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Emerging Manager Essays
July 15, 2026Onchain Assets Meet the Allocator's Discipline
Tokenized assets have spent a decade as a story about technology. They are starting to become a story about allocation. As onchain markets mature — de…
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July 3, 2026Playing the Long Game When Nobody Is Watching
The hardest stretch of building an investment firm is not the launch and not the crisis. It is the long middle, when the fund is established but not yet proven, the returns are fin…
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March 3, 2026Position Sizing Is Where Strategy Meets Psychology
Position sizing is often taught as a technical exercise — a matter of formulas, volatility estimates, and optimization. In practice it is where a manager's strategy collides with t…
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November 11, 2025The Quiet Advantage of Permanent Capital
Permanent capital gets discussed as a structural nicety — a preference for managers who dislike fundraising. That undersells it badly. The right capital structure is not a convenie…
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August 26, 2025What Compounding Actually Asks of You
Everyone in this business talks about compounding. Far fewer have sat with what it actually asks of the person trying to do it. Compounding is not primarily a mathematical phenomen…
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April 15, 2025Hiring Your First Non-Investment Person
There is a moment in most emerging firms when the founder realizes they cannot personally do everything that isn't investing anymore. The first non-investment hire — operations, co…
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January 21, 2025The Case for a Smaller Fund
The default assumption in this business is that bigger is better — more assets, more fees, more validation. For a certain kind of manager running a certain kind of strategy, that a…
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October 8, 2024Drawdowns Are a Communication Problem
Every manager knows drawdowns are a portfolio problem. Fewer treat them as what they more dangerously are: a communication problem. The portfolio damage from a drawdown is often re…
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May 28, 2024How to Lose an Allocator in the First Meeting
We have sat on both sides of enough first meetings to notice the patterns that end them early. Emerging managers usually worry about not being impressive enough. In practice, the m…
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March 19, 2024The Founder-Investor Is a Different Animal
Running an investment firm and running an investment strategy are different jobs, and the emerging manager has to do both at once, usually with the same overloaded brain. The tensi…
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December 12, 2023Fees Are a Filter, Not a Reward
New managers tend to think about fees as compensation — the reward for the work of running money. It is more useful to think about them as a filter that shapes which investors you …
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September 5, 2023Concentration, Conviction, and the Cost of Being Early
Concentration is where emerging managers most often distinguish themselves and most often destroy themselves. A concentrated book is the clearest expression of conviction available…
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June 27, 2023The Operational Debt Every New Manager Accrues
In the rush to launch, almost every new manager takes on operational debt — the small compromises in process, documentation, and infrastructure that let you get to the first close …
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February 14, 2023Why Your Track Record Is a Story, Not a Number
Allocators ask for your track record, and new managers hand over a number. The number matters, but it is not what a thoughtful allocator is actually buying. They are buying the sto…
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November 29, 2022Building an Edge You Can Actually Repeat
Every manager has a story about their edge. Fewer can tell you why that edge will still be there in ten years. The distinction matters more than almost anything else in this busine…
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August 16, 2022Anchor Investors: What They Really Cost You
An anchor investor can turn a fund that might not happen into a fund that will. That is a real and valuable thing, and we don't want to talk anyone out of it. But anchors are rarel…
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May 10, 2022The First Close Is a Mindset, Not a Milestone
New managers tend to treat the first close as a finish line. You raise enough to open the doors, you send the wire instructions, and it feels like the hard part is over. In our exp…
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February 1, 2022The High Returns With High Volatility Game
When a position is down 50%, much of the market assumes the verdict is in: you were wrong. We think that conclusion arrives too fast. Whether a drawdown is a mistake depends on t…
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September 1, 2021Stand Out To Break In
Most people trying to break into the investment business send the same résumé to the same fifty firms and hope. The candidates who actually get hired tend to do something differe…
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