Quant hedge fund CIO: 'We copied a fair bit of our culture from Goldman Sachs'
When you ask hedge fund founders about their culture, one name pops up again and again... Goldman Sachs. The most recent founder to cite the investment bank as an inspiration was Cliff Asness, CIO of quant fund AQR Capital Management, who did so on a recent podcast.
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The bank was one of two key inspirations. Asness semi-sarcastically suggested that AQR had "stolen a fair amount of [its] culture" from "pre-IPO Goldman Sachs" and "the University of Chicago's PhD program."
Asness paid homage to the former when creating AQR's partner structure. He says it's "motivating to non-partners as a goal, and motivating to partners as they own a stake in what they do." AQR started with four partners, and Asness says the firm has "somewhere around 30 today." Asness previously spent six years at Goldman Sachs, joining as a PhD and eventually becoming an MD in asset management quant research.
His rationale for praising Goldman differs a bit from Ken Griffin. The Citadel founder likes Goldman people because they "are almost universally good communicators." Asness instead prefers the "savage but fair" culture of the University of Chicago.
Reminiscent of Bridgewater Associates' 'radical transparency', the PhD program wasn't afraid to say "I'm not buying it" to researchers presenting their life's work if it wasn't up to scratch. Asness says this approach doesn't just get results, it "attracts the kind of people who want to be rigorous, who want to be subjected to peer review." If you're looking to join AQR, don't expect it to be "warm and cuddly."
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