Shape.

There’s a shape to how problems show up.

Not a metaphor. An actual shape — the thing underneath the thing, the part that keeps reappearing after you’ve talked yourself hoarse about specifics. A Salesforce architecture problem and a mispriced security and a bad decision about what to do on a Tuesday: same shape. Same handful of moves that work, same handful that don’t.

I used to think the skill was having more opinions. It turns out the skill is having fewer — but holding them across domains.

I went from engineering at Purdue, to running a small hedge fund, to building Salesforce for a living. None of it felt like a pivot. It felt like the same problem, wearing different clothes.

Graham’s whole idea, stripped of footnotes, is this: figure out what something is worth, then pay less. The gap between the two numbers is the margin of safety. It absorbs your mistakes. It absorbs the world’s mistakes. It’s how careful people survive uncareful markets.

Most of investing is a fight over the first number — what’s it worth. Graham’s move was to stop fighting. You’ll never nail it. So build in a gap wide enough that you don’t have to.

I use the same trick outside of stocks. Overbudget the code. Overstock the calm. Quote the deadline with air in it. A margin of safety is a professional humility tax you pay to the future.

The junior preferreds trade at roughly a quarter of their par value. If the companies are recapitalized — which they were designed to be, and which the courts keep gently nudging toward — the gap closes. You don’t have to be right about timing. You don’t have to be right about politics. You only have to be right that something worth a dollar shouldn’t cost a quarter forever.

This is not a hot take. It’s been my biggest position for twelve years. I’ve written eight books about it. The framework · the full thesis.

Eight vertical SaaS products on one Salesforce platform. Each one replaces a piece of software that costs a customer five figures a year. The spread between what that work is actually worth and what it’s currently priced at is the margin. My job is to close it, one install at a time.

Find the mispriced work. Ship the margin. Compound. What I build →