Business incubators and accelerators are all the rage these days, particularly in Silicon Valley. Outfits like Y Combinator look to goose start-ups, in part by providing shared resources and collaborative brainstorming.
Mutual Series became a veritable rookery for scrappy, all-star value investors, including Seth Klarman, who has been portfolio manager of the $24 billion hedge fund Baupost since its inception and has a stellar long-term track record. Klarman also wrote a highly regarded volume on value investing, Margin of Safety.
“It was a unique environment,” says Friedman, 64, currently a student at Harvard Divinity School. “Michael was a brilliant entrepreneur who knew how to build a business and manage investments. He didn’t care if you’d work there for a year or 10 years. If you had a good idea and wanted to pursue it, he would listen.”
Adds Marcus: “Nobody had an office. There was just a big room and Michael sat in the middle so you could hear everybody and learn from them.” I had some history with Price. I wrote a story about him for Fortune in 1996. My boss decided to put it on the cover with the headline, “The Scariest SOB on Wall Street.” I was nervous about that—because Price was scary—but he seemed to relish the line.
Some, of course, do leave, going back to Gerald Tsai, who founded the Manhattan Fund reportedly in 1965 and became a billionaire. Jeffrey Vinik went on to hedge fund fame and fortune along with fellow Fidelity fund manager Michael Gordon, and now owns the National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lightning and a piece of Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox.