Carin-Isabel Knoop - Executive Director of the Harvard Business School Research and Case Writing Division
Release Date: 05/29/2024
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There’s a vast landscape of valuable but unconventional assets out there, but how do you find them, filter them, and properly value them? What frameworks can you use to understand them and how can you integrate them into a portfolio? Jeff Collins of Cloverlay, a seasoned investor in niche assets for decades, loves to explore these esoteric and overlooked opportunities. We delve into various topics, including litigation finance, data centers, the intellectual property behind Care Bears, refurbishing cargo planes, purchasing whiskey barrels, and modeling future revenues for Phantom of the...
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Joan Solotar - Scale as Advantage at Blackstone
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Joan Solotar is global head of Blackstone Private Wealth and a member of the firm’s management committee. Joan’s career tracks the fascinating evolution of Wall Street in the past thirty years. Joan worked on three notable IPOs: DLJ in 1995, Goldman Sachs in 1999, and Blackstone in 2007, and we discuss the strategic reasons behind them. She was tapped to lead the development of Blackstone’s private wealth group, which has since grown to $250 billion. We talk about the state of the industry she covered in the 1990s, the challenge of building a two-sided marketplace in...
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Mark Strauch - Fishing in a Different Pond
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Mark Strauch is a founding partner and president of the private equity firm Alpine Investors, known for its unique CEO training program. With a background in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University and subsequent business studies focused on finance, his career spans operational roles at companies like Electronic Arts, entrepreneurial ventures such as the early cloud concept Desktop.com, and significant leadership challenges, including orchestrating a complex turnaround as CEO of Business Engine. Mark provides a detailed look into Alpine's operational methodology. He explains the origins...
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Paul Carbone - The Advantage of Family Capital
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Today we are going to hear the story of one of the most interesting firms to spring from a significant family office. JB and Tony Pritzker approached today’s guest, Paul Carbone, with the idea of expanding their direct investments into a free-standing firm called Pritzker Private Capital. Paul takes us through that journey and we discuss the importance of a well-defined value system, the benefits of family capital, partnering with other families, the difference between flexible and patient capital, the problem with club deals, and why direct investing is not for everyone. ...
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Jason Mudrick - The Debt Landscape
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Jason Mudrick is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of the $3.4 billion Mudrick Capital Management, a firm renowned for its expertise in navigating complex credit situations and distressed opportunities. With a career spanning multiple market cycles, Jason brings a wealth of experience and a unique perspective on the evolving landscape of distressed investing. Forgoing a law career at Skadden, he did M&A at Merrill and then joined Contrarian Capital where he learned debt at the right-hand of Jon Bauer. Taking the leap after the financial crisis, Jason started Mudrick...
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Matt Fleissig - The Service Matrix
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Today, we're charting the remarkable trajectory of a wealth management powerhouse: Pathstone. Joining us is Matt Fleissig, co-founder and CEO. Pathstone is a great case study for the major trends in wealth management over the last ten years. Pathstone’s DNA was from the well-known Harris MyCFO, which was the original dot-com family office formed by the founders of Netscape and WebMD. Pathstone has since grown into a firm managing and advising on a remarkable $162 billion in assets. Matt has been a key architect of this growth story, and we'll explore how they navigated the...
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Michael Fisch - Buying Market Leaders
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Michael Fisch is a founder and the CEO of American Securities, a $23 billion private equity firm that originated in the Rosenwald family office. This is a great story of a fabled family office turning their investment DNA into a thriving private equity firm by buying market-leading businesses. William Rosenwald, son of Julius Rosenwald who built Sears Roebuck, started the family office back in the 1940s, investing in private companies. Michael’s mentor, Chuck Klein, took them to the next level in the 1980s and offered a role to 30-year-old Michael, who turned around and...
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Jim Tananbaum - AI and the Language of Biology
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Today’s guest is Jim Tananbaum of Foresite Capital. One of the most exciting places AI is revolutionizing is drug discovery, so I was very excited to have Jim on today. Jim Tananbaum is the founder and chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, a U.S.-focused healthcare investment firm founded in 2011 that has approximately $3.5 billion in assets under management. During the last three decades, Jim has been a thought partner for some of the most impactful and fastest-growth companies of their generation, including: 10x Genomics, Amerigroup, and Jazz Pharmaceuticals. ...
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Mark Gerson - Master of Networks
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Today’s guest is Mark Gerson of 3i Members. Mark is a remarkable entrepreneur, philanthropist, and master at creating networks. He is most well known for founding Gerson Lehrman Group, the original and largest expert network in the world, and most recently, 3i Members, a global deal network for investors, all of whom have exited a company or led a family office. Mark is also the chairman of United Hatzalah, a network of volunteer medics in Israel, and the cofounder of the African Mission Healthcare Foundation, which supports missionaries performing medical care in Africa. ...
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David Salem - Know What You Own
Private Capital
David Salem has had a remarkable career. He did his undergrad at Middlebury, went to Harvard Business School where he sat next to Seth Klarman, then went to work with Jeremy Grantham at GMO where he became a partner. He started The Investment Fund for Foundations, a groundbreaking way for smaller endowments to benefit from professional investing and scale, and had David Swensen of the Yale Investment Office, Jack Meyer of the Harvard Management Company, and Seth Alexander of MIT, as well as many other talented investors on his board. He went on to advise George Soros on his...
info_outlineCarin-Isabel Knoop is the founder and executive director of the Harvard Business School Research and Case Writing Division. This conversation was spurred by two things, one that I found out on the Business Breakdowns podcast last year that Harvard Business School Publishing is larger than Forbes, and two that I’ve also always been curious about how case studies are actually written. Anyone who has done security or competitive analysis will appreciate the level of detail that goes into a case.
This is similar to the great conversation I had last year with Paul Edelman, who has developed psychological tests to find talent for leading hedge funds. I would encourage you to listen to that one if you haven’t, Paul is great at breaking down conceptual thinking.
Cases are used to teach decision making and business reasoning for analysts, business owners, consultants and investors, but what are the decisions that go into the cases themselves and why are they such a good tool for teaching this mode of thought? What I found was intriguing and in some ways pleasantly surprising, and Carin was great fun to talk to. Please enjoy our discussion.
Carin-Isabel Knoop is the Executive Director of the Harvard Business School Case Research and Writing Group which she began in 1995. Previously she was a consultant at McKinsey and Price Waterhouse Coopers. Carin has her bachelors summa cum laude in Government, Economics and International Relations from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Harvard Business school with honors. She is also a very active writer on Medium and where she writes about creating better workplaces.
https://carinisabelknoop.medium.com/