On Risk
Josh Brown, a financial blogger and wealth manager, recently wrote a piece about a colleague’s grit and determination titled How to Succeed. I’ve excerpted his ‘formula’ below and bolded a section that I’ve been pondering through the lens of Cortlandt.
Make yourself useful to smart, successful people. That’s how you should spend the first ten years of your career.
Surround yourself with smart, successful people and then bet on them. That’s how you should spend the next ten years. And then you’re done, if you want to be done….
It’s how Wall Street became Wall Street and Silicon Valley became the Valley. Nobody is born on Wall Street. None of the digital fortunes emanating from the campus of Stanford outward were magically discovered by the locals. Smart, successful people followed each other to these places and pulled trillions of dollars in value out of the molecules in the air around them. No oil strikes, no diamond mines. Most of the Financial District is built on top of Peter Stuyvesant’s old 1600’s Dutch farming colony (google “Bowery”). The World Financial Center was built on landfill. There’s nothing there.
It was about who you met and how you could collaborate or compete. The people you were surrounded by, what you wanted from them and what they wanted from you...Everyone had to come there and bring their talents and abilities, their connections and, yes, their…guts. Risk-taking was a key element.
In Cortlandt we’ve satisfied the first condition: smart and successful people are coming together to collaborate and more are following. But what about the second condition? Who is willing to risk what? Some Cortlandt members are focused on capital accumulation, while others prioritize the preservation of capital. This is usually with respect to their financial capital but it can also be true of how they approach their social capital and human capital.
I’m often asked what makes a ‘good’ Cortlandt member. After reading the above I’m reminded that a collective willingness to take a little risk is required to make the most out of Cortlandt. It’s how we’re going to pull ‘value out of the molecules in the air around’ us. You might have to risk an hour of your time on a topic that seems uninteresting, only to discover you have a relevant insight or an introduction that will unlock value. You might have to risk partnering with someone you don’t know that well to launch an initiative you couldn’t manage on your own. You might have to risk some time and sweat-equity on several projects that sputter out before you land on a winner.
You’ve all taken a risk in being founding members of Cortlandt: it’s a gamble on a new way of working together in pursuit of profit, impact and knowledge. Hopefully we’re all prudently ‘risk on’.
