YouSaid · the spoken record

Tony Yoseloff

lines on the record: 85
first: 2025-04-11
most recent: 2025-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And I said, oh my God, how is that possible? And they said, well, you know, there's a lot going on in the US. This was right past fall 2008, right? And I said, you know what? There's an opportunity here. So we did a massive hiring spree in London over the next three or four years. And I said, okay, London, because, you know, all this stuff in the U.S. had cracked. And in London, it hadn't cracked in the same way. And so the European opportunities came a few years later, but they came in big droves. And we followed the same playbook in Asia as well. We opened an office in Hong Kong in 2010. We now have smaller offices in Mumbai and Shenzhen as well to access the China and India markets. And that was a fantastic decision. Those markets are less efficient than the US is. Some of that structural, some of that, there's just fewer people trying to access those opportunities. You need to have local people. You need relationships. It's much more relationship driven. That was like one.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the story I like to tell is we had a pretty good size office in London. I make a point of going four or five times a year. I showed up in early January 2009, which I remember because I remember seeing all the Herod's holiday ornaments for sale in the gift shop at the Heathrow Airport on my way home. And I go to see the old Merrills, right? So Merrill Lynch had been merged into Bank of America at this point, but they were still there. And they said, we just want you to know you're the first American who's come to our office in four months.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, so first of all, you know, I'm a believer in some of the truism of markets, which is that capital chases returns and returns become efficient over time. Like there's no getting away from that. If you have an asset class and people are doing well in it, other people will show up in your asset class and eventually change the dynamic, right? That is what it is. We had a couple of strategic inflection points that I think were very helpful in our business. So the first of which was opening our international offices. So I mentioned earlier the fact that we kind of miss the opportunity set in Asia in the late 1990s because we just weren't staffed to do it. I'm a big believer if you're going to invest in markets outside the US. You want local people with local relationships and local language skills doing that, right? You don't want it just to be a bunch of smart people in the room doing it from New York or London. We opened our London office. I don't know, at the end of 2000 or 2001, something along those lines. And we really invested in that office.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so easy to foresee with the inflation we had in 2020 and 2021 that the base rate was going to rise, but it still came as a shock to the markets where it actually rose. And so you're now in the middle of this, I think, several year period of time where owners of assets are like, hey, I got to actually raise money in my capital structure to delever. I mean, some assets are going to be need to be just fully restructured because they aren't worth what the debt is worth anymore. But there are many other asset owners who have assets who have equity value, maybe not as much equity value as they had previously, and they look at their capital structures, and you probably need to raise $20 to $40 of equity for every hundred dollars of debt that you had before to delever your capital structure. And that's super interesting because there's a lot of different ways companies can do that. They can do liability management exercises to try to whittle down the debt.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really good tailwind for opportunistic credit specifically, but I give a little bit more of a nuanced answer to that. And an opportunistic credit, I think you need to go back to how we got here, right? So it's not the absolute rate of return in fixed income today that's interesting. It's the 16 months that it took from early 2022 for the base rate to go from zero into the fives. And obviously it's come off of that a little bit since then. So most capital structures that are in the marketplace today were set entirely or in some cases partially, but meaningfully prior to 2022 in the base rate was zero. And when you're close to 15 years into a base rate of zero, companies were assuming or people who owned assets were leveraging them were assuming, and probably rightfully so, that the base rate would stay zero forever. And in fact, you know, it's one of those things where.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say a couple things. So, first of all, we're in an environment of higher rates. It doesn't mean that we're in an environment of high rates, right? And so if you look at the nice thing about interest rates is you have hundreds of years of history you can actually look at in these things. And so if you look at the 100-year history of interest rates in the United States, I believe the 10 years between 4% and 5%, right? So that's about where it is today. So you don't have a high 10 year today. You only have a high 10 year today compared to what people got used to from the late 2000s until 2021 in terms of rates of return. So first of all, I do think that higher rates is a tailwind for absolute return strategies in general. So that would include opportunistic credit strategies. It would include event-driven strategies, which we do. It would also include relative value strategies. So we've got some of that in our portfolio, but it's not the dominant strategy that we have because of the dispersion you have in markets in that period of time. I also think”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We completely agree with that. And also, you know, I think that it's tough to just do a simple 60, 40, or 70, 30 portfolio. I mean, maybe for very smaller institutions, that makes sense. But once you have some degree of sophistication that you can bring into your portfolio, it makes sense to have some alternatives of different sorts to balance out that risk.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a year where people started to seriously question the 60, 40, or 70, 30 model with where things were. If you were an absolute return type strategies, you did much better that year. If you were an optistic credit strategist, you did much better that year. You protected capital, I think, at a minimum in those strategies. And that gave you more of a chance to take advantage of upside in 2023 and 2024. I mean, opportunistic credit has the additional advantage that it tends to be pretty inversely correlated in terms of when it does well to strategies like growth equity and venture capital. So again, those are like perfectly good strategies. I'm not popping them. I'm just saying they're very cyclical in terms of making investments in those strategies. And so they actually pair very well with opportunistic credit in portfolios because typically opportunistic credit is doing well when those strategies are not doing well and sometimes vice versa.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, again, I'd start out with, I think absolute return can play that role. So opportunistic credit can be part of a absolute return strategy, whether it's accessed in public format or private format. Some people put operatistic credit in larger what they would call private credit buckets as well. But I do actually think that absolute return will eliminate the rate risk portion of things. Bonds are abolished except if they're not, right? So you go back to 2022. In 2022 was certainly the worst year for fixed income in 100 years. It may have arguably been the worst year for fixed income in the history of the United States. If you go back over very long periods of time and performance of bonds, you were basically down mid-teens depending upon what you owned, whether it was treasuries or investment grade or high yield or things along those lines. 2022 was not a great year for the equity markets either, right?”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two things together, and you'd have a great portfolio. So you fast forward to 2024. I think things are very different today. And we wanted to figure out why. I mean, absolute return strategies collectively had their best year in a very long time last year. I think they're off to a very good 2025 as well. So why is this happening? So is it just rates? And so you're unquestionably in a period of higher rates today versus what you were in the 2010s, but it's not just rates. It's actually dispersion. And so what we did is we looked over long periods of time and there's a high correlation between dispersion and markets and higher rates. And so not only do you get the benefit of a interest rate premium today compared to what you had four years ago, but you actually get about 50%. It's a touch more than that.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been the expectation of absolute return was that you were going to earn high single or lower double digit rates of return in the strategy and be a diversifier and have low volatility. There were other strategies within absolute return that might have had higher return and higher volatility expectations, but that would have been the base expectation. So what happened, right? You had a period of time with 15 years roughly of 0% interest rates. The longer that period went on, the more and more returns got reduced in the area. I would say by 2020, when the pandemic hit, an allocator's expectations for absolute return strategies would have just been to be abolished against their portfolios. And what I mean by that is we need abolished. We need a volatility dampener. We're going to use absolute return for that, but we expect to earn our quote unquote real returns off of our equity strategy. So whether that's public equities or private equities or maybe if you're a little bit more venturous, growth equity or venture capital and you'd pair those.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Well, you know, it's interesting. This is something that I reflected on last year. And so the general subject of the party is just getting started, which is a white paper that we put out recently, is about the role of absolute return in a portfolio. And the reason I reflected on this is if you go back to the start of my career, so the 1990s and the 2000s, you would have relied upon absolute return strategies to be a volist in your portfolio and a diversifier in your portfolio. But you also would have relied upon them to get you home in terms of the overall portfolio objectives, right? So if you look at a typical allocator, right, they've got a 5% spend rate and they want to earn something plus inflation over that. So many allocators are shooting for kind of higher single digit rate return, 7% or 9%, depending on the institution and the needs. And in the 2000s, when I started my career, I was first a partner at Davidson Kepner.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the world was falling apart in August of 1998. And, you know, I've told this to some of our younger people over time, like the best time to be on a trading desk is when you have no responsibility, right? So it's not your fault that things are going bad and you just learn from it and you watch the people around you. And I remember how cool and calm and collected everyone was in the face of dramatic adversity. And, you know, that was super helpful to me when I was dealing with 07 or 08 or things that happened after the fact. And so I quite enjoyed having that opportunity.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's literally right when I started, right? So I started at Davidson Kampner as a summer intern in May of 1998. And so the Russia crisis and the long-term capital crisis were August or September of 1998. By the way, thank goodness they liked me at Davidson Kempner and were willing to give me a job because it was a very tough job market in the fall of 98 dealing with those particular things. The Asia contagion, I think, was more 97. And so I saw parts of it. I mean, that was also a learning lesson. People made a fortune in Asia. We just weren't equipped to do it at DK. We looked at a few things. And what we figured out, which was right, was we couldn't invest there unless we had boots on the ground and a real knowledge base. And so we didn't. And so folks like Goldman Sachs made a fortune in that era. Those are lessons I corrected later on where we sort of built boots on the ground in places around the world to take advantage of opportunities as they emerged. But I learned that from Asia in terms of what we weren't doing. But look, I mean, I was on a trading day.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, one of the fun things about doing opportunistic credit is that you need to be a little contrarian, right? Because you are looking at opportunities that other people have turned down, right? So, you know, there's this idea in credit or an opportunistic credit of good company bad balance sheet, right? And those exist sometimes, but not often. And the reality is that the market's efficient enough that many people will figure out quickly. It's a good company with a bad balance sheet. And so it's not going to price the way it probably would have priced 20%.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or two and ultimately made their way back. And so I think there was some more random noise in what happened in COVID. So I probably would take lessons on a going forward basis from the COVID crisis than I would take from some of these other crises. I do think that, you know, if you look at a very long period of time, 25 years, you had 12 or 13 of them where you had interest rates at zero, right, or close to zero. I'm not even close to 15 when you add it up. And then the interest rates for most of the rest of the time, you know, U.S. treasury has probably peaked around 6%. A lot of it's been four or five percent. And so, you know, these have been pretty tame periods of time. And so you are going to have an occasional crisis. I mean, you go back over like long periods of time in finance, I do think having the economy blow up every 10 years was a very 1880s, 1890s thing as well. And so I think history does repeat itself a lot. To me, I don't want to say it's part of the fun of being an investor because I don't mean to be crass. These are people.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Predictable but not well predicted. I mean, hindsight's always 2020 in these things, right? But they were certainly predictable by people who were following markets. I would differentiate the COVID crisis from the sense that, you know, you probably had a month or two head start if you really followed what was going on in Wuhan. But fundamentally, it was much harder to figure that out. Like six months earlier, no one was going to say a pandemic was going to overwhelm financial markets. And so the reason I want to flag that is, you know, we do a lot of up, down analyses in what we're doing, right? And we try to really stress test investments. And so when you're a credit investor, there's a lot of things that you say, well, this can happen and that can happen, but we're still not going to lose money on this investment, right? Because there's subordination below you one way or another in the capital structure or there's assets that you can claw onto that you can sell off or maybe not all those assets are markets driven COVID created a lot of random winners and losers sometimes they were winners and losers for a year”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I would maybe say a couple things for that. So first of all, I think the pandemic was an exception compared to some of the other crises because I would suggest that the dot-com bubble or the GFC or maybe some of the European crises in the mid-2010s were very predictable. Like if you looked at where share prices were in the 1990s for tech stocks or how levered banks were coupled with the subprime crisis that was going on in the mid-2000s or some of the issues with the sovereign credit in Europe in the mid-2010s, like those were all with the benefit of hindsight, like, oh yeah, of course that was going to happen.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tom Kepner had just retired a few months before that, and I joked that he left me a playbook for a financial crisis, but he didn't leave me a playbook for a pandemic. And so some of the HR things we all had to deal with and getting people out of the office and getting people back in the office, we had to kind of invent along the way. It really focuses the mind when you've got your money where your mouth is.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's the first testimony. I mean, in investing, how much money do you have in the product? How much skin do you have in the game? We obviously use operating partners sometimes in our private market investments. That's the first question I ask. How much money does the operating partner have in the investment? And is it meaningful to them, right? So sometimes it's not just the quantum of money. It's how meaningful it is to the person who's involved. And again, having a private firm, we're 100% owned by our current and retired partners with our retired partners in an earn out. So they eventually don't own shares of the firm anymore. And so you're beholden to two constituencies. You're beholden to your LPs and you're beholden to yourself and your employees. And that's really how we run our business. And so, you know, kind of keeps you out of trouble. It also keeps you very focused when things are going bad, right? You know, we've lived through a lot of crises. I lived through the global financial crisis. I lived through the COVID crisis. COVID was probably even harder in a way because.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, not necessarily in any individual fund, but collectively across the funds. We are in any individual fund where we put a meaningful amount of money relative to the size of the fund.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your own money. So I think that speaks very powerfully. We require all of our partners to reinvest a substantial majority of their net worths back into the funds every year. We all invest Peripesu across our funds, so you can't cherry-pick which funds you want, the partnership chooses collectively.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I hadn't thought about it that way, but I agree with you in terms of your conclusion. And look, there's basic building blocks of what you're doing as an investor, as a firm, and who you're doing it for. So I take like the basic building blocks of Davidson Keppner today, which, by the way, were similar to what they were 27 years ago. We're primarily an investing firm. We're not an asset gathering firm. And so for us to offer an investing fund, My partners and I, we want to invest our own money side by side with our LPs. We're by far the largest single investor collectively in our funds. And so if an investing product is not a good idea, we're not going to offer it, even if we have clients who would want it because we can't put our impromptu or whatever behind it.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a junior person at Goldman Sachs, but knew the Goldman Sachs structure quite well. And they didn't know each other when they formed the partnership in the mid-1980s. And so they came up with an arm's length agreement that took the best of what they knew from Bayer and Goldman. And that structure stuck and it sticks today. And so what I knew for me was if I did a good job, there could be a career for me at Davidson Keppner. And so not only did I have people that I liked and a thing I like doing with my time, but I knew if I put my head down and did a good job, there was like a future there for me. And so that was just very, very powerful. I mean, I will say, like, you look back, I mean, from what I started for the summer, it's almost 27 years ago. It does feel like a long time, but it never felt that way along the way. You know, I mean, with any career that's always good and bad, but overall, I found an amazing experience.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have those what if moments in life, I do believe in fate to some degree. And I got very fortunate with how it all worked out. And look, I liked what I was doing and I liked who I was doing it with. And I would say probably those are two of the most important factors that you have in choosing a career is what are you doing and who you're doing it with? And so I never felt the need to leave. The other thing I would say is, you know, Davidson Kempner is an old school Wall Street style partnership where we make new partners every couple of years. When partners leave our firm, they get an earn out of their shares and the shares are ultimately effectively acquired by the ongoing partners in the firm. And that structure existed in the 1990s. We've made some changes over the years to it, but a lot of it's still substantially similar to what things look like. And that's because if you look at the founding of Davidson Kampner, you know, Marvin Davidson had been a senior executive at Bear Stearns and Tom Keppner.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, look, we obviously would try to steer our time towards things that were actionable. I definitely was getting support. I mean, by senior partners, there was two. There was Tom Keppner and Michael LaFell. I mean, those are the only two folks who really were doing this fast. No, Davidson? Marvin Davidson was still running the firm at the very end of his career, but he really deferred to Tom and Michael in terms of running the debt portfolios that we had at the time. So we found things ultimately that I would call like solid singles, you know, things where you could, you know, buy a bond in the mid-90s and there was a takeout at 101 and you earn a coupon. It wasn't things you were going to earn giant amounts of money, but you were going to earn very good IRRs on them. And so I cut my teeth doing things where you could put relatively small amounts of money to work. And keep in mind, we had a billion dollars at the time. So, you know, 10 million dollar investment was a 1% investment in the fund. It was still meaningful to what we were doing.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the companies that were in trouble in the late 1990s deserve to be. And it was because it was sort of a peak of financial markets that really good opportunities probably started three to four years into my career. So I felt very proud of the fact afterwards that I didn't like anything. But at the time, I was like, are they just tossing me the bad stuff that I'm looking at all these investments and not wanting to do them? But it turned out, no, that was actually what most of the opportunity set was in our world in the late 1990s.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might do one or the other, but wouldn't do both of them. So the joke of it is I'm literally the only person who applied for this job. They literally got one resume. And that probably speaks as much to the time as it does to anyone else. I mean, so if you weren't doing a dot-com startup in the late 1990s from Columbia, you were going to work in investment banking or you're going to work in consulting. There were like a handful of people who were going to work in money management at all, right? That really was not a big area, despite the fact you had a big value investing program there at a time. These would have been the more popular career paths. And obviously non-financial services career paths as well. And to me, that was kind of fun. Like, I don't know. I mean, so the first two years of my career at Davidson Kepner, I hated most of what I was looking at as an investor. And I kept saying no to things. And what I didn't know is that was actually the right answer, right? You know, when you get to an investing job, you want to put, you know, investments on the book and that makes you feel like you're accomplishing things.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's about 15 people working here. That seems like a pretty good ratio in terms of number of people to dollars under management. And I knew a little bit about distressed debt investing just because I had taken a bankruptcy course in law school. And there was maybe like half of one class was devoted to what this was. It was really a pretty nascent industry. And so I said, okay, I can go be one of 100 or 200 people or whatever at a bank training program for the summer. Or I could be the only person who is doing this. And they had hired an intern the year before. So I spoke to him on the phone. His name is Dan Swern. He went on to found a money management firm that ultimately didn't work out and now runs Arena of Partners. And it seemed like a pretty good ratio in terms of opportunity. And I got there and it just spoke to me. And it spoke to me because I like the fact that I could do a form of investing that used both my legal background and my financial background. And I felt like there were many areas I might spend time on.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's really interesting, right? So I didn't necessarily seek out to do the type of investing that we do at Davidson Kepner, which is a combination of opportunistic credit and event-driven investing. But it actually goes back a year earlier to 1998. I was looking for summer jobs for the last summer of my JDMBA program. And so I applied to a number of the banks. I applied to some of the investment shops. And I found Davidson Kempner because they posted at Columbia for a full-time merger arbitrage analyst. And so I didn't really know any better. So I sent in a resume. And I got a call from them. And they said, well, we think your background is actually really good for then what it would have been called distressed debt. And why don't you come in and talk to us and work for us for summer? So I literally met three partners. They offered me a job and I said, hmm, these folks have about a billion dollars under management.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process at different places, and they'd say to me, How do we know what you're going to wake up caring about finance? How do we know you're going to read Wall Street Journal every day? And so questions that kind of seem silly with the benefit of hindsight. But, you know, I had no financial services background there. Once I went to business school, boom, I had the financial services background there. But the courses I took at Columbia were exceptional. Like I really enjoyed taking courses, particularly the ones that were taught by adjunct professors where they had real world experience. And so you could learn, you know, derivatives from someone who was trading derivatives every day at JPMorgan. Or I learned about the retail business from someone who was a former CEO of a mid-size regional retailer department store. A lot of department stores of that period of time. And they bring in a different CEO every week to talk to you. And that stuff just fascinated me. And so if I think about like my Columbia Business School education, like there was a lot of good things I took from that. And so the combination proved to be very powerful for me.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's super helpful. So, first of all, I also went to law school with the same idea that you did, that law school was an amazing. Education and that good things would come out of it, whether I was interested in pursuing law or not. I was very fortunate. I actually finished all my coursework at Princeton in three years, and I had a chance to start Columbia Law School during my fourth year at Princeton, which was a program that Princeton and Columbia had with each other at the time. But very few students did. So I kind of had a free look at law school. I enjoyed my time at law school, my time working in law just sort of made it seem like it wasn't for me ultimately, but I think it's a great field and would highly recommend it to others. The business school side initially started out as a path to getting a job. I actually found that it's sort of hard to think today, but it wasn't so easy for someone with a law degree and no work experience to go work on Wall Street in the 1990s. In fact, I had a few HR folks. I make it pretty far along in my recruit.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Legal background. I'm really glad I have the public policy background. It's actually super helpful as an investor. But it wasn't like, you know, I never set out on this path. It's just sort of the journey found me.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 1990s were really the heyday, I'm going to say, of mutual funds. And it was sort of the early days of electronic stock trading. My family is a family of academics and book publishers, so it wasn't necessarily through my family background that I got interested in investing. But it was sort of around us in the ether. I did a lot of reading on it in high school, in college. I was fortunate enough that I had a number of my friends' parents were willing to take me out to coffee and kind of educate me on the financial services business. And really the inflection point was when I was at Columbia where I had to kind of choose a path between going to Washington and working for a law firm that would have gotten me in the regulatory side of things versus working at a law firm, which I did for a couple years as a summer associate where the focus was private equity. And that was the path I chose. And I sort of never looked back. I'm really glad I have.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's interesting. So, first of all, I've got a pretty boring background in the sense that I grew up in central New Jersey in a town called East Brunswick. I went to college. I went to college half an hour from where I grew up. And then I moved to New York City the day after I graduated from Princeton and haven't left. And so I've lived within a 50-mile radius my entire life. My original career plans to the extent that they were fully formed would have been to do a career in law or potentially public policy. My high school happened to have a very good civics type program. I think I was probably at the only public high school in the United States that produced a cabinet member for both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, which I thought was pretty amazing for a suburban public high school. It was really during my time at Princeton and during my time at Columbia, where I made the decision to pursue money management as a career instead of something in public policy.”
2025-04-11 · Masters in Business · The Absolute Return Revival with Tony Yoseloff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source