Tiger Global recently marked 25 years from its founding as Tiger Technology in 2001, when the firm had just $42 million in seed capital. The Tiger Global of today oversees $50 billion in assets under management, and the team has learned some valuable lessons along the way as they’ve generated robust returns spanning major technology transitions and market cycles.
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As they celebrate their 25th anniversary, the Tiger Global team has formalized some guiding principles reflecting who they are now and what pushes them forward. One set of these principles focused on their process.
Focusing on process rather than outcome
In their 25th anniversary letter to investors, which was obtained by Hedge Fund Alpha, the Tiger Global team noted the difficulties of the investing business. Sustainable returns require a disciplined, refinable process that evolves over time.
Recalling an analogy from the Tiger Global team’s favorite sports psychologist, Bob Rotella, they said most good golfers have established routines they go through before taking every shot. Sometimes they don’t correctly analyze or even forget a step, resulting in an error. Other times, something unpredictable happens, such as a sudden wind gust, leading to a random outcome.
The Tiger Global team explained that seasoned golfers know that can trust the process and skills they’ve picked up through practice and accept whatever happens after they hit it.
“By emphasizing process and focusing on what we can control, we too adopt this mindset,” the Tiger Global team wrote. “When we evaluate our own investments, we talk about ‘good process, bad outcome’ or ‘bad process, good outcome’ to assess the merits of our underlying investment process as opposed to the outcomes which can be influenced by luck.”
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