Blake Hansen Founder & CEO, Alturas  ·  Boise, Idaho

I bought my first stock in 1992. I was eleven.

When I was fifteen, my mother and sister died in a plane crash. Not long after, my father told me I could spend the rest of my life feeling sorry for myself, or I could choose to do something with it. I've used that as motivation most days since.

At twenty-two I bought my first rental property. Earlier that same year, I lost every dollar Kim and I had in the stock market. It was a concentrated option position on margin, which meant that I still owed them two thousand dollars I didn't have after they closed out my position. I had to walk into the bedroom and wake her up to tell her.

So I went to the university library to find out whether anyone actually beats the market over decades, or whether the whole thing is rigged against someone like me. I started pulling books off the shelf. Soros. Peter Lynch. Then I fell down the Buffett rabbit hole and it rerouted my life. A stock is a piece of a real business. Cash flow is what's true. The best holding period is forever.

I started Alturas in 2007 and kept my job as an auditor for almost three more years, building at night and on weekends until the numbers said I could go. I left in 2009. Phil Knight taught accounting while he built Nike, which was precedent enough for me. The rule I give people now is to minimize your expenses and maximize your experiments.

By then my underwriting model was a stack of county tax records. I'd look for the year the trend went vertical and pay less than the assessed value from before it did. Dumb math, but it was a thesis, and almost nobody else had one. We flipped more than a hundred houses on it.

In 2011, when housing starts were at a post-war low and the sensible advice was not to build, we started a homebuilding company. In 2015 we built the real estate fund. Both are still here, and the fund has never changed its structure. It was built to last.

Today it's thirteen companies and two funds, run from Boise on purpose, a long way from anyone who'd tell us which quarter to sell in. We don't sell what we buy. The plan is a company that outlives everybody currently working in it.

Kim and I have six kids, and we've raised them all here. That's most of why building something permanent has never felt abstract to me.

I write because I was the least-informed guy in the room for a long stretch, and the people who bothered to write things down are most of the reason I'm not anymore.