WSO Podcast | E165: Pro Hockey to Equity Research to Point72, Millennium and COO of a Startup
About
In this episode, we learn how Gerard left college early to go pursue a professional hockey career in Europe. Find out how he broke into Columbia almost 5 years later, why he was so behind for finance recruiting and how he got his first break at Citi in equity research, only to jump 5 months later to Point72 as a research analyst. Listen to hear why he made the jump to a startup called Hivecell and what they are up to now.
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WSO Podcast (Episode 165) Transcript:
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:00:06] Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and chief monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me! As I talked to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into Different career paths and life in general. Let's get to it. In this episode, we learn how Gerard left college early to go pursue a professional hockey career in Europe. Find out how he broke into Columbia almost five Years later, why he was so behind for finance recruiting, and how he got his first Break at Citi in equity research, only to jump five months later to two point seventy two as a research analyst. Listen to hear why he made the jump to a startup called Hive Cell and what they're up to now. Enjoy. Brian, welcome to the Wall Street Oasis podcast.
Gerard: [00:00:59] Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:01:01] So you could just give listeners a short summary of your bio. I know you've done a lot of stuff, but just kind of a 30 second, two minute spiel would be great.
Gerard: [00:01:09] Sure. It's eclectic, to say the least left college early to go play professional hockey. I retired after five years,
Went back to school to finish my education, came out of Columbia as a 29 year old Man, which was a Different experience, to say the least. Had a lot of catching up to do on the career front and found myself highly focused on accumulating as many skills as I could over the coming years in order to again play, play catch up. And so I started off in hedge fund accounting at City, migrated over to equity research, which then landed me from the sell side and then I went to the buy side. And then once I was on the buy side, the world opened up to me with all the different types of roles and opportunities that exist there beyond just being a portfolio manager and an analyst. And culminated most recently in my seat at Millennium, where I was on the equity management team, overseeing roughly about 30 portfolio teams and their research process research technology, hiring pretty much day to day operations.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:02:24] Very cool. And then what was your latest? Yeah. Oh yeah.
Gerard: [00:02:27] And then there's that right? I decided to early twenty, which is just perfect timing. Pack up would have otherwise been a career long seat at Millennium and left to go help run a tech startup. So I'm currently at an edge computing startup called Hive, so we're on the CIO CFO of the business.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:02:51] Super exciting. So let's go all the way back to undergrad. You were at University of Vermont. Are you a New England native? The Canadian? What's going on?
Gerard: [00:02:59] I grew up on Long Island. My accent is a is a healthy mix between Long Island, Boston and Canadian, with virtually No Long Island in there, which is great. I think a lot of people, if there was one accent that I think everybody just generally hates, it's the Long Island accents, and so I've been able to disassociate myself with that. But yeah, I grew up on Long Island, played locally both junior hockey and in high school hockey, and was fortunate enough to get a full academic and athletic scholarship to the University of Vermont to play hockey there.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:03:40] So tell me a little bit about this, the progression as you're kind of You're there for The full three years.
Gerard: [00:03:45] Yeah, I was there for Three years and then
I had a really interesting experience where in between my junior and senior year, I went over on a European hockey tour. You know what, people don't realize and they shouldn't, is that professional hockey over in Europe starts early. And so there was an opportunity to go over with a few of my other Buddies that were at Northeastern and Harvard and a few other schools And play professional Teams to get ready for my own season. And at the end of the trip, I got offered a contract and basically called home and basically said to send the rest of my clothes over.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:04:28] That's awesome. So you were, you were, what, 20 years old? 21.
Gerard: [00:04:31] I was, I was just about I was 20 years old at the time.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:04:34] And so tell me, do you can you share with that contract was or who like, how much do they pay you? Oh God, no,
Gerard: [00:04:39] It wasn't enough to pay a speeding ticket. Let's put it that much.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:04:45] Just enough to live basically like 10 like 20 grand for the year or 50 grand.
Gerard: [00:04:49] Yeah. And they give you a house. They give you a car. So why? Why take that? Um, you only get to live once, right, like I felt I felt confident in myself, right to say, you know, school education, job workflow. All of that is, you know, I have the rest of my life to do that. My body is as young as and strong as it will ever be right now. And I felt confident in at the time when I was going to or about to try and do and wanted to basically just put my mind towards one thing, right? Because at that time at school, right school is undoubtedly a distraction, especially if you're on a full scholarship. There's demands in terms of, you know, certain GPAs and things of that nature. And at the time, I just felt like if there was ever a time to give it a go, it would be then and now for sure. Yes. Where are you? Where are you? I was in Berlin. And so, you know, looking back on, you know, I consider myself a pretty introspective person. I was I was very immature at 20, and I like
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:05:58] Most of us, yeah,
Gerard: [00:05:59] I recognize about that, about myself and felt like getting thrown. I'll tell you the story when I when I ended up signing the contract and we were in a completely different city, right? And so my coach at the time literally dropped me off at the train station, gave me one hundred euros and was like, Good luck. And that was it like I was in. I didn't speak a lick of German, right? I didn't know where I was geographically speaking. I knew this new coach that I was about to go play for was going to Pick me up at the Bon Hof, whatever, in the middle of Berlin. And that was it. that was it, and it was grow up time, right, and So I look back fondly on that time because I realized I, I needed that To grow up.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:06:46] Was there any inkling at that point of finance or anything like that? It was very much just hockey life. Hockey was life and life was hockey life.
Gerard: [00:06:53] Yeah, I think it was that. But in the Back of my mind, you know, one
Of the stipulations of me doing this was promising my mom I would go back to college and get my education. And I had at that point always had an affinity towards numbers.
And my dad was my dad was on Wall Street for 30 years or whatever. So I what did he do? So he was a He worked at like Kidder B. Kidder, Peabody back in the day, he worked at Lehman Brothers. He was an operations guy, execution guy. He was handling global execution for the Lehman Brothers and for Kidder.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:07:32] So you were in the hockey world for almost five years, for four and a half plus years? Yeah. Tell me how that all progressed. So it sounds like you were kind of getting some traction ToHang around that long.
So, yeah, you're back in the U.s., you played, I think, in the minor leagues. I played the Canadiens.
Gerard: [00:07:51] I played a little bit in in the American
Hockey League and primarily in The East Coast Hockey League. So effectively AAA and AA Baseball for people who don't Understand the levels Of hockey. Yeah.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:08:03] What's your thought process in terms of just how crazy difficult it is to make to the NHL stars? It's not very.
Gerard: [00:08:11] Yeah. And there's like, it's funny you, you think you're good and then you play against those guys and you're just like, right? And it got
To the point, like, it was so obvious to me that. That relative to my skills, relative to my age, because at that point the NHL had just hockey in general had had changed. It was at that cusp of getting younger and younger and younger and people spending not having as long of a career. And so the idea of using my mind to make money just felt like, again, I always had this. I call it, I call it a quiet cockiness about myself. I just I thought I could do it right. I thought I could, you know? Now is the time to actually use what I what I Considered I was good at, which was critically thinking and yeah,
And going from there. So how did you
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:09:02] Even get into Columbia? Brute force. Yeah, and tell me how that works, because you know, you're going from a University of Vermont and makes sense to trade. Yeah.
Gerard: [00:09:15] So it was funny, I'll never forget it, I was sitting at it was my cousin's wedding weekend. Very fortunate. I come from a family where my uncles were incredibly successful. One of them's an orthopedic surgeon down in Florida, and I remember sitting and having A beer with him, and he was asking me what I was going to do. He was interested in what the next Phase of my life was going to be. And I was like, I'm just going to go back to UVM. And I had a year left and my scholarship persisted even though I left. And they. They held it for me, which is incredibly nice of them.
And so my uncle, I'll never forget it, my uncle looked at me, it was just like, you're an idiot. What are you doing? He's like, you have you have life Experience that classrooms would pay for at Universities would pay for? And he's like, I would go to I would call Princeton, I would call Harvard. I would call Yale. I would call Columbia and tell them your story.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:10:17] And by the way, you couldn't. You couldn't play hockey there, could you? No, no. I had no idea I had already. You'd be like crushing people.
Gerard: [00:10:24] I didn't. Yeah. The thing was, though, is I didn't even want to at that point. Like when you look back on my when I look back on my life, I never I was never just a student, right? I always had distractions. I was and nothing personal.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:10:39] I was just teasing. But yeah,
Gerard: [00:10:41] But I'll tell you a story about when I got to Columbia, so. The so, yeah, I unbeknownst to my uncle, I only Went to Columbia. I only called up there in Columbia has this really interesting program called the School of General Studies, which was built and designed for World War Two vets coming back from war to acclimate them into society. So it was this idea of a nontraditional student being put into a traditional College atmosphere and allowing their life experience to drive their educational Curiosity and things of that nature. It's a really, really, really unique program that was really defined by the previous what Do they call heads of the School? This gentleman by the name of Peter on phenomenal human. Phenomenal Human. And so when I got there, I just realized that like this was my chance to sit in front of the classroom. This is my chance to. And I just found new and unique ways to learn. But it was when I say Brute force it was. I went on, I met with everybody in the admissions department, I met with Teachers, I met with Faculty, I met with alumni and at a certain point it was just like, All right, let the kid in already, right? Like, it was just like, can Somebody stop him from coming To school like, unannounced? Yeah. And that that was it. I just there was I had one track, one track mind, which makes sense, right? It was. I was just Being myself and
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:12:23] Thinking Columbia, just because in New York, you know, being near the finish, that's exactly right.
Gerard: [00:12:26] Yeah, that's exactly right.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:12:28] Yeah. So you weren't interested in going in like Princeton or whatnot, or you would have probably gone there, but it was more like Columbia was where you wanted and you just focused on that. That's it. You think that really played a role just harassing all the admissions people like your percent
Gerard: [00:12:43] Because again, my mind when I left
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:12:47] You, how did you how did you sweet talk them? How did you do it? Like, I know you said persistence, but was there like, I mean, you can't like eventually they're like calling the cops on you if you're too crazy, for sure.
Gerard: [00:12:58] No, I think it. I had a story to tell, right, and I've been and this this applies to jobs, this applies to, I think, just generally speaking, right? You have to look at your resume three dimensionally, right? If you don't, then all you are as a piece of paper. I remember one of my buddies was telling me He was he was Two years out of business school. He was responsible for the recruiting for the Columbia Business School at. I think it was one of the one of the big banks. And this guy is this guy's boss walked in true story, walked in, grabbed half the resumes. Threw them in the garbage and said, I don't want to hire anybody that's unlucky in. Quote unquote. Quote unquote. Yeah, and I'll never forget hearing that because it just makes you realize that when you drop your resume into those random boxes, right, résumé drops. The odds of you getting that job Are almost zero, right, unless you have some way of making that piece of paper come to life. And so the way I saw that working was, I sent in my resume. I sent in my application and then I made sure people knew that when they opened my
Application, there was a Huge store like I was a three dimensional person to them, right? And because there's so much nuanced everybody's life, it's so hard to like, you know, find some way on your resume to whether it be for a job or School or whatever.
To articulate all of the context and all the meat behind Who you are, right?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:14:47] But how did you even get them to give you the time of day? Like how did you actually did you show in? I showed up in, I showed up
Gerard: [00:14:53] In a coat and tie and just waited until somebody talked to me.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:14:56] And so who were you able to talk to? Head of admissions?
Gerard: [00:14:59] Yeah, I talked to the dean of admissions and then pretty much every one of his Underlings Because at the end of the day, it was like who? I didn't know who was going to open up my application and I read it, so I made sure everybody knew who I was.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:15:13] That's awesome. That's awesome, I love it. I love the tenacity. So tell me a little bit about kind of. So, you know, you're finishing up was almost a year or two there.
Gerard: [00:15:21] Yeah, I was finishing up a year or two there.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:15:25] How are you thinking about things? Are you immediately starting to look into finance type roles? Yeah. And I was
Gerard: [00:15:30] Wildly
Under underprepared, underprepared for Understanding what it meant to get an Internship, how to Get that internship,
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:15:42] Which is surprising given how tenacious you were to get into Columbia. Like how it's the same skill set, right?
Gerard: [00:15:48] I was actually a function of timing, right? Because I started. I started my first semester at Columbia in January. Like in the spring semester and so everybody liked the way I was late to the game and then I was. I look back on it and I was ignorant to. I didn't know how to prepare for the interviews that I even got right. I'll never forget sitting down with the recruiter from City, talking about corporate finance. And they were. He was like, so which Department of corporate finance do you want to go into it and I'll never forget responding to him would be Like, Well, can you tell me more right about each one of these things? And he was like, No, you were supposed to research this, and I was like, Oh, that's how this works, right? Yikes. I didn't read. I didn't read that, that piece of advice Yet. So.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:16:40] So you were still kind of floating. You were still kind of a young guy in terms of job interview skills. You're still a young kid. Yeah, I had I
Gerard: [00:16:48] Had virtually none. I had virtually none.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:16:51] Is that why you kind of end up in accounting, right, lets you end it up? Yeah, but did you even get to get that? How'd you get that job even?
Gerard: [00:16:57] Yeah.
So at the time my My dad was working at city hedge fund accounting Like he had been partially retired. And like most guys that work In Wall Street for 30 years, they have in his, in his opinion, a world of, you know, a lifetime of experiences that these new fund accountants or whomever operations guys Just don't have, right? Because my dad was doing it before computers. Yeah. And so my dad had to do all of the reconciliations of a bank by hand with his team, right? Yeah. Trade reconciliations were done three or four days later. Right. Crazy. Like, you can't even imagine walking out of the bank or a hedge fund now and not having a bar right at the end of every day and closing your books almost every single day. And so my dad had all of this like institutional knowledge, so, you know, it was he was. He was basically doing this on the side a little bit and keeping himself busy, and he introduced me to his counterpart at City Hedge Fund Services. I got hired, quite frankly, as a Part time guy, you know, to start with. Mm hmm. And then, you know, keeping with tradition, just brute force taught myself, you know, VBA. I taught Myself All the things about excel. I taught myself about, you know, all the different just accounting aspects of stocks and derivatives and all that kind of stuff. And you know, the biggest thing for me was just this recognition of like, well. Where does this end, right? Does this end like having this knowledge base, does this end in a really good place? And the answer was no. Right? Like, I didn't want to be, I didn't want to be in the back office, right?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:18:53] So how did you manage to make the transition equity research that's assuming tough transition internally?
Gerard: [00:18:59] Yeah, it's pretty funny. So. Um. Hockey is a very small world, and so at the time, I was coaching in this youth hockey organization up in Mamaroneck. Um, and the guy that was running the program, this Phenomenal guy, but he was also in a small, small detail in this guy, he used to be Aerosmith's road manager. That's pretty cool. Ok. So I've had I've had beers with this guy probably three or four times in my life, I've never heard him tell the same story twice. Just the best person to go out to. And so I called them. I called them. One day I was like, Hey, Richard, it's been a while since I caught up with you. I'd love to drive up and see you after practice or whatever. He's like, Listen, I just started a new business. I have no time. He's like, in two minutes. Tell me what you're doing. At the time, I was at City, so I called them, I was like, you know, I'm at City, I'm doing this. He's like, I got this guy. He's like, you got to call this guy. John Rogers, who unbeknownst to me, was the head of equity research at Citi. Mm hmm. Big Hockey fan and all these kinds of things. And so he was like, I told John, you're calling him, give him a call when you can. And so I called John and I was like, John, this is Gerard. Rich told me to call you. He's like, what are you doing right now? It's like. Nothing actually is like there's a shuttle From Jersey City over two, three eight Greenwich leaving in like 15 minutes, it was like, Get over here. Like, OK. So I jump on the shuttle, I come over and No word of a lie. He went and met me across the street from three eighty eight. We talked for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and he was like, you want to work in
Equity research? I was like, sure, he's like, All right, wait right here. And he went back into three eight and grabbed one by one, grabbed a bunch of different analysts that were trying to hire a junior research associate. And I eventually stumbled on somebody there, and it just worked out, and I ended up walking away that day with a basically an equity research job that I wasn't fully prepared For. So how did
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:21:16] You? So he was pulling people out to kind of interview like analysts and promised.
Gerard: [00:21:20] That's exactly right.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:21:22] It was it was you better or you're more prepared at that point, like, how did you even say you want to do equity research? You were a little more prepared.
Gerard: [00:21:28] I was a bit more prepared. I had a good buddy that had
Just left there again, a
Gerard: [00:21:32] Hockey guy. So he had prepared me to some degree because I knew I was going to end up in this place. At some point, I just didn't realize it was going to be that day. Right?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:21:43] He moves fast, sometimes, right? So why such a short stint there tell me what happened, that another opportunity came knocking? Tell me how that happened to switch the by side?
Gerard: [00:21:53] Yeah, it was. It was very fortuitous again,
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:21:58] Because it was five months at City, right?
Or even less. Yeah, it was like six
Gerard: [00:22:01] Months in equity research. And I got.
A buddy of mine called out of
Gerard: [00:22:08] Nowhere, he was like, Hey, listen, we're starting this new group at zero point seventy two. It's a fundamental research group and we're doing all these things and. My boss loves hockey
Players and their mentalities, and, you know,
Gerard: [00:22:23] Would you want to come interview? And I'm certainly not going to name names or speak ill of, you know, what was going maybe at the time at City, but it just wasn't. It wasn't working out with me in the analyst that that I was working for at the time.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:22:39] And this why do you why do you think that is just the unrealistic expectations where you just two green and taking a while to get up the learning curve? What are you honestly looking back on it?
Gerard: [00:22:48] It was completely misaligned expectations. Ok, very different.
Gerard: [00:22:54] It was what I wanted to be doing. What I thought they were going to teach me to do was just completely different than what I was.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:22:59] I like unpacking that because this happens a lot to people where they kind of jump into a role they think they want it happen to me. I went to private equity, got fired
And within three months, it sounds like you, you have found a better opportunity. That's why you jump. But yeah, for me, it was like just very different going banking where they're like telling you when you go to the bathroom to private equity and you're like, didn't talk to you for like, I think you just had to know what to do. And for me, it was like a super tough transition. I wonder, was there any of that kind of when you jump to equity research from like an operations role or is it more
Gerard: [00:23:29] Just like it was? This analyst had just a very different opinion of what I Should be doing, and it had nothing to do with equity research it. I thought I would be touching stocks. I thought I would be looking at balance sheets, writing reports, at least listening on company calls. And it was like, No, you haven't earned that. And so you're going to you're going to do this or hey, yeah, it's just you're going to do this until I tell you you're better than until you're allowed to do this. And it was tough because I think that that person in particular was just very Incongruent with the other analysts that I had run into at Citi. It was a It was an interesting, interesting Time in my life, to say the least.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:24:16] So you were actively looking or you just I don't think I was. It just happened. Just happened.
Gerard: [00:24:21] Ok, I would love. I would love to attribute it to divine intervention, to say the least.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:24:28] Ok, so four point seventy two comes calling you, of course, say yes. It's interesting. Do you mind talking about like operations paid equity research then to the buy side what the jumps were? I assume they were all pay raises.
Gerard: [00:24:39] Yeah, they were. I was pro I from operations to equity research. It was probably a. I earn twice as much,
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:24:50] It's like fifty to one hundred or
Gerard: [00:24:51] Something, yeah, something like that. And then and then from sell side to by side, it was probably an additional. 20 or 30 percent?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:25:03] That sounds about OK. That's what I would guess. You know, a few years out of school. Ok, so you're there. How is it different? Is it better? Are you actually doing stocks and doing research or not? Yeah, I was.
Gerard: [00:25:14] I was doing Research. It was it was here that I started recognizing the value of data. You know, I think that and the organizations right again when I got to point seventy two. That was the time where I realized that while there's more to hedge
Funds than just being a portfolio Analyst or a Portfolio manager or an analyst, right, there's all. You mean you can you can do business Development and hire people. That's pretty cool. You could do the whole data analytics team, probably.
Gerard: [00:25:53] There's a whole data analytics team that was being built at the
Time, a lot of different venues. You just kind of had to get there, right? And then you had to keep it right. You couldn't be an idiot. And but then you also realize stuff about yourself like I realized very quickly. One of the core reasons why I think I was generally
Unhappy at that time in my life was because I was stuck behind a computer screen. I mean, I'm by definition, an extrovert. And so sitting behind a computer screen, typing research notes or working on an Excel model is like my hand starts to shake, right?
Because you're not fulfilling Like a primal piece of your of yourself that If you ignore that for a long enough period of time, it becomes really Unhealthy,
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:26:45] Which so do you recognize that by you say you're pretty introspective? Did you recognize it back at the time?
Gerard: [00:26:50] One hundred percent, yeah.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:26:51] And so what were you thinking like? What's the next step? How did you even go? You're like, Oh, like, I'm down this equity research or this research path. Yeah, I should be. I should be in sales or whatnot.
Gerard: [00:26:59] So it was more about like at that time I had I understood what a research process look like, right? I could. I could talk stocks with People, right, still remains still remain to be seen whether or not I could. I could actually deploy capital or things like that, but again, I didn't want that Stress, I didn't, I didn't want that for myself. Yeah. And so I was fortunate to stay in touch with somebody who I worked with. The point seventy two that worked at Citadel. And he moved over There and then another person within at the time Surveyor they were looking for to build out the business development team and found myself with an opportunity to finally be out in front of people, talking to people, interviewing people. But the other aspect of it, too is like, I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I can say that wholeheartedly. But what I was cognizant of is, how do I go build up very, you know? Effectively, mutually exclusive skill sets, so I had worked with accounting, right? I had worked with equity research
At this point. You could tell yourself
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:28:15] Some Vba. Yeah, I taught
Gerard: [00:28:17] Myself a little bit Veeva. Just enough to be dangerous. Yeah. I've since forgotten all of it. It is what it is. And then when I when I saw the opportunity to citadel, it really was, OK, how do I understand A portfolio Construction research process? How do I tie that all together? How do I start to figure out who's full of shit and who's not? Excuse my language.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:28:44] And so this job at Surveyor, it's that that came up, this business analyst, this business development. What did what exactly that mean? Like day to day? So you said you're interviewing, so you're working with HR to interview people like, what are you?
Gerard: [00:28:56] You know, I was working directly with the portfolio teams, right? Understanding. Was it coverage that was missing, right? If it was Coverage, what type of skill set, what type of whatever? And then it was it was cultivating relationships or at least attempting to across the buy side in order to see and inevitably interview talent and draw them away and draw them to surveyor. But it was also as it was as much about learning the technology that existed within Citadel. And again, I think my time at Citadel only reinforced. What was slowly becoming something that I was drawn to, which was how do you how do you take in data, right? How do you interpret it and how do you do that in a scalable, repeatable way so that you become introspective about your research process, uncovering bias and in your construct and how you trade and all these kinds of things. And so I found myself more and more involved with how do I, how do I take the relationships that I now built with the portfolio Teams, right? And how do I now recognizing that there was an. Uh, the portfolio teams at Surveyor,
To some degree, were underrepresented from an education standpoint with the technology that existed within Citadel more Broadly. How do I go learn that technology and bring it to the teams to bring out the efficiencies and things of that nature that, quite frankly, Citadel labored over? But the way that surveyor had been built and brought up, you know, opened up the There was just this disconnect with the tech.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:30:42] How should the listeners think about the connection between Citadel and Surveyor? Because for those that don't know?
Gerard: [00:30:47] Yeah. So Citadel is long. Short equity business began and started with global equities, which is their flagship long, short equity brand. Mm hmm. Surveyor started As a as a new way of deploying Capital for them, so it started off as something called Pioneer Path, which was effectively a fund of Funds at the time, so They would seed managers outside the building. And then I think it was right around two thousand eight, when their ability to control the decisions of these portfolio managers outside the four walls of Citadel became a problem. So surveyor served as a as a way to suck in all of this talent and all the capital that they had deployed Put them underneath the Citadel
Technology stack and trading. And then it just took a little bit of time to figure out Who was the right Portfolio manager that would succeed in this in this Methodology.
And undoubtedly, that was there was a gentleman there by the name of Mark Hansen, who was basically the third Hire at Surveyor And basically hired every single portfolio manager over time. Great mentor to me. Really good. Really good guy.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:32:08] Awesome. So you were there for a good three years. There's a nice run. So yeah, should I think of your role? There almost is like you're like a conduit between the mothership and surveyor or is there like, you know,
Gerard: [00:32:22] I was at the time I was reporting directly to the Ceo of Surveyor. Got it. And there was there was a transition period there where I was doing a lot of business development Stuff at the beginning of the first half of my tenure there. And then the second half was business development.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:32:39] Be more specific, the hiring, the hiring and then internally,
Gerard: [00:32:44] My last year, year and a half there was deploying the technology. So learning the technology and then bringing it to the portfolio Teams and hopefully Enhancing their process to some degree. Got it. So you're there for
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:32:58] A good three years wide jump. Um.
Gerard: [00:33:02] I felt like there was. In hindsight, when you look at Millennium, I didn't know as much about Millennium as I grew to and truly appreciated once I got in there. Nothing short of an incredible business that is these both.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:33:22] You give the listeners who don't know Millennium well, like just a quick summary.
Gerard: [00:33:25] Yes, the millennium was is has been around since nineteen eighty nine. It really is a platform by every Definition, right? So they have all of these trading
And back office and everything. They apply all of that to every portfolio manager that they bring on. They give you capital, you do your you do your business. And it's just a meritocracy. It's very Straightforward. You, you get paid out every year exactly what you need, right? But there's, you know, all of these nuances to that, right? It means that. It means you have to produce, right? And so there's
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:34:10] Think or swim, it's very sink or swim culture.
Gerard: [00:34:12] And it previously before I got there, the idea of the equities
Business was very hands off, right? It was Very it was almost each each portfolio team was their own Effective business. They ran their own hiring, they ran their own portfolio analytics. They did all these.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:34:32] Everyone's doing like different technology stacks all around for every single one. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
Gerard: [00:34:38] And so they
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:34:39] Brought you in to try and get some best practices across the border. Well, my, they bought my bra.
Gerard: [00:34:44] They brought my boss in to do that. And then my boss hired me to help execute it. And so I was very fortunate to get hired by a gentleman by the name of Mike Ferrucci, who to This day Remains One of the more influential guys in my life. Just the way he the professionalism, the way he conducted himself. I remain eternally grateful for the opportunity, but you know, he came in with this completely radical idea of, well, why don't we help the teams we get to see across 60 portfolio teams? We could have some of the best portfolio managers on the street. Well, why don't we spend incrementally more time with each one of those portfolio managers understand best practices and then effectively distribute those best practices more broadly across the entire effectively portfolio of human capital? And then the assumption would be that everybody would benefit. And so one of the key pieces that I Was fortunate to help work on was really this this portfolio dashboard, this portfolio optimizer, all These things, these tools that historically each one of these portfolio teams was doing slightly different. And so when it came time to analyzing their book both from a management level but also their own level, the consistency of that data mattered, right? And so we spent an inordinate Amount of time stabilizing and scaling the calculations and in such a way that regardless of who you were right, you would go into the tool. And this column in this Row meant this for everybody. So you now you had this incredible apples to apples comparison across the entire portfolio and the incremental changes that came as a result of seeing that truly gave you gave Pete Santoro, who's the head of Equities there, a completely new view on the business and how it's truly the pulse of the business, right? We really saw it as that.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:36:42] That's awesome. So, Tim, about the latest opportunity and the jump there and the excitement around Hive Sell, and then we can call it because I know you've got to leave soon. So yeah, So
Gerard: [00:36:53] Hive sell again, falling in line with this idea of data and how people use it. It's one thing for a portfolio manager to use their trading data one way. That's easy, that's centralized, right? They're truly Decentralized problems that the world that businesses in general are facing. You know, like anything, there's. There's patterns that happen in most industries and in in the case of compute. There have been really four big pendulum swings right from a centralization to decentralization back and forth. So the first one was obviously to the mainframe. Right then it was to the personal computer right now. It went back to the cloud. And now what we're what we're seeing is that there's a momentum building back towards decentralization Towards this something called edge Computing and this idea of putting compute power as close to the raw data as possible because there's a proliferation of Sensors and Iot Internet of Things related data. Yeah. And there's not a great way of processing all of that information. And so what we're finding is a lot of the companies we Deal with at the Margin are having to compromise which data sets they choose to analyze in order to come to the conclusions that they think they have to answer. Our argument is acquire at all right? We're data acquisition story. We're the last mile of compute story. We're going to edge computing story. So we're all of these things, right, depending upon who you talk to and the flavor of the problem That you're trying to solve. And so. That's where so I was fortunate to meet my the CEO of the company six years ago while I was at zero point seventy two. He and I have stayed in touch over the years. I became a personal investor in the business in twenty eighteen. And then, after a pretty sizable seed investment From Mellanox, which is now Nvidia, he offered me a job at the
At the end of twenty Nineteen, which at the time sounded like just then Best idea, right?
We had all of these proof of values that were going out with Koch Industries and NBCUniversal of the World was fine. What's this virus? Blah blah. And I'll never forget just incrementally every day because I had a three month notice period at Millennium.So from the time I quit to the time I started,
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:39:37] The world fell apart. Yeah, the world
Gerard: [00:39:39] Literally fell apart. My first day on the job was March 16.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:39:42] Oh my gosh. My birthday was March 14th, my 40th birthday, and there was a party we had like the last hurrah and like half the people cancelled and it was like, Yeah, it was like the last get together before everyone was like the whole world shut down. Yeah, it's a hell of a way to go out, right? Yeah.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:39:58] But just under the wire.
Gerard: [00:40:00] But no, we got when I look back, I would I would make the same decisions all over again, I think. You know, I'm one of the lucky ones I found Myself in, just One of my coaches always used to describe luck As like Operation Preparation meets opportunity, right? Yeah. And so having gone back to business School a Little while, like in twenty fourteen, you know, one of the core questions that my CEO asked me when he was trying to challenge me to come over here was he was like, I don't think you went to business School to be running an equities management team. I. It doesn't sound congruent. I think that there's an entrepreneur in there somewhere, and if I can, if I can. If I can pull that out of you, I think you're going to be, I think you're going to
See the world in a completely different way, and I couldn't help, but that nagged at me for weeks. Um, and he turned out to be right, I think there was a huge learning curve, right? I came here as the CEO and within four months got promoted to the CFO or took on the CFO title because I had to right there was, yeah, I just had to move and shake like I had to go get an SBA loan to Supply the business with capital. I had to build the financial model. I had to re-architect all of our accounting and chart of accounts. I had to figure out our new banking and I there was no time like today to finish that stuff because there was a sense of urgency I'd never felt before, especially since retiring from hockey. And listen, here we are. We just, You know, we raised four and a half Million dollars in the middle of last year in the middle Of the pandemic, which was, I consider, a pretty good success rate. Yeah. And then we just
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:41:58] Congrats on that. By the way, I didn't think we
Gerard: [00:42:00] Talked since then. No, thank you. And then we I was just able to get a lead investor for our $20 million Series A. So we'll be closing that here in the next
Month or month or two. Just exciting.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:42:13] Super exciting. Yeah. Thanks so much for sharing your story. Any last or final words of wisdom kind of looking back at your whole career so far? I know there's still a Long, long way to go, but
Gerard: [00:42:24] Yeah, I think it's It Really is. To me, it's all about being. Being flexible and kind of letting go, letting go of expectations of yourself, letting, letting go of expectations of what this job is supposed to be for you. Whatever, it's all going to serve a Purpose, right? And even if you're at this very moment somewhat Unhappy with where you are career wise, there's blessings, blessings in Disguise all over the place. And they're usually in the Form of new and unique Skill sets, new, new and unique opportunities that if you're willing to put your hand up and take them, you might never know where you might otherwise be right. And so. And then just work like the idea of work ethic is something that Hockey ingrained in me like, as I was saying earlier, this idea of brute force everything in my life is about brute Force, right?
Control what you can control. And to that degree, if you can control more, control more, right? Because then all of the Ambiguity, all the probability, all the statistics go out the window and you control one hundred percent of your outcome or your destiny or your
Goal or close to it or close to it, right? And then the other part of this, too, is this willingness to fail, right? Failure is not as bad as everybody seems. It says it is. It's usually if you if you're willing to look inside of yourself about why it didn't go the way you expect it to, why you failed, there's you get to learn So much about yourself. And the incremental step you take towards whatever you're supposed to be doing Is a lot clearer if you're willing to, if you're willing To go through that introspective Exercise and
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:44:13] Love it. Let's end on some introspection. Yes. Thanks, man. Really appreciate it.
Gerard: [00:44:18] It's so good to see you. And like I said, I'm anybody that I'm now an adviser with you guys. And so if there's any, anything, any way that I
Can help both you and your listeners, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm more than happy to do what I Can for the sake of the sake of the class people that you're trying to reach.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:44:40] Appreciate that. Yeah. Can be found in our mentor area of the site. Definitely. Check them out. And we'll also link. We'll put this podcast up on the site and you can we'll link to your mentor profile as well. Amazing people would find you easier. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. All right. And thanks to you, my listeners at Wall Street Oasis. If you have any suggestions whatsoever, please don't hesitate to send them my way. Patrick at Wall Street Oasis. And till next time.
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