The Investor's Podcast Sep 19, 2026 · recorded Aug 20, 2026 1h 48m 1h 15m saved
With Rob Vinall, Managing Director of RV Capital and manager of the Business Owner Fund
Rob Vinall has compounded the Business Owner Fund at about 15.5% a year net of fees since 2008, a cumulative return of more than 1,200%, and he stopped trying to raise money for it after roughly six months.
Most managers with that record build a marketing function around it. Vinall gave up cold-calling in his first year, works from an office at the top of his house with no Bloomberg terminal, and has given almost no in-depth interviews in twenty years.
"If you were to put a 100 managers in front of me and say divide them into the best versus the worst, I would be no better than average and quite possibly worse."
Vinall, on The Investor's Podcast with William Green, founded RV Capital in Switzerland in 2006 with a single client, launched the fund two weeks before Lehman Brothers failed, holds about ten stocks, and put roughly a third of the portfolio into Chinese companies while most Western investors were selling them.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 108 minutes of audio, 33 minutes of reading.
Here are the 19 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
He screens for managers who have made the business their life's work, and admits he cannot rank a hundred managers any better than chance
The pool is founders and very long-tenured insiders; everything run by a rotating cast of MBAs is cut first
A third of the portfolio is in Chinese companies, bought because the market is out of favor rather than because he knows China better than anyone
He says he expects at least 10% earnings growth and at least 5% in dividends and buybacks from them
The fund fell 47.6% in 2022, and he says a large part of that was his own mistakes rather than the market
In July of the same year he was told a tumor had been found in his stomach
A narrower moat that is widening beats a wide one that is shrinking, because a wide moat breeds complacency
His whole valuation framework is one number: a 15% owner return, made of the cash a business returns plus the growth in its earning power
Liking a CEO is a signal, not a weakness — he says Warren Buffett hired Ajit Jain largely because he liked him
The corollary: you have to hold the values you are screening other people for, or you will not recognize them
He and co-managing director Andreas Lechner never tell each other what they are buying, on purpose
They argue about ideas; the decision is made alone so it comes from conviction rather than deference
A momentum-driven market is a good market for him, because share prices now fall 60% to 70% on temporary bad news
In March he bought Constellation Software during the selloff in software stocks
Charlie Munger's advice on rich children was "learn to fail gracefully" — and Vinall says he disagrees with it
1. Seaford To Cambridge
Green opened on Vinall's childhood in Seaford, a small town on the south coast of England, and on how little in it pointed at a career running money from Switzerland.
The town was the last stop on the railway line
It quite literally is the end of the line.
Rob Vinall
His father worked in an office at the local port and his mother stayed at home. There was no family money and no Wall Street connection. The one investing influence came from a relative.
His grandfather was the first investor he knew
I got early exposure to investing through my grandfather who was a passionate stock picker.
Rob Vinall
At eleven he passed the entrance exam for Christ's Hospital, a fee-charging English boarding school that charges according to what parents can pay. Green noted it was founded by King Edward VI in the 1550s and that pupils still wear long blue coats and yellow stockings.
The school takes children who could not otherwise pay
It's means tested and yeah, it's a school where the philosophy is very much to give an opportunity to kids who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford to go to a public school.
Rob Vinall
Vinall said he has mixed feelings about it. Corporal punishment was still normal, and the place felt closer to Dickens than to the present. It also got him a place at Cambridge, where he read modern and medieval languages, specializing in French and German. English degrees are not vocational, he said, and a languages degree at Cambridge is mostly literature and philosophy: a new author every week, started from nothing, written up by Friday. He drew the parallel to picking up a new company from a standing start.
2. AI As His Editor
Green asked what large language models do to the ability to sit with a hard problem. Vinall split the question into research and writing.
On research, he described cycling fifteen minutes to the Cambridge University Library, ordering a book, and waiting an hour for it to arrive — and that being one of the best research setups available at the time.
The speed of the answer is what changed
If there's something you're interested in, you put in the question and most of the time, of course, there is a little bit of hallucination, but most of the time you get the exact answer you're looking for and it takes a fraction of a second.
Rob Vinall
He had sent his half-year letter to investors that morning and had used AI as an editor for the first time rather than only as a research tool. His daughter asked whether that was cheating. He said it is not: a professional editor is something writers and journalists have always had and almost nobody else could afford.
He thinks refusing the tool would be perverse
Whereas now that editor is available to anyone irrespective of how worthy they are. And I think it'd be madness not to use it because it really improves and sharpens the writing.
Rob Vinall
Green disagreed in part, and said so in his own voice.
The host's worry is about his own thinking, not the tool
I worry about my brain becoming softer if I rely too much because I think most of the things that I've learned that are really deeply valuable are things I agonized over for a long time
William Green
Green credited the phrase "the ability to linger longer" to Chris Begg, a fund manager he has interviewed. Vinall's own version was less flattering: the half-year ended on 30 June and the two of them were recording on 20 August.
He called the delay what it was
So there was still two months of procrastination and what you much more generously describe as lingering.
Rob Vinall
3. Goldman Wanted Cogs
Vinall graduated in 1996 and joined Goldman Sachs Asset Management's graduate trainee program in 1997, then moved to a small German bank in Frankfurt in 1998 as a sell-side analyst covering telecoms. Green asked what was driving him.
Financial independence, he said, never great wealth. He also said he put no thought into where he started, and picked Goldman Sachs because it was the best-known name on Wall Street. Large investment banks hire the best graduates because it reflects well on the brand, he argued, not because there is senior work waiting for them.
The junior job was not the one he had imagined
And so you start at the bottom of the food chain more like working the photocopier all hours of the night.
Rob Vinall
He described the firm as a machine that needs interchangeable parts rather than independent thinkers, and the fit as bad from the start.
He was punished for not choosing carefully
And it was a complete mismatch and so it was an early punishment for not being thoughtful.
Rob Vinall
Asked what happened, he said it became a fight with his superiors that only had one possible winner.
His summary of his own employability
I've never been very good either with superiors or with copying machines.
Rob Vinall
4. Buying Below Net Cash
Vinall was about 30 when the dot-com bubble burst. Until then he called himself a financial analyst — someone who could build a model. The crash is where he says he became a value investor, because the telecom companies he covered fell 99% or to zero and the phone stopped ringing, which left him time to look at what was left.
Companies were trading at a fraction of their own cash
So it wasn't unusual for something to have maybe 10 million market cap but 100 million of cash on its balance sheet.
Rob Vinall
He was sharing an office with two friends, Vidar and Wolfgang, and initially kept the idea to himself. They noticed he was working flat out on something and pressed him until he explained. One of them then turned up with a book.
Graham had described the same setup, fifty years earlier
And there's one chapter in the intelligent investor where Ben Graham describes how after the great crash of 1929, these former high-flying companies were so despised by investors many times they would trade below their net cash.
Rob Vinall
He was investing a few thousand euros of his own money. Doubling it more than once a year, he said, moved things along quickly.
5. Concentrated By Accident
Green noted that Vinall has typically held about ten stocks from very early on, and asked how that happened. Vinall said it was not a decision at all. He had little cash, so he put it behind the best idea, and he had no large watch list of companies to spread it across.
Concentration is what a small, well-informed investor does anyway
So if you combine having a few very good ideas with a limited amount of capital, I think it comes very natural to invest in a concentrated way.
Rob Vinall
When he got seed capital five or six years later, his mentor Norman Rentrop gave him one instruction: keep doing it the same way and change nothing.
He never had to unlearn diversification
I didn't have to unlearn that lesson because I never learned it in the first place.
Rob Vinall
Rentrop, Vinall said, is a German entrepreneur in Bonn who built a professional publishing business, stepped back at 40 to invest full time, and whose first act on doing so was to take a train from Chicago to Omaha. He runs a German-language value investing conference in Omaha around the Berkshire Hathaway meeting.
6. Omaha, Then A Fund
Vinall went to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting for the first time in May 2006 and set up RV Capital in August 2006. He said the sequence was not a coincidence.
The trip is why the firm exists
It was, obviously May 2006 when I went and I set up RV Capital in August 2006. And I think it's fair to say that probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been to Omaha that year.
Rob Vinall
He was in a job he liked and was learning from, with one problem: other people made the investment decisions and his job was the analysis underneath them.
What he wanted was the decision, not the research
But what I above all wanted to do was to be the decision maker
Rob Vinall
Green brought up Nick Sleep's partner Qais Zakaria, who had described his own first Omaha trip as the discovery that this was not a casino. Vinall said his reaction was similar and close to religious: what he took from Buffett and Charlie Munger was that the point was not only the returns. That sense of a purpose beyond compounding capital, he said, is why the job still interests him after he reached the financial independence he was originally chasing.
He made one call to launch the firm, to Rentrop, asking him to become the first client. Rentrop said yes. The Business Owner Fund started in 2008 with seven or eight million euros and about seven investors, on 30 September — roughly two weeks before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
The setup was cheap, not strategic
So as you mentioned there was no employees, there was no office, there was no Bloomberg terminal and that wasn't because of any master plan. That was simply because I wanted to keep my outgoings to an absolute bare minimum.
Rob Vinall
Sitting at home reading annual reports through the crisis, he said, was easier than sitting on a trading floor would have been, because the only people around him were his wife and children, who had no idea what was happening in markets. What began as cost control became a deliberate choice.
He also spent about six months cold-calling prospective investors, who took the meetings and then turned him down for having too short a record and too small a fund.
He stopped marketing and never restarted
I was like, okay, I'm not doing any more marketing. This makes no sense and it doesn't work anyway.
Rob Vinall
7. The 15% Owner Return
Green said he had gone back to a 2009 interview Vinall gave to The Manual of Ideas, one of very few he has done, in which he set out a target of 15% a year over a long period.
The record has landed roughly where the target was set
And here we are 18 years later and you've done exactly that.
William Green
Green put the arithmetic on the record at the top of the show.
The fund's stated record
he's racked up an annualized return of around 15 and a half percent, net of all fees, which is a cumulative return of more than 1,200 percent over the last eighteen years.
William Green
Vinall explained where the 15% came from. He started out buying on price-to-earnings and price-to-book and quickly decided those ratios carry almost no predictive power on their own.
The multiple matters less than whether the earnings are real
The crucial thing is actually whether those earnings are real and how good of a business it is subsequently to when you're buying it.
Rob Vinall
So he built a measure he calls the owner return: what you would earn holding 100% of a business, with no change in the multiple. It has two parts — the cash the business hands back each year, and the annual increase in its earning power.
One target, made up of cash returned plus growth
And what I targeted was always a 15% return. That could have been a 15% dividend yield. that could have been 15% earnings growth or some more typically some mixture of the two.
Rob Vinall
8. People Beat Analysis
Green read back a line from one of Vinall's shareholder meetings: that he has found a niche of managers who have turned the business into their life's work, often founders, sometimes long-serving insiders, and that this is the pool he fishes in.
Vinall's answer started with what he cannot do.
He does not claim to be a judge of management
If you were to put a 100 managers in front of me and say divide them into the best versus the worst, I would be no better than average and quite possibly worse.
Rob Vinall
The edge is in a narrow subset, not in ranking the field
But I do think there is a small cohort of managers who do make the business their life work completely aligned completely dedicated and when you do find those the odds are just massively stacked in your favor.
Rob Vinall
He described three stages in his own development: buying on price, then buying good businesses, then buying good people. The first shift was fast, because some of the cheap companies turned out to be frauds. The second took years, because he had to give up the idea that analysis alone could do the work.
Diligence only ever reaches the visible part of a company
But the reality is when you analyze a company, no matter how diligent you are, you only really see the tip of the iceberg
Rob Vinall
Where the people at the top were good, he said, what he could not see was at worst fine and often better than expected.
Bad management produced only bad surprises
And where the people weren't great, the surprises were always negative.
Rob Vinall
The narrowing itself is mechanical, he said: reject every company whose management is a revolving door of MBAs, which removes most of the market quickly. What is left, meaning founder-run companies and firms led by people connected to the original team, needs real work, because plenty of founders lose interest, sell their stock or stop being the right person for the company they built.
On why he takes an instinctive reaction to a person seriously, Vinall cited Buffett's hiring of Ajit Jain, who had no insurance background, on the grounds that Buffett liked him. Green had read the anecdote in Alice Schroeder's Buffett biography, The Snowball, and it had come up in one of Vinall's Omaha talks. Vinall's argument is that an immediate reaction to someone is a pattern built over decades of meetings, and that a small team can act on it where a large organization cannot, because a large organization has to justify decisions on quantifiable evidence.
That leads to the line Green said he had marked in italics, bold and underline.
You cannot spot values you do not hold
You said if you want to find managers that have the values which you think are important, you better live by those values because if you don't, you won't be able to spot them.
William Green
Vinall's own framing of it opened the episode.
The screen runs in both directions
And so the big lesson that people like us should take away from that is we really need to cultivate the values in ourselves that we're hoping to find in other people because we're automatically going to be drawn to them whether we want it or not.
Rob Vinall
Green added the same test applied to his own money: he invests with Chris Begg and Josh Tarasoff largely because he likes them as people, and said a French investor he had dinner with recently told him he would never invest with a friend because of what happens when it goes wrong. Chris Davis told Green a version of the same rule — no business with friends before 40, and after 40 only with friends, once enough pattern recognition has accumulated.
9. Carvana And Ernie Garcia
Green raised Carvana, where Vinall is close to co-founder and chief executive Ernie Garcia, and where short sellers have attacked management for years.
He cannot account for the hostility
I mean to my dying day I will never understand why Ernie Garcia is the polarizing figure he is.
Rob Vinall
To him, Garcia is the type case of the founder he looks for
I mean he is just to me at any rate so obviously the absolute epitome of the founder building a business into his life's work that I just can't for the life of me understand how anyone could reach a different conclusion.
Rob Vinall
He said a reader is free to dislike the company or doubt the business model, though he thinks the model question has now been settled. Doubting Garcia's motivation is what he cannot account for.
Two stories carried the point. The first belongs to Cliff Sosin, another Carvana shareholder, who told Vinall about a contest with Garcia.
Both men are competitive and it escalated
And they both being competitive types, they challenged each other to a chin-up competition.
Rob Vinall
Sosin did around fifteen. Garcia started fast, was visibly struggling by five or six, and then produced another ten rather than lose. Garcia's own explanation, quoted in the conversation, was "I'm not going to lose to Cliff."
The second story is Vinall's. Carvana went through its crisis in 2022 and had clearly turned the corner by 2023, and everyone on analyst calls wanted to know how fast it would grow again. Garcia was sticking to the line that the economics come first. Vinall told him about a chief executive who had explained that there is a correct growth rate, fast enough to keep competitors out and slow enough not to break the organization, and that it was 20%.
Garcia looked at him with contempt, Vinall said, and replied that the reason that chief executive only grew at 20% a year was that he wanted to be home by six. Vinall took it as an accidental disclosure that Carvana's answer would not be 20%.
Green's own version of the trait comes from his book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, after interviewing Jeff Vinik, Peter Lynch and Will Danoff: that success is often nothing more mysterious than how badly a person wants it. Vinall pushed back slightly. There is no checklist of qualities for a great leader, he said, because founders shape companies and then companies shape founders. Steve Jobs treated people badly by most accounts and it worked; leaders with no ego who can pull people together also work. What matters is the fit between the leader and the organization.
10. Meta, Nestlé And Mistrust
Green asked how Vinall reads Mark Zuckerberg, given that a lot of what he does is buying misperception.
He puts Zuckerberg in the same category as Garcia
It's a mystery to me why he is the controversial figure he is, but I realize a lot of people would disagree with that.
Rob Vinall
Vinall declined to go further, saying it was a rabbit hole. He made one general observation instead.
Hostility scales with the size of the company
But the one observation I would make is I think generally people are quite negative about business in general and the bigger the business is the more negative they are about it.
Rob Vinall
His example was from his own childhood.
The 1980s version of the same argument was about Nestlé
So I remember when I was a kid and the big bug bear at that time was Nestle of all companies
Rob Vinall
The claim at the time, as he recalled it, was that Nestlé was sending powdered milk to Africa, weaning infants off their mothers and then withdrawing the product. He called the theory ridiculous, noted that Nestlé does not make a meaningful share of its revenue in Africa now and would have made less then, and said the readiness to assume the worst of the largest companies has not gone away.
11. A Moat That Widens
Green asked about competitive advantage, given holdings such as Carvana and Meta. Vinall said his view has changed: ten years ago he would have said moats are good and bigger is better.
A wide moat can make a company complacent
They can create complacency and especially in industries where there's rapid change that could be an active disadvantage rather than an advantage.
Rob Vinall
A narrower advantage that keeps a company under pressure, he said, forces it to keep adapting. The direction matters more than the width.
The test is whether the advantage is growing
And more importantly that moat should be expanding and moving in the right direction rather than narrowing.
Rob Vinall
He said he would rather own a company with a smaller advantage that is widening than one with a larger advantage that is shrinking.
12. A Third In China
Green said four of Vinall's top ten holdings looked Chinese. Vinall corrected the framing upward.
The weighting, in his own words
It's about a third of the portfolio.
Rob Vinall
He has traveled to China nearly every year for about fifteen years, apart from the COVID closure, and went back as soon as the restrictions lifted, writing a postcard to investors about the trip. The perception he had expected, of cheap manufacturing and no innovation, did not survive the visit.
The 2023 trip reversed his expectations
And when I went back there in 2023, it was completely clear to me that the complete opposite was the case.
Rob Vinall
He listed innovation across manufacturing, consumer internet and e-commerce, and cities that had visibly improved. The investment case, though, rests on the gap between his view and everyone else's: a country he is positive about and the rest of the world is negative about is the setup he wants.
He was blunt about his disadvantages.
He does not claim an edge in China
I'm very conscious when I invest in China that I don't speak the language. I only go there once or twice a year and so there's one and a half billion people on the planet who are better positioned to invest in China than I am.
Rob Vinall
The compensation is to keep it simple and apply the same three tests he applies anywhere: a founder still running the business, a wide competitive advantage, and a cheap price. The names are Luckin Coffee, a recent purchase, Tencent Holdings, H World Group and Yum China. He also still owns DiDi Global, which he thinks has dropped out of the top ten, and has owned Prosus as a discounted route into Tencent.
What he expects those holdings to earn him
So all of those companies you mentioned I would expect the earnings growth to be at the very least 10% in the coming years in many cases much more than that and most of them are returning at least 5% if not more of their capital in terms of dividends and share buybacks per year. So I get very comfortably to the 15% owner return that I target.
Rob Vinall
Those figures are Vinall's own expectations for his holdings, not disclosed results.
13. A Partner, Not A Vote
RV Capital has had a co-managing director, Andreas Lechner, since a 2022 change in Swiss law required the firm to hold a license, which it had a better chance of getting with two people. Green described him as a brilliant and eccentric mathematician who published a book at 17, has never worked for anyone, and runs his own money in about six positions.
Vinall's introduction was a joke about the firm's research process.
The in-house model has a name
Well, RV has its own LLM.
Rob Vinall
Anthropic calls its model Claude, he said; RV Capital calls its Andreas. The two met in Omaha in 2006 and have been in constant contact since, mostly about businesses and stocks. The 2022 licensing change formalized a collaboration that already existed.
The productive part of the relationship, he said, is that they share enough assumptions to have a conversation and disagree on enough to argue. China is one of the disagreements.
His partner is the bear on China
And China is one area where Andreas is certainly more negative than I am.
Rob Vinall
What they do not do is tell each other what they are buying. Vinall runs the Business Owner Fund alone; Lechner runs his own money and some outside client money. Vinall splits a decision into a research phase, where he wants as much input and disconfirming evidence as he can get, and the decision itself, which he makes alone.
The reason is not distrust of his partner
But when it comes to actually making the investment decision, I think it's super important to make that by myself because, and it's not because I don't trust Andreas or value his feedback. It's more that I actually in some respects don't trust myself.
Rob Vinall
He is guarding against deference, not disagreement
I don't want to be making a decision because I think other people think it's a good idea.
Rob Vinall
Green read back a line of Lechner's from a shareholder Q&A, on the consistency of quality.
Excellent companies are excellent everywhere you look
What I've increasingly flocked to was companies where I just admire what they're doing. Excellent companies usually are excellent from all perspectives.
William Green
Vinall said that belongs to the same category as liking a manager: three decades of investing his own money has given Lechner patterns that fire before the analysis does.
14. The Weirdest Market
Green quoted something Vinall had said to him in June.
His June description of the market
This is the weirdest market I think I've ever seen
William Green
Vinall walked it back a little, since 2008 and the COVID period were also strange, but kept the substance. The index looks like an ordinary year.
The average conceals the distribution
It looks like a very normal type of stock market year, decent gains, but you poke under the surface and you have like just a handful of stocks that have just gone to the moon
Rob Vinall
Everything else, he said, is priced as though there had been a financial crisis, with most of the gains coming from one corner of semiconductor hardware. For someone buying durable businesses cheaply, that is a good problem.
In March the problem was choosing, not finding
especially in March of this year in the software space the question wasn't can I find a software company I want to own it was like which of the 20 or 30 which are down 60 70% from their previous highs should I be buying now
Rob Vinall
What he bought in early March was Constellation Software, the same selloff Chris Begg bought into. His case is about people rather than the acquisition machine. Founder Mark Leonard stepped down for health reasons but is still a presence, and the company is full of people who founded the businesses inside it.
The current chief executive is himself a founder
So the new CEO Mark Miller, he actually started the company which was the first company that Mark Leonard bought when he started Constellation Software. So you could almost make the case that the current CEO is more of a founder than the actual founder.
Rob Vinall
The other reason he leaned toward Constellation over other software companies is pay: he said much of the sector issues far too much stock to employees, which leaves too little of the earnings for owners.
15. Cash, Not Momentum
Green read from the half-year letter, where Vinall addressed the hunt for the one enormous winner.
He is not playing the outlier game
If the odds of picking one have lengthened from 100 to one to 200 to one, so what? That was never the game I was playing.
William Green
What the letter says he is doing instead
Instead, I aim to find a small number of durable businesses that can grow their intrinsic value by 15% or more per year through earnings growth, capital returns, or a combination of both, and buy them when they're cheap due to a temporary setback.
William Green
Vinall said the two edges he assumed he needed when he started, outthinking everyone and outwaiting everyone, have both inverted. Waiting is no longer scarce, because share prices now collapse in a day on minor disappointments as everyone tries to sell ahead of everyone else. Thinking is not scarce either, because chatbots let anyone get up to speed on a company quickly. His read is that fundamental research has become a commodity and is therefore being skipped, while attention goes to identifying the next Nvidia, Google or Micron.
He accepts he will own none of those. What he expects to own is a large number of companies that cannot be huge winners but will produce satisfactory returns over five to ten years, and he thinks those are getting easier to buy.
Green asked how valuation discipline survives a market like this, citing Terry Smith, whom he has interviewed and who has been criticized for turning toward momentum. Vinall said he does not derive a method from observing what is working.
He treats discounted cash as the fixed point
I deeply believe that a company is worth the cash it's going to produce over its lifetime.
Rob Vinall
And he is explicit about how hard the forecast is
Now obviously it's not easy to predict what that cash is going to be and that's where it becomes more of an art than a science but as a basic rule I think that's about as close as a law to physics as investing will ever come.
Rob Vinall
16. The 2009 Dinner Table
Asked how he built an environment that supports a countercultural approach, Vinall again said he stumbled into it. His evidence is a conference dinner in roughly January or February 2009.
He did what investors normally do at dinner
So I threw out a few ideas and then people just stopped me in my tracks and said had I not seen the memo that the world is about to end?
Rob Vinall
The table wanted to talk about stocking a larder for economic collapse. He said his composure was not a character trait.
Insulation did the work, not temperament
So the reason I think I kept a cool head in that period wasn't because I have a particularly stronger constitution than other people.
Rob Vinall
Today he is less insulated, with a bigger network and a bigger name, but the structure is the same. Vinall was speaking from the office at the top of his house and going down to dinner with his family afterward.
Nobody in his day argues with the portfolio
So, no one's going to be beating me up this evening over whether I should be owning more momentum stocks or anything like that.
Rob Vinall
17. Down 50%, Then A Tumor
Green set up the hardest year directly.
The drawdown, as the host put it
I think the greatest trial by far you've had in your years as a fund manager has been in 2022 when the fund was down 47.6%
William Green
Carvana, a large holding, fell about 98% on Vinall's account, and there was open speculation that it would go bankrupt.
The size of the fall was not the shock
So I wasn't shocked that the fund went down 50%.
Rob Vinall
The shock was the attribution. The market was bad but not catastrophic, which meant a large part of the loss was his own errors rather than the environment. He said some of it was the market behaving strangely and some of it was him getting things wrong, and that he had not prepared mentally for the second.
Then, in July of the same year, he collapsed and was vomiting blood.
The hospital found a tumor in his stomach
But then in July of that year, I had a medical emergency where unfortunately I broke down started throwing up blood.
Rob Vinall
His first reading of the diagnosis
When I heard that I assumed it was more or less game over.
Rob Vinall
The tumor was cancerous but treatable and he has made a full recovery. For about a week he thought otherwise. The expected compounding of two crises did not happen, he said. The second put the first in proportion: life, family and friendships sit above a bad year.
Green asked whether it changed him permanently. Vinall said no, and explained why in an image.
He was not ready to leave
So what I realized during those days was that I was like in the middle of a movie and actually really enjoyed that movie and I was like sad that I had to leave the theater just when it was getting interesting.
Rob Vinall
Part of what he did not want to miss was Carvana, which he still thought the market had wrong. What did change was small. He estimated ten minutes a day spent deleting pointless email, multiplied across thirty years.
The change he made was an email filter
And so one thing I did was just like create all these filters in Gmail that most emails don't land in my inbox anymore.
Rob Vinall
He also said his reaction to the looser relationships in his life ran the opposite way to the usual one. Rather than cutting back to a core of family and close friends, he decided the once-a-year acquaintances and the people who provide him a service were worth leaning into as well.
18. Engelberg And Purpose
RV Capital holds an annual gathering every January in Engelberg, Switzerland. Limited partners attend, along with a couple of hundred other people, and Green noted that the free tickets go within seconds. Vinall said the reason he works alone is specific.
He does not think he would hold his ground in a group
I'm a strong character, but not an alpha character. I describe myself as beta plus rather than alpha.
Rob Vinall
Which is why the firm has almost no staff
The reason I set things up the way I do is because I realized that I couldn't be successful as an investor if I was surrounded by a bunch of other people.
Rob Vinall
He is not a recluse, though. About fifteen years ago he wrote a memo for young investment managers on how he set up RV Capital, and the combination of that memo and a widening network left him overwhelmed by requests to meet. A friend suggested he see everyone at once, which is how the meeting started.
The value is in the room, not on the stage
But more importantly, I think the connections people make there are probably more valuable than whatever they hear from me.
Rob Vinall
The meeting is published on YouTube afterward. Green said what struck him watching was the inclusiveness — when someone asks a weak question, Vinall answers as though he has misunderstood it. Vinall put that down to spending his first five or six years managing only his own savings, where there was no reason to defend a mistake and every reason to hear about it immediately.
Looking forward, he separated performance from purpose. On performance, he compared his position to an early Olympic sprinter who won partly because almost nobody else could afford to train.
Very few people get this seat
But I do see a strong analogy to the situation I'm in today where how many people get to run a fund of my size and have an opportunity to put down a long-term track record. It's maybe hundreds, but it's probably not thousands.
Rob Vinall
On purpose, he named the three groups on RV Capital's website: young managers who ask him for advice, his own investors, and the companies he owns. He said Green would have ten good alternatives to him as a manager and most of his investors would not — their alternative is a private banker selling structured products. With the companies he owns he calls himself a fan rather than an activist, and says he encourages them to keep doing what they already do.
19. Failing Gracefully
Green's closing question was about money and children. Vinall has two daughters and a younger son, and had raised the subject with Charlie Munger.
The story Vinall told is of a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting where an Indian entrepreneur stood up in front of 20,000 people, described arriving in the United States with nothing, studying by day and washing dishes at night, eventually building a successful company, and asked how to instill the same hunger in his children.
Munger's answer, in Vinall's telling
You're just going to have to learn to fail gracefully.
Rob Vinall
Vinall said he loves Munger and disagrees with him. His counter-evidence is two families he knows.
Wealth does not have to produce soft children
But what I have observed at other families is that you can be in a very wealthy family and still have incredibly driven and balanced kids.
Rob Vinall
Ernie Garcia's family was already wealthy before he started Carvana, he said, and nobody would call Garcia undriven. The other is Will Lundin of the Lundin family, which holds stakes in commodity and energy companies around the world. Vinall put him in his early thirties and described him as both humble and driven. His own postscript was that his children are not grown yet, so the experiment is unfinished.
Bonus Insights
Charlie Munger had a hair rule
never invest in a company where the CEO has good hair
William Green
Green heard the line from Chris Davis and said it reminded him of interviewing Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi as a young journalist. Messier had excellent hair; Vivendi did not do well.
What he looks for in a meeting with a chief executive
What I try and do is just take a manager a little bit off piece and try and hear about how they think about the world and above all what their motivation is.
Rob Vinall
Vinall said investors who ask about the market opportunity and entry barriers get answers the chief executive has given a thousand times. He prefers a walk or a meeting at his home, and Green noted he counts scruffiness and introversion as points in a manager's favor rather than charisma — the opposite of the person in a $6,000 bespoke suit. The question Vinall says matters most is whether he likes the person, and the material he wants is the history of the company, on the theory that the past is the best guide to what the future looks like.
He also declined to preview the lesson of his twenty-year letter, telling Green he would rather save it for the letter itself.
On his name: Green apologized at the end of the interview for mispronouncing the surname at the start and said he leaves his mistakes in. Vinall said he has anglicized his own pronunciation since living in Germany because it is easier phonetically for German speakers.
Vinall's bottom line is that his edge is neither analysis nor patience but selection of people: a small number of founders and lifers running businesses he can buy at a price that delivers a 15% owner return. A market rewarding momentum, he said, is where that approach gets cheaper rather than harder.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
RV Capital and the Business Owner Fund (The firm he founded in Switzerland in 2006 and the fund he has run since 2008; he says the annualized return is about 15.5% net of fees)
Carvana (His largest controversy: he calls co-founder Ernie Garcia the epitome of a founder whose business is his life's work, and says the stock fell about 98% in 2022)
Meta (He admires Mark Zuckerberg and says it is a mystery to him why Zuckerberg is a controversial figure)
Constellation Software (Bought in early March during the selloff in software; he says chief executive Mark Miller founded the first company Mark Leonard acquired)
Luckin Coffee, Tencent Holdings, H World Group and Yum China (The Chinese holdings behind the roughly one-third weighting, all still run by their founders)
DiDi Global (Still held, he says, though it may have dropped out of his top ten)
Prosus (Previously owned as a discounted way to hold Tencent)
Nestlé (His childhood example of a large company assumed to be acting badly, over powdered milk sold in Africa)
Berkshire Hathaway (The 2006 annual meeting is what pushed him to start his own firm; Buffett's hiring of Ajit Jain is his case study in liking a manager)
Goldman Sachs (His 1997 graduate program, which he describes as a machine that needs cogs rather than independent thinkers)
Nvidia, Google and Micron (The companies he says investors are hunting for the next version of, and which he expects not to own)
Trupanion (Named by Green among the founder-led companies Vinall has admired)
Vivendi (Green's cautionary example: Jean-Marie Messier had excellent hair)
Claude (The joke behind his description of his partner: Anthropic calls its model Claude, RV Capital calls its Andreas)
Gmail (Filters were the concrete change he made after his cancer scare, to stop losing ten minutes a day to deleting email)
Christ's Hospital (The means-tested English boarding school he attended from age 11)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham (A friend brought a copy into their shared office during the dot-com crash; the 1929 chapter described exactly what they were seeing)
The Snowball – Alice Schroeder (Source of the Ajit Jain passage Vinall used in his Omaha talk)
Richer, Wiser, Happier – William Green (Green's own book, where he wrote that success is often no more mysterious than how badly a person wants it)
RV Capital's letters to co-investors (Including the half-year letter he sent the morning of the recording, and the postcard he wrote after returning to China in 2023)
RV Capital's annual meeting videos (The Engelberg Q&A sessions, published free; Green drew several quotations from the 2022 and 2024 sessions)
The Manual of Ideas (Where Vinall gave a rare 2009 interview setting out the 15% annual target)
Value Investor Conference (The Omaha conference where Vinall gave talks in 2014, 2017 and 2024)
William Green's interview with Chris Begg (Begg bought Constellation Software in the same software selloff, and is the source of "the ability to linger longer")
William Green's interview with Terry Smith (Raised as the example of a value manager criticized for turning toward momentum)
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