Henry Singleton

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The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

When a CEO generates significantly better returns than both his peers and the market, he deserves to be called “great,” and by this definition, Welch, who outperformed the S&P by 3.3 times over his tenure at GE, was an undeniably great CEO. He wasn’t even in the same zip code as Henry Singleton, however. . . . Known today only to a small group of investors and cognoscenti, Henry Singleton was a remarkable man with an unusual background for a CEO. A world-class mathematician who enjoyed playing chess blindfolded, he had programmed MIT’s first computer while earning a doctorate in electrical engineering. During World War II, he developed a “degaussing” technology that allowed Allied ships to avoid radar detection, and in the 1950s, he created an inertial guidance system that is still in use in most military and commercial aircraft.

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Since going public, the company has also pursued an unusual and aggressive capital allocation strategy (one that has caused a fair amount of comment and confusion on Wall Street), maintaining generally high levels of leverage, repurchasing shares, and announcing a large special dividend (financed with debt) in the depths of the recent financial crisis. Not surprisingly, returns for the shareholders have also been excellent—the stock has appreciated over fourfold since the company’s 2006 initial public offering. CHAPTER 2 An Unconventional Conglomerateur Henry Singleton and Teledyne Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business . . . if one took the 100 top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton’s. —Warren Buffett, 1980 I change my mind when the facts change.

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Chief executive officers—Biography. I. Title. HD38.2.T476 2012 658.4′09—dc23 2012012451 Contents Preface: Singletonville Introduction An Intelligent Iconoclasm 1. A Perpetual Motion Machine for Returns Tom Murphy and Capital Cities Broadcasting 2. An Unconventional Conglomerateur Henry Singleton and Teledyne 3. The Turnaround Bill Anders and General Dynamics 4. Value Creation in a Fast-Moving Stream John Malone and TCI 5. The Widow Takes the Helm Katharine Graham and The Washington Post Company 6. A Public LBO Bill Stiritz and Ralston Purina 7. Optimizing the Family Firm Dick Smith and General Cinema 8.

Quantitative Value: A Practitioner's Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors by Wesley R. Gray, Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, backtesting, beat the dealer, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, compound rate of return, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, intangible asset, Jim Simons, Louis Bachelier, p-value, passive investing, performance metric, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical model, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, transaction costs

By making repurchases when a company's market value is well below its business value, management clearly demonstrates that it is given to actions that enhance the wealth of shareholders, rather than to actions that expand management's domain but that do nothing for (or even harm) shareholders.” —Warren Buffett, Shareholder Letter, 19841 Henry Singleton is most notable for two achievements: building Teledyne from scratch into one of the most profitable and successful stocks in the United States at the time he stepped down 29 years later, and for his “almost arrogant scorn for most conventional business practices.”2 Warren Buffett has described Singleton as a “managerial superstar,”3 saying that he had “the best operating and capital deployment record in American business.”4 That is high praise indeed, coming from one of the world's greatest capital allocators.

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Buyback spending among Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 companies hit a record high in the third quarter of 2007, near the market peak. It shrank 86 percent over the next seven quarters as share prices tumbled.9 This behavior turns the stomach of value investors, but it's par for the course for most managements. The Henry Singletons are few and far between. Another method for measuring the performance of stocks is to measure the change in the stock's outstanding shares from one period to the next, rather than the amount of stock issued or repurchased or the dollar amount spent or raised, and then to examine the subsequent performance of the stock price.

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We discuss the steps we take to increase the probability that the returns we analyze are possible, can be replicated by independent researchers, and are likely to provide favorable live performance in the future. NOTES 1. Warren Buffett, “Shareholder Letter,” Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. Annual Report, 1984. 2. Robert J. Flaherty, “The Singular Henry Singleton,” Forbes, July 9, 1979. 3. Warren Buffett, “Shareholder Letter,” Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. Annual Report, 1982. 4. John Train, The Money Masters (New York: HarperBusiness, 1994). 5. Flaherty. 6. Alison Leigh Cowan, “Wall St. Eyes Are on Teledyne.” New York Times, July 9, 1987. 7. David L.

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

The best capital allocators delegate the day-to-day operations to other managers within the business; for example, Carlino delegates the day-to-day operations to COO Tim Wilmott. This allows these CEOs to see the big picture and not get bogged down in the details. One of the best capital allocators in corporate history was Henry Singleton, longtime CEO of Teledyne, who cofounded the business in 1960 and served as CEO until 1986. In John Train’s book The Money Masters, Warren Buffett reported that he believes “Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital-deployment record in American business.” When Teledyne’s stock was trading at extremely high prices in the 1960s, Singleton used the high-priced stock as currency to make acquisitions.

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Look for Managers Who Continually Increase Their Ownership Interest in the Business The best managers to partner with are those who continually increase or retain their ownership in the business. For example, the following CEOs have sold very limited quantities of their companies’ stock during their tenures: Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; Bruce Flatt, CEO of Brookfield Asset Management; Dave and Sherry Gold, founders of 99 Cent Only Stores; and Henry Singleton, former CEO of Teledyne. Singleton, for example, did not receive any option awards and only sold stock in 1987 and 1988 after continuing to buy it for more than 20 years.28 Bruce Flatt was once asked what his hobby was, and he responded that it was collecting shares of his stock. All of these businesses have created tremendous value for shareholders over the long term.

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Both of these were major stumbling blocks that Motorola had not fully considered when it was developing the service.11 Motorola had focused so much on achieving its strategic goal that it neglected the basics of getting good customer feedback early on. Here are a few examples of businesses operated by CEOs who do not follow well-formulated strategic plans but instead improve the business day by day. Henry Singleton, CEO of Teledyne Inc. from the 1960s through the 1980s, believed the best plan was no plan. Under his tenure, Teledyne’s stock compounded at more than 20 percent for more than 20 years. He believed it was better to approach an uncertain world with an open mind. Singleton once remarked at a Teledyne annual meeting, “. . . we’re subject to a tremendous number of outside influences, and the vast majority of them cannot be predicted.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Peter Lynch, One Up on Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 27. Updating Our Beliefs in Light of New Evidence 1. Michael Rothschild, Bionomics: Economy as Business Ecosystem (Beard Books, 1990). 2. Carter Johnson, “Dr. Henry Singleton and Teledyne,” ValueWalk, April 27, 2018, https://www.valuewalk.com/2018/04/dr-henry-singleton-and-teledyne. 3. Whitney Tilson, “Notes from the 2004 Wesco Annual Meeting,” Whitney Tilson’s Value Investing Website, May 5, 2004, https://www.tilsonfunds.com/wscmtg04notes.doc. 4. Scott Fearon and Jesse Powell, Dead Companies Walking: How a Hedge Fund Manager Finds Opportunity in Unexpected Places (New York: St.

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“Investing Instinct.” Investment Masters Class. http://mastersinvest.com/investinginstinctquotes. Jobs, Steve. “ ‘You’ve Got to Find What You Love,’ Jobs Says.” Stanford News, June 14, 2005. https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505. Johnson, Carter. “Dr. Henry Singleton and Teledyne.” ValueWalk, April 27, 2018. https://www.valuewalk.com/2018/04/dr-henry-singleton-and-teledyne. Jordon, Steve. “Investors Earn Handsome Paychecks by Handling Buffett’s Business.” Omaha World-Herald, April 28, 2013. https://www.omaha.com/money/investors-earn-handsome-paychecks-by-handling-buffett-s-business/article_bb1fc40f-e6f9-549d-be2f-be1ef4c0da03.html.

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—Phil Fisher When businesses treat equity capital as gold, even those with limited internal compounding growth opportunities can create significant shareholder value through disciplined capital allocation. If excess free cash flow cannot be reinvested, then look for sound capital allocation that might result in dividends or value-accretive buybacks and acquisitions. Henry Singleton of Teledyne Technologies was an exemplary capital allocator. He would issue shares to acquire cheaper companies when his company’s stock was trading at expensive P/E multiples of 40× to 50×, and when his stock P/E was in single digits, he would repurchase stock. It is smart capital allocation to raise equity at a low dilution when the shares are trading at steep valuations.

100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them by Christopher W Mayer

Alan Greenspan, asset light, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, market bubble, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, peak oil, Pershing Square Capital Management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, tontine

And it serves as a handbook for exactly the kind of thing I spend so much time looking for: truly great owner-operators. Finally, but just as importantly, the quest for the next 100-bagger logically begins with a study of the wizards who have already done it. 94 100-BAGGERS Thorndike profiles eight CEOs. Four of their stocks became 100baggers under their watch. These CEOs include Henry Singleton at Teledyne (180-bagger), Tom Murphy at Capital Cities (204-bagger) and John Malone at TCI (900-bagger). Oh, and Warren Buffett. There are also four who don’t quite make the cut of being a 100-bagger, such as Katharine Graham at the Washington Post (89-bagger) and Bill Stiritz at Ralston Purina (52-bagger).

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Outsiders show “a genius for simplicity,” Thorndike writes. This allowed them to cut “through the clutter of peer and press chatter to zero in on the core economic characteristics of their business.” He provides many examples of all these traits. And you see the result: some jaw-dropping track records. Take Henry Singleton of Teledyne. (This is one of my favorite case studies in all of business history.) Teledyne was a conglomerate—nothing too special. But look at how Singleton used his tool kit. He avoided paying dividends. He ignored reported earnings, focusing on cash flow. He had Teledyne buy back 90 percent of its stock over time.

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Harrison Labs is not a familiar name today because it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1962. The stock’s price zoomed, and Shannon got a handsome chunk of Hewlett-Packard stock in the merger. The size of the paper profit convinced him that there was real money to be made in stocks. The experience with Harrison made Shannon receptive when another friend, Henry Singleton, spoke of starting his own company. Singleton was a close friend of Shannon’s from MIT graduate school. They played chess together. For a while, Singleton lived in Greenwich Village near Bell Labs. Then he moved west to work in the booming defense industry. In 1960 Singleton and George Kozmetsky founded Teledyne, a defense contractor selling digital navigation systems to a still-analog Pentagon.

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When they were thinking of investing in Kentucky Fried Chicken, they bought the chicken and served it to friends to gauge their reactions. “If we try it and don’t like it,” Shannon said, “we simply won’t consider an investment in the firm.” Shannon became a board member of Teledyne. He was not just a distinguished name in the annual report but was actively scouting potential acquisitions for CEO Henry Singleton. For instance, in 1978 Shannon investigated Perception Technology Corporation on behalf of Teledyne. Perception Technology was founded by an MIT physicist, Huseyin Yilmaz, whose training was largely in general relativity. During the visit with Shannon, Yilmaz spoke enthusiastically about physics, asserting that there was a “gap in Einstein’s equation” which Yilmaz had filled with an extra term.

Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

Although the modern concept of the CEO as an executor of management technique, objective setting, and implementation has continued to be dominant, another management model has gained traction The Investment Challenge 7 in recent years. The success of CEOs who place emphasis on effective allocation of capital and people has led to a reappraisal of the hierarchy of management skills.8 Noteworthy examples of these CEOs include Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Henry Singleton (Teledyne), and Thomas Murphy (Capital Cities), all of whom have demonstrated the significant impact of CEOs as allocators of capital and human resources. Often this focus on capital allocation is paired with an executive style that emphasizes meaningful decentralization in the management hierarchy.

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Decentralized management approaches identify experienced, skilled, and accomplished leaders for different segments of a business network, allowing them to operate with relatively little day-to-day supervision beyond that exercised via control of major available resources. In the view of many management theorists, management control of this sort offers distinct advantages over the more minute-to-minute frenetic activity of dominating, control-oriented CEOs.9 Henry Singleton, the CEO of Teledyne from the 1960s to the 1980s, was a wonderful example of this management style. While there were earlier CEOs who focused more on resource allocation than on the more traditional management skills such as execution of management technique and implementation of day-to-day management plans, Singleton seemed to be the most striking contemporary departure from this dominant model.

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Camera and Instrument immediately forbade them from participating, citing potential conflict of interest. No one noted it at the time, but Davis and Rock were launching the first venture capital fund on the West Coast.75 Rock had become a close friend to Jay Last and so knew of Last’s longstanding dissatisfactions at Fairchild. Rock had also made the acquaintance of Henry Singleton, a PhD engineer who had left his research job at Litton Industries two years before to start a high-tech conglomerate he called Teledyne. Singleton wanted to start a division of Teledyne to develop advanced semiconductor devices for military applications. In other words, he wanted to start an integrated circuits company.

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“Nothing else was really in Intel’s best interest,” Markkula acknowledges.48 But Arthur Rock had paid careful attention to Markkula and Wozniak’s presentation. A few days later, he called Markkula’s office. “I want to talk to these guys,” Rock said. After attending a small computer hobbyists’ convention and noticing many more people crowded around the Apple booth than any other, Rock decided to invest $60,000 in the company. He also brought in Henry Singleton of Teledyne, who invested $108,000. In 1977, Regis McKenna, who handled Intel’s public relations, began working with Apple. He hosted a party, one of whose key objectives was to introduce Ann Bowers, who was building her consulting business, to Steve Jobs, who McKenna thought needed to hire a human-resources expert.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Time passed and nothing happened. Last and Hoerni seemed too timid to act. So Rock spoke with Teledyne’s boss, Henry Singleton, explaining why his hiking friends would be assets to his enterprise. Then he placed a call to Fairchild midway through the company’s Christmas gift exchange, which featured none other than Jay Last dressed up as Santa Claus. Now was the time to seize the moment, Rock pressed the vacillating Santa, wheeling out the man-or-mouse challenge beloved by later headhunters. Henry Singleton was by his phone, Rock urged him. He was sitting there, waiting, expecting Last’s call.[53] Last duly dialed Singleton and agreed to meet him at Teledyne’s headquarters in West Los Angeles.[54] He promised to bring Hoerni along.

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham

book value, business logic, buy and hold, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, corporate governance, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, fixed income, George Santayana, Henry Singleton, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, junk bonds, large denomination, low cost airline, Michael Milken, oil shock, passive investing, price stability, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Teledyne, the market place, transaction costs, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

However, very few enterprises possess both characteristics, and competition to buy those that do has now become fierce to the point of being self-defeating. The second category involves the managerial superstars-men who can recognize that rare prince who is disguised as a toad, and who have managerial abilities that enable them to peel away the disguise. We salute such managers as Ben Heineman at Northwest Industries, Henry Singleton at Teledyne, Erwin Zaban at National Service Industries, and especially Tom Murphy at Capital Cities Communications (a real managerial "twofer", whose acquisition efforts have been properly focused in Category 1 and whose operating talents also make him a leader of Category 2). From both direct and vicarious experience, we recognize the difficulty and rarity of these executives' achievements.

Deep Value by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, financial engineering, fixed income, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, John Bogle, joint-stock company, low interest rates, margin call, passive investing, principal–agent problem, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple

By 1966, Litton had sales of $1 billion, and sold more than 5,000 products, including such high-technology exotica as oil drilling rigs, submarines, credit cards, trading stamps, and, of course, mechanical tabulating machines.14 The torrid pace of acquisitions since Thornton had taken over in 1954 had burned out a number of the top executives. Those that left were called LIDOs—Litton Industries Drop Outs—and Litton became known as a “school for conglomerateurs.”15 One notable LIDO was Henry Singleton, who, along with another Litton alumnus, left to form Teledyne. Buffett has described Singleton as a “managerial superstar,”16 with “the best operating and capital deployment record in American business.”17 The LIDOs and others aped Litton, but none had Thornton’s zeal for publicity and deft touch in investor relations.

Concentrated Investing by Allen C. Benello

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, Claude Shannon: information theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, family office, fixed income, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Louis Bachelier, margin call, merger arbitrage, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, prudent man rule, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, survivorship bias, technology bubble, Teledyne, transaction costs, zero-sum game

., started in 1954 by Charles William “Bill” Harrison, a former Bell Labs scientist, and his wife, Gwen. The company made parts for the nascent field of color television cameras. When Hewlett‐Packard acquired it in 1962, Shannon received stock as part of the merger, and was struck by the size of the gain.13 He also invested in Teledyne, Inc., a new venture started by Henry Singleton, a close friend and alumnus from MIT’s graduate school. Shannon bought in 1960 at the $1 initial public offer price.14 By 1967, the stock traded for $24. None other than Warren Buffett would later describe Singleton as a “managerial superstar,”15 with “the best operating and capital deployment record in American business.”16 Shannon would go on to sit on the board of Teledyne, and would conduct technical and business diligence on potential acquisitions at Singleton’s behest.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Baker insisted it was an honorable thing to do “should the man who came up with information theory” suffer any kind of financial hardship.)25 Shannon had become wealthy, too, through friends in the technology industry. He owned significant shares in Hewlett-Packard, where his friend Barney Oliver ran the research labs, and was deeply invested in Teledyne, a conglomerate started by another friend, Henry Singleton. Shannon sat on Teledyne’s board of directors. The stock market was therefore just another puzzle, albeit one with a pleasant proof of success. He was convinced that the stock market was less efficient than some economists believed, and that a smart investor who took advantage of mispriced stocks could do quite well.26 Len Kleinrock, Shannon’s former student, recalls that one day at MIT, Shannon mentioned that he was making a mathematical model of the stock market.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

I always suggested that it was a lot of things all happening just right with some serendipity thrown in: an amazing product, a client that wants an amazing commercial, a great director, and then the Apple board… Mike Murray: So we get it done and we are told that we need to show it to the board of directors, and Steve is chairman of the board. It was Phil Schlein and Mike Markkula and Art Rock and Henry Singleton, and Steve and maybe one or two others. I remember very clearly going into that board meeting. We had a TV on one of these rolling carts and we send it out and we show it. They roll tape: Big Brother is on a television of enormous size addressing a crowd of zombified skinheads. Suddenly a beautiful young blonde wearing a Macintosh-branded tank top and red hot pants runs to the front of the crowd while swinging a hammer.

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

The winner that year proved to be Richard Nixon, but Frawley and his political friends had seen the future. The group of California conservatives who brought Reagan to power included Frawley; Bloomingdale; Henry Salvatori; Taft Schreiber, an MCA executive; Holmes Tuttle, a car dealer and realtor; Tom Jones, the chairman of the defense contractor Northrup; Henry Singleton, a former OSS (Office of Strategic Services) man and engineer who cofounded Teledyne, the conglomerate that made everything from unmanned aircraft to Waterpik shower heads;14 Earle Jorgensen, who turned a scrap steel distributorship into a giant industrial concern; drugstore owner Justin Dart; corporate lawyer William French Smith; and A.