Died Ed Iskenderian. 104 years old.
If you're not into the world of hot rods and built engines, the name might mean nothing. But it should. The guy was known as "The Camfather" — the Godfather of Camshafts. And no, that's not some American journalist's clickbait exaggeration. The man literally revolutionized an entire industry working out of a shop behind his house.
The New York Times published the obituary. I'm going to tell you what they didn't: the financial lesson hidden inside this story.
A Shop Guy Who Understood the Market Better Than Any Analyst
Ed Iskenderian was the son of Armenian immigrants. Grew up in Los Angeles. No pedigree, no Stanford network, no venture capital fund bankrolling a pretty PowerPoint.
What did he have? Skin in the game.
Taleb would be proud. The guy started messing with engines in the 1940s, when hot rods were the hobby of crazy kids racing on dry riverbeds in California. Nobody took it seriously. Nobody saw a "market" there.
Ed did.
He realized that the camshaft — that part most people don't even know exists inside an engine — was the performance bottleneck. He improved the design, started manufacturing, and became the supplier for an industry that blew up over the following decades.
No pitch deck. No seed round. No showing up on the Shark Tank of the era.
Just a guy solving a real problem, hands covered in grease, risking his own money.
The Lesson the Financial World Solemnly Ignores
You know what pisses me off? Every week some new "unicorn" pops up burning billions, turning zero profit, and everybody claps. WeWork became a business school case study — on how not to run a business. Most of the fintechs your financial advisor recommends wouldn't survive five years under the Iskenderian model.
The Iskenderian model is simple:
- Find a niche you understand better than anyone.
- Make the damn product work.
- Reinvest the profits.
- Repeat for 80 years.
Yes, eighty. The guy stayed in the business for over eight decades. Isky Racing Cams still exists. Still runs. Still sells.
Meanwhile, half the companies in the 1980 S&P 500 don't exist anymore.
Warren Buffett talks about "moats" — competitive moats. Ed Iskenderian was the moat. His technical knowledge, his reputation built part by part, customer by customer, race by race — you can't replicate that with VC money and digital marketing.
The Niche Market Is the Market That Survives
There's an obsession in the investment world with scale. "It needs to scale." "What's the TAM?" (Total Addressable Market, for those who don't speak consultant jargon). Everybody wants to be Amazon.
Nobody wants to be Ed Iskenderian.
And that's exactly why most of them go bust.
The most antifragile businesses — to use Taleb's term — are the ones that dominate a niche so specific that nobody bothers to compete. Camshafts for high-performance engines? Who's going to enter that market? Google? Some neobank?
It's the corporate equivalent of a medieval fortress in a narrow canyon. You don't need a massive army to defend it. You just need competence and consistency.
The Obituary That Should Have Been on Bloomberg
Ed died at 104. He outlived most of the corporate empires he watched rise and fall. He built real wealth — not valuation inflated by a Series D round.
The New York Times treated it as a cultural curiosity. I treat it as a case study.
If you're out there racking your brain over where to invest, which startup is going to "blow up," which guru to follow — stop. Breathe. And ask yourself:
Who's got their hands covered in grease in this business?
Because at the end of the day, between the guy in a suit showing off pretty slides and the guy in coveralls who knows how to make the part work, my money's always on the second one.
Ed Iskenderian never needed validation from the financial world. The financial world should have been learning from him.
Rest in peace, Camfather. Your legacy is worth more than most 2024 IPOs.
