A Letter From Our Founder

The world is a complicated place. What else do we expect when 7 billion intelligent apes run around fighting for their needs.

A mentor of mine once told me, understanding history is like trying to understand all current events, it’s nearly impossible. But for reasons that are typically all too obvious, we discuss history like its kindergarten math. It’s not out of bad intention, it’s actually quite the opposite - because it’s innate in all of us to try to understand our purpose and our story.

However with good intentions, historical analyses is usually misguided. And maybe misguided isn’t the right word, maybe a better way to say it, - “we write/tell history that fits into our belief system of the world, not history based on facts.” I’m guilty of this and even the best historians are guilty of this.

My grappling to interpret the past has multiple purposes.

First, it offers clarity and appreciation to know that people before us struggled the same way we struggle, failed the same way we fail, succeeded the same way we succeed, loved the same way we love. It’s that genuine connection to our past that offers value, and maybe one day if physicists and bio engineers can work together to rewind that tangled mess of entropy, we will be able to time travel. Talk about a Zero To One - Peter Thiel business idea; “Enjoy a day at the Colosseum in 165 AD with Marcus Aurelius for as low as $10,000. Or, enjoy the streets of Paris at the turn of the 20th century for $1,000. Book today at timetraveleurope.com."

For now, I’ll stick to reading for those experiences.

Beyond just entertaining my historical interests, understanding the past has a much greater purpose for Franny Amare.

One overarching theme when studying empires, peoples, teams, and organizations, etc - the best are guided by right values. Strategy is important in the short term, like Caesar taking Gaul or the United States buying the Louisiana Territory from France, because it moves the needle forward.

Strategies can obviously backfire. For example, the United States waisted countless lives and over 10 years fighting a war in Vietnam. The end result, complete failure. Or think about Teddy Roosevelt’s strategy to become a president under the Bull Moose Party. It failed epically. Even with good intentions, strategies implode. Woodrow Wilson wanted the League of Nations to be the governing body that ended all wars. Twenty years later, the world was engulfed in the worst man induced disaster in history.

What I’m trying to get at is strategies are irrelevant in the long term because values are what determine survival. President Wilson may have thought his League of Nations strategy failed, rightly because it did, but because he was bound and inspired by the values of democracy and freedom - the USA and our western allies plugged forward.

Conversely, think about the Southern Confederacy. Their strategy worked in the short term. For 4 years, they successfully fended off the Union and formed their own government. They were actually defeating the Union army. But their scripted values were born in hell. It was only a matter of time before their values crumbled in on themselves.

You can read about our investment strategy, it’s fairly simple. We invest in great businesses and hold our equity for long periods of time. This strategy has worked very well for us and I don’t anticipate it changing much, although in reality, I am confident through the years it will change.

The single most important thing I can do will be to get our values right. Franny Amare can survive a strategy gone wrong, but it cannot survive values gone wrong.

Long Live Franny Amare.

Thank you.

Eric Hagstrom