Anouk Dey is a partner at Durable Capital Partners, co-founder of the non-profit Reclaim Childhood, and a former instructor of the "Compounders" course at Columbia Business School. Her background spans analyzing small-cap growth stocks at T. Rowe Price to operating sports camps for refugee girls in Jordan. This outline covers her methodology for evaluating long-term equities and her approach to building sustainable organizations in resource-constrained environments. — Colossus, "The Last Human Edge" (2025).

Visual summary of operating lessons from Anouk Dey.

Part 1: The Anatomy of a Compounder

  1. On structural advantages: Her study of compounders found businesses that "got better as they got bigger, faced less competition as they gained scale." — Reference: Colossus, "The Last Human Edge" (2025).
  2. On return on invested capital: Every compounder she studied "showed increasing returns on invested capital" and "could reinvest profits at persistently high rates of return." — Reference: Colossus, "The Last Human Edge" (2025).
  3. On the rarity of compounders: Her Columbia course starts from the observation that "since 1926, a mere four percent of stocks have generated all the wealth in the US stock market"—the companies she calls compounders. — Reference: Columbia Business School, "Compounders" course description (Dey and Mueller)
  4. On the second act: Most compounders get there "in two acts": "one product in one market, in most cases, is simply not enough," so the second act is usually an adjacent product or market—Netflix moving from DVDs to streaming. — Reference: Columbia Business School, "Compounders" course description (Dey and Mueller)
  5. On pricing the second act: With Shopify, her team valued the first act at a lower return threshold, then tracked how many merchants adopted payments and other seller services. When that adoption inflected, they could "value that optionality" before the rest of the market did. — Reference: Value Investing with Legends, "The Multi-Faceted Future of Value Investing with Henry Ellenbogen and Anouk Dey" (Columbia Business School, 2020)
  6. On the good-to-great pattern: Rollins, owner of Orkin, used technology to build a second act that strengthened its ties with employees and customers. "It's the exact same pattern we've seen happen in Vail, a ski resort company and Bright Horizons, a childcare company." — Reference: Value Investing with Legends, "The Multi-Faceted Future of Value Investing with Henry Ellenbogen and Anouk Dey" (Columbia Business School, 2020)
  7. On deeply human investing: "The investment industry is bifurcating between robots and what we call 'deeply human investing.'" — Reference: Frederik Gieschen, "Henry Ellenbogen's Playbook for Durable Growth" (quoting the 2020 interview)
  8. On trust no robot can earn: In the March 2020 crisis Durable negotiated private placements directly with public-company CEOs: "The CEO has to trust you. A robot can never do that." — Reference: Value Investing with Legends, "The Multi-Faceted Future of Value Investing with Henry Ellenbogen and Anouk Dey" (Columbia Business School, 2020)
  9. On volatility in transition: Her study found compounders "intensely volatile": over ten years of 20% compounding, one year typically saw a 62% fall, often during the transition to something bigger. — Reference: Colossus, "The Last Human Edge" (2025)
  10. On thinking differently from the market: "If you think like the market, you can't beat the market." At T. Rowe Price her team analyzed Vail Resorts not as a collection of real estate but "as a collection of data assets." — Reference: Columbia Business School, "Investment Management: Resources On How To Think Different" with Anouk Dey (2017).

Part 5: Navigating Global Affairs and Policy

  1. On information and power: Watching Twitter during the Arab Spring, she saw "non-state actors gain power that rivaled governments," which pulled her from foreign policy toward technology and investing. — Reference: Colossus, "The Last Human Edge" (2025).

Part 6: Reclaiming Childhood Through Sport

  1. On leadership development: Reclaim Childhood began with the belief that "sport and play teach confidence, communication, team building, leadership, and fairness." — Reference: Davis Projects for Peace 2008 viewbook, "Reclaiming Childhood for Iraqi Children in Jordan".
  2. On local coaching: Reclaim Childhood's training clinics gave Iraqi refugee mothers "the opportunity to make a living by coaching their daughters." — Reference: Financial Post, "Women in Power: Canada's 100 most powerful women" (2013).
  3. On defining impact: "Nothing could compare to the moment when a girl previously resigned to a life of poverty and oppression told us of her big dreams for herself." — Reference: Davis Projects for Peace 2008 viewbook, "Reclaiming Childhood for Iraqi Children in Jordan".

Part 8: Academic Mentorship and Independent Study

  1. On joining extraordinary people: On joining Henry Ellenbogen with no investing background: "the one thing I knew is if you meet someone extraordinary, get on the rocket ship." — Reference: Colossus, "The Last Human Edge" (2025).
  2. On challenging consensus: To think differently, read differently: "I like to read things that other investors aren't reading"—The New Yorker, Harper's, Team of Teams, Creativity, Inc. — Reference: Columbia Business School, "Investment Management: Resources On How To Think Different" with Anouk Dey (2017).
  3. On lifelong learning: "The best investors are the ones who collect patterns… The extent to which you can accelerate how quickly you build those patterns, the better investor you'll be." — Reference: Colossus, "The Last Human Edge" (2025).
  4. On more swings at the pattern: Compounders are "five to six times more common in small cap," so studying small caps shows you the patterns more often. "It's no different than when I practice my tennis serve. If I get to hit a whole basket of balls, instead of just hitting with three balls, then I'm going to improve more quickly." — Reference: Value Investing with Legends, "The Multi-Faceted Future of Value Investing with Henry Ellenbogen and Anouk Dey" (Columbia Business School, 2020)
  5. On a mosaic of perspectives: "A lot of investors talk about collaboration. I don't know how many truly practice it." On a name like Shopify, a consumer specialist and a payments specialist each add their view, building "this mosaic of different perspectives." — Reference: Value Investing with Legends, "The Multi-Faceted Future of Value Investing with Henry Ellenbogen and Anouk Dey" (Columbia Business School, 2020)