Large Cap Investing During Volatile Markets

TRANSCRIPT

What else? We don't have any investments in the energy sector, obviously; that sector is being disrupted and avoiding that and I think with the rise of alternative forms of energy and electric vehicles, the long-term outlook there is poor. Avoiding those areas that are being disrupted and focusing on many of the areas that we've been focused on and many of the companies that we–that we already own and looking to add to those positions and areas on weakness. Ankur Crawford : I would add is that we already have businesses that we believe in, as Pat was mentioning and this market is creating dislocations in some of the stock prices where the good is getting lumped in with the bad in some cases. It doesn't necessarily mean that we have to either add any name, or it could just be changing the weight that is expressed in the portfolio to take advantage of the dislocation. Speaker Question : You follow a lot of technology and the trends and innovation, etcetera. What are you finding as we're coming through this and maybe emerging to the other side that's different, maybe something that surprises you, something that might be another theme as we go forward for the next ten years? Ankur Crawford : One of the things that we have–and I don't know if it's necessarily surprising and we've already mentioned it on a call but I think that the–the speed at which people were–are moving is what is surprising is this acceleration to the cloud and the acceleration of the need for digital transformation. We were talking to a company called CoStar Group and their clients are building owners who are trying to rent and sell apartment buildings or rent apartments. All of a sudden, their entire business is collapsing because how do you rent an apartment unless you have a virtual tour online? How do you even sell a building without a virtual tour? Or how do you even express–have any interest in the building without having a virtual tour and all the information? I think what's been surprising has been the pace at which people are running to adopt digital transformation even in this brief period of time because, again, as the tide goes out, you see where your flaws were and how you need to compensate for it. I think that has been kind

of a surprising outcome. I didn't expect it to happen and for people to be talking about it quite so fast.

Another interesting thing that I think has come out of our kind of on the ground research has been a lot of companies already have a virtual sales force, which I think it's something I hadn't appreciated going into this, where they have sales forces that work remotely and staff that work remotely all the time. In some of these businesses, they're not missing a beat in terms of bringing people online–this is the way they work. And I think that is going to become more of a trend as we go forward. I do think that how the workforce in general is going to work and interact with customers, whether it's using video conferencing or–I think that is a more ongoing trend and change that we will see. You know, do people want to sit in traffic for an hour in the Bay Area, if they can just simply do it from home and be more effective, or equivalently effective? Why not? That's kind of a new trend that I think will emerge out of this, in terms of a big change to society. But Pat, do you have anything to add? Patrick Kelly : I would echo that work from home trend and how that changes how businesses operate and how that will result in an acceleration in some of the trends that we've talked about, like the cloud. We have the continued secular growth trends of the internet and the mobile internet and that continues to be incredibly disruptive when you think about just ecommerce trends and now those are only accelerating with the current situation, or online advertising, which will continue to accelerate share gains over other traditional forms of media. But these other themes are still very early stages. I mean, artificial intelligence: the CEO of Google has said that that could be more disruptive, or have a more profound impact on the economy, than fire or electricity, which is a pretty bold statement. And many of the companies that we own, our top holdings, are employing a significant amount of artificial intelligence into their businesses to more efficiently run those. But we are in the first inning of this trend within artificial intelligence and this is a 50-year plus type trend, which will be very disruptive.

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