If your boss calls you in the early hours of the morning with a pressing work issue, you might be understandably frustrated.
But if they call you for a raise, you might smile and nod off again.
That’s what Peter Brown, CEO of investment management firm Renaissance Technologies, was counting on when he called his subordinate at 1 a.m.
Talk about Goldman Sachs comminicate podcastBrown — worth $100 million, according to data Forbes— said he and a colleague were working late together and they encountered a problem that neither of them could solve.
“Around 1 o’clock in the morning, I picked up the phone and called him,” Brown recalled. “[My co-workers]said to me ‘Wait a minute, you can’t call this guy in the middle of the night, he doesn’t make enough money.'” So I said, ‘Well, what about this? I would call him, tell him we were going to give him a raise, and ask questions. “So that’s what we did.”
Brown himself admitted that he sent emails at 2 a.m. with little sleep.But the legendary investor trained as a language technologist before joining IBM company founded by jim simmonssaid he gets his work done thanks to an unusual strategy: sleeping in the office.
The hedge fund manager confirmed on last week’s show comminicate He “literally” slept in his office on Long Island for nearly 2,000 nights.
“In terms of my productivity, spending close to 80 hours a week without any interruption other than sleeping and thinking about work is really great,” he said.
After the grueling ceremony, Brown said he spent three “normal” days at home with his wife Margaret Hamburg Former Director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administrationworks in Washington, D.C.
“Of course, I really miss my family,” the father of two said. “But the freedom of being able to focus uninterrupted while surrounded by colleagues is extremely valuable. This job is so demanding that I really don’t know how I would be able to do it otherwise.”
Brown also gets sentimental about why he works so hard away from his family.
“My experience is that when a husband and wife work in two different towns, the husband commutes,” he added. “Psychologically, if I’m going to be away from my family, I have to work. When I’m on Long Island, I sleep in the office.”
In addition to working into the early hours, Brown established another unorthodox approach at the wealth management firm he led.
Joined Renaissance Technologies twenty years ago — promoted to executive vice president in 2003 and named Served as co-CEO in 2010—Brown set an unusual precedent for the company and stuck to it.
he told the podcast host Raj MahajanGoldman Sachs’ global head of systematic client franchises said “almost all” of the firm’s new hires come from non-financial backgrounds.
With so many ideas on Wall Street, many of Renaissance’s competitors may find this odd, but to Brown — who worked on the earliest iterations of AI’s large-scale language models like ChatGPT — it makes perfect sense.
Renaissance Technologies uses quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analysis to inform its investment decisions.
“We find it’s much easier to teach mathematicians about markets than it is to teach math and programming to people who understand markets,” Brown said. “Everything we do is something we figure out ourselves, and I really love that. That way. Unlike some of our competitors, we try to avoid hiring people who have worked at other financial firms.”
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