Entertaining and Likable
Emily and I spoke to some business school students the other day and after 55 minutes of good questions about deal flow, position sizing, valuation, and the like, the professor said, “With five minutes left, what else should they know?”
Emily turned to me and said, “Tell them why you took a job at a small firm in Columbia, MO.”
It was an interesting prompt, and I didn’t immediately know where to take it. I also have a habit of when I don’t know the answer to something, talking my way around it until I figure it out. So I jumped into my usual spiel about having worked in public equities with my last job there leading a team of software developers and data scientists to ingest research from about 100 equity analysts working around the world to try to figure out who was lucky and who was good and for those who were good, what they were good at and how analytics might make them better. My conclusion from that work was that we are all luckier than we think and that the opportunity for edge in the public markets was being eroded by technology.
But Permanent Equity was different.
Unlike in public markets, where every investor sees the same companies and the same prices at the same time (acknowledging, but intentionally omitting, high-frequency traders), Permanent Equity could (1) cultivate proprietary deal flow; (2) negotiate both price and terms; and (3) seek to add value post-close. That’s way more levers available to the typical public markets investor, and that was both interesting to me and different.
And when I said the word “different,” I realized that was the answer.
A key to success, I said, is to do something that is genuinely different. When I encountered Permanent Equity, I gauged it to be genuinely different in its model and approach. That was exciting to me.
But if you want to build a career in anything, not only should you work somewhere that is doing something different, you need to be genuinely different as well. One form this can take in finance is by being a good writer. It’s conventional wisdom that you need to be at least reasonable with numbers in order to buy and sell things for a living, but it’s one thing to calculate a return profile and another to persuade someone to take the risk of earning it.
Another differentiator is to be entertaining and likable. That’s because doing a financial job well is about building and maintaining relationships more than any quant would care to admit.
After all, the thing financial people won’t tell you about financial math is that it’s learnable and not as hard as it looks. What’s harder is keeping relationships. And that’s exactly what they (you?) should know.
-Tim