Here is something that made us pause and think this week:
I just finished Red Notice, an incredible story about hedge fund manager, Bill Browder, who took on the bureaucracy and oligarchs of Russia during its transition from communism. If you love a great thriller, are intrigued by doing business across different cultures, or, due to a very sad storyline in the book, care about global human rights activism, then you might want to pick this book up. I did and couldn’t put it down.
The first part of the book is about how Bill Browder, a Stanford GSB graduate, spotted a unique opportunity to invest in places no one else wanted to touch. He realized that Polish and Russian companies were trading at up to 97% discounts to comparable western companies. For sure, some of the fear and skepticism of investing in these regions was warranted because theft and corruption were rampant, but he was able to identify investment opportunities that made him and his investors incredibly wealthy. He had a unique perspective, took a big risk, did the hard work to understand the culture, markets, and companies, and it paid off handsomely.
At Spark, this is what we are set up to do: take a contrarian bet on a software company that isn’t getting a lot of love from traditional private equity or venture capital investors then roll up our sleeves for the day-to-day grind that it will take to make sure that bet pays off.
This is exactly what I thought I was going to take away from the book: an entertaining story and an investment-thesis-affirming lesson. However, in a surprising turn of events, Bill Browder became a human rights activist. I won’t give the whole story away, but, in the end, instead of spending all of his time looking for the next undervalued asset in far off lands, he pushed to have new laws introduced and passed that protected innocent people and punished guilty ones. For him, his business and wealth took a back seat to morality and justice.
I didn’t expect a moral takeaway when I picked up a book about a hedge fund manager with a fancy MBA. However, I’m grateful for it. And I believe in it. At Spark, we know that there’s more to business than stats and figures and that there is more to life than just business.
Have a great week!
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