This will not be a comprehensive book review - I am focusing on Tiger Global's corporate culture as discussed in the book. Carbon referrs to Tiger Global obviously and XXX is Chase Coleman.
I thought this book would be a really hard hit on Chase Coleman and Tiger Global. Even though Tiger and Chase are frequently in the media and we regularly report on their letters, the firm is notariously quiet. In fact, Bloomberg had a piece on how hard it is to find pictures of Chase Coleman.
What I got from the book is that Chase coleman is a geniunely good person. Yes he worked his employees to the bone but I think anyone in America who is a billionaire has basically done that. However, many of them also treated their workers horribly, abused them and sometimes worse. Chase was a family man who worked extremely hard and (whether fairly or not) expected the same of his workers. The author even admits Chase was kind to her during her time spent working for ihm and gave a glowing review to her next employer.
Have you ever spoken to anyone who worked in investment banking right out of college? The hours are worse and the work more gruelling but on top of that many times your boss is a psycho. The author was lucky that Chase is the rare billionaire who also
What also is interesting is that as the author hints and I have heard Chase is not an investment genuis - Chase merely hired them. But what the media missed but became obvious from reading the book is that Chase is an excellent businessman - he might not have the brains or personality to read through thousands of pages of debt convents but he was excellent at hiring those who could read them. He was also great at making sure that their work would leads to good returns to their investors. That is impressive and just as hard if not more than being a good investor - Afterall, even a great stock-picker will fail if they cannot run their fund well - being a successful fund manager is not just good stock picking but portfolio sizing, risk management, employee management, dealing with clients, marketing etc. it really requires a vast skillset so if anything the author makes me realize Chase had a great knack for that. Even if Chase came from a wealthy family which gave him a head-start it did not lead to him managing $50 billion plus today.
While this review will not be political I cannot help aboid the elephant in the room - politics. The author had a really rough life - her story of being raped is horrific and her parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution and verbally and emotionally abused her really made me empathetic. Also it was extremely couragous of her to be saw raw and vunerable in a book about finance.
I agree with the author that inequality has gotten too extreme in America. I am 100% agree that workers should be treated well and with kindness. I do find it ironic that the social policies she promotes largely caused this breakdown of American society but I will leave my politics out of here as it does not relate to the book.
Her dripping content for America and Whites was extremely disatestful and fit well in the Post George Floyd and in general post 2012 American culture which vilifies White Men, Christianity and the like. She even starts the first line of her book describing a doctor (who saved her life) as White. Her being among a very succesfful demographic group and making hundreds of thousands of year still placed her among the oppressed classes.
Another irony is her stories about her family remind me very much of mine. My grandfather was forced into the Siberian Gulag and the Red Army, his village of 250 people were all murdered.
My grandmother spent ages 12-15 freezing and malnurished hiding in a barn of my great grandfather's Belarussian pesante worker. In fact, it was my great-grandfather's kindness to his worker and the respect and warmth that was shown to the worker that led the worker to risk his life to save my great-grandfather. Which has made me even more concious of the complaints the author has regarding how some workers were treated and my grandparents never let us waste a crumb of food, just like her parents.
However, this is where our families diverge - by any metric my grandparents had an even worse life than hers as my grandfather and grandmother were considered "lucky" compared to their neighbors, cousins, friends, and immediate family members. My grandparents came to America without a penny, emotionally and physically destroyed by the Communists and Nazis and did not speak a word of English. Instead of developing contempt for Americans (who mostly viewed them as foreigners) they came to appreciate this land where they could work in safety to provide a better future for their family. Yes America, is not perfect but its a lot better than where they came from or where the author's family lived during Mao's reign of terror.
While I agree with the author Chase was too demanding of a boss and despite her (and her colleagues) clearly laying that outr he did not get it. Maybe though
