Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital is one of the clearest thinkers on the investment process. I have read many of his memos over the years. In early 2014 he published Dare to Be Great II, building on an earlier memo of the same name, and the argument has stayed with me.
The core riddle he poses:
"Suppose I hire you as a portfolio manager and we agree you will get no compensation next year if your return is in the bottom nine deciles of the investor universe but $10 million if you're in the top decile. What's the first thing you have to do — the absolute prerequisite — in order to have a chance at the big money? No one has ever answered it right."
The answer is not obvious. You have to assemble a portfolio that looks different from everyone else's. If you hold what the crowd holds, you can do well or poorly — but you cannot do different. And different is the prerequisite for superior.
Non-consensus investing, though, carries its own cost:
"Non-consensus ideas have to be lonely. By definition, non-consensus ideas that are popular, widely held or intuitively obvious are an oxymoron. Thus such ideas are uncomfortable; non-conformists don't enjoy the warmth that comes with being at the center of the herd. Further, unconventional ideas often appear imprudent. The popular definition of 'prudent' — especially in the investment world — is often twisted into 'what everyone does.'"
I think about this often in the context of what we are building at Enduring Ventures.
Acquiring small, profitable, founder-led industrial and B2B businesses in Southeast Asia — businesses with USD 1–3M in annual net profit, often in sectors like packaging, distribution, or engineering services — is not where most institutional capital is looking. These businesses are too small for private equity. Too unglamorous for venture. Too far away for global allocators.
That creates an opportunity. But it also creates the loneliness Marks describes. There are few benchmarks to validate against. You make your judgement, you act on it, and you sit with the discomfort of not knowing whether the crowd will eventually agree with you — or whether their agreement matters at all.
What I have come to believe is that for the kind of work we do, the crowd's agreement is largely beside the point. We are not buying to sell. We are not marking to market. We are acquiring businesses to steward them — for the people who work in them, for the founders who built them, and for the communities they serve.
In that frame, the non-consensus path is not just a source of return. It is a path that is deeply meaningful to us, as we steward these businesses that we acquire, to grow them over the long run and for the common good. Daring to be great, in this context, means being willing to embrace the less taken path — and building anyway.
— Lucien Ong, Co-Founder, Enduring Ventures