6 Key Takeaways from the Johnathan Bi/Cosmos Institute/Colin Moran Interview

The Best Investors don’t Chase Spreadsheets — They Decode Cultures.

Colin Moran has spent two decades compounding at the top tier while hiring classicists, theologians, and musicians, then telling his team to “follow the fun.” It sounds unserious until you realize that fun, properly understood, is shorthand for deep intellectual curiosity. For Moran, businesses are “human ecologies,” not abstract cash-flow machines. Read them as you would a novel: identify the characters who actually move the plot, listen for the themes that recur, and notice the tone that seeps between the lines. That approach led him to Shopify; not because a model said so, but because the culture and its craftsman-CEO were unmistakably alive.

1) Treat research like close reading

Moran’s process borrows from the critic Robert Warshow: slow, attentive description before grand theory. When a company puzzles you resist the urge to “solve” it with a macro story. Instead, talk to employees and customers, use the product, and keep listening until the company’s music coheres into a narrative. Sometimes it never does; walk away. But when it does, you’ll see what org charts hide: where energy concentrates, which subcultures create compounding advantages, and why a leader’s clarity and sincerity matter economically. Culture, in other words, is not vibes; it is a predictive variable.

2) Know reason’s limits — and narrow your circle of competence

Moran is explicit about what his team won’t do: predict interest rates, narrate the business cycle, or let “systems thinking” launder emotion into analysis. Reason works wonderfully on knowable micro questions and poorly on global prophecy. So they build an inventory of companies they understand and wait for price to meet preparation. A crucial corrective follows: the amount you’ve studied a name doesn’t improve its risk/reward. The world is indifferent to your sunk research. Either the spread between price and value exists, or it doesn’t.

3) Conviction feels like fear (and that’s okay)

The great trades never felt inevitable ex ante. In 2008, with markets melting down, Moran bought a heating-oil distributor trading at roughly one times free cash flow, the cheapest he’d seen, and concentrated a third of the fund. It was terrifying; it was also rational. Conviction, properly earned, often cohabits with anxiety. That’s because the opportunity usually exists precisely where consensus is most afraid. The discipline is to distinguish fear that signals ignorance (“we don’t understand this”) from fear that accompanies clarity (“we do understand this, and the world is mispricing it”).

4) Founder myths, selection effects, and the craftsman ideal

Tech loves essentialist stories about “types” of great founders (autists, megalomaniacs, revenge seekers). Moran’s pushback is twofold. First, beware retroactive narrative: we study the winners because they won, then back-fit traits. Second, many exceptional leaders are neither tyrants nor demigods; they’re craftsmen. Shopify’s Tobi Lütke is his exhibit A: a builder with clear thought, honest communication, and a sincere purpose that scaled. Culture built by fear can work when marching in formation is the goal; culture built for originality requires trust, clarity, and an animating craft ethos.

5) The philosophy underneath: commitments before certainty

Here’s where Moran becomes unusually candid for finance. He draws on John Henry Newman’s idea of the illative sense — the judgment we arrive at through reasons we can’t fully formalize. You don’t achieve mathematical proof about a company (or about God); you cultivate a lived, tested confidence. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski sharpened the point for him: to say tyrannical evil is truly evil, we make metaphysical commitments. In life and in markets, you cannot outsource conviction to spreadsheets. You must choose where you will stand — then let feedback, over time, refine or rebuke that stance.

6) A practical playbook for builders and investors

• Hire for humane detectors. Analysts who can read people, parse subcultures, and hear the “music” of an organization will surface truths models miss.
• Research for delight. “Follow the fun” isn’t frivolous; it’s an algorithm for non-obvious insight. Curiosity pulls you into edges others ignore.
• Refuse macro theater. Put your attention where you have agency: unit economics, product truth, leadership character, customer devotion.
• Accumulate understanding, then wait. Price is the final arbiter; preparation is your edge.
• Expect nerves at the moment of truth. If the thesis is clear and the price is right, the presence of fear is not a disqualifier.

The through-line is refreshingly unromantic: treat companies as living cultures, respect the boundaries of reason, and accept that conviction precedes applause. That’s how a hedge fund run by humanities nerds keeps finding asymmetric bets — by reading the world as carefully as a great book, and only turning the page when the story rings true.

You can listen to the entire interview on X.