Founder-Led Companies Beat the S&P by 3-5% | Michael Monaghan

Michael Monaghan spent 15 years on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, Sanford Bernstein, and UBS before leaving to build Beartooth, a technology company that let smartphones connect without cell service. That 12-year entrepreneurial journey — and a visit to the Smithsonian where he and his partner were struck by the iconoclastic nature of America's builders — led him to launch the Founders 100 ETF (ticker: FFF), a fund that owns the 100 best publicly traded companies still run by their original founders.

In this episode, Michael breaks down the strict definition of "founder-led" that drives the portfolio, the 30-year, 11,000-stock database his team hand-built to validate the factor, and why founder-led companies have historically outperformed the S&P by 3-5% annually. We get into the actual fund mechanics — the Bernstein-style factor model, the 7% position cap at quarterly rebalance, and why the 80/20 rules-based vs. discretionary split exists primarily to catch IPOs between rebalances. Michael also makes the case that FFF is a direct replacement for QQQ, running 85% active share against the S&P and 70% against the Nasdaq, and explains his distribution playbook for breaking through in a market where 10 new ETFs launch every week. Plus, the names he's watching for that he can't own yet — including SpaceX, Stripe, and Anduril.

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