PATIENCE

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.

The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.

Successful investing requires patience, discipline, and a tolerance for uncertainty. It also helps to have a sense of humor.

The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation in a market dominated by short-term thinking.

If you can hold on during the bad years — and there will be bad years — the Magic Formula works. If you can't, you will sell at the bottom and miss everything.

Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. But eventually, earnings drive stock prices. Always.

I have never wavered on the innovation theme. The question is timing. And we believe timing is irrelevant over a five-year horizon.

I went broke trying to get rich quick. The way to get rich is boring: spend less than you make, stay out of debt, invest consistently for 30 years.

Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy. Stay the course.

The market always recovers. Always. If it doesn't, no investment strategy will save you anyway — because civilization has ended.

Time in the market beats timing the market. I know everyone says it. Everyone says it because it keeps being true.

Compound interest is the most powerful force in personal finance. It is also the easiest to understand and the hardest to actually be patient enough to use.

I bought Tesla when everyone thought it was going bankrupt. I held through every dip. That is the only way you catch a 10x.

Most people overestimate what they can do in a week and underestimate what they can do in a decade.

I think about businesses the way a farmer thinks about land — something you acquire, improve, and hold for generations.

Patience isn't passive. It's the active decision to wait for the right opportunity instead of settling for a mediocre one.

The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.

The best investing is dull, boring, and almost mechanical.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten.

The best investors I know read more than they trade. Most people have it backwards.

Patience isn't passive. It's the active decision to do nothing when doing something would be a mistake.

Compound interest is the most powerful force in finance, but only if you give it enough time.

The best investment strategy is the one you can actually stick with for 20 years.

Gradatim Ferociter. Step by step, ferociously. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

We started OpenSea in 2017 and nobody cared about NFTs for three years. Then one day in 2021, everyone cared at the same time. Being early is indistinguishable from being wrong — until suddenly it isn't.

Patience is not passive. You do the work, you establish the value, you identify the catalyst, and then you wait. But you are always watching, always updating.

Patience isn't passive. Holding a great business through short-term noise while the market panics is one of the hardest things to do and one of the most rewarding when you get it right.

In my experience, the key to making money is knowing when not to do anything.

A dollar here, a dollar there — it doesn't feel like anything. But compound interest doesn't care how small you start.

We spent two years building before we launched anything. Most people thought we were crazy. Turns out the product needed that time.

We spent three years in stealth building the product. Most startups would have shipped in six months. We needed it to be right.

We lost money for ten years straight. A billion dollars in cumulative losses. But we were building logistics infrastructure that nobody else had. You can't copy that overnight.

We spent 10 years and $2.5 billion on mRNA before we had a single approved product. Every board meeting, someone asked: when does this pay off? Then COVID happened and it paid off in 11 months.

We spent 10 years building Noom before it became an overnight success. Ten years. The app launched in 2012 and didn't go mainstream until 2019. Patience is a business strategy.

We filed for an IPO. A fintech company from India, founded in 1998, going public after 25 years. Not every startup story is a two-year blitz. Some take a quarter century.

When I started building in Jersey City, people thought I was out of my mind. Thirty years later, those same people are paying $4,000 a month to live in my buildings.

We built the product for 8 years before anyone cared. Then COVID happened and suddenly every company on Earth needed a digital whiteboard. We were ready. Most of our competitors were not.

When you buy a stock, you should be willing to hold it even if the stock market shuts down for five years. If you can't do that, you have no business being in equities.

I have made more money sitting on my behind than by actively trading. The art is not in buying — it's in holding.

The stock market is not a place to get rich quickly. It is a place to get rich slowly, and then one day you wake up and realize you're rich.

I would rather grow slowly and own everything than grow fast and owe everyone.

Delay gratification. The most important ability is to resist short-term temptation for long-term reward. This applies to companies, careers, and life.

We spent two years building before we launched. In crypto, that's like waiting a century. But we wanted to get security right before we got users. That patience is why we've never been hacked.

I've been building oracle networks since 2014. Most crypto people discovered the oracle problem in 2020. We had a seven-year head start because we focused on the hard stuff while everyone else chased tokens.

Signing up 300 banks wasn't the hard part. Getting them to actually use XRP for on-demand liquidity — that's the challenge. Enterprise adoption is a marathon, not a sprint.

Spotify lost money for 18 years. Eighteen. Every year people said the model was broken. We knew it wasn't — it just needed scale. Patience is the most underrated startup strategy.

The crypto industry has a bad habit of shipping first and thinking later. We spent years on the research before we wrote a single line of production code. That's why the protocol works.

I spent eight years building Rivian in secret. Most of the auto industry didn't know we existed until 2018. We used that anonymity to perfect the product before anyone could copy it or write it off.

Everyone said a battery company had no business making cars. But I knew that eventually, cars would run on batteries. I just had to wait. In 2003, I bought a car company. In 2024, we outsold Tesla globally. The wait was worth it.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten.

I do not check my portfolio. Seriously. Maybe once a quarter. The less you look, the better your returns tend to be.

Our stock went from $1 to over $300. I tell people: if you believe in the mission and the technology, the market eventually catches up.

The question is not whether plant-based meat will succeed. It is how long it takes. I am betting my life that the answer is within my lifetime.

CUDA had zero customers for years. People said we were wasting money. Now every AI model on earth runs on CUDA. Patience is a competitive advantage.

LinkedIn for $26 billion looked expensive in 2016. It generates $15 billion a year now. Patience is the best due diligence.

I never took outside money. I owned 100% of Spanx for 21 years. That patience was worth $1.2 billion.

Charlie Munger taught me that the big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.

The best investments are the ones where the downside is limited and the upside is unlimited. That requires patience most people don't have.

The goal isn't to be the smartest investor in the room. The goal is to build a life where you can think clearly when everyone else is panicking.

Most investors fail because they confuse activity with progress. The fewer decisions you make, the better each one tends to be.

The insurance float is not just capital. It's patient capital. And patience is the most undervalued asset in finance.

My biggest mistakes have always been selling too early. When you find a true compounder, the correct holding period is almost always longer than you think.

Price is a consequence of value creation, not the other way around. If a business creates enough value, the stock price takes care of itself.

Most fund managers destroy value through excessive activity. The hardest thing in investing is doing nothing, and it's also the most profitable.

I run my fund from a horse farm in Middleburg, Virginia. Population 673. I don't need Wall Street. I need good businesses and patience.

Markel is a 30-year project, not a quarterly earnings story. If you need excitement, buy a lottery ticket.

Portfolio turnover is the enemy of compounding. Every time you sell, you reset the clock and pay taxes. I prefer not to sell.

Compounding is the most powerful force in business. My job is to remove anything that interrupts it.

The secret to investing is the same as the secret to getting rich slowly. Find compounding machines and get out of the way.

The best brands in the world are deferred gratification machines. They invest today in markets that won't pay off for a decade. Most investors can't stomach that. I love it.

I bought Nestle in the 1980s and I still own it. When you find a business that can compound across every continent for 40 years, why would you sell?

I look for companies with the capacity to suffer — the willingness to sacrifice near-term profits for long-term growth. That is the rarest quality in business.

We buy assets at 60 cents on the dollar and wait. The market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. We wait for the weighing.

We started this project at Google in 2009 because we believed autonomous driving could be solved. Fifteen years later, we are the only ones actually doing it at scale.

Patience is our competitive advantage. Everyone else rushed to launch before the technology was ready. We waited until it was.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. But they can also remain rational longer than you can remain patient.

The hardest part of value investing is holding on when the market disagrees with you for years at a time.

Short-term price movements tell you almost nothing about the long-term value of a business.

The market rewards patience and punishes impatience. Most people have it backwards.

Being early and being wrong feel exactly the same. The difference only becomes clear in hindsight.

Ariel's motto is slow and steady wins the race. Our mascot is a tortoise. In a world of hares we are proud to be boring.

We have spent over a billion dollars without carrying a single paying passenger. That is the cost of building the future of flight.

Wall Street makes money on activity. Investors make money on inactivity.

It is not the thinking that makes big money, it is the sitting.

I'm not smarter than the market. I'm just more patient.

Remember the power of compounding. You don't need to make spectacular returns to build real wealth.

Don't be in too much of a hurry to sell.

The best time to sell a great stock is almost never.

Be patient and focus on the long term. The market will test your conviction. That's its job.

Investing is the only business I know where you can be wrong three years in a row and still be considered competent.

The market can stay irrational longer than the client can stay patient.

The best strategies are boring. Boring is what compounds wealth over decades.

The edge isn't in analysis. It's in discipline and patience.

Mean reversion is the most powerful force in financial markets. Everything returns to the average eventually.

Prison taught me patience. Five years of patience. I wouldn't recommend the method.

Being a public company that hasn't turned a profit is humbling. But we're building something that takes time.

Our stock 5x'd from the IPO low. Everyone who called us a money pit has gone quiet.

We're building the operating system for Indonesia's digital economy. That takes time and patience.

We've burned through nearly $1 billion. Building a bank from scratch is expensive. But being a real bank is worth it.

Being willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time is the price of doing anything worthwhile.

Aston Villa went from the Championship to the Champions League. Patience pays.

I'll wait years for a single lease. Patience in acquisition beats speed every time.

Build one thing well over decades. The world rewards consistency, not novelty.

$310 million in revenue after 15 years. Enterprise AI is a marathon, not a sprint.

The SPAC gave us capital. The stock dropped 80%. Space data is valuable — proving it takes time.

Two years perfecting one game. No MVP, no soft launch. Just obsessive polish until it was undeniable.

26 years and $1.2 billion. Either we're decades ahead of our time or the longest science experiment in VC.

Jeff Bezos invested because he thinks long-term. Fusion is the ultimate long-term bet.

We built telehealth for 14 years before the world needed it. COVID was our moment.

The stock dropped 90%. The technology didn't. Selling to hospitals is slow. The device still works.

The Dodgers were called the most overpaid acquisition in sports history. Now they're worth three times what we paid.

The best investments are in things that people think are finished. They rarely are.

I don't invest in trends. I invest in assets that will exist in 50 years.

2022 humbled me. We lost 30%. But the positions that hurt us the most are the ones that will make the most money over time.

The biggest mistake in tech investing is selling your winners too early. Power laws mean a few positions make all the returns.

Lone Pine taught me that the best investments come from knowing a business better than anyone else. That takes time.

The best businesses compound. The worst thing you can do is sell them to buy something mediocre.

The Dodgers were called the most overpaid sports purchase in history. They're now worth three times what we paid. Patience wins.

eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype. Microsoft paid $8.5 billion. The lesson: great technology only gets more valuable.

We spent twelve years building before we shipped a single vehicle. Most people thought we were crazy. Now they think we were early.

I played cricket the same way I invest — with patience. You don't need to hit every ball for a six. Singles add up.

100 centuries took me 24 years. Good things compound. There are no shortcuts in cricket or in wealth creation.

I held my Spotify shares for nearly 20 years. Patience isn't just a virtue in investing. It's the entire game.

You don't need to be on Wall Street to beat Wall Street. You just need to think independently and be patient.

Thirty years of 15% returns. The secret? Buy quality businesses and do nothing for as long as possible.

Holding cash when markets are expensive is not being lazy. It is discipline. The opportunity cost of overpaying is higher than the opportunity cost of waiting.

The hardest part of investing is doing nothing. The second hardest part is doing nothing when everyone else is panicking.

Indian internet took 10 years longer than everyone expected. The founders who survived until it arrived became very wealthy. The ones who gave up did not.

Building Somnium Wine is the same as racing. It takes years of preparation, the results are not immediate, and the details matter enormously.

The wine business taught me that patience pays. You plant, you wait, and if you did everything right, something great comes out of it.

I'd rather make 12% a year for 40 years than 40% a year for 12 years. The math works out much better.

Event-driven investing requires patience. The events happen on their own schedule, not yours.

The best commodity trades take years to play out. If you need to see results this quarter, you’re in the wrong business.

I’d rather miss a move than get caught in a bad one. There’s always another trade.

Patience in distressed investing isn’t a virtue. It’s a requirement. The assets tell you when they’re ready.

The stock market rewards patience more than intelligence. Most smart people are too impatient to get rich.

Being early is the same as being wrong if your investors don’t have the patience to wait.

Sovereign debt is the ultimate game of patience. Countries don’t disappear. They eventually pay.

I started investing in cloud software when people called it “utility computing.” Twenty years later, it’s a $500 billion market. Patience pays.

The best deep tech investments look like science fiction for 5 years and then become obvious in year 6.

Mining is not a technology business. It is a patience business. The ore does not care about your quarterly earnings call.

Patience in venture capital is not passive. It is an active choice to let compounding do its work.

I would rather be a company that survives 100 years than one that grows 100% in a year.

Quality takes time. We would rather delay a game by a year than release something mediocre.

We spent 15 years developing the technology before anyone cared. Then suddenly everyone cared all at once.

The question isn't whether autonomous driving will happen. It's whether it'll happen fast enough to justify the billions being spent right now.

I'm a long-term investor. I don't buy things to sell them.

The biggest advantage of family wealth is the ability to think in generations, not quarters.

Shipping cycles are predictable. The timing is not. So you buy and wait.

Patience is the most underrated skill in development. Great projects take a decade. Most people quit at year three.

You do not need permission to be competent. Eventually the world catches up.

Boring is beautiful. The world's most essential assets are the least exciting, and the most profitable.

We do not rush. We take time to understand a brand before we represent it. That discipline is what keeps our relationships lasting decades.

Patience is not just a virtue in Islam. It is the single most important business strategy there is.

Short-term underperformance is the price we pay for the prospect of long-term outperformance. We accept it willingly.

Patience is the most underrated quality in business. We have been building for 60 years. That is our competitive advantage.

If you own shares in a great company, don't be in a hurry to sell them. Good companies are hard to find.

Once you find a good reason to buy, stay with it unless you find an equally good reason to sell.

It's not always easy to do what's not popular, but that's where you make your money.

Patience is not passive. It is active discipline applied over time.

The market will give you your price eventually. The question is whether you can wait long enough without flinching.

Never borrow money to invest. It destroys patience, which is the only real edge a value investor has.

The stock market is a mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.

You must be willing to hold a stock for years, sometimes decades, before it reaches its full value.

Secular trends last much longer than anyone expects, in both directions.

Do not try to buy the bottom of Stage 4. You will catch falling knives. Wait for Stage 1 to complete. Then wait for Stage 2. Then act.

The most important quality in property investment is patience. Markets go up and down. Those who sell in panic always regret it.

If you hold good land in a growing city, time works for you rather than against you. That is the whole secret.

We take a 20-year view on every asset we acquire. Short-term volatility is noise. What matters is whether the business will still be generating superior returns two decades from now.

Property markets move in cycles. The discipline is to be prepared when others are not — to have the resources to act at the right moment.

Real estate is about patience. The land you buy today will give returns your grandchildren will thank you for.

Streaming is a journey, not a destination. We are building Peacock for the long term, and we have the balance sheet to do it.

You build a team over years. There are no shortcuts. Patience is a competitive advantage.

I've been preparing for this for 30 years. You don't rush something you've built your whole life around.

You cannot build a ten-billion-dollar piece of infrastructure unless you are willing to look completely ridiculous for a very long time.

Patience in mining is not just a virtue. It is a survival skill. Every world-class mine takes twenty years from discovery to full production.

The long-term investor and the market often disagree. The market is right quarter by quarter. History is right century by century. We operate on the history timeline.

The minimum length of my investments are five to six years, if not 10 to 12 years.

You build a business like this over decades, not over quarters.

There is no short game for a venture capitalist.

I'd rather build a company that takes ten years and changes an industry than flip something in eighteen months.

Build the factory before you chase the order.

The market has taught me to continually stay the course even though I do believe that prices of businesses in public markets and, maybe, even in private equity, fluctuate and that volatility is much higher than the actual long term value of a business.

The market has taught me to ignore the market most of the time. Just stick to fundamental investing.

Investment is a line, not a point. And however good is a company at the first meeting, we like to track it.

Invest like a bull, sit like a bear and watch like an eagle.

The long-term trend of markets is always up. Ultimately stocks move up and make money for those who stayed put.

When you find a founder worth believing in, the smartest thing you can do is hold on and stay out of the way.

Patience is not a nice-to-have in venture. It is the entire job.

Time in the market beats timing the market. Patience is the investor's real edge.

We are patient, our funds are designed to be 10-year-plus funds.

Just because something is inevitable does not mean it is imminent.

We are still, certainly, majority dry powder, and we continue to be thinking in terms of years, not months.

You have to be willing to look wrong for a long time in this market. Conviction without patience is worthless in crypto.

I have been a stock broker for all my life. I have seen all the crashes, financial crisis, where really, it is only a paper loss. Just make sure you are not jammed with cash flow.