Investing Without the Noise: A Worldly Approach to Technology
An engineer’s pursuit of forever-hold companies and durable engineering moats.
The number of times I’ve relaunched this thing is downright crazy, but that’s okay. Over the years of writing (and making videos) for TechBreakdowns, I’ve had a lot of different thoughts and ways of thinking through things.
One year I wanted to break down exactly how technology worked, inspired by the likes of ByteByteGo. Other times I wanted to write about how to run technology companies, and other times I wanted to write about how to invest in technology. Each generation was a restart, but they all ultimately led back to the same path.
And that same path is what I’m relaunching with today. It’s investing and technology. It’s not chasing the high-growth, high-beta names. It’s not going to be “YOLOing” into the latest thing. Instead, we’ll be taking a well-thought-out path inspired by the likes of Worldly Partners.
The Inspiration
Worldly Partners might be familiar to anybody who has listened to the Acquired podcast. This investment firm seeks to buy and invest in companies for the long term, and they talk about 20 years plus. That’s the kind of thing I want TechBreakdowns to be.
I want it to be low stress. I want it to be: hey, we’ve looked at every part of this company and we believe we can sleep safe at night investing in it. But I also want to combine that with technology. I don’t want to sit back and just say “Coca-Cola is fine,” which, maybe, you know, Coca-Cola is fine. I’m sat here with a Diet Coke right now, and it’s pretty good.
So we’ll look at names like Meta, sure. We’ll consider investing in companies like Apple if it makes sense. But what I really want to do is turn over the stones of some of those smaller companies and find names we can invest in for the long haul.
Up First
The best way I can think of doing this is to create a content calendar right now. I have an idea of the companies I want to build a portfolio around, so here’s the list of names we’ll be looking into deeply over the coming months.
These companies fall into a few different buckets. It’s a near certainty that, given our requirements, we won’t invest in every single one of these, but we’ll take a look at them anyway and explain why.
First, let me give you the bullet-point requirements (they’re super short):
The company has to be one we could see ourselves holding forever.
Ideally, it’s strictly in tech.
Because we’re holding it forever, we’re a bit price insensitive.
Ideally, the target is not some behemoth that everybody already holds.
We’ll have to break rule #4 quite frequently, just to make sure we have some foundation to the portfolio that keeps things stable, especially if we’re planning on holding these things for 10 to 20 years.
Some of the large-cap names we’ll look at include Taiwan Semiconductor, Intuitive Surgical, Meta, Palantir, and maybe even Tesla. These are big companies that could form a foundation.
On the smaller side of things, involving companies that are not necessarily small, we’re looking at Rocket Lab, which I have a long history of covering, and AST SpaceMobile, which is launching satellites for cellular connectivity. We’re also watching Symbotic, a robotics and automation company, and CoreWeave, which is an AI infrastructure pure play. These are some of the names on the watchlist right now. Over the coming months, we’ll start putting together deep dives on these and similar names to build a portfolio that should last for a decade and beyond.
About the Author
My name is Ash Anderson, and I’m the author of TechBreakdowns. I’ve been writing and talking about finance for a very long time. I started on MotleyFool.com before it was Fool.com. I also wrote on Seeking Alpha, where I had high ratings that can be verified on TipRanks. Over the past few years, as you can see at the top of this post, I’ve tried to create TechBreakdowns a few times. I’ve gone back and forth on what I wanted it to be and what I wanted it to become. I’m a software engineer by day and an enthusiast of the financial markets by night. That’s why I’m building this. I love investing and tracking various companies, and this will essentially be my journal on that journey.