YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Bushey

lines on the record: 82
first: 2018-12-03
most recent: 2018-12-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think just to be patient and grateful for where you are, you always are pushing to do something and it's only going to come in the appropriate amount of time. And so I think that holds true for what I'm doing now and certainly for the future too.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never miss anything by either Jeremy Grantham or Howard Marks. Those are probably my two favorite letters. And then obviously the annual report from Buffett, but I'm sure that's like a lot of folks in our business.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arrogance, I mean, it's just a tough one. It happens a lot in our business. It's something that bothers me. So I wish there was a little bit more humility and gratitude in our world.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty mediocre. But like our investing strategy volatile, sometimes really good and sometimes pretty bad. So the overalls. Still half decent”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only thing I do these days is play golf outside of a working family, and that's my happy spot to be on a golf course.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To continue to find good investments, I want to spend as much time as I can really focus on finding the two to four good ideas a year. And I wish I could find one tomorrow. And we've gotten a couple great opportunities in the volatility of October. And we're going to spend 2019 really focused on fluctuating outcomes in our current portfolio and hopefully finding a couple new good ideas.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another thing we've tried to be cognizant of is do people believe in the efficacy of our process but not necessarily the mousetrap that it's being fit into? I don't have any or belief around that. If we can be a solutions provider to folks who fall under the following category, good people, believe in what we do, willing to be long-term oriented, we will think about doing a solution that makes sense for them. I think if I had my brothers, we would have it all in one fund. But particularly as we're smaller, one of the things I wanted to make sure of is if different people had different views on volatility or duration that we could possibly look at these other products in order to satisfy a customer want or need without imposing anyone's particular view on our main fund. And so we've thought about partnering with folks on different products. We're not there yet.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned some of these inbounds about, hey, can you disk? Can you do that? You started with a flagship hedge fund. How do you start considering, oh, should we incorporate along only fund? Should we incorporate a series of SPVs? And what have you done?”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been really cool when I was at a big farm. I managed huge amounts of money for very, very large investors. Now I manage a little teeny bit of money, but for just like, I can't even believe how nice and cool. And I can pick up the phone if we ever need anything to any of our LPs. And they're there for me. And the reverse is true. They don't pick up the phone and like, hey, why are you down 3% this month? They all get it. I couldn't be happier with where we are even though we're a long way from where we could theoretically be. But again, if you're happy, if you have good partners and you're doing what you love, that's success to me. And we've gotten lucky and just continue to sort of try to build on that.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not going to get really paid on it, or it's not going to change anything, but that, I promise you, if you keep working with those people, you're amazed at how then they'll tell another person. And we're starting to get calls now being like, okay, what's the next thing you're working on? Inbounds. Like, we want to do more with you. And it's all incremental. You know, no one's walking in the door with enormous nine-figure checks, but it's just these little things that start to build on each other. And it's natural to have doubt initially of, okay, this person said no, or they gave us a token amount of money that maybe they're just being nice because they don't want to offend me. But once you start to change that perception from, okay, maybe they're just being nice to, oh, they actually kind of like what we do and you build that relationship, everything just takes, it takes years. And those things are finally starting to happen. And that's been”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just was sort of one off. To be honest, you have to be grateful for and take pride in very, very small wins. So it's, hey, XYZ, great entrepreneur, great investor, or good person likes and trusts you enough to give you a small amount because they believe in you. And that's a huge win.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From those early days, you've actually done quite well and grown, had the business evolve from this is just hard and we didn't give, our expectations weren't right and it was going to take a lot longer and now you're three years later. What started to click.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of people talk to us about well, business risk or small, you might go away tomorrow. I think the thing that I kind of figured out through this whole process was it's not necessarily size that's ever a part of the business risk. I think it's if you have mismatch of expectations and your capital, that is what really creates business risk. It doesn't matter if you're 5 billion or 10 billion or 50 billion or 50 million. My biggest mistakes were all generally self-inflicted, but again, getting back to this concept of entrepreneurship really is learning by doing. And we've done that and happy where it's turned out.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest mistake I made was just feeling like I could effectuate an outcome, like just wanting something to happen when the only thing that was going to actually build what I wanted was Partnering with good people, finding good investors, being patient, doing something different that hopefully adds value to people, it was more that we just felt like, okay, there's this opportunity out there. There's so much money out there for hedge funds. We should attract some portion of like, well, logically, this should happen, right? And that was just a mismatch of what. Least reality for us was But I feel really lucky in that”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I do anything differently because we met a lot of great people along the way who may end up being investors of ours. It just probably is going to take them three years or four years or five years or never. But there's a pretty decent chance and a lot of the folks I met along the way who weren't going to give us money initially. There's a handful of those people who I do think will be great partners for us for the long term.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open, it's really difficult to raise a lot of money unless you do it for three, four, five, six, seven, ten years, right? Like I think everyone in our industry gravitates to the handful of successes every year as opposed to the reality of building a great business over time. Pretty much every manager I admire or look up to started the same way we did. It just was 25 years ago. And you kind of forget that for whatever reason you want to chase some middle ground. You know you're not going to be the biggest and the best launch, but there's got to be something in the middle. And the reality is it's pretty binary. And that's okay.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the hardest thing to do, and I had really admire this in some of the smaller managers out there, there are some people who just want to invest and don't really have any of the externalities that we want as validation. I mean, that I admire. It wasn't me. I didn't want to just manage teens of millions of dollars in the suburbs by myself at the Bloomberg. Could have done that. Probably it would have been fun and fine. But I just, I really wanted to build something. And so I think calibrating expectations appropriately for what that means other than a small select handful of people. I think the problem you have as an emerging manager is if you're not in that handful of folks who have spent years and years and years building relationships with large LPs at their prior firm and you don't have this whole sort of social proof or have to get a now phenomenon at your own”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First and foremost, the blame lies at my feet. I felt very personally responsible for those people. I personally really liked everyone, obviously. It wouldn't have worked with them in the first place. Things turned out differently than I expected. And I think a lot of the difficulty in being a small business or startup is the mismatch between expectations and reality. And I think not having an appropriate calibration initially, I think you have to be optimistic by nature. And I was certainly. And things happen that weren't, as we would have scripted. And you just try to do the best you can. You try to let, at least for me personally, it was important that We did as well as we could have to make sure that it all worked out for everyone.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone will be fine. Everyone's probably going to be happier and better in a different spot. And you kind of work with what works for you. And ultimately, hopefully do what's best for your investors. Something we went through. It's wildly typical in all of the people I've talked to and we work with. And it just so happens I made those mistakes in our business as well.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The good news is all of these things happened at a stage of our business where there wasn't a ton of risk. We didn't have a huge asset base. We didn't have a ton of people. If there's ever a time to learn these things, it was then. And so that was the way for us. I think that's from a lot of the entrepreneurs I talk to, it's so, so common in our business, in the asset management industry, it's viewed so differently than it is in a regular company that, of course, teams are going to iterate. And of course, you're going to try to find the right people. And of course, you're going to try to build the right culture. And that isn't necessarily a fit for everyone day one. In our business, it's viewed differently. And so I was really almost scared to make the necessary changes to make it good for me, which ultimately is good for our investors. But at the end of it, you figure out that”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's just this overarching theme of, I just didn't know what I didn't know. And I'd never really manage people in a business. I had folks work with me and for me, but it's very different in an entrepreneurial setting, both from a who you want to partner with you from a investor perspective and who you need around you to be your best, perform at the highest level you can at your day job. You start a fund, you have a small window in time to build a team and you can get really lucky with that or you can make some decisions that aren't reflective necessarily on the people, but just it wasn't going to be a fit. And that happened to us. And it was a learning experience. I wouldn't say it was fun, but it happened.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who believes in what you're doing for the long term and who doesn't? And for us, would it have been nice to raise more money and we had to compound that and it would have been good, I think. But truthfully, what volatility in our performance and sort of our lack of success, if you will, of fundraising, it's now allowed us to really focus in on working with really good people who believe in what we're doing for the long term. We've had drawdowns this year and we had a deal that was going to happen and broke and was our largest position and I didn't get a single phone call from one of our 50 LPs in a very bad month for our large position, not one phone call. We proactively reached out to people, but that makes me feel comfortable in that for whatever we did, we ended up attracting the people who kind of believe in allow us to invest in a way that will hopefully be successful over the long term.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Noticeable, it still is. We had a good first couple months. There was a lot of interest. We had our fourth month. We were down meaningfully and that nothing had really changed. Our four month total was great. Our first three months were really good. And our fourth month was a drawdown. It was evident within, again, four months that that was the behavior that you could see it in call volume, email volume, all of that. And so even our second year in business, we were relatively flat and had a couple really good months at the end of the year. And January, February, March of the next year, there was a ton of interest. And then you're flat for a while or down a little and it's crickets. And so what I would say is important is through those periods, you can kind of tell.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You start investing, there's this known truth about investor behavior, whether it's a manager or an allocator that people chase returns. Had some good periods, you have some weaker periods of performance. What happened from your perception of the outside interest”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not fair to have expectations of someone sitting across the table that they will or won't give you money. But if someone emails me and says they want an hour of our time, at least in the first few years, they said, great, I'd love to do that and happy to spend time with you. And I think as an emerging manager, it's really hard. I can now sort of understand if there's sincere interest or if there's not, and we're just much more efficient about that. I couldn't have learned that other than going through the process.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tried to be as efficient as we could, so we went to three pretty big conferences our first year where we'd probably met with 50 or so people at each one, sort of a speed dating concept, but we met a lot of great, really thoughtful smart people. If folks would come to our office in Boston, we'd be happy to take a meeting. And then I travel occasionally, but not that often. And so it wasn't really by choice or by design necessarily. The only marketing we have is if we can be half decent at our day job. And so we really tried to be as efficient as possible when we met with people. And we've done a lot better at that over this year than we had.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, once you get going on the investing side, you're still having meetings, right? People are still coming in, you still would like to track capital. How do you balance what you want to do, sort of sit in your office, do your thing, visit companies with that sort of necessary piece of continuing to grow the business?”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not from an investing perspective, no. But you see the math. I mean, you see the budget, you know what you're burning. I wouldn't say it feels great, but it didn't really, you sort of very much compile, at least we did, we compartmentalized that thing. And all I like doing is really sitting in a room and investing. So that was the bright positive in a if you're spending six months with lawyers and PBs and pitching for money, that to me is, you know, there's nothing I'd rather do less. So it was fun to actually get going on the investing side.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, it was in the teens of millions of dollars. I don't remember exactly, but it wasn't a lot. So we started trading because Our belief was that if we do a good job over a long enough time horizon, we'll be fine. And waiting around certainly wouldn't have raised us any more money. So we were excited to get going.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us personally, we just went our docs were done and the funds were open and our PB accounts were open, we went There was no dollar target. We thought we would have more money initially than we did. We had a couple sort of soft commitments, if you will, and those didn't end up showing up on day one. Even our initial capital was a little bit less than what we thought day one.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at some point in time, you get ready for launch. You've been having a bunch of meetings. You've got this anchor. Maybe other people come on board. When do you decide, okay, what we have is enough and we're going to start, or do you just keep doing meetings until you try to kind of hurdle casts and get more commitments?”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Initially, when someone shows interest in you, especially starting out, I think the natural tendency is to really gravitate towards that. A couple of those situations didn't work out over 10, 15 meetings, a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of energy. And there was no presumption that anyone would ever give us money, but you can't help but be a little bit disappointed by those outcomes. And the other frustrating thing thinking about it is it's more inward directed in that I wish we just accepted that we're going to build something we're really proud of. We're going to do it for a really long period of time. And everything will work out. So just be patient. There was sort of an undue amount of pressure that was all self-imposed. And that was a pretty big learning lesson for me. And it all worked out and it's all good. And we're happy. But there were, again, getting back to this experience concept of being an entrepreneur. It's really hard.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I talk to people now about it, I don't even describe a process. I say this is what we have done and this is what we do with our companies because that's all I have. And that either resonates with people and they like it or most people it doesn't and you kind of move on. And that's just a much more efficient way to do it. You want to be a people pleaser to some extent initially. And I think that ran into trouble with one being at least two differentiated first off and then maybe not being differentiated enough as we sort of pulled back a little bit on how we talked about the business.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even say to myself that we kind of pulled back a little bit and we'd go into meetings and we'd start even being vaguer or more general about what we do. And then you end up sounding like every other fund. And then so you run into problems both ways. I think over time, we as a firm have become comfortable with this is what we do”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asked a good question about when you're setting it up, what do you think? And for me, even more so than the business itself, I thought about What was different and how different it is, and why that could be a positive? I think one of the risks you run into in doing something, I wouldn't necessarily say dramatically different than some funds out there, but then most is then your story becomes, okay, how do I fit you into this box? Don't you think what you're doing is ultra risky? I mean, of those 300 first meetings I had, probably 200 of those people told me why what I was doing was ludicrous. And here's how they would do it. And here's what their funds do. And my personal view is, okay, if I think this is the best way for me to run money, to have the thought that someone else would kind of immediately gravitate towards that was really naive. And so we're intentionally trying to be different. But a lot of the problems, and I would say this to allocators out there, is when you launch and you maybe are doing something that's not well understood in the market, you get a lot of pushback. And then maybe I would.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So differentiation, the concept of differentiation to product differentiation in a space like hedge funds where there are 8,000 different funds just seems hard How important is that when you're out telling the story?”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we didn't have a differentiated way to go to market, which I think we kind of do now and we kind of learned and got better and take a little bit of a different tack these days.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were very lucky in that a lot of people wanted help. Prime brokers were great capital introduction. We were invited to conferences. We did whatever the sort of playbook of hedge funds 10 years ago. We got handed that playbook and we did it. We tried. We launched in 2016, which was a necessary great year for capital raising. We weren't as successful in doing it. You know, we would meet with pretty much anyone who wanted a meeting. I mean, that was a lot, a lot, a lot of people we probably did, gosh, 300 or so meetings in our first year, which looking back on it is completely ludicrous, but we didn't know what we didn't know. And through that, I learned a ton. To be fair to the people sitting across the table, I didn't really know how to explain my process very well in ways that's so intuitive to me that it took me almost probably at least 18 months to sort of figure out how to even describe thoughtfully what I do.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time I was leaving a very big place. I didn't want to necessarily be sort of relegated to like the Junior Var City high school team of I wanted to still be relevant in a way. We wanted to build a credible enough business that I could still go to a big emerging managers conference or still have great people walk in our office.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketing, I would say whatever you want to call it, business development marketing, the truth of the matter is in a small firm. It's next to impossible to have someone else sell you, I think LPs or partners, at least the ones we have, we have fifty LPs in our fund. I know all of them personally, which, and I like them and I trust them, and that's what has whatever tiny amount of anything successful we've done has been a long, long process of just building relationships with people we want to be around and talk to and trust. To have someone else do that is tough.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Built a middle and back office that was world class or at least could pass muster of a diligence test, right? I didn't want to be lucky enough to have an investor we wanted to partner with come in and check our systems and books and be like, okay, sorry, you guys are too small or whatever the case may be or you're not ready yet. I didn't want to build it as we go. I wanted to build it right the first time. And so that was an important part to me. And we got lucky and hired a great CFO who's been wonderful and done that.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of keys for me were I'm an analyst. Everything I have to see touch, feel, and do. Prospect of having a big team or sector analysts or, you know, that can work for a lot of different people. It couldn't work for me. I just didn't feel comfortable not having primary responsibility. Again, on a small portfolio of names, the one thing I wanted to make sure of is that”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understanding that just because someone looks great on paper, that's maybe the beginning or maybe not even an important part of the overall decision, buy-in, culture, belief in the organization, personal qualities just massively outweigh a great resume. And people with great resumes have the right qualities too, but Again, my bias before I was an entrepreneur myself was whoever looked good on paper, whoever had sort of social proof of they've been great before, maybe they're great this time, that stuff all becomes so much less important after you've really worked with people in an environment where it's not always easy, especially in companies that are growing. The personal attributes of the individual a part of the company are just so much more important than I ever gave them credit for. So you're now, let's get right to the phase”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not even a cliche. I think what I didn't appreciate is you have to be happy building it with people both who are your clients and who are your partners with a similar vision for long-term success. You need to take care of them as well as you can and you need to be happy and grateful doing it. If you don't have those things, no matter if we were a billion dollar startup, that wouldn't be success to me. I kind of went through that and really appreciate that now and we're going through hiring a CFO for one of our portfolio companies now. And just the experience I went through as an entrepreneur, just I can key in on things so much differently than when I was just an investor. Whatever hardship or difficulty we went through in the moment has all been really interestingly very additive to my day job.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can read as many books or as listen to many people talk about it as you want. The entrepreneurial cliches are there for a very large reason. Most of the things we've gone through, pretty much every entrepreneur or startup has gone through. It's really difficult to learn your way out of them. You can get lucky, you can plan, but really if you're starting a business for the first time, it's highly probable that you're going to make all the mistakes that I have and a million other entrepreneurs have.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The small things that aren't necessarily financially rewarding as milestones of, hey, I'm proud, like we started this thing, we're doing it. Someone wants to listen to what I have to say for an hour. That's some of the great advice I got, honestly, was, one, be really grateful for that. And two, feel proud that that's a milestone, right? There's no financial reward to that. The probability that that person's going to give you money is almost zero. But I didn't know and I enjoyed it. And all of those things up front were wonderful lessons for us that you just can't learn without doing them. And so that was kind of cool.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You try to just take as many good positives away. I mean, even when a particular allocator would send me an email saying I want to meet with you, right? I was so naive to what that even meant. I was just pumped. I'm like, wow, someone wants to talk to me. There's a lot of good things that come with that in that you can accept.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First year or two, I probably had that feeling, I don't know, once a week. I never thought it would come easy or quickly. Obviously, I thought perhaps there were a range of outcomes that would be from half decent to pretty good. There's just such a fine line between those outcomes, but you never know. There's never a perfect time for anything. And so I just wanted to get started. And I just wanted to do it. And I felt ready. And my belief was as long as one person believes in me, I'm going to work really hard to try to figure this out. And that was more exciting to me than any of the potential, you block out the negative and you just go. Do you have any?”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had been fortunate in a lot of respects, but money's just never been the driving factor for me. It's always been, where can I go? Obviously, I do fine, but how do I learn the most? Who's going to give me the most rope? And how am I going to learn for myself? What works for me to be ultimately hopefully a decent investor and hopefully that has merits to some subset of clients. And I felt comfortable enough in that to take a leap. And we never had a lot of pressure from that. I have to make X number of dollars to be in business. I didn't really set it up that way. And again, our initial client was also very supportive of our business financially as well. So they were willing to help me spend the amount of money necessary to set it up institutionally. And that was important to me. I didn't want to just get an office in the suburbs and have me in a Bloomberg. That was more of a fear of mine than any of the monetary risk. I wanted to at least do it in a way.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't necessarily a consideration because, in hindsight, I was probably wildly over-optimistic on how that would turn out.”
2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source