero, it was unexpected to say the least. I wasn't even expecting that sort of performance. But when the clock hit zero, I finally understood what the entire journey was. From Little League, playing for Big Ed when I was a kindergartner to the NBA Finals. The work, the sacrifice, the process, the failure, the success, it all led me to that moment. And I was ready to capitalize because it wasn't about me, it was about again, what do I need to do for my team. And that's the most proud I've ever been of an individual performance in my entire career. Because it came at the most stressful time, with the most on the line. It was about us. It was never about me and you and the team.

You went to the edge, you know, you went to the edge and then it was sweeter because of that. And I think that that's true for companies too. I mean, like, you gotta taste the, oh my gosh, this thing might not work and I might be failing in order to come through on the other side and feel like you earned it. And that's the happiness that comes from that. Well, this is interesting, Shane. One thing, businesses don't have these trophy moments the same way that athletics does. You have a championship. This is what we're going toward in business or in investing. If you don't have those same kind of trophy moments necessarily, how do you motivate? How do you get everyone around a shared mission when the mission is not quite as obvious? And year by year, how do you do that and how have you seen great leaders do that? What have you observed? I know you spent a lot of time with companies, what works.

QB Brown did something really genius for a team that was trying to learn to win. And this is the Memphis Grizzlies. He came in and totally changed the culture. And when you play in the NBA, you play 82 games a year, and that's a lot of games. It's tough to stand in game one and say, I want to win 50 games this year. It just, the season is so long, it's such a grind, you can't even like wrap your head around it. So he did something very, very simple for a team learning to win. He said, look, we're going to break up our entire season into sets of three home games and three road games. That's all we're going to worry about. And our goal is to win two out of three home games and one out of three road games, we do that, we will be 500 at the end of the year. Win 41 games, we'll be close to the playoffs. And it sounds so simple, but that's all we focused on. If we won two games, we would say we have a chance to get a plus game. Guys, there are these little micro goals that we had for a young team that was learning to win, which in retrospect was an amazing part of a stretch goal for people trying to figure it out. You do have to make it bite sized and you have to celebrate the process and it can't be so grandiose that people can't get their arms around it. I learned that from Hubie and that was a big reason why two years after implementing that system, we won 50 games a couple times, made the playoffs and totally change the culture.

Oh, that's cool. I like that. One of my favorite statements in business is this idea that I heard from someone which is you got to translate your mission into your metrics. But what you're talking about is input metrics, not just output metrics. Not just about the 50 wins, not just about the championships. Just like, let's go do the right stuff, it'll show up and if we do that consistently, it'll show up in the output metrics. So just let's go and take the big problem and turn it into some smaller ones. When you think about again, take it from basketball to business. You mentioned your no stats all star. That was a great descriptor that Michael Lewis gave you. How do you find those people in a company? What are the characteristics? And if you're a leader or somebody listening to this, or if you are somebody, who is that? What are the characteristics that make somebody that outside of athletics, from a leadership

standpoint, you have to be obsessed with your people. That's your job. Coach K was so obsessed with his people to the point where, like, he never saw me play in the NBA, not one game live. He was so focused on his own guys. Like no one would ever call him during the season because all he would talk about is his own team. He was so obsessed about what his people needed and what he needed to give his people. When I was a junior, Duke had just lost players to the NBA draft for the first time ever. All right, my roommate, Elton Brand, William Avery Trajan Langdon graduated. Corey McGetty left for the draft. All that was left was some really talented freshmen named Carlos Boozer, Jay Williams, Mike Dunleavy, and three holdovers, Chris Carroll, Nate James and Shane Battier. And people were like, badier, like badier is going to replace Elton Brand, the first pick in the draft. I probably had my doubts too. And so Coach K knew this. And so I was interning at a public relations firm in Chicago and he called me one day and said, hey, Shane, like, how are you doing? Great. I have a question. Did you wake up thinking about being the ACC player of the Year next year? And I sort of laugh. Come on, Coach, quick. Coach K hung up on me. It's kind of weird. So he calls back the next day about the same time. Sorry about that. Shane. I got a serious question. Did you go to work today and say to yourself, I'm going to be first team All American and get us back to the Final Four? Sort of laugh, oh, Coach Click again. And the third day he calls back, I finally wised up and he said, oh, sorry about the shame. I got a very serious question at lunchtime today. Did you think about being the national player of the year, going back to the Final Four and finishing the job this year and winning the championship? And I said, coach, absolutely, I'm your guy. You can count on me. And he said, look, son, we can't be that team unless you are that guy. And you cannot be that guy until you believe you are that guy. And so that only comes with having intimate knowledge of your personnel, your people understanding, like I had some insecurities and that's the pep talk that I needed. Look, when you were trying to identify these positive energizers in any organization, there was a study, actually a Butler School of Business study that I inspired, who are catalysts within organizations. So they did a wide study across a multitude of industries and professions and they found catalysts who were like me, who maybe go overlooked and undervalued, but they share a lot of traits that actually are an amazing engine to any group structure, any corporate structure. And the shared traits of humility, selflessness, a desire to see teammates or others do better self starters, people who listen well, people who laugh at themselves, people who ask pertinent questions, people who are present, people who are just ready. In other words, all of these attributes, they're not like God given. You didn't learn this at Duke University or Stanford Business School. These are just all traits that you control. You control humility, you control your selflessness, you control your work ethic. And the people that control Those to the 95th to 100 percentile, those are the people that are adding tremendous, tremendous value to your group and your organization. And it's your job as a leader to identify those people. Don't look at the resume, don't look at the hard skills. You have to look at the soft skills of attributes and traits that people develop because they want to develop them.

You know, it's fascinating because that's true in so many walks of life. I think about that we probably try to tell our kids that of you got to focus on what you control. You decide your level of aggressiveness, you decide your level of enthusiasm, you decide how good you are to your teammates. And I think that the other thing that you mentioned a bunch is just sort of the everyday nature of leadership, which is that you have to know your team well enough to know what to say. That's not the canned speech that Coach K gave you. Right. It's a speech that was relevant for you. And then this is interesting thing about founders, it's not the resume that does it. It is truly a bunch of these other things. And a lot of it, Shane, is like you and I have talked about. It's whether other people will want to come with them because you can't build it by yourself and whether people are going to want to come with them on that journey for a long time.

Yep.

And so it's amazing the level of applicability of some of this inside and outside of it.

And people have a pretty good detector. Yeah. For the most part, you know, there's always a few of the slip through the cracks. People may not always have the answers of the correct way to go down the path, but they often know this ain't the way, homie. The antenna goes up. So again, to be pure of spirit, pure of the journey, pure of team, it comes out and people will appreciate that and follow you.

I love that. Well, look, this thing could go on forever like some of our zooms do. But we probably need to wrap. So let me wrap with this has been an unbelievable conversation. Let me wrap with Patrick's signature question, which is what is the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for you?

Well, this is easy. It's the sacrifice my parents made for me to have every opportunity. My parents were not college educated people. They didn't know anything about investing. They didn't know anything about getting a master's degree or doctor degree. But they knew enough to surround me with books and people that had much more success in terms of professional success that they couldn't provide me. They sacrificed a ton to get me to Detroit Country Day. They scrounged together every last dollar to make sure they could pay for an education and just a chance. And I saw what it meant to go to a fantastic school like Duke and have success and have aspirations and dreams to change the world. And they sacrificed everything for me to have that opportunity. Man, they drove me around to every single basketball practice and AAU tournament in the country. This is before their phone. So they just sat there and watched me practice so that I look at that now and I can never, ever, ever repay my parents for what they sacrificed in the kindest way possible so I could live my dream.

Shane, thank you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for your friendship. It's something I'm eternally grateful for. I had a great time doing this with you, Ravi.

Always surround yourself with people that are smarter than you, more compassionate than you, and you are that guy for me. I love you.

I love you too, buddy.

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Sam.