Yet Another Value Empire: 2025 vision, superpowers, and saying no

Welcome to the Yet Another Value Empire (YAVE) in 2025!¹

To kick off the year, I wanted to break my “no navel gazing” rule to provide a detailed post with my plans and vision for my “empire” in 2025. I did something similar at the start of 2024, and I think it really helped me define what I wanted from the empire throughout the year (and I think it also holds up very nicely as a post; if you’re looking for more on how I think about my empire, I’d point you to that article).

Let me start off with an anecdote: in my December rambling, I mentioned a lot of different things (it is a rambling, after all!), but there was one particular section that got the most inbounds / questions / feedback. To sum, it was the following three bullets:"

• Wondering what separates the absolute top investors from merely good or average

• My “what is your superpower” question for framing and dismissing potential investments.

• This is very related to the “superpower” question, but I mentioned a friend who is specialized in one area and has an absolutely killer track record in it…. but then has an average overall track record because they spend a lot of time researching and investing in things outside of their specialization

I’ve been thinking about those questions / that feedback a lot recently, particularly when I’ve been thinking about my 2024 year in review. Perhaps I am using hindsight to pattern match, but when I look at my big 2024 winners I look at them and say “o yeah, that’s an investment that fits into my personal ‘superpower’”. It had some quirky forced seller, some weird event angle, some type of hidden value, etc. When I look at my big losers, I look at them and I’m not quite sure they fit into my personal superpowers. Take, for example, my big (and very public) loser in Spirit. I still can’t believe the judge ruled against Spirit…. but when I look at it in hindsight, I say “Andrew, you’re not even a lawyer, much less an antitrust lawyer (in fact, you start every pod on a legal situation by highlighting that repeatedly!). Was betting big on an antitrust case really the area where you had the most edge?”

Look, it’s a tough question. I had big and very public wins in Twitter and Liquidia, and both of those were court cases. Maybe I got lucky in those; maybe I got unlucky in Spirit. Maybe some combination! I don’t know; it’s something I’m going to be giving more thought going forward²!

I’m going to try to apply that “what is your superpower” framework to everything I do. Not saying I will be perfect at it, but my overall goal for 2025 is to focus more on applying my “superpower” (i.e. things I think I’m differentiated / bring value to) to everything I do, while getting better at saying no to things that don’t fit. So let’s talk about how that effects my empire. As a reminder, YAVE has four sides:

1. The public side of the blog (YAVB, what you’re reading right now)

2. The premium side of the blog

3. The podcast (YAVP)

4. Twitter (both my personal twitter and the YAVE twitter account, which I generally just use for tweeting out new YAVE posts)

Let’s start with the one that I think will have the most changes: the podcast (YAVP). Again, I will start this with an anecdote.

I was talking to Eric Speron before our podcast, and he mentioned a somewhat famous Charlie Munger quote / story. Munger said he had read Barron’s for 50 years, and in that entire time he found one investment. But the investment was such a no brainer that it made him $80m³.

To be honest, I approach every podcast kind of like Munger approached Barron’s. I generally do not have a position in the stock we’re discussing, and I’m generally not going to buy the stock after the podcast (if at all). But what I want is for the podcast to be really fun and informative for me, the guest, and the listener. If I do 300 podcasts and enjoy them all / learn something but never make an investment, I think that will have been a good use of my time…. but my hope is that on the 301st podcast something just hits and I say “o my god, this idea is the best I’ve ever heard” and then I go and make $80m off it. And I hope that’s how listeners enjoy / listen to the podcast too⁴!

How does that apply to the podcast in 2025?

I want to apply my “what is your superpower” rule and the “is there a chance I would pull a Munger and invest in this” rule to the podcast going forward…. so I’ll be turning down guests and ideas that I don’t think fit either of those criteria. An example might illustrate this nicely: there are a lot of really good investors who spend all of their time in phase 1 or 2 biotechs. Historically, if one of them reached out to come on the podcast with an idea they were super excited about, then I would have them on.

I don’t think that works for me anymore for two reasons. First, I’m extremely unlikely to make a big investment in a company whose key asset is a phase 1 drug, so the podcast wouldn’t fit my “Munger rule.” Second, while I’m sure a company with an early stage drug is interesting, it’s outside of my “superpower” wheelhouse for hosting a podcast, so the amount of questions / discussion I can have on the idea is more limited. That’s actually been one of my disappointments on the podcast; several times I’ve had really smart guests on to discuss ideas that were just so far out of my wheelhouse that I think I couldn’t do them justice in terms of spurring the conversation / providing good pushback.

So I’ll be turning down ideas and guests that I don’t think make a good fit for me for potential investments / interview. That probably means fewer podcasts and guests in 2025… but hopefully the remaining podcasts will be higher quality + more fun, and I’ll be able to spend more time researching / prepping for them⁵.

Ok, let’s turn to the blog. The blog consists of two sides: the public side (what you’re reading right now) and the paywalled / premium side. I think 2025 is going to be a continuation / extension of the trends I started in 2024. On the public side, there won’t be much / any discussion of single stocks; that will all go on the premium side. On the premium side, this sounds trite to say, but I’m increasingly trying to focus all of my ideas / investing on ideas that are firmly in my wheelhouse, so write ups there will certainly (hopefully?) follow that path. If that’s interesting to you, I’d encourage you to subscribe: (I guess I will pause here to note that the annual price on the premium side is increasing to $619 at the end of the week⁶, so if you’d like to be grandfathered in at the legacy prices you can subscribe now…)

The public side of the blog will focus mainly on my “weekend thoughts” pieces; every weekend, I try to sit back and put pen to paper on one thing in the market or investing that I’ve been spending time thinking about that week. For 2025, I’m going to try to do one of those every week, and then I’ll likely use those pieces to build on / discuss during my monthly random ramblings on the podcast.

To wrap this up, let’s quickly talk twitter. I have two accounts (my personal twitter and the YAVE twitter account); I don’t use either much. I’ll tweet out a thought every now and then on the personal account, and the YAVE account is mainly for announcing new posts… however, I am very active in the DMs, so please feel free to slide into them any time if you want to chat about anything.

Alright, that’s it for my vision for YAVE in 2025. Honestly, laying it all out, it sounds so small…. but I’m truly excited for what 2025 has to bring, and I hope you enjoy all the content this year!

1. For those unfamiliar, I (somewhat facetiously) consider Yet Another Value Blog (YAVB) and its associated products (mainly the podcast (YAVP) and the blog’s premium side, but also my personal twitter and YAVE twitter account) my mini-empire (which I’ve coined Yet Another Value Empire, or YAVE)

2. If I had to really challenge myself here, I would say Twitter and Liquidia were both much more unique and black and white cases, where as Spirit was a pretty cookie cutter anti-trust case. Maybe the rule should be you can do legal but only in novel cases, but there’s issues with that as well….

3. It appears the investment was Tenneco

4. Given I said “make $80m,” I will just go ahead and remind listeners of our legal and disclaimer as well as to do their own work / consult a financial advisor!

5. To point to some example podcasts, I did podcast #273 (with Kyle Mowery on DRVN) and #274 (with Chris Waller on WOSG) back to back. I remember thinking at the time how much fun I had doing those and how much I learned; those are the type of podcasts I want to exclusively record in 2025!

6. Why $619? As mentioned here, prime numbers only going forward! I also mentioned I was going to raise prices Jan 5, but I thought I was going to get this piece out before then, so I figured I’d slightly delay it so everyone could see my full vision before making a decision!