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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “All the mistakes I had made from being an investor, I kind of had the rope to hang myself with over the last six or seven years. I felt comfortable from an investing perspective. I had the support from an anchor tenant, and that was good enough for me. I just really wanted to start and having one client was in my mind all I needed and we went from there.”

   2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “The nice part about being at BlackRock was I went from being an Alice to managing a portfolio. I felt comfortable that I'd made enough of the mistakes in the actual construction management. I felt comfortable that I was Was doing it the right way for me. What I thought I knew and turns out I really didn't, running a business is a very different thing. So I felt like I was ready from an investing perspective. I also felt like I kind of knew what I was doing from setting up a business. Turns out that wasn't the case, but I felt comfortable in the process of how we were going to invest because I believed in it so much. I felt like others would. And that definitely didn't turn out to be the case.”

   2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “So you had the strategy you wanted to pursue in a box you felt like you couldn't quite pursue, you had a client on board. What were the other key considerations in saying, okay, I'm ready to take the leap?”

   2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I talk to the client and just I laid it out and that was their support and it was one. It was just one person. Again was enough. For me because I had always wanted to do it. And it certainly wasn't about size, given the dollar amounts, but it was about wanting to invest in a way that I felt proud of and felt like I was doing the best job for the strategy that I believed in. And that was it.”

   2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Because I was a fiduciary across large dollars, I couldn't size it in the way that I should have for what was this incubation for what I wanted to do. And that was fine. That's how it should have been from a fiduciary perspective. But I just felt like I was sort of halfway stepping into this thing that I wanted to create. And I wasn't really doing it as well as I could have. I didn't feel like I was concentrated at a place like BlackRock. I was the outlier. And so there were all these sort of mathematical backs and forth with, okay, what's the efficacy of what we're doing? Why are we doing this? And there was a governor on what I wanted to do. And so I approached the client who seated this fund at BlackRock and I said, would you support me if I did it independently? And I was really lucky that they said yes.”

   2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “The light bulb went on for me in particular around one deal, which was sort of the setup I had waited for. We bought a big slug of a company from in a sort of complex transaction that gave me a really good insight into the business and also a great price. Ultimately, that business ended up getting sold. And I looked at the end of the day and I...”

   2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “So you're running these three funds at BlackRock, and one of them is where your heart and soul is, and the other says paying the bills or whatever it is. How do you decide when you feel like you're ready to do your own thing?”

   2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Entrepreneurial ownership perspective. Again, that was the thing that I've always admired and wanted to do. And if in some small way with whatever dollars I can cobble together, do that, I think that will be something different and something powerful for a small group of investors who would entrust me to do that. So that's kind of the plan.”

   2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “It's kind of pretty simple. The biggest opportunity I saw on the market and still see even today is smaller companies with great assets, great people, great brand, sometimes get into short-term trouble and the stocks trade. It's going back to those early days of private equity where if I got that book across my table at that valuation, I wish I could do that over and over and over again. And you don't get that that often in private markets. They're relatively efficient. But in the public markets, especially in months like we just had in October, you're able to buy really great long-term outcomes for half off of a multiple you'd be willing to pay for in the private markets. And if you can just really hold them for a rational time horizon, call it five years, there's a lot of things that can go right. You can be wrong, but the risk rewards are incredible. And I just wanted to put in practice a very different”

   2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “I was responsible for three different funds, the third of which essentially I had this idea of how I thought I was good at managing money. It didn't really reflect on what maybe is the best marketing fit or what could be a huge multi-billion dollar fund within a place like BlackRock. This is the way I view efficacy around what I think is a structural advantage for the long term. I took it to sort of a product committee, if you will, and they said, that's great. We don't think it can scale, but if you can find a client to do it, go do your thing. And I was really fortunate to have a client who backed it and we really started incubating what is now the process that we have here at Sunderland about a year and year and a half into my tenor at BlackRock. And I was obviously a fiduciary across all three, managing a lot of money in aggregate, but very teeny, teeny amount of money in the fund that I thought was how I wanted to invest. And so it was a relatively riskless way to try out this project.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Experience of starting your own firm. So, again, the process for me has always been try to throw yourself into as deep of a pool as you can and figure out how to swim. And I'm grateful that those firms gave me the opportunity to do that.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “I wouldn't say I ever had a conscious plan. I just tried to go to the place that would give me the most responsibility. There wasn't really a master plan around branding. It just so happens that I worked at what is now one of the largest hedge funds in the world during 08 and 09 because they were pretty much the only person who was hiring. And BlackRock gave me at 32 years old the opportunity to go from being a senior analyst to being a portfolio manager. And that was an opportunity I was incredibly grateful for and I got to learn a ton. And there was no master plan around either of those. I would say both of those experiences probably gave me a different sense of how hard it was to raise outside capital than it should have been. You didn't have to market. You just get a phone call being like, XYZ client wants to send you a large pile of money. Would you take it? And you say yes. And that's.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “I was there for about 18 months. The firm had grown from almost nothing to three billion very quickly. And then the other lesson I learned early on was $3 billion of capital is not the same as a $3 billion private equity fund. And so as quickly as that goes up, even if performance isn't bad, it was primarily European fund to funds money. And that was a piggy bank very quickly. And I learned that lesson as well. So having the right partners in the right direction of capital is obviously something that was seared into my memory very early on. And I'm lucky that happened at that age.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Like most firms at the time was relatively levered, thought they were hedged in every way. At the firm I worked for, there were three Cambridge PhDs who would send me a spreadsheet saying it would be impossible to lose more than 5% of our portfolio. That was the model we'd get in the morning. Like we have hedged in Greek letters that are still not familiar to me and basically made this mousetrap of impossibility to lose money. The truth of the matter was obviously all that those historic correlations broke down and it didn't work out and I found myself seeing the early version of a movie that would play out in 08. So that was my first experience as a public market investor.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Do the best job I can for the firm I'm working for. And then also, okay, if I can absorb this and figure out what people actually are pricing in, maybe at some point in the future that'll be a help. Just being involved in the market on a day-to-day basis, even that short-term day-to-day helped me learn a lot about how to absorb that into a process going forward. So it was every step along the way. It's been a good one. And that was a good first lesson.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Was just so different from a time frame perspective and an IRR perspective, right? It was billions of dollars, literally billions of dollars of capital chasing three, four, five, 10% returns. And that just was with events or deal closings or quarters or speculation on who would buy what and how. And it was very different than what I was used to. I mean, I was at a firm that probably had $10 billion of gross market value to event-driven stocks and I was the only person in the room at 27 who had ever done an LBO. So it just, you know, it was kind of crazy. It didn't seem logical to me. And obviously what followed wasn't necessarily a surprise, but still in the back of my mind was, okay, let's think about what should work, what is a rational time horizon, and how to really gain that experience with the sort of myopic stuff that doesn't make sense to me. And let's figure out at least how I.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “So it was a little bit of personal experience. My wife was graduating medical school in New York, matched her residency in Boston. So I knew for personal reasons I wanted to be in Boston and got a random headhunter call from a group of London saying, hey, there's a hedge fund in Boston, would you be interested in joining? And so I moved up after my tiers were up and started being a public market investor. That was first part of 07.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “is he'd go in a company that had gotten into trouble in the public markets buy between 5 and 15 percent of the company and they'd go on the board and they'd try to fix it and make it better. With almost an infinite time horizon, they made investments while I was there. And even in the late 90s that they're still involved with today. And for me, that's really where the light bulb went on. When I was in private equity, I was the associate in charge of handling sort of the mail would come in and you get 15 companies to look at and you'd pick one and you'd go bid and there'd be 50 other bidders on that. And that just never struck me as an efficient way to allocate capital. The light bulb for me really went on when I looked across the room and saw what Fred Malik was doing. And I was like, that's the thing. Like, that's it. Like, I wish I could figure out how to do that. That was the thing that made sense to me. And that's fortunately what was really attractive about the public markets ever since.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “I was approached by one of my clients I did a deal for, a small middle market private equity firm based in Washington, D.C. And again, getting back to this concept of what do I enjoy? Again, I just wanted to be around people who built businesses and of the bunch of different options, there was sort of a banking 2.0 private equity path of the big firms. I didn't really want to do that. The firm I joined was called Their Capital. And of the six partners there, four had been operators or chief executives of very large, very well-known companies. And that was very, very appealing in a very flat organization. So that was a pretty easy next step for me. It was sort of a first go-around of the heyday of private equity 05 to 07. So it was a pretty interesting seat to have. While I was there, the chairman of the firm did a couple different things. So they had their traditional middle market buyout fund, but he'd also pioneered a strategy, which he called strategic block investing and all that really means.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “I went to New York and did investment banking, which is pretty much the assembly line of Wharton undergrad. I think they essentially manufacture bankers. And it was great. It was a little bit after the first internet bubble, 2002, 2003 timeframe and the market had begun recovering. So there was actually work to do, which was nice. I worked at Credit Suisse for Boston, surrounded by a lot of very smart and very talented people who gave me a lot of rope. It was hard. It was old school investment banking as the most junior person on the totem pole, but you can't really get thrown in the fire much better than that experience. So with the benefit of time, I actually have a pretty fond memory for all I went through during that time.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Spending like a year of your life learning how to make a very rudimentary DCF model doesn't really apply in the real world so much. It's amazing how much I learn every day being around people who actually run businesses for a living. You can't really learn it without doing it. I thought I could be as prepared as I could be, but really my whole career, I'd kind of been left in a corner and they're like, pick a good investment. And if you can do that, then you can kind of have a decent career. The subtleties of managing people and running an organization, I tried to learn either through a book or through a professor or through talking to as many people as I can. And it's hundreds and hundreds of people. You can't really learn unless you do it. And I've learned so much over the last three years of even just managing my tiny little business.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “It's a really weird thing conceptually to think about a 17 year old kid being like, I want to go to undergraduate business school and lock myself into that trajectory. But yeah, I wanted to learn. I didn't know if that would be a helpful push to be an entrepreneur or to learn business, but it's what I loved and what I wanted to do. And so I wouldn't necessarily say Wharton was this great academic experience. It was more hunger games for a bunch of people like me. And that's valuable sort of. I really enjoyed my overall undergrad experience, even though Wharton was a little too specific for a lot of the skills I wish I had.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Trying to soak up as much from people in that position ever since, even in what we do now, if you look at our 50 LPs, most of them are entrepreneurs in some form fashion. Either run an asset management business or have built their own company. And those are the people I still want to spend time with. And that's what I love to do. And that's what we do in our business for whatever reason from the time I can remember just being around people who are managing, building, and growing businesses is what I love. However, I can get exposure to that. That's always been the spark that's interested me the most in figuring out how did you build this? What do you do? What's interesting about the market you're looking at? Being around people and understanding that the group of people driving the organization is generally what makes the difference between something great and something not so great. That's been a huge lesson for me and something that I've tried.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “the growth and it was the coolest thing to me and that's really what I felt like I wanted to do. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know what that meant or how that would progress or anything, but that was the first taste and that was a very lucky and very cool experience for me. What did you do with that initial spark? I didn't know what to do with it other than I wanted to figure out a way to eventually run my own thing, whatever that thing was going to be. I wanted to be able to work with people I really liked and trusted and hopefully add some value to the people who were being a part of it. And that I never had this master roadmap. I just thought, okay, how do I learn how to be an entrepreneur or learn how to be a business person? And you can't really, other than doing it, you know, I learned that the hard way over the last 15 years, but I felt like I just wanted to surround myself with people who did that. And, you know, I've been.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Great to see you, bud. Thanks for coming to see me. Appreciate it. Yeah. When did you first get interested in investing? I've always been interested in business. I think the first exposure I got was my mom's side of the family built an entrepreneurial car dealership from one fiat store in Newport, Rhode Island to a pretty large regional network. And we used to go every Sunday. We drive from the middle of Western Massachusetts down to Rhode Island and soak up all I can from my uncle and my cousin who were running the business and that was sort of the first taste I got. How old were you when you first got interested? I was probably 11 or 12. I mean, I did everything. I swept the floor, washed cars, and they'd let me tag along. You know, I had no business being in the meetings I was, but they'd let me sit in the corner and just listen. And that was the first taste. And obviously was young and didn't really know what I wanted to do. But that's where I first got the bug. I thought it was cool and I loved what they were doing. The people in the place.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “You should know I have a small vested interest in his success. Once again, I want to thank Peter Taboris from Strongpoint Wealth Advisors for sponsoring this episode and our podcast guest dinner series. We had a second dinner bringing together guests from the show a few weeks ago and it was another fascinating evening. Peter's a gracious host and I'm thankful to have his support and that of Strongpoint for our dinners. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Tom Bushet.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “My guest on today's show is Tom Bushy, the founder of Sunderland Capital, a Boston-based hedge fund he started in two thousand sixteen. Tom graduated from the Wharton School as an undergraduate and worked as an investment banker at Credit Suisse first Boston, a private equity analyst at Thayer Capital, a hedge fund analyst at Millennium and Mayo Capital, and a portfolio manager at BlackRock before trying his hand on his own. Even with that stellar resume, The Road to Success running an asset management business has plenty of obstacles along the way. Our conversation tells Tom's story of what happened through his career and the launch process. He shares an inside look from a manager's perspective of what it takes to get a fund off the ground. As an important aside and disclaimer, I've known Tom for a while and have been advising him for the last two years. I happen to like him a lot both personally and professionally.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Hello, I'm Ted Sides and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can keep up to date by visiting capital allocators podcast.com.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Capital out hitters is also brought to you by admired leadership. Back in April on episode 497, I sat down with Randall Studman, the executive coach behind admired leadership, who advised more than 500 CEOs, including some of the most respected names in asset management. Randall introduced me to Alex, an AI leadership coach's team built on 40 years of proprietary research into what the best leaders actually do. For investment professionals, that means your entire team gets on-demand coaching grounded in the behaviors that drive results, and build the kind of followership that retains your top talent. We use Alex and our team at Capital Allocators swears by it. Try Alex for yourself at the link in our show notes. Try Alex. Leadership.com.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Capital allocators is also brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline makes your day unrecognizable. That's how refreshingly different it is from legacy investment management technology. With Ridgeline's front-to-back AI native platform, your typical tech pains disappear. No integration headaches, no data discrepancies, and no upgrade cycles. Instead, you get real-time data flowing through everything from portfolio accounting to reporting to reconciliation, trading, compliance, and more. In the AI era, asset and wealth management firms moving to Ridgeline gain a decided advantage. That's why customers call it miraculous game-changing and an awakening. If that's not how you would describe your investment management tech, request a demo at RidgeLine.ai.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “To an exact verifiable source because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it, and without the sense you know exactly what that is. See it for yourself. Try a free trial at alpha-sense.com slash capital. That's alphacense.com with a hyphen in the middle slash capital.”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Capital allocators is brought to you by AlphaCents. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing, transcript, or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in a retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content over 500 million curated documents from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back”

    2018-12-03 · Capital Allocators · Tom Bushey – Launching a Hedge Fund (Capital Allocators EP.78) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source