What’s Next?
Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s retirement plan has been in the news lately because he’s long said that his tenth movie would be his last, he’s up to nine, and he’s shooting a new one this year. His reasoning for this is that “Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film [effs] up three good ones.”
In other words, the man wants his professional legacy to be one high quality, completed, coherent thought, and I respect that. I mention that here because Tarantino’s plan is relevant to a question we get a lot at Permanent Equity, which is what happens at the end of 27 years (i.e., our fund life)?
Candidly, it’s a good question that we don’t know the answer to, and the reason we don’t know the answer yet is because there is a lot of time between now and then and therefore a wide range of potential answers. The endpoints of that endgame interval are (1) Permanent Equity ceases to exist to (2) Permanent Equity goes on forever.
The interesting thing about endgames is that to be thoughtful about one, you have to start preparing for it long in advance, but you can also prepare for more than one at once. Here at Permanent Equity we are trying to get and stay prepared for a lot of possibilities. After all, if you’re in the business of creating variance (which is what I think we are), you have to be able to take advantage of it when it’s created.
The challenge is that preparing to take the Tarantino approach (i.e., end it) looks very different from preparing Permanent for permanence in terms of what we do and how we spend our time. To do the former, we should be heads down on our core business, with tight quality controls, while syncing everything up to pay off around the same time. The latter, on the other hand, would have us spending more time on talent recruitment and development and risking mistakes in the name of learning so that the practice can evolve and outlive the practitioners.
Tarantino has chosen the former, and in doing so, has assured himself of an incredible legacy. But what he’ll never know is if his 11th or 12th or 13th film might have been best and enhanced his legacy, or if he started a studio and let someone else make Pulp Fiction 2, if that would have been fantastic.
After all, that’s the value of open-endedness.
The risk, though, is that you or someone else tarnishes a legacy that should have been left alone to stand on its merits. For example, what would Goldman Sachs look like today if it hadn’t gone public? And is Giorgio Armani still a high-end brand?
So what in your life and work are you preparing for? You don’t have to know the answer now (again, we don’t either). The key, though, if you don’t, is to make sure you’re not doing or not doing things (like ignoring talent recruitment and development) that would make it impossible to accomplish one of your possibilities in the future.