Guest Post: Work Quietly, Decide Quickly: Lessons from Great Investors
(+ Our Grandparents)
This week features a post from AC Summer Scout Brandes Woodall, a recent Columbia University graduate with degrees in Statistics and Economics.
How do you decide to make a 10-year commitment in 10 days, 10 hours, or 10 minutes? You lay the groundwork far before the decision point: build your principles, sharpen and pressure test your viewpoints, and invest in relationships well in advance. Then, when the moment comes, you’re ready. Our generation could learn a lot about that from our grandparents.
Over the past few decades, Americans have extended our decision timelines. We take far longer to choose what career to pursue, where to go to college, what house to buy, and even who to marry. There are clear forces behind this. Most obvious is the explosion of options and information. Dating apps have expanded your potential partner pool to include the entire online universe. Scholarships, financing, and the internet make it easy for students to apply to schools across continents. Social mobility and remote work mean that careers are no longer constrained by geography or background. Zillow lets you look inside every house in your neighborhood.
But do more options, more information, and longer timelines actually lead to better decisions? Or do we hit a point of diminishing returns? Relationship research shows that dating for a certain number of years minimizes divorce risk, but both shorter and longer courtships increase it substantially. We give young people more time and exposure to figure out their professional paths through internships, yet the average job tenure for younger generations has stayed roughly the same. Young home buyers now take 12 weeks to make an offer on a home, up from 8 weeks in 1990, but they stay in their homes a year less.
Of course, this is an over-simplification. Housing, job, and marriage market behaviors are shaped by huge confounders (economic volatility, switching costs, cultural shifts, and more), but there’s still a clear pattern. More time or optionality at the decision point doesn’t meaningfully improve the result. With far more dry powder in venture capital, the investable universe has exploded. Yet speed is still a core attribute of the best firms, despite the fact that investor-founder relationships can last a decade or more. It’s a long-term, career-defining, highly consequential commitment, but the greats still gain conviction quickly. How? Quiet preparation, anchored principles, and decisive speed.
I’m Brandes, and I’ve spent the past summer on the scout team at Also Capital. I studied statistics and economics at Columbia and have explored everything from rare earth supply chains to Arctic infrastructure to the privatization of U.S. passenger rail, always drawn to markets where execution is hard and defensibility matters. Before joining Also, I worked on an investment research team, becoming a true generalist as I wrote reports across a wide range of industries. When I’m not researching or writing, you’ll usually find me skiing or on the tennis court. At Also, I’m learning that investing rewards those who can see a few moves ahead and trust their preparation when it’s time to act.