Adam Wyden: buying someone else's pain in Stagwell $STGW and Driven Brands $DRVN | ADW Capital

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.

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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

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