article thumbnail

What If Google Had a Hedge Fund?

Harvard Business Review

Acutely aware of the competitive edges timely data offers sophisticated investors, the company's ever-entrepreneurial cofounder once proposed that Google launch a hedge fund. Google may not have a hedge fund, but it's unlikely that high IQ hedge funds aren't using Google's data to better manage their own situational awareness and risk.

Hedge 15
article thumbnail

What to Do When People Don’t Support Your Next Career Move

Harvard Business Review

Hedge against the downside. Understanding the potential risks enables you to do a much better job hedging against them. In that case, taking a financial management class before you leave your day job, or recruiting a top-quality CFO, would simultaneously assuage their fears and make your startup more likely to succeed.

Career 8
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Case Study: A Short-Seller Crashes the Party

Harvard Business Review

When the well-known hedge fund manager and short-seller Jeremiah Hughes first put Terranola in the spotlight, issuing ominous warnings about unsold products, a looming patent expiration, and flawed growth projections, the considered judgment of the executive team was to do nothing. “I As CFO, A.J. Doom and Gloom. Confident words.

article thumbnail

Why Cybersecurity Is So Difficult to Get Right

Harvard Business Review

Recent attacks on OPM and a London hedge fund show two different ways that cybersecurity is so difficult right now: First, even the U.S. government isn’t safe from attack, and second, the hedge fund’s CFO was able to be fooled into giving away information over the phone.

article thumbnail

How Amazon Trained Its Investors to Behave

Harvard Business Review

Well, he's a hedge fund veteran who has always taken a skeptical view of Wall Street, treating it more as a loopy rich uncle than the efficient information processor of standard finance theory. How has Bezos done this? Nobody complains.

article thumbnail

Why GE’s Jeff Immelt Lost His Job: Disruption and Activist Investors

Harvard Business Review

So is John Rice, the head of global operations, along with CFO Jeffrey Bornstein. And in the 21st century, the majority of public company shareholders are institutional investors (banks, insurance companies, pensions, hedge funds, REITs, investment advisers, endowments, and mutual funds), not individuals. (In Comstock is out.

Ries 8
article thumbnail

McDonald’s Has to Do More than Manipulate Its Stock Price

Harvard Business Review

This oft-heard defense of buybacks is clearly hollow: Once a CEO or CFO makes this claim, the company cannot sell the stock at a higher price for the benefit of the corporate treasury without signaling to traders that the stock is now over valued, something that no top executive would want to do. million in 2014 to a high of $12.6

Price 8