Serendipity Now
“How did you get here?” is an interesting question to ask and be asked. So it went on a recent call when a college student I’d been introduced to wanted to know – because I think he was interested in doing the same – how I had become the chief investment officer of a private equity firm.
“I,” I said, “have a fairly non-traditional background, so take from this what you will…”
Coming from Long Island, N.Y., where I did landscaping as a summer job, I went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., because I thought at the time I made that decision that I was interested and had a future in government. But I got an internship in the House of Representatives early on there and realized I had very little interest and definitely no future in government. I also found that I liked my political theory (shoutout Plato) classes far more than my practical politics classes because of the writing and thinking and so eventually wound my way to being an English major with a concentration in playwriting (which is why after I became CFO of Permanent Equity with no classical training in numbers, our CEO Brent would refer to me as the most under-qualified CFO in America).
I graduated from Georgetown in 2003, which wasn’t a great time to be looking for a job what with the economy still recovering from the double shocks of the dot-com bubble burst and 9/11 (both formative events in my life that had occurred before the college student I was telling this tale to had even been born…ahem). Without a lot of prospects, I was expecting to head back to Long Island to landscape and then maybe go on to graduate school. In fact, I hadn’t even received a response from any of the more professional jobs I had applied to, including one as a writer at The White House, which I had applied to at the recommendation of one of my English professors even though I didn’t think I was qualified.
And I wasn’t!
See, the job required a master’s degree, and I didn’t have one. Because of that, I later learned, my resume was put at the very bottom of the pile.
But never underestimate serendipity.
Because they interviewed everyone on top of me in that pile and none of them got the job. So the choice came down to interviewing unqualified me or reopening the process, which meant it might take six to nine months to fill the role. And so I ended up on the right side of the fact that something is better than nothing.
Now, an important thing to know here is that this happened a long time ago and I didn’t yet have a cellphone. So the number on my resume was attached to the landline at the house I shared with a bunch of others on Potomac Street near campus. But by the time this all happened, we had graduated and were moving out. I kid you not that my roommate Doug was about to pull the jack out of the wall when the phone rang with The White House calling on the other side.
An interlude…
Getting a job writing at The White House might sound impressive. You’re probably thinking about memorable lines spoken during grandiose speeches on impressive stages. And there were people who did that.
But what also happens is that the President meets, greets, and receives gifts from a lot of people that then need thanking. And someone needs to write those thank you notes because the President doesn’t have the time for that, but also wants to promptly send detailed thank yous because votes and also because not thanking a world leader for his or her gift might cause an international incident. Again, something is better than nothing.
And that’s how I got hired for that job. Because I was better than nothing. But I’m still not close to telling you how I became the chief investment officer of a private equity firm…
That wheel started turning because I’m a cheapskate. Not as cheap as Morgan Housel (shoutout Morgan…we good?) and not as cheap as I used to be (shoutout past me), but always and still stingy. What’s relevant is that back when I worked as a thank you note writer, I saved everything I could in order to be relentless about investing.
One reason I learned to be relentless about investing is because my Dad was relentless about investing. In fact, he started as a professor at SUNY Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) around the same time as Jim Simons, the founder of the wildly successful quantitative investing firm Renaissance Technologies who recently passed away. Jim and my Dad shared a relentless interest in investing and allegedly talked shop, but Jim I think pursued that interest somewhat more relentlessly (if measured by financial outcomes and so it goes). That said, my Dad was still relatively relentless about the topic, and I took that in.
So as a young, relentless investor with a small amount of savings near Washington, DC, I inevitably happened upon The Motley Fool (based in Alexandria, VA). Then as I read The Motley Fool, I discovered that they were looking for a writer (and then ended up working there and doing other things).
I’m going to fast forward because this is getting long and attributing things to serendipity seems lazy, but I will say that another question I get asked is: “Should I work at a big company or a small one?” My answer is that big companies might pay you well and give you lots of training and small companies might pay you less and provide minimal training (and the government might…well, I won’t comment on government jobs). You can do well anywhere, of course, but I think something about working at small companies is that you get the opportunity to do whatever you want. That creates variance and variance is upside (unless you screw it up). So if you value the future over the present, the opportunity to do more and earn less until later is always worth more (shoutout lifetime value) than the opportunity to do less and earn more in the present. Even a lot more (unless you screw it up).
Back to serendipity (and whoa is this too long a tale), I got hired at the Fool just as they were recovering from the dot-com bust, so I was a very junior employee at a very small company given the opportunity to do whatever I thought I should to add value while sitting at the same pod everyday as Bill Mann (you’ve met him before) and Fool co-founders David and Tom Gardner.
Serendipity.
I listened first-hand as smart people debated not only what investments to make, but also how to run a business that was at times under stress and at other times very much not. I guarantee you that the people being hired into Amazon or Apple or Goldman weren’t and aren’t being afforded the same opportunity.
After more than a decade of doing that (and a short stint managing Morgan), I got introduced to Brent Beshore (because of Morgan…it all comes full circle), saw what Brent and team were building here in mid-Missouri and thought it was pretty smart, and was paying attention when he told the world he needed someone “with a breadth of financial, accounting, and tax experience to help lead our team.” Even though I had little of any of that, I sent him an email saying that I thought I could be helpful, we met, and here I am. So the answer to how I got to be the chief investment officer of a private equity firm is: I was curious. I learned from great people. I worked hard. I took risk. And I got lucky (because I don’t think I ever applied for and then was offered a job I was qualified for).
And curiosity, mentorship, work, risk, and luck is a helluva equation. But I’ll tell you, I often think what might have been different if Doug had unplugged that phone.
-Tim
