Protect
the King.

There is a moment, in every game and every market, when the board tilts. The clock accelerates, the information thins, and the gap between the people who rise and the people who unravel turns out to have almost nothing to do with talent — and almost everything to do with the choice made in the next two seconds. That tension is where Poison Pawn lives, and it's the premise Seth Makowsky carried into the Patricof Co Executive Speaker Series.

The audience earned its first fortune on fields, courts and tracks. But they were sitting in it as something else now: investors, allocators, decision-makers with real capital and real consequences on the line.

The Unlikely Coach

Here is the detail that makes Makowsky the right guest for an investment firm: he is not, by origin, a sports guy at all. The first college football game he ever attended, he was standing on the UCLA sideline as a coach. His background was running and growing companies — CEO of smaller organizations, then larger ones, turning them around — before he built his own advisory group taking on complex turnarounds for banks, airlines, airports, hotels and restaurant groups. It was inside those rooms that the real lesson formed.

In parallel, almost by accident, chess became an obsession. He went from studying with a grandmaster once a week to studying with grandmasters around the world. He became his own test subject: making faster decisions, growing comfortable with failure, treating everything as a process. Then, while running due diligence on an elite California sports academy, he noticed half the facility was devoted to the mental side of the game — pattern recognition, sequencing, coordinate training. It looked exactly like how he'd been studying chess. Olympic volleyball players and backup quarterbacks started breaking records. Word of mouth did the rest.

The Thesis

Chess, for Makowsky, is not the subject — it's the simulator. Within the first four moves of a game, there are more than 288 billion possible positions. That overwhelming complexity is exactly the point: it forces process thinking. A framework for deciding, rehearsed thousands of times in a small window, instead of waiting for the real moment to arrive once.

“At the end of the day, you're in the decision-making business. If you make really, really good decisions, you're going to win.”

Under Pressure

There are personality types. The impulsive decider moves fast and sometimes recklessly. The perfectionist overthinker won't move until the risk is zero, and so moves too late. The work is making tiny adjustments to each — getting the overthinker comfortable deciding faster, giving the impulsive decider a beat of process before instinct fires. Tiny adjustments that unlock massive results — like a quarterback going from the most turnovers in the league one season to the fewest the next.

But press him on the single biggest separator under pressure and the answer turns almost philosophical: the enthusiasm to win versus the fear of failure. They can look identical from the outside — same sweat, same stakes — yet they produce opposite decisions. One reaches; one flinches. And the great ones accept, in advance, that losing is part of it.

The Method

A quarterback might have three seconds before a very expensive, very motivated defender arrives. So Makowsky trains him to decide in under one. Sweating, under noise, under an athletic protocol that mimics the real chaos and then turns it up — so that three seconds, on game day, feels like an eternity.

“You can study weightlifting. You can take the class. But at some point you have to lift the weight if you want to get stronger.”

The Investor's Lens

As Makowsky described how he reads an athlete under pressure, Allie Barry recognized her own job. It was, she said, almost exactly what P/Co weighs when it sits across from a founder.

“Is this founder tough enough mentally? If they take a dip in sales, are they going to be able to make a comeback — to put that play behind them and keep growing the company?”

The One Principle

Asked for the single idea every listener should carry out of the room, Makowsky didn't reach for motivation. He reached for risk management. In chess, rule number one is to protect the king. It doesn't matter how brilliantly you're playing — leave the king exposed for one move and the whole game ends.

But this was never really about chess. You can be crushing it on the field, crushing it in life, and make one genuinely bad decision off it — and it's a zero multiplier. Every rep, every sacrifice, every disciplined year goes to zero instantly. It's the most important thing in chess, and the most important thing in life.

It is also, almost word for word, the first law of investing. Markets don't ruin you for the deals you miss; they ruin you for the position that wipes you out. A portfolio that touches zero stays at zero, no matter how brilliant every prior decision was.