Adam Wyden runs one of the most concentrated books I know, and he came on to make the case for two stocks the market has basically left for dead: Stagwell ($STGW) and Driven Brands ($DRVN). On Stagwell, his pitch is that this is not a dying ad agency but a marketing-services and data business compounding toward $700M of EBITDA by 2028, sitting at a 20%+ free cash flow yield because it came public through a no-fanfare reverse merger and carried a dual-class and TRA overhang that kept institutions out. On Driven, he thinks the sum of the parts (Collision, Autoglass, and a 50-year-old franchise stub around Take Five) is worth far more than a low-teens stock, and he has been loud enough about it that the company started disclosing numbers within 48 hours of one of his letters.

I push back on both. On Stagwell I keep coming back to the agency model itself: WPP, IPG and the rest have trailed the S&P for 20 years because the human capital walks out the door every night and takes the economics with it, and AI arguably makes that worse. On Driven I press him on why a business this cheap has stayed cheap for four years running, and whether the corporate cost and the leverage ever get fixed without a private-equity owner. Adam's answer, more or less: the market doesn't care until it cares, and the best money he has ever made is buying someone else's five-year pain right before the aha moment.

This episode is sponsored by fiscal.ai: https://fiscal.ai/yav. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global equities and one of the leading data connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, so you can pipe real-time fundamental data straight into your LLM. I signed up with my own money to plug it into my Claude cowork setup: more than 20 years of statements, ratios, segments and KPIs, updated within minutes of earnings, not days. Use my link fiscal.ai/yav for 15% off.

Chapters:

(00:00) Intro: Adam Wyden and two names, Stagwell and Driven

(02:44) Stagwell $STGW: the bull case on a marketing-services roll-up

(05:00) Mark Penn and how modern Stagwell came together

(08:40) Does AI break the ad agency model?

(12:50) The data moat and Stagwell's agentic operating system

(19:00) Is Stagwell a jockey bet on Mark Penn?

(24:20) Free cash flow, buybacks, and a stock priced to die

(28:20) Undervalued for four years: what is the market missing?

(32:15) Adam's activist stake and the August 14th tease

(37:00) Driven Brands $DRVN: the auto aftermarket bull case

(41:30) EVs vs ICE and why the aftermarket keeps compounding

(45:20) Sum-of-the-parts: Collision, Autoglass, and the franchise stub

(51:30) Activism at Driven, Roark, and where this business belongs

(58:30) Closing: the AI losers that become AI winners

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

$VEON trades like a busted emerging-markets telecom, but it owns 84% of Ukraine's Kyivstar and a Pakistani fintech, JazzCash, that already moves 15% of the country's GDP. Samit Umatiya of UIG Funds lays out the sum-of-the-parts case for why the holdco could be worth roughly 4x today's price, and Andrew pushes back hard the whole way: a not-so-storied history of value destruction, a sanctioned 45% shareholder, capital controls, and a long graveyard of telecoms that bungled every growth opportunity they ever had. The result is one long push and pull on whether the upside is real this time.

This episode is sponsored by Fiscal.ai. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global equities, with a web terminal plus a self-serve API that plugs real-time fundamentals straight into Claude and ChatGPT. Andrew uses it himself. Get 15% off at https://fiscal.ai/yav

Chapters:

00:00 The setup: a sum-of-the-parts EM telecom nobody talks about

01:31 Sponsor: Fiscal.ai

02:35 Who is Samit Umatiya and what is VEON

04:19 Vimpelcom to VEON: the history and the Russia exit

08:14 Why is the market asleep on this name?

11:31 The sum of the parts: Kyivstar plus four frontier markets

13:59 Bridging the EV gap: Andrew's $8B vs the bull's $3B holdco

16:36 Valuing a telecom on revenue: the "it's a tech company" case

17:54 JazzCash: 15% of Pakistan's GDP, never independently valued

21:00 The bridge to ~$1B of free cash flow and a 4x

23:40 Organic vs. bolt-on digital growth

24:34 Capital controls and getting cash out of the op-cos

27:11 What the market is missing: demographics and under-penetration

31:09 Starlink: competitor or partner in Ukraine's rebuild?

35:31 Digital stickiness and retention

37:42 The Kaspi problem: a dominant super app that never re-rated

39:25 The AI 1440 strategy and a sovereign-AI moat

42:31 Is telecom just structurally bad at capturing growth?

45:11 Capital allocation and the next catalyst: a JazzCash spin

49:38 The elephant in the room: LetterOne's sanctioned 45% stake

54:05 Geopolitical turmoil as a feature, not a flaw

55:24 Is that 45% block actually an opportunity?

57:09 Founder DNA, CEO Kaan Terzioglu, and the spin-off playbook

1:01:56 Wrap

UIG Funds (Samit Umatiya) - https://uigfunds.com

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

MSA Safety ($MSA) is the "OG pick and shovel" of worker safety: a century-old, pure-play maker of gas detection and firefighter equipment that the Pershing Square Challenge 2026 finalist team argues is a quality compounder the market is underrating. The bull case has three legs. Portable gas detection is shifting to a recurring, higher-margin subscription model, the "canary" that now sings to the whole worksite instead of just the worker wearing it. A legally mandated SCBA replacement cycle is coming that consensus barely credits. And a 2023 divestiture of product liabilities freed up the roughly 17% of EBIT that used to leave the building every year at a zero return. Base case: a double to about $350 by 2030 from roughly $160 today.

EJ Karobath, Craig Larkin and Bob McGrane walk through why MSA's owned-sensor hardware is hard to copy (Blackline got taken private, and its devices break if you drop them), how winning a tier-one fire department like LA or Memphis pulls the surrounding towns along on interoperability, and why 50-plus years of dividend growth and a record $500 million buyback point to real capital-allocation discipline. I push back on the obvious tension: this is a roughly 20x compounder that does not scream alpha, the CFO is guiding mid-single-digit growth, and most of the thesis only pays off in 2028 to 2030. Is the market that inefficient, or is this just a very good business priced about right?

Team MSA's pitch deck is linked here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gv1oj18pawqrmeq7lai4j/MSA-Pershing-Square-Challenge-vYAVP.pdf?rlkey=8l5vkpkr7r26oi0k7wx5fcf0h&st=g4ow2fxo&dl=0

This episode is sponsored by Trata: trata.com. Trata is recorded, anonymized conversations between two buysiders who actually follow the same company, about an hour each, with a full transcript. When you are getting up to speed on a name, there is nothing like hearing two people who research it talk it through. Check them out at trata.com.

Chapters:

00:00 A quality compounder hiding at a market multiple

01:24 Sponsor: Trata

02:47 Meet Team MSA: EJ, Craig and Bob

05:50 Why they picked MSA: an underfollowed, simple business

07:50 What MSA is: the "OG pick and shovel" of worker safety

10:24 The three segments, and why detection leads

11:51 Fixed vs portable gas detection

13:15 The subscription shift: the canary that sings to the whole worksite

16:40 The moat: durability, owned sensors and a long replacement runway

17:21 Market share, and why Blackline got taken private

21:32 Fire safety: the G1 and the mandated SCBA replacement cycle

23:38 Valuation: a double to ~$350 by 2030, and the reverse DCF

25:43 My pushback: a 20x compounder that doesn't scream alpha

27:00 Why management sandbags the connected and SCBA upside

28:46 A stock for the patient: the J-curve and the long horizon

31:47 Primary research: site visits, IR access and r/firefighting

36:18 Becoming a tech company: 40% of engineers now in software

38:10 The tier-one halo: win LA or Memphis, win the region

42:08 Capital allocation: the liability divestiture, dividends and a $500M buyback

44:13 Wrap: where to find the team and the deck

Team MSA (Columbia Business School): pitch deck linked above

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/