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Thomas Baade-Mathiesen
Thomas Baade-Mathiesen
The Sustainability Strategist | Greening Corporations, Private Equity & Real Estate Investments for Higher Returnsđź—˝
Published May 17, 2024
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“You get smart people together. You give them a lot of freedom. Create an atmosphere where everyone talks to everyone else. They’re not hiding in a corner with their own little thing. They talk to everybody else. And you provide the best infrastructure, the best computers and so on that people can work with. And make everyone partners.”
I want to give a nod to the legendary Jim Simons, who passed away last week at 86. Often called "the most successful hedge fund manager of all time," Jim was a titan whose influence brought me to Manhattan.
While Jim didn't personally bring me here, the startup he helped start and oversee, Gradian Health Systems, did. Our conversations, especially his sockless feet in loafers even on cold winter days, were unforgettable.
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Gradian Health Systems paved the way for an influential chapter in my life. During my last MBA semester at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , I dove into the global health space. This adventure took my team to Zambia to assess Gradian's market potential. Our findings engaged Gradian's leadership at their HQ behind the Flatiron Building and Madison Square. I was invited to turn our plan into reality, spending the next year establishing Gradian's presence in Zambia. Two years later, our solution won an award to equip over 30 Zambian hospitals, addressing the critical issue of safe anaesthesia access with innovative approaches and machines that operated manually during power cuts and concentrated their own oxygen. Jim and Gradian had given me a crash course in building holistic systems with broad reach and very real consequences.
Jim's impact on me extended beyond Gradian. He generated annual average returns of 66% between 1988 and 2018, outperforming icons like Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio. Standing in the same room as him, you could feel the weight of his success. Had we only invested with him...! $1,000 in Renaissance Technologies LLC 's Medallion Fund 20 years ago would have turned $1M now.
Jim would invite us to fascinating lectures by world-leading experts and even fly us out to an annual nature retreat. Picture diving into the still waters of a distant island, discovering skates, small sharks, and turtles swimming around.
His entrepreneurial journey inspires me even more today as I navigate the roller coaster of setting up a firm.
In 1978, at 40, after an already accomplished career as a Cold War code cracker (until he was dismissed for his opinions against the Vietnam War) and academic at MIT, Harvard, and Stony Brook, he surprised many by leaving academia to start an investment firm in a dreary Long Island strip mall next to a clothes shop and a pizza joint. Early on, he traded like most, reading the news and betting on investments but found it stressful. “Fundamental trading gave me ulcers,” he once said. Persistence and contrarian thinking led him to gradually develop an automated trading system that revolutionized the market.
With the unfathomable amounts of money he generated from beating Wall Street traders, Jim became a philanthropist, supporting science, health, and education through the Simons Foundation and backing Democratic candidates. Together with his wife, Marilyn, he championed initiatives ranging from Math for America, and the The New York Climate Exchange Center on Governors Island to helping people with autism enjoy better lives, and the The Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life.
In a 2019 speech, Jim advised MIT students to “Be guided by beauty. It can be a way a company runs, or the way an experiment comes out, or the way a theorem comes out, but there’s a sense of beauty when something is working well, almost an aesthetic to it.”
May his legacy of being guided by beauty inspire us to create a more graceful world, one clever solution at a time.
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