Moving to SFO from NYC
8/11. Full Moon and Culture
Monday mornings are what they are. Sitting on my terrace overlooking downtown Manhattan I see the glare of sunlight making its’ way through glass and water. The Moon is round and full over Jersey. One of those amazing August mornings in New York City.
4 Days left for me to say bye to the Big Apple. Today’s plan: 18 Miles run. Write my weekly column. Meet my tax accountant. Work on our new concept/website.
The new concept is actually not so new. I just need to put it in words. What am I doing here? What is my purpose? Before I leave this town I need to define who I am and what my company is all about. It’s important to know who I am when starting fresh somewhere else.
We started Orange Capital Partners as a typical arbitrage hedge fund in March 0f 2008. Arbitrage is like a SWAT team, going in quickly and getting value before everyone else.
This worked for a while but then the financial crisis hit in the fall of 2008. Nothing worked anymore. The markets froze. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. And we took it. We made a lot of money doing big macro stuff. We took bets on companies going bankrupt, countries defaulting and currencies loosing huge amounts of value.
This worked for a while but then, by nature of things, people sat together and stopped the carnage. We entered the area of money printing by central banks and the notion that risk doesn’t exist anymore.
It took us about 2 years to reposition ourselves in this environment. We gave up on the macro and arbitrage stuff. Again, this was great for us since it forced us to really think who we are and what we want to do.
About two years ago we started focussing on culture. Kind of like a manifesto. We asked questions like, what are our values, what is our purpose, what do we want to achieve and how?
Our culture is defined by two factors. First, we look for innovation in a Clayton Christensen type way. Second, we pay attention to ethics and Conscious Business. The latter is a bit more complex, but in essence it means that people should be conscious of their actions and their impact on the environment. We see the combination of those two factors as a great way to create longterm value because it leads to better outcomes.
We put all this in a tag line. “We are for better.”
This is really important. Because it gives us a framework to observe the business world. We can meet hundreds of companies and quickly decide which ones are interesting to us. It’s like speed dating with a framework. This way you know what you want and you can afford to talk to many people without getting confused.
Wall Street is one of the few places left, where people don’t feel they should to the right thing. It’s like they want to be good human beings but their job doesn’t allow them to act ethically. Making money is more important. This is stupid.
We strongly believe that money investing like many other sectors of the business world can become a catalyst for better things. That is our purpose and the culture we’re brining with us to San Francisco.
