The FREOPP Brain Trust: Dan Arbess

In the 1990s, Daniel J. Arbess was a pioneer in helping eastern European economies enter the free market. Today, Dan is focused on ensuring that all Americans have the same opportunity.

Dan was born in Montreal, and went to law school in Toronto (at Osgoode Hall) and in Cambridge (at Harvard). While an affiliate at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1987, Dan was invited to the Kremlin with other policy analysts and foreign observers, where he had a front-row seat as Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev began to open up his country.

That experience shaped Dan’s career for the decades that followed. “I realized right there that, whether he realized it or not, Gorbachev’s moves would end the Soviet command economy, and I saw enormous human opportunity in the reforms that would follow.”

Dan relocated to Eastern Europe weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, finding new governments that welcomed his help in developing new economic policies and converting state-owned enterprises into modern businesses. He became the youngest partner in the history of White & Case. His technical advice gained the admiration of the editors of the New York Times, who described his work as “the most precious gift America has to give” the emerging economies of eastern Europe.

Eventually, Dan crossed over from advising governments to investing, introducing economic discipline to newly privatized companies in eastern Europe and Russia: an effort that the New York Times Magazine concluded would “determine whether the region’s economies thrive.”

Dan eventually returned to New York and founded the Xerion hedge funds, whose investment strategy was guided by big macroeconomic and industrial developments. He merged Xerion into Perella Weinberg Partners in 2007, and managed over $3 billion in assets under management at Xerion’s peak. In 2014, Dan closed Xerion to focus on philanthropy, non-profit work, and personal investing in new technologies to detect and intercept hard-to-treat health conditions.

Dan serves on the boards of the Global Virus Network and Cancer Expert Now; and helped found No Labels, an organization that works to build a bipartisan governing coalition. He is also a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dan is a member of FREOPP’s Board of Advisors, where he brings his insights into the future of work, the digital economy, inflation, and macroeconomics. “I’ve always appreciated the advantages in education and health care I received as the foundation for a meaningful life. While nobody can guarantee equal outcomes, FREOPP is an intellectual home for partners who care about equal opportunity, and are serious about extending the same to communities that are still underserved. No mission is more American.”

Dan lives in New York with his wife, Marlene. They have three grown children.

Follow Dan on Twitter: @DanArbess