People sometimes ask me where I get my investment ideas, and my answer surprises them. My investment ideas don’t arrive in boardrooms. They arrive on a footpath, usually between kilometre two and three, delivered through earbuds at twice the speed a normal person would consider comfortable! The honest backstory involves a trading desk from the late 1980s, a daily walking habit, and roughly 5,265 podcast episodes listened to at double speed. Let me explain.

Before angel investing, there was BT

“Forty years for experience”. It’s a phrase people use that sounds impressive until you ask what, exactly, was experienced. Experience isn’t just time served. It’s a way of seeing that compounds over decades, and for me, the foundation was laid in a place most people wouldn’t associate with angel investing: the equities trading desk at BT Funds Management.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I managed all the Australian equities cash and derivatives dealing for BT. At the time, BT was the most active institutional trader in the Australian market. It was, without exaggeration, a god-like view. Every day, I saw and heard nearly everything significant that was happening in Australian equities.

The position came with an extraordinary information feed. As the dealer, I had direct access to the best institutional stockbrokers from the top firms. Every morning, the calls would start. Each broker would bring their firm’s best ideas: research notes, economist views, strategist calls, stock-specific recommendations.

Over time, I noticed something that became foundational to how I think about markets. Some of the ideas I was hearing were common — the same themes showing up across multiple brokers, multiple firms. And some were genuinely new — a different angle, a contrarian thesis, something the market hadn’t yet absorbed.

Both were important, but for different reasons. The common ideas told you what was “in the market”. They explained the consensus, the water everyone was swimming in. The new ideas were where the money was. But here’s the critical insight: you couldn’t recognise the new ideas unless you already understood what was in the market. Without the baseline, you couldn’t spot the signal.

That distinction between what’s known and what’s genuinely new became the operating system for how I think about investment opportunities. It survived long after I left the trading desk.

At BT, I also learned to develop what I think of as investment theses, or patterns for making money. A good thesis isn’t a hunch or a gut feel. It has a logical foundation that can be clearly articulated. As a mathematician, this appealed to me deeply. First-principles thinking. An argument you can write down, stress-test, and explain to someone else. If you can’t articulate why something should work, you probably don’t understand it well enough to bet on it.

The discipline of building structured theses from pattern recognition has carried forward into everything I’ve done since, including angel investing.

The footpath as my research department

Fast forward a couple of decades, and I’m an angel investor with a walking habit.

I walk every day, some 8 to 10 kilometres, without fail. I’ve been doing it for six years now, which works out to roughly 3,000 kilometres a year. It started as exercise, but it became something else entirely when I discovered podcasts.

About seven years ago — partly because, as an angel investor, I’m always watching for new trends — I started paying attention to podcasts. I had a thesis (there’s that word again) that they would be massive, that they’d cannibalise significant chunks of radio’s audience. That thesis turned out to be right, but the personal consequence was more significant: I started filling my daily walks with startup and investment content, listened at 1.5 to 2x speed.

What began as casual listening became a system. A daily, immersive data feed, not unlike the broker calls from the BT trading desk, except the brokers are now some of the sharpest minds in venture capital and technology, and the trading desk is a footpath.

I use an app called Overcast, and when I exported my data recently, the numbers surprised even me. I’ve listened to 5,265 podcast episodes across 56 different shows.

My heaviest rotation tells you something about what I’m trying to learn.

• The Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings leads the count at 758 episodes. Harry has interviewed virtually every significant VC and founder on the planet, and the consistency of his output is remarkable.
• Next is the a16z podcast at 529 episodes. Andreessen Horowitz’s deep dives on technology trends and market shifts.
• Capital Allocators with Ted Seides comes in at 472. I think it’s the best window into how institutional investors think, which matters enormously if you want to understand where the money flows.
• Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy at 423 episodes. Wide-ranging conversations on investing frameworks across every asset class.
• All-In with Chamath, Sacks, Friedberg and Calacanis at 319. Real-time debate on markets, tech, and policy from people with skin in the game.
• And ARK Invest’s FYI at 290 episodes. Cathie Wood’s team building and stress-testing disruptive innovation theses in public.

Beyond these, the long tail matters too: Business Breakdowns for detailed company analysis, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson for strategic thinking about technology platforms, Acquired for the definitive histories of great companies, Open the Pod Bay Doors for the Australian startup ecosystem, and dozens more.

Why volume (eventually) becomes wisdom

Here’s where the two threads converge.

When you listen to that volume of content, layered on top of extensive reading, conversations with founders, and the deal flow that comes through Brisbane Angels, something familiar starts to happen. The same dynamic from the BT trading desk reasserts itself.

You start to hear what’s “in the market.” The common ideas. The themes that every second podcast guest is talking about, the sectors that keep surfacing, the buzzwords that have reached saturation. This is the consensus of the startup world, and just like the consensus in equities markets, it’s essential to understand. Not because it’s where the opportunities are, but because it’s the baseline against which you measure everything else.

And then, against that baseline, you start to hear the new ideas. A business model innovation that two unrelated founders on different continents are converging on independently. A technology shift that hasn’t yet filtered into the mainstream conversation. A thesis that has logical force but hasn’t been widely articulated. These are the signals.

From those signals, investment theses emerge — the same kind of structured, first-principles arguments I learned to build at BT, but now applied to early-stage companies. Patterns for making money that have a logical foundation you can clearly state.

I’ve written about some of these theses in the angel education material on the MooCoo website. But this post is about the process, not the conclusions. It’s about how the theses get built in the first place and why “40 years of experience” isn’t just a number. It’s a compounding process. Every new podcast episode, every founder pitch, every conversation with a fellow angel gets filtered through decades of pattern recognition. The BT years taught me how to think. The podcasts and the walking and the reading provide what to think about.

When a startup pitches at Brisbane Angels, I’m not evaluating it in isolation. I’m pattern-matching against thousands of podcast episodes, against theses I’ve been developing for years, against deals I’ve seen succeed and fail, and against a way of thinking about markets that was forged on a trading desk thirty-five years ago.

That’s what 40 years of experience actually means. Not time served. Compounded pattern recognition.

Come walk with us

If the way we think about deals at MooCoo and Brisbane Angels interests you, or if you’d like to see some of the investment theses in more detail, you’ll find our angel education material on the MooCoo website. And if you want to be part of a community that thinks this way about early-stage investing, Brisbane Angels and the MooCoo syndicate are always open to curious, committed people.

M&A advisers, wealth managers, accountants, you’re often the first person a founder calls after an exit. If any of them are looking for somewhere to put that experience and capital to work, the introduction would be most welcome.