- Scott Coulter’s Cowbird Capital has closed, the second Lone Pine spinout to shutter this year.
- In the past five years, four other alums have either shuttered or stopped trading hedge fund strategies.
- One exception has been Mala Gaonkar, whose fund has added more than $1 billion in assets since launch.
Lone Pine’s saplings are struggling to take root.
Scott Coulter’s Cowbird Capital closed at the end of summer, several people told Business Insider. It’s the latest spinoff from long-running Tiger Cub Lone Pine Capital to shutter. Coulter, who started Cowbird in 2017 and managed roughly $200 million as of March, according to regulatory filings, did not return several requests for comment.
Lone Pine, the $16 billion firm led by co-chief investment officers Kelly Granat and David Craver, was founded in 1997 by billionaire Steve Mandel. Mandel had previously worked for Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management and was hailed by his late billionaire backer as “probably the greatest analyst of all time.”
But while Robertson’s Tiger is now known as much for its talent development prowess as its investing acumen, Lone Pine’s own alumni network has struggled in recent years. The firm has spawned at least 12 hedge funds, but about half of those have shuttered or are no longer running hedge fund strategies.
The Tiger Cubs, dubbed so because they’re descendants of Roberston’s Tiger Management, have lost luster in recent years. Big-name funds like Tiger Global and Coatue suffered serious drawdowns, casting doubt on the cohort’s growth-stock focus. Lone Pine, which lost 36% in its long-short fund in 2022, has battled redemptions and departures.
But the struggles of Lone Pine’s spinoffs are also a symptom of a larger industrywide trend that sucked money from smaller single-manager funds and redistributed it to more diversified platforms.
Allocators, however, still had an appetite for backing launches from big names with significant experience, and the biggest Lone Pine spin-out has had a quietly solid start.
Mala Gaonkar, who previously co-led Lone Pine with Granat and Craver, began trading at her fund SurgoCap in January 2023. It launched with capital from the massive Texas Teachers Retirement System, among others.
While Gaonkar has appeared more on red carpets and cooking podcasts than on CNBC — her partner is Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, whom she had worked with on various artistic ventures over the years — a person close to the firm told Business Insider that SurgoCap is up more than 25% this year. The firm now manages more than $3 billion, a big jump from the $1.8 billion she started with in 2023.
SurgoCap — the largest-ever launch of a woman-run fund — has a few of the big-name tech stocks in its portfolio, including Nvidia, but its biggest holdings are stocks such as healthcare conglomerate McKesson and energy giant GE Vernova. The firm was also a part of the summer fundraising round by Figma after its deal with Abobe fell through at the end of 2023.
Inside the Lone Pine family tree
Gaonkar’s experience is far from the norm for Lone Pine alums though.
Of the seven Lone Pine spinoffs Business Insider identified in 2019, two — David Stemerman’s Conatus Capital and Scott Phillips’ Latimer Light Capital — had already closed. Since then, another two from that original list of seven — Matt Iorio’s White Elm Capital and Coulter’s aforementioned firm — have shuttered while Eashwar Krishnan’s Tybourne Capital wound down its $2.8 billion hedge fund at the end of 2021 to focus on long-only and private investing.
Of those seven funds, only Li Ran’s London-based Half Sky Capital and Brian Eizenstat’s Dilation Capital are still running hedge fund strategies.
Stemerman is now running a new multi-strategy offering called CenterBook Partners, where he is not trading but mining external managers’ books to create his portfolio.
Other Lone Pine employees have started funds in recent years to mixed results. Paul Eisenstein’s Vetamer Capital — a fintech-focused manager that invested in public and private companies — wound down at the beginning of this year after launching in 2020. Nikhil Trikha, who launched California-based Ampersand Capital Group in 2022, has less than $150 million in assets, according to regulatory filings.
Meanwhile, former Lone Pine managing director Arthur Wit is launching Perryridge Capital, a new fund focused on healthcare and industrials stocks, later this year and declined to comment for this story.
Is Viking Global now the gold standard?
It’s not uncommon for startup hedge funds to struggle to get off the ground and eventually stall out completely. Even though last year was the lowest level of fund liquidations in nearly two decades, according to Hedge Fund Research, there were still more than 400 closures.
The pedigree of the greater Tiger Cub universe and the ambition of those who work at these firms means there’ll still be a solid supply of new launches from funds like Lone Pine going forward. But the hallmark of Robertson’s tenure atop Tiger Management was not just that his proteges would start new funds — it was that these new launches endured.
Firms like Lone Pine, Tiger Global, Coatue, Viking Global, Maverick, Light Street, and others have lasted for decades and minted billionaires along the way.
The firm that’s come closest to filling Tiger Management’s shoes appears to be Andreas Halvorsen’s $48 billion Viking Global, which has become, to many, the gold standard of talent development in the Tiger Cub world. The firm has been the launching pad for funds such as Dan Sundheim’s D1 Capital and Ben Jacobs’ Anomaly. Ning Jin, the firm’s longtime CIO, left at the end of August to start his own manager.
Indeed, one of the biggest Lone Pine spinouts has a Viking connection: Marco Tablada, who was once on Lone Pine’s management committee and worked for Robertson at Tiger Management before that, cofounded Alua Capital with former Viking CIO Tom Purcell in 2020.
According to regulatory filings from earlier this year, the firm now manages close to $2.7 billion.
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