The 2025 Sohn New York Conference may be over, but we’re continuing to bring you features and content from the event. As part of Hedge Fund Alpha’s continuing coverage of the conference, we’re providing a feature on Connie Lee of Felis Advantage, a Tiger grandcub still in the making.
Preparing to launch
Previously a partner at Tiger Global, where she was co-head of the firm’s short portfolio, Lee is launching her own long/ short equity fund, Felis Advantage, later this year. Before Tiger Global, she was with private equity firm Berkshire Partners and the long-only fund Stockbridge.
Felis Advantage will launch as soon as its long/ short portfolio is majority ramped. Lee said they entered the year with their long book 70% ramped and their short book around 40% ramped, thinking they were on track to launch soon.
However, the recent market volatility threw a wrench into the works, sending Felis’ shorts plummeting 30% to 85%. As a result, Lee and her team are now refreshing and rebuilding that portfolio.
“Our job has gotten a little bit easier given where the markets traded back up at, but I think for us, the launch time is just governed by whenever the portfolio is ready,” Lee explained.
Background on Connie Lee
Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea and moved to California for her father’s job at LG when she was eight or nine. She thinks her family’s history and her time living in both places really shaped the person she is today.
“I think part of what's really inspired me to build my own firm is that I come from a long line of entrepreneurs,” Lee said. “My dad ended up leaving LG and becoming a small business owner. And I saw firsthand as a child my grandparents fleeing from the Korean War with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and they took our family out of poverty by building their own businesses. So for me, it's been a really big inspiration in terms of what I'm doing today.”
She didn’t always know she wanted to be a hedge fund manager. In fact, she didn’t know it was a career option for a long time, instead thinking of public equities investors as stockbrokers or those who trade aggressively on the floors of the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq.
When Lee finished college, she started as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, knowing vaguely that she wanted to do something business related.
“I didn't know what, but I figured that was a really good way to get exposure to a lot of different industries,” she explained. “And in that process, I ended up working on a handful of due diligences with both private equity firms and with corporates. And that's actually what led me into investing.”
Lee found the work to be incredibly exciting and challenging as it gave her a chance to dive deeper into high-level questions like whether a particular business is a good business or investment.
On building Felis Advantage
Lee always wanted to build something of her own, so for her, it was a question of when rather than if she would move forward with her own fund.
“Tiger Global is a wonderful place, and Chase was a great boss and, obviously, a world-class investor,” she added. “It was a very difficult decision. I think for me personally, it was a handful of things, both personal and professional. I think from the personal side, I'm from Boston, I wanted to move back home for a long time, and it felt like the right time.”
From a professional standpoint, Lee joined Tiger Global at a time when the fund was smaller, so they could research a lot of smaller-cap names, which was her primary focus at the firm.
“That just became harder to do, increasingly, in the context of a larger fund,” she explained. “And so for us this is sort of coming back to our roots and where I feel like I've been most successful.”
At Felis Advantage, Lee and her team are focusing on companies with $1 billion to $20 billion market capitalizations, where the vast majority of the names trade less than $50 million a day. As a result, they’re not really competing with institutional investors like Tiger Global.
Assembling the Felis Advantage team
When assembling her team, she felt lucky that she already knew about half the team before starting Felis Advantage. Her chief of staff, Megan Bates, heads up investor relations efforts and was at Tiger Global for nearly a decade before joining Felis.
Lee and one of her other team members, Tyler Jennings, have been friends since working together at Berkshire and Stockbridge. They have similar backgrounds, as Jennings left Stockbridge to join another Tiger grandcub founded by Neeraj Chandra, who was a partner at Tiger Global for over a decade. They’ve been trading stock ideas for years.
Lee also hired two new people she met through other contacts. Craig Foscaldo is Felis’ chief operating officer, chief financial officer, and chief commercial officer, and she met him through Brett Caughran, a mutual connection in the hedge fund industry. Lee described her other analyst, Vincent Cao, as a “classic profile” of someone she would’ve hired at Tiger, with two years of banking and three years of private equity experience.
She met him through someone she follows on Twitter who used to be a portfolio manager at one of the multi-manager shops, although he also spent time at a big Tiger cub and now runs lots of training programs and courses for aspiring public markets investors. Since Lee had followed his content for a long time, she reached out to him for a list of people who had attended one of his seminars.
Strategy
Felis Advantage is a long/ short equity fund that aims to combine Lee’s experience at Stockbridge with what she learned at Tiger Global. Lee and her team particularly focus on growth, the size of the addressable market, and incremental margins and unit economics. They also look at the industry structure and quality of the business.
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