I climb mountains.
Big ones sometimes — Denali took 22 days to summit, then only 21 hours to get back to the base.

Success requires more than technical skills.
Putting in the hours to figure out the optimal way to reach your goal can make the difference between success and failure. Teamwork is vital.

I’ve founded successful companies and an unsuccessful one, and I learned the most from the unsuccessful one.
You don’t need to win every time if you can stay in the game and learn from your mistakes.

Investing by checking boxes never takes you anywhere interesting.
If people know what box you want to check, some of them will fake it. It takes work and consideration to understand a company’s true merit. This is doubly true with environmentally and socially responsible companies.

I support science and international education. One of my favorite quotes is from the architect Daniel Burnham;

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.”

We invest in a manner we can be ethically proud of, and our experience gives lie to the defeatist claim that ESG investing depresses returns.

I was born in DaNang Vietnam, adopted when I was one, and grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut. My parents came from American working-class backgrounds, were the first in their families to attend college, and built successful businesses. They valued education, contributing to our community, and finding a career that you are passionate about. They instilled these values in me.

From a young age, I was driven to work towards social improvement and had strong expectations of contributing to a world which had afforded me so many options. My inspiration to make the world a better place comes from a gratitude I’ve always had from being adopted out of a war-torn Third World country into an incredibly loving and hard-working family.

After college, I discovered philanthropy working for a New York based private family Foundation. The idea of “those who have” giving to “those in need” mirrored my life. It was during this time that I was exposed to finance, and I decided to pursue an MBA to learn more.

Finance is, on one hand, about numbers, NPV, and risk-adjusted returns, but it’s also about creating capital to fund projects that wouldn’t happen, companies that wouldn’t exist and dreams that wouldn’t otherwise come true.

I believe exposure to different cultures inspires creativity and broadens our perspective.

I’m a co-founder of the SEA2C foundation. Our mission is to reconnect adoptees from the war in Vietnam with their birth families and to provide emotional healing for veterans.

Private wealth is ideally positioned to advance endeavors whose impact will resonate positively around the world. Capital can be deployed into a wide range of economically accretive ventures that could simultaneously promote improved environmental resilience, better conditions and outcomes for vulnerable populations, greater social equality, and more.

Capital can dictate terms; terms can absolutely emphasize and drive objective good for the planet.

We seek to invest in opportunities, ideas, and people that share our philosophical and values-informed vision. When placing a 5-, 10-, or 20-year bet, we want to be sure that we’re buying into a trajectory that we’ll be proud of all the way through.

Much of my personal travel is organized around a desire to see corners of the world that many other travelers don’t ordinarily target. I’m extremely fortunate to get to talk to and invest alongside some of the world’s most respected and established private investors, certainly, but I’m also grateful to be empowered to search farther afield in pursuit of extraordinarily exciting new teams and fresh ideas.

If you aren’t in the habit of challenging assumptions, what are you really doing?

I spent 20 years at Nike. I was impressed and inspired by their passion-driven workforce and constant desire to innovate and challenge convention. Similarly, Kinneret encourages diverse thinking and challenges the norm in an industry that often likes to create a mold and stick with it.

I took a horseback safari through the Serengeti. We got too close to elephants, who started to charge us, a humble reminder we may not be the biggest nor the fastest in a situation at any given moment of time.

The world needs to hear from more individual voices. More people who are willing to question a norm, but also offer a solution to explore. The world also needs more listeners who won’t turn a deaf ear to ideas we don’t agree with.

No matter your wealth or standing, it’s vital to always question. If things seem to be going well on paper, why settle? Ask how things could be better and better yet, ask why things are being done the way they are.

I pick up an instrument and play daily. Most people in the firm are artists in one way or another and how we choose to give space to that expression aids in our understanding of how to solve the complex problems that we face in our work.

When we started the firm, we wanted to do things that other people were too afraid to try.
I dreamt for a long time about working in an environment that treats profits and improving the world as part of the same mission. More than that, we strive to give voices to those that have not had the opportunity, and create a more equal world.

We have an obligation to do good for the planet and ask, “If we don’t do it, who will?” And if it doesn’t exist, then we build it.

No one on the team has the same skills or the same background. People complement each other.

Learning, evolving, and teamwork are essential. When every day, there are events that can change the course of history, knowing how instruments, strategies and algorithms have acted historically may provide insight to the future.

We created an ecosystem to explore topics and opportunities that are hard to solve. Kinneret allows us to zoom out, take a breath, and perform incredibly invasive quality assurance on everything we do. It also means we can truly focus on our mission of making the world a better place and make money while being a “good” world citizen.

We take great care to make sure that all decisions are put through the lens of, “If this was our last dollar, would this be a good way to spend it?” We need to rethink the way we do everything.

Human. A decade in technology and food systems has taught me to challenge the known, embrace the unknown, and harness limitations.

There is something about the tangible that is so satisfying. Be it process or outcome, art, or expression–making it happen is bliss.

I strive to be an adaptive steward. Restoring wasteland through food systems transformation is something I hope to dedicate the rest of my life. The more I learn, the more I commit to the vision.

I am a Colorado native, born to two entrepreneurs in the service industry. Taking responsibility, calculated risks, and pushing the limits of what is possible was, is, and always will be part of who I am.

Listening is one of the skills I have cultivated the most in my career. The art of listening deeply keeps me humble.

Purpose-driven and intrinsically motivated. My work in finance has taught me that just because someone has money or manages money it does not mean they operate from a mindset of abundance. Kinneret sets a new kind of standard when it comes to values alignment – it’s liberating.

I admire iconoclasts, and am inspired by the desire, creativity, and boldness to create new paradigms. We try to execute that mindset by continually challenging priors and biases to explore whether opportunities exist to do something better.

We strive for simplicity. Simplicity is hard. It requires significant work and mastery to strip something difficult down to its essence. However, the insight gained by that discipline is invaluable, and leads to robust, flexible approaches.

Details matter. In our experience, focusing on the fine print and capturing nuance separate the exceptional from the average.

We analyze issues as an asset owner. Having our own capital at stake drives both our risk management and our opportunistic framework, and enables us to avoid the asymmetries endemic to detached, arm’s length advisers.

We endeavor to make our communities better. We ascribe to the maxim that strong communities, both small and large, redound to the benefit of all.

The purest silence I’ve ever known was standing atop an Alaskan glacier. It was interrupted by the sound of ice chunks in the distance breaking off and crashing into the water.

Though I haven’t had the time to really pursue it, I enjoy painting. I love that there’s not one way to do it right. There are many ways to create something beautiful. I think that applies to finance as well.

I have always worked in big corporations where it was difficult to connect my work to anything bigger than contributing to the bottom line. Here, we’re all personally involved, and our aspirations are much greater than profits.

We have the ability and the privilege to be selective about who we do business with and where we choose to invest.

I take immense pride in my attention to detail, and I’m gratified to see this obsession reflected across Kinneret. Every penny is accounted for, every transaction is structured with care, and every trade is executed thoughtfully. Without a solid foundation, everything will eventually fall.

Over the years I have learned to never be afraid of asking questions. Utilize the help and wisdom of your community to strengthen your approach to any challenge.

Sports are a huge passion, specifically March Madness. Who doesn’t find joy in watching a small school upset a top-ranked school? Excitement is often enjoyed most during unexpected times.

So many times, capital is used to invest in today as opposed to considering the harder question of how capital can be allocated to invest in and create a better world. As we know, change like this does not happen overnight; in order to create resounding change, one must be prepared to invest thought and, most importantly, time.

I learned about the positive impact of diversity and inclusiveness at an early age. I was born in Philadelphia, spent my early childhood in Enugu, Nigeria, grew up in Israel, and lived a year in Quito, Ecuador.

I have a confession. When I was 12 years old, I played Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen for six straight hours. I was completely taken by the complexity and how different musical genres worked together in perfect, never boring, harmony.

I am a quant guy through-and-through. Before joining Kinneret, I co-founded two start-ups. One was specifically dedicated to originating and refining machine learning genetic algorithms for non-discretionary trading, and the other developed analytical and visualization software for algorithm development.

Passionate attention to details, sound data architecture, full transparency, minimal latency, real understanding of needs, and deep knowledge of financial instruments and investing techniques: these themes, commitments, and knowledge inform our internal technology development efforts.

I seek divergence. When things are too homogenous, the results tend to be wrong. It’s why machine learning algorithms need variance. It’s akin to natural selection; when one models a population, there needs to be enough opportunity for variation so that potentially informative mutations can happen out of the unexpected.

At Kinneret, nothing is off the table. We all talk constantly. Unlike larger, more scattered organizations, we are not too many for a potentially good idea to get lost in the noise.

I’ve learned a lot about investing by working with wood. Before you begin to shape it, you must have a clear idea of your desired outcome. It’s imperative that you examine it from all sides…understand how it will behave in the future and what can go wrong. We are analog devices in a digital world and woodworking lets me explore this.

Traditional “wealth management” bedevils me. Too much is taken for granted. We were given the opportunity to look under the hood of how wealth management operates and what we saw left us aghast. At Kinneret, we’re looking at the same puzzle. We’re just trying to solve it better. And if a better way doesn’t exist, we’ll build it.

We are investors. Chasing returns is anathema to our philosophy. Empower people and the returns will follow.

How does this movie end? It may sound like a simple question, unrelated to finance even, but it really does change how you think throughout the entire process. It’s a three-dimensional way of thinking. I believe others think in 2D at best.

We are approaching a historical intersection in finance. We’re entering a new socioeconomic period. How well one anticipates the shift and changes along with it will reverberate for generations.