Quality Partners Beat Price

Shaan Puri shares his experience about selling his company (Milk Road) and how choosing quality partners over the highest bidder led to better outcomes. This aligns with Charlie Munger's principle that to get what you want, you need to deserve what you want.

Key Points:

• Decision Making in Business Sales:

  • Chose buyers who weren't the highest bidders but were the highest quality people
  • Believed that being in business with high-quality people would create more value long-term
  • Theory: Every dollar less taken today could create 3 more dollars in the future through quality partnerships

• Learning from Quality Partners:

  • Buyers had built and sold businesses for $90-200M
  • Expected to learn SEO expertise from these successful partners
  • Instead of complex tricks, learned a simple but profound lesson about deserving success

• The Real Success Formula:

  • Success comes from deserving it, not from tricks or hacks
  • Example: To rank #1 in Google, they:
    • Printed out competitor pages
    • Honestly evaluated their own page quality
    • Made incremental improvements until they genuinely deserved the top spot
    • Focused on being objectively better than competitors

• Munger's Philosophy Applied:

  • Things you can't buy but must earn:
    • Trust from others
    • Success
    • Admiration
  • The path to getting what you want is becoming worthy of it

This approach demonstrates that sustainable success comes from genuine value creation rather than shortcuts or tactical advantages.