Patrick Henry

Henry Ellenbogen has one of the best track records in growth investing, yet he has kept a notably low profile. He built his reputation at T. Rowe Price, where he ran the New Horizons Fund and turned it into one of the best-performing small-cap growth portfolios in the country. He backed more than 50 companies through IPO before leaving in 2019 to found Durable Capital. Henry believes great investing is about understanding people and change. He spent his career studying the 1% of companies that drive nearly all long-term returns, which led him to a simple philosophy: invest in small companies that can become large ones. He built Durable to uniquely support a company through its full compounding journey. A single team can invest early in private markets and continue owning businesses as they scale into durable public companies. He talks about investing in and learning directly from founders like Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings, @tobi, @mlevchin, and @LuisvonAhn, and watching how they adapt and rebuild as their businesses scale. He is especially drawn to "Act II" entrepreneurs, founders who have already built one company and return with sharper judgment and execution the second time. We also discuss Durable itself, which is Henry's own Act II. He explains how he has built the firm around developing talent, measuring people by how much they make others better, and his discipline of writing memos and doing multi-year lookbacks on every investment. What comes through most clearly is how much Henry loves the craft of investing, and how seriously he takes building something meant to last. Enjoy! Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:02 Origin of an Investment Philosophy 07:02 The "One Percent" of Stocks 13:17 Domino's 19:10 Betting on "Act Two" Teams 24:31 Building Durable Capital 34:46 Market Structure and Time Arbitrage 52:49 Adapting to Discontinuous Change 1:03:19 Physical Moats vs. Soft Moats 1:11:52 The End of Free Money 1:37:35 The Argument for Going Public 1:46:43 The "Warriors" Mindset 1:51:17 Kindest Thing