
Becoming a hedgie
Good luck, Lawrence
Hedge funds had not yet fully exploded on to the scene in 1998, when
I was in my second year at Harvard Business School. By contrast,
internet start-ups were all the rage. Why bother with cash-flow analysis
and five-year projections when you could help change the world while
living in sunny California? It may have been a failure of imagination
on my part, but I had spent my summer working at the private equity
firm Permira, and that seemed like my best option. I had worked at
McKinsey too, but management consultancy wasn’t for me. So there
I was, vaguely thinking about going into privat