Ken Griffin on Investing, Winning, and Why He’s Focused on the Future

Full Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by an automated system and has been lightly edited for clarity. It may contain errors or omissions.

Michael Liu: Welcome to View From The Top: The Podcast. I’m Michael Liu, an MBA student of the Class of 2025.

Michael McDowell: And I’m Michael McDowell, a producer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Michael, could you please introduce today’s conversation?

Michael Liu: Absolutely. I spoke with Ken Griffin, who is the founder and CEO of Citadel, the most profitable hedge fund in history. Ken started trading in his Harvard dorm room and shares in this interview that he installed a satellite dish on the roof of his Harvard dorm in order to get real-time data. A couple years later he then started Citadel, which today has now grown into a huge hedge fund, and he also has co-founded Citadel Securities, which is the world’s largest market maker.

Michael McDowell: I suppose now that he’s Ken Griffin, Harvard is more comfortable with his likely unauthorized remodel.

Michael Liu: I think he got permission at the time, but I think they’d give him even more permission to install as many satellite dishes as he would like now.

Michael McDowell: So content-wise where did you identify a unique lane, how did you narrow it down?

Michael Liu: I’m personally a public markets person myself, and so something that I learned is that every analyst and portfolio manager has a different investment process. So a lot of the interviews I listened to with Ken were focused around his view of the markets, but I really wanted to focus on him and his entrepreneurial journey and also understand more about his personal investment process, which we got to.

Michael McDowell: He said a number of things that surprised me, but I’m wondering if there’s anything that surprised you that you could preview, that you think really might be a delight for our listeners?

Michael Liu: I think what might surprise people is how he admitted how wrong he is every day and how important it is to be wrong. He makes a ton of trades every day through Citadel, and so that humility and understanding that you just need to be right more than 50% of the time.

Michael McDowell: And Ken is looking for something in life. What is that?

Michael Liu: He said to be drawn to people who you can learn from. Finding people that are willing to spend the time to share their thought process, share their investment process, and share what’s gotten them to where they are is something that’s incredibly important. And I’m in admiration that Ken still spends so much time mentoring people, and it’s something that I’ve been looking for. I’ve reached out to people I respect and people I think I can learn from and hopefully, I can be helpful to them as well. I think it’s a two-way relationship.

Michael McDowell: Wonderful. So without further ado, should we play the tape?

Michael Liu: Let’s do it.

Michael Liu: Ken, welcome to Stanford and welcome to View From The Top.

Ken Griffin: So first of all, I was with the CEO of Sequoia and we think that there might be a branding problem here. We think this should be the ‘View From The Climb.’

Michael Liu: I will bring that back to Roelof. He was here in your seat a couple of months ago, so,

Ken Griffin: Yes, yes.

Michael Liu: We’re really lucky to have you and I’ve been —

Ken Griffin: You can decide that at the end of this hour.

Michael Liu: I’ve personally been inspired by your entrepreneurial journey as have many of my classmates, and we’re impressed at your achievements in leading Citadel to becoming the most profitable hedge fund in history. So we have a lot to learn from you.

I’d like to dive right in and bring us back to a key moment in your story. You’re 19 years old in your Harvard undergrad dorm room and you install a satellite dish on the roof in order to get real-time data to start trading convertible bonds. So what was it about the markets that clicked for you at such a young age?

Ken Griffin: Wow, so this brings back memories. I was with my son and we were updating the Xbox and he was about 13 this was a few years ago, and he looks at me, he goes, “You were alive before the internet…” And in the stone age of the eighties, you used satellite dishes to get real-time stock quotes. There was no internet, so there was not ready access to real-time pricing. And I needed real-time pricing to engage in arbitrage strategies between common stocks and related derivatives, convertible bonds, convertible preferred securities, or warrants.

I had a background in software engineering, a passion for mathematics, and a real interest in how to use those skills in the realm of finance. That was a personal interest of mine, and I think one of my friends who we’ll leave name aside because he’s never told me I can use his story but put it succinctly, the entrepreneurs of any moment in time are the people that have the skill set that is relevant to solve the problems of that moment in time.

I think that’s a very succinct understanding of what drives many of your great entrepreneurial success stories is having the skills that are relevant at that moment in time to solve the problem of that moment in time.

I mean, what’s interesting is all the work that we did in pricing derivatives in the late eighties and early nineties as I built the firm is all taught in, it’s like a chapter two today in your textbooks. It’s just like in passing, let’s talk about Black-Scholes, and in passing, let’s talk about derivative securities. It’s part of the foundation today of what’s taught in finance. It’s no longer on the cutting edge or revolutionary.

And so that was the story of the start of my career was a passion for finance and ability to use my skills in computer science, my interest in mathematics, and to solve the pricing of derivatives. Now, I never thought I’d do this for a living. I wanted to do private equity.

Michael Liu: God forbid.

Ken Griffin: I still really haven’t had a chance to do what I set out to do. It’s a bit frustrating sometimes, but it’s been good. It’s been good.

Michael Liu: It’s been very impressive. I’d like to double down a little bit a couple of years later, you founded Citadel in 1990 with a couple of million dollars of seed funding. So what gave you the conviction to strike out on your own at such a young age, at the age of 22, and how did you convince people to fund you?

Ken Griffin: Was I 22 or 21? I wonder about that. So I can’t help myself but share the story. The group that funded me in Chicago, it was a Chicago, New York-based firm. The person in Chicago, I just had a personal fondness for. The guy in New York was like central casting Wall Street. He had the perfect suit, the perfect pink shirt, the perfect tie, the perfect gray hair. The guy in Chicago looked like your high school physics teacher. All right, I need to say nothing more.

And I went to Chicago to work with the partner in Chicago because I had a personal affinity for him and it was very simple. They would back me. They had seen my track record and what I’d done in college, he’d tell you the reason that they backed me was that if you can do this in college, you’re pretty resourceful. We’ll take a bet on this and if the bet doesn’t work, well you can go back to business school.

That was his sales pitch was to me, and I haven’t gone back to business school yet, but I have really enjoyed my journey in finance. So that’s how I set out.

Let me just be to the point. Right now most of you don’t have children, you don’t have a mortgage. You’re at a point in your life to take risk. When you’re in your twenties, what’s your worst-case scenario? It’s not that bad. If you’re in your forties and you go out to start a venture, there’s more downside and I really decided that in my twenties I would take risk in my career. Why not? I have nothing to lose.

Michael Liu: So it sounds like you took a risk and it paid off, but we could have had you at the GSB if things didn’t work out.

Ken Griffin: I mean if I had gotten admitted here is another question that’s not as obvious. It’s not as obvious.

Michael Liu: I think I know the answer to that question. I would love to hear more about some setbacks that you faced as you were scaling Citadel.

Ken Griffin: We have an hour? Okay, so let me walk through… Actually, I’m not going to answer that question. All right? Because I think what’s more interesting is how did you actually build the business. Because everyone’s going to have to navigate setbacks and setbacks are all going to be different. What I’ve learned over the years is we spend way too much time analyzing what goes wrong rather than thinking about what goes right. All right? And what goes right is that’s the flywheel that’s going to drive your business. So you need to spend, if you sell a product, what did I do right in that sales process? What did I nail in getting the customer to say yes? Whereas if you focus all your time on the nos like you’re not focusing on what it takes to win if that makes any sense.

All right, so what did we get right? The first thing that I got right was I hired really… So I’m in my early 20s. I’m not going to get the 20-year veteran from Wall Street, who’s kidding who? But I can attract really bright undergraduates and graduate students to work for me. And to be clear, I paid better than Wall Street, and lots of promises of responsibility. There’s a whole bunch of people that were either interns or working still in the early 1990s that have gone on to really big jobs on Wall Street from running from chief operating officer to J.P. Morgan to running foreign exchange at Credit Suisse. I mean really big jobs out of that initial group. And of course, a number of those people were, and to this day, partners at Citadel. So we hired really bright ambitious people. We gave them a tremendous amount of responsibility, and then we would selectively bring in people with expertise that would help to seed the ground with wisdom and knowledge about what it took to be successful.

And so the combination of really bright raw talent, great athletes and where we could find it, people who we could attract that had experience and wisdom, that created an environment in which we could prosper and succeed. The other thing we had as an advantage was Wall Street was very skeptical of the use of quantitative analytics in the early days. I hired a Russian rocket scientist. He actually built rockets for the Russian government. And one of my friends called me and said, “What the hell are you thinking? You spent a bunch of money to hire a Russian rocket scientist?” My friend worked at Bear Stearns. All right?

We had to do things differently to compete against the incumbents. I can’t go head-to-head against a J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs in most of what we do and win, they have such incredible institutional capabilities. You need to think about how to be to the left or to the right of them, how to get underneath the radar to succeed. You got to do things differently than they do if you’re going to compete. And that’s an important element for a startup. You don’t want to just go on the frontal assault, you’re going to lose, but how do you get under the radar of your competition? How do you solve a problem with a customer that they’re not paying attention to?

You need to think outside of the box in building a startup and I think we really did that quite well. But this is the naiveness of youth. Just take a step back like strategy 101, how are we going to win? So we did it with really bright people. We hired very good communicators, lots of innovation, lots of idea generation, lots of debate within our four walls about what to do and how to do it. An incredibly high rate of learning and to the day that’s the essence of what makes our culture so successful is the rate of learning at Citadel is just extraordinary.

And then the asset management business is actually fairly straightforward. If you deliver alpha, you should be able to sell that product. So it’s actually one of the easier products in the world to sell because it’s a fairly concrete, you have a track record, you’ve got your sales pitch, and you can sell that. And so we’re all clear, let me tell you how much I enjoyed selling when I was 20: that would be a donut, all right?

And my physics teacher, who was my partner in Chicago when he retired, he said, “You can have whatever you want from my office you can have.” I want the $10 plaque that was behind your desk that said, “If we’re all going to eat, someone has to sell.” Because when I was 20 years old, looked at that plaque, it was like a wake-up moment of all the things that this man could have around him he’s got this cheesy $10 plaque that says, “If we’re all going to eat, someone has to sell.”

And it speaks to the importance of what it takes to build a business. You are always selling, you’re selling to candidates, you’re selling to vendors, you’re selling to counterparties, you’re selling to customers, and you just have to get comfortable with the fact that if you’re always selling, you know what you’re going to hear a lot? No. Not going to do that. Not interested, no interest. In 1994, I was in Switzerland. We’d had a rough year in ‘94, we lost about 4% of our capital in ‘94. It was one of our only losing years in the history of the firm. And I’m in Switzerland. I mean, it was a rough day. My lunch, I sat down at lunch, this person sits down, “Oh, you’re not John Griffin?”

Like, “No, I’m Ken Griffin.” He goes, “Oh, I thought you were John Griffin from Fenchurch, another firm.” He goes, “I got to go.” I’m like, “Great. I flew all the way to Switzerland for my lunch date to get up and leave the table.” And then around three or four in the afternoon, I was with another Swiss banker and we’re in his office. His office was almost the square footage of the stage. Beautiful furniture. He goes, “Do you mind if I smoke?” He takes out a big cigar. He’s smoking this cigar and we’re talking for about 45 minutes. “Such a pity that such a bright young man would so pick the wrong career,” like, well, that’s the most graceful no I’ve gotten today.

But you just have to tolerate. You’re going to hear no a lot, but you need to become accustomed to having to market your ideas and market what you represent and what you stand for. Again, whether it’s the people that you want to have work for you or people who are trying to give you capital or customers, you need to get comfortable with the art of selling.

Michael Liu: Thank you for sharing that story. It’s so profound. I think selling is so important in every single [inaudible] —

Ken Griffin: It’s so important and it’s something that we tend to pass over or gloss over, particularly in academia. It’s like, well, here’s how you go for your cash flows, and here’s how I think about management organizational structures. No. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you got to first learn how to sell.

Michael Liu: A hundred percent. I’m sure there are many entrepreneurs in the audience taking notes. That leads me to my next question. So if you were starting Citadel again in today’s environment with the same ambition, I think I know what you would do the same, but what would you do differently?

Ken Griffin: Well, so the interesting part of that question is what would be my theory as to my initial competitive advantage? So job one would be to take a huge step back and go, “Okay, what do we think we can do better or differently than those that we’re going to compete against?” Because if I can’t establish what our competitive advantage is going to be, there’s no point in starting the journey. So that would be the real challenge and I can’t tell you how much we just… If you were in our meetings every year where we go through business strategy, it is strategy. It’s how do you build a competitive advantage? What are your moats? How do you strengthen the moats? What are our competitors doing? Which of those ideas are clever that we should be copying? Which of those can we improve upon? Strategy is so underrated and so necessary for success in a business.

So the first question I would ask is, well, what are we going to do that we can have a competitive advantage in doing? Once we establish that question, then the rest of the problem comes into focus.

And of course, a strategy is going to come down to what product can we solve or create that solves the need of a consumer. All businesses come down to the following, can you create a product that meets the needs of a consumer and can you do it at a price that when you sell it the consumer leaves you with a reasonable margin with which to run your business? So the product that epitomizes this, I see one right there. I see an iPhone in your hands. Everyone’s got an iPhone in this room.

Apple has one of the absolute killer products in the world. It has made them one of the most valuable companies in the world. They sell a product that solves a huge number of the problems that you face in day-to-day life. How do you stay in contact with friends? How do you keep track of your schedule? It’s amazing. How do you take pictures? I don’t need to give you Apple’s sales pitch. You live it every day of your life. What is your killer app? What is your product that looks like the iPhone?

Michael Liu: That brings me to my next question. So the world has changed so much since 1990. There’s new asset classes like crypto, there’s high-frequency trading, and of course there’s AI. So I’m curious about how AI is changing Citadel’s business and how it’s affecting your business strategy.

Ken Griffin: So do you want a little funny note in the history books?

Michael Liu: I would love that.

Ken Griffin: Okay, high-frequency trading. So one of my partners was a string theorist, actually went to school down the street here at another school called Berkeley.

Michael Liu: Okay, I think I’ve heard of it.

Ken Griffin: But he studied string theory at Berkeley. You want to hear an irony? The government ended the funding of the supercollider in Texas around the time of his graduation. And without that government funding, we never completed the supercollider in the United States. There’s CERN in Switzerland, but the United States does not have a competitive offering. And his dreams of proving his theories in string theory literally just came to an end. So he decides to pursue a career in finance. It’s kind of a wild story, isn’t it?

By the way, there’s a whole generation of derivatives traders on Wall Street that all look like my string theorist colleague. You’d sit down at a lunch in Canada at some derivatives conference and oh, I studied string theory and I did string theory and I did the string theory. You’re like, “What is it about string theory that draws you to finance?”

But to make a long story short, he ran our equity-set arb business, which he started from scratch, and he viewed that as a long-term equity-set arb strategy, and he goes, “I want to be engaged in a shorter-horizon trading strategy.” So I’ll call that high-frequency trading. And that’s how that word actually took root in the industry was my colleague, the string theorist, chose to call our short-term trading, high-frequency trading in contrast to the longer frequency or longer holding cycle of what he did traditionally day in and day out.

So bring us to AI. Look, generative AI has just gripped the world both in mind-share impact and to some degree hype. Let’s go a little bit back to the history books. Generative AI is another branch in the holistic machine learning tree, and machine learning has been around since at least the nineties. I mean when I was younger, we took a look at this in the nineties, let’s be right to the point. What an interesting curiosity: Not nearly enough computational power to actually create machine-learning models of any note. And the whole area just sort of disappeared into the dustbins of history until Google. Google harnessing roughly the computational power of the fifth-largest country in the world, got that? One firm, fifth largest country in the world, decided to revisit machine learning for purposes of optimizing the search monetization for Google users.

And it worked. And from that came TensorFlow, which Google gifted to the world and it’s one of the greatest gifts ever given to humanity. It was the reintroduction of machine learning writ large to the broader population. I remember my colleagues were in my office when TensorFlow, the day it was announced, they were so excited about this. They’re like, “This is going to change the world.” And about two weeks later, the most senior partner in the room, I called, I said, “So any thoughts on this whole machine learning thing yet?” He’s like, “Thoughts? It’s in production. We use it to trade equities every day today.”

And I’m like, “It’s been two weeks.” He goes, “It only took 10 days,” but in 10 days… It took 10 days from TensorFlow to be a part of the decision-making in almost one in four trades that happens every day in the U.S. stock market. And I’m giving you this bit of history because generative AI is just another step in the journey of the use of machine learning technologies by modern society. Do we use it in our investment business? A little bit. A little bit. I can’t say it’s been game-changing. It’s saved some time. It’s a productivity enhancement tool. It’s nice.

I don’t think it’s going to revolutionize most of what we do in finance. Why is it? These models are based on what has happened thus far to date in the history of humanity and investing’s about understanding what’s going to unfold tomorrow or next year or in two years. That’s not really the basis by which machine learning models holistically are trained. Machine learning models are really good at wanting to have an underlying dataset that the relationships within that dataset represent what happens holistically today and tomorrow and so on and so forth in the future. So I’ll give you a simple mental model. Self-driving cars historically have worked really well in the south. Clear skies, no snow, got that? Snow wreaks havoc with self-driving cars because it changes the contours, the lines of what the car has to recognize in terms of staying on the road. All right?

So machine learning models work really well with problems that are more static in nature, reading a radiological report. But investing is about understanding how the future is going to unfold. And that’s where these models really struggle. They work great in short-term trading, and short-term I mean as in the next five minutes, but when you think about the next year or two years, they really start to fall apart. That’s just not what they do. So having said that, it’s going to change the world around you. It’s going to change the world around you in a lot of profound ways. Call centers as we know them today, will be extinct in five to ten years. Gone. I mean, I have friends who have businesses that have big call centers. Today you call, the human on the other side talks to you, but every prompt is now coming from a generative AI model and over time it’s getting better and better and better.

And they’re going to push their customer base into Slack and email as the mode of communication. They’re going to try to take the human out of the loop and it’s going to have a profound change. For example, call centers. Could you imagine doing language translation? So a friend of mine has multinational. They sell products in a hundred and some countries, they have roughly 8,000 people in documentation. They think it’ll be a thousand within three years. And those are really good high-paying white-collar jobs and I got to tell you, it’s going to be painful for them to find employment from the skills that they have now, which is highly specialized, highly valued. They’re going to have to pivot midway through their careers or even late in career to other roles. So with machine learning is going to come with a cost to society, a cost that we need to understand how do we help these people land on their feet so we don’t end up with a backlash against AI and machine learning.

Other areas that’ll come into play. I mean marketing to one, a friend of mine in his twenties, he ran a pet insurance business, and they can look at your Facebook page and when you post a photo of a new golden retriever, they can hit you with a direct ad. Congratulations on the new golden retriever that’s in your life, but nothing’s more heartbreaking if that dog gets sick and we have the insurance solution to meet your needs. Got that? Marketing to one, it’s game-changing and one of the fastest-growing pet insurance businesses in the world and they sold it for a lot of money because of this innovative use of generative AI. Marketing to one. So I think the really interesting generative AI stories are going to be when people think about how to use these tools in radically different ways than we currently use software, and those will be many of the game-changing businesses of the next 10 to 20 years. So it’s going to be incredibly exciting. It’s going to come with a cost to society. As a society we need to think about how to manage the cost for those who are adversely affected and those people will be very adversely affected in some cases. And it also highlights the point that there’s often a mindset in America like I finished college or I finished graduate school, I finished my education. You’ve just started your education. You just started.

I hope that the most important thing that you’ve learned at Stanford is to learn how to learn because you will have to develop entirely new toolkits in your journey of life if you want to be relevant and in the middle of this world for the 40 to 50 years you have ahead of you in your career. And I say 40 to 50 years because of machine learning and generative AI, we’re all going to live longer and healthier lives and you’re going to have to really work hard to main current skill sets that are current and relevant in that much longer, much healthier life.

Michael Liu: You’ve mentioned that investing is about understanding what the world will look like in one, two, three years. It’s been a while since you were an analyst yourself, but when you were stock picking, I’d love to dive deeper into understanding what were the critical pillars of your investment process.

Ken Griffin: I got to tell you, when I was most involved in stock selection, it was just a very different world. It was phenomenally less competitive than it is today and one of the reasons that the market today is so competitive is we pushed very hard a model of steep sector expertise. Now, we weren’t the first to do this, but I think we did it in the boldest, most recognized way in the marketplace. So we’ve got several dozen teams of absolute world-class portfolio managers with great analysts and great associates that know their companies cold. I mean just cold. The way that I would’ve done my research back in the nineties, I would just be writing these guys checks as in I would be on the wrong side of every trade with them. They know these businesses so well and others who have seen the impact of just how successful this model has become have really copied this across a number of the large hedge funds.

Unfortunately, we did change the world. We made the world more competitive. That’s good for society as a whole. It means capital’s allocated more efficiently, but it means that everything I know about picking stocks from the nineties is frankly not that relevant today.

And it was actually a fun time. I mean, there was a stock I was looking at, god, these guys are just going to run out of money. Their cash flow’s terrible. They’re going to run out of money soon. I called the company and I’m talking to the CFO, I’m like, “I don’t see how you’re going to make it through the next quarter and the stock’s up a lot on this theory that your company’s going to get bought.” He goes, “Yeah, if we’re going to get bought, it’s going to be bought out of bankruptcy.” Okay, this is definitely short. I got it. That call just doesn’t happen today. Doesn’t happen. I mean, it’s a great story. It’s a 30-year-old story. It doesn’t happen today.

Michael Liu: Yeah. Ken, you’ve witnessed some of the most volatile moments in the public markets from the bursting of the tech —

Ken Griffin: From the last two weeks to —

Michael Liu: To the GFC to COVID and the last month. So I’m curious, what are the core principles that have endured in helping you stay focused and resilient?

Ken Griffin: So first of all, I think the key is that Citadel is a team sport. I am so fortunate to have extraordinarily strong partners and that helps to create resilience because everyone has a down, whether it’s a down day, a down week, a down month, having really good partners who have really good judgment it’s a huge centering force in moments of dislocation. And part of being a good investor is to get over emotional burdens to making the appropriate and rational decision. I mean, I do think I have a few people that work for me who are just completely rational at all times. I’m not one of them. All right? I get emotional and they walk in my office and go like, “Okay Ken, so you’re married to this position and you’re dead wrong and let me tell you why.” And you’re like, “Oh, it’s going to be a long conversation.”

But they’re often right. And you want to have people around you who are really thoughtful in ways that you’re not so that you can get to a reasoned discourse or reasoned debate and you can get to a better position. I think one of the things that I’m very good with my colleagues on is my willingness, okay, if we think we’re right, we’re going for it. If you could walk me through the argument, the merits of our investment, we are willing to go for it. I’m very proud the culture of our firm we’re a risk-taking firm and we’re not shy about it and we attract people who want to be risk-takers. There’s a lot of people in the money management business who ultimately, when it’s all said and done, they actually don’t want to be risk-takers. They enjoy hiding behind I’m a fiduciary and I’m a steward.

I’m here in a prudential role and the people that give us their capital, they want us to earn a return on it. They want us to outthink, to out-hustle, and to outwork the competition, and when we have a winning idea, they want us to bet on that idea. That’s what they want us to do and I think that I’m an important part of our culture, which is a culture that takes pride in winning. We have no shame. We go to work to win. We’re here to win. And I am actually happy to see the pendulum of America swinging back towards that ethos because while it’s swung away from that ethos, the rest of the world was still focused on winning. And it’s good to see it’s a positive change in the United States, this sort of like we’re in it to win it again.

So to be clear, great investors, great investors, okay, have great clarity thought as to where they have a competitive advantage. They do great research to create those differentiated viewpoints, then they’re willing to commit capital against their viewpoints with conviction.

And equally, when they’re wrong, they’re able to let go of their position to acknowledge their error and to move on to the next idea, frankly, with no tears. Like we’ll triage what we got wrong, what we can learn from that, but we’re moving on. And when they get it right, it’s like what happened? What allowed that right moment to happen and how do we find more of those moments? They’re really good at getting past sunk cost fallacies and they view their wins and their losses as just the tuition bill of being professional investors. And by the way, I’ve paid a lot of tuition. All right. The only good news is on the winning side of the balance sheet, I’ve made far more in wins than I’ve endured in losses, but I’ve paid a lot of tuition.

Michael Liu: I love that you answered my next question about how important it is to acknowledge when you’re wrong. So thank you for getting there ahead of me.

Ken Griffin: Wrong. Okay, it’s 24:47 on the clock. Directly or indirectly, I’ve been wrong, I don’t know, probably three million times since we sat down. We’re about 52% in our market-making business on win-loss ratio and we’ll do a few million trades in an hour. No one in this room is more wrong than I am today.

Michael Liu: I know you care a lot about mentorship and you’ve mentored some in the audience today, so I’m curious to know what about mentorship is so important to you. And for those that are looking to be mentored by someone they deeply respect, how should they approach it?

Ken Griffin: Well, let’s broaden the aperture on that. It is really important to build relations with those who you can learn from. So when I was in college, I would trade convertible bonds, one of the up-and-coming proprietary traders at Bear Stearns, one, two one two, two two seven, two, four, nine, eight. The phone number in the Dark Ages, we used to have phone numbers we’d memorize, but I would talk to him three or four times a day and walk through trades and explain to me this or what do you think about that? You want to find people who will teach you in life.

One of the most important decisions you’ll make when you graduate is what learning environment will you place yourself into. If you’re going to go to work at a firm and you’re the smartest person in the room, you have so screwed up your Stanford MBA, what a mistake that is. I will walk into a room at Citadel and on any given topic, I will guarantee you I’m not the smartest guy in the room. Not a chance. I mean, there’s one of my colleagues is probably one of the top 10 in his generation stats. He’s brilliant at math.

We have a tough math problem. He goes, “I’m not sure how we’re going to solve this.” He goes over to another guy who works for us in Europe and comes back with a solution the next day. I can’t imagine how smart that guy is. When the smartest guy that I know goes, “I don’t know how to solve it, but I know who will.” The other guy must be really smart. So you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room. People that you will learn from, you will learn from your colleagues at work, you will learn from your customers, you will learn from your competitors. And one of the great, great resources in America is you can learn from those who are older than you who will take the time to teach you.

The American culture is very generationally kind and generous. I cannot tell you how many people have spent time with me over my career telling me things I needed to know and coaching me and helping me not out of pecuniary interests, but just because as a culture we’re a very kind and generous culture and frankly, everybody in this room needs to carry that culture forward with them. It’s part of the magic of America is that we are willing to across generations share insights, ideas, observations, and lessons learned.

Michael Liu: Ken, the theme for this year’s View From The Top is leaving your mark. So one question we’re asking all of our speakers is how would you like to be remembered?

Ken Griffin: I like to think I haven’t accomplished yet what I will be remembered for. I like to think that this is not a View From The Top, but a journey to a destination yet to be determined and that my best days are ahead of me. And I will tell you that I’m fortunate enough to work with people who as a firm we have helped to democratize finance. The cost of trading has plummeted because of Citadel’s role in markets around the world. We played a really important part in both the regulatory and market aspects of making that happen. I’m incredibly proud of that. We have done well by our limited partners of the years. You mentioned we’re the most profitable hedge fund in the history of the world. Not only is that a huge source of pride, but it’s also been an inspiration to countless other money managers in building their businesses.

And I do think that that has an… When I was in college, it’s funny, Henry Kravis recently had a milestone moment in his life and I sent him a copy of, it was either, I think it was Forbes or Fortune where he was the cover story and a note like, “This was an inspiration for me in my life was what you had done at KKR back in the eighties.” And then there are things that I have been a part of that I’m very proud of. Operation Warp Speed originated with my team at Citadel with me. We probably saved half a million lives here in the United States. Where did that idea come from? We’re a huge commodities trader. Commodities is all about logistics, time to market, and Operation Warp Speed was about minimizing the time from finding a vaccine that would work to shots in people’s arms and it was a huge success.

One of the greatest successes of the Trump administration the first time around was that project. Huge success. And then we played an important role in helping to cross the digital divide in terms of a legislative win. It’s unfortunate that we have yet to implement this as a country, but we’ve set aside the resources to really bridge the digital gap that exists in both inner-city America and in rural America. And I’d like to think that over the next 20 to 30 years of my life, I’m involved in a bunch of other wins, both for Citadel and more importantly for America. I am so blessed to have been born in this country and I would like to believe that I will have done my fair share to have made this the greatest nation in the world.

Michael Liu: I know you have a hard stop at one. So that’s probably all we have time for. I’m going to end with a View From The Top tradition, which is a couple of rapid-fire questions. I’ll ask you a question and you say the first phrase or word that comes to your mind. We’re joined by many renowned finance professors in the audience, including our own Dean DeMarzo, so what is one piece of finance knowledge you hope every business school student learns?

Ken Griffin: Options pricing.

Michael Liu: What is one thing you have to do every day, no matter how busy you are?

Ken Griffin: I mean, I have to check my P&L. It’s unfortunate.

Michael Liu: I love that. I’ve heard you’re an active real estate investor, so what is your favorite city and neighborhood? I feel like I might be able to guess this one.

Ken Griffin: Which one do you think it is?

Michael Liu: I was going to say Miami.

Ken Griffin: It’s Miami.

Michael Liu: Yeah.

Ken Griffin: Yes.

Michael Liu: Okay. Favorite piece of art?

Ken Griffin: Oh god, it’s Blue Poles. It’s owned by the Australians.

Michael Liu: Jackson Pollock.

Ken Griffin: Jackson Pollock. Yes. Yes. A great story is Blue Poles was bought by the Australians in the 1970, ‘71, give or take for a million Australian dollars. The government of Australia almost fell because of the outrage. They spent a million dollars on an American painting. I offer the Australians several hundred million dollars to get that painting back to America with no success.

Michael Liu: Yeah, it’s in my home country and then finally one —

Ken Griffin: Wait, you have that damn painting?

Michael Liu: Yeah, let’s talk backstage. And then finally, one trait that separates good investors from legendary.

Ken Griffin: I think the legendary investors, going back to what I said earlier, really know when they have an advantage and they press it. They’re confident in their conviction, like I said earlier and when they’re wrong, they move on. They just let it go and move on and why is that so important? All right. My best stock pickers, the best guys that work for me, guys is obviously men or women, to be clear, they’re right about 54% of the time in alpha terms. So I mean, could you imagine, okay, if you got a 54% of your test here at Stanford, where would you be after a quarter? You’d be gone, right? If you were a cardiac surgeon and 54% of your patients lived through surgery, you’d have a pretty short career.

So the remarkable thing is the amount of mental fortitude to do a job and to do it well and to do it with just going for it every day when your best, best people write 54% of the time that’s actually pretty remarkable In a world that has become accustomed to every test is an A. Finance is very different. Markets dictate the terms of engagement. The market has a grading system and the market is not on a curve.

Michael Liu: Ken, it’s been such a pleasure to have you with us today.

Ken Griffin: Great to be here.

Michael Liu: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Michael McDowell: Are you comfortable with the art of selling?

Michael Liu: I’m getting better at it. I think it’s an important skill and I actually did some time when I was in university in the sales team of a tech startup, and I actually loved it. It was very confrontational, but it helped me learn a lot and I’ve become more confident, so it’s something I’m learning,

Michael McDowell: So the entrepreneurs of any moment in time are the people that have the skill set that is relevant to solve the problems of that moment. Any thoughts?

Michael Liu: I thought that was an incredibly profound statement and I think it acknowledges that things are changing at such a rapid pace. When he was an investor, when he first started out at Harvard, the markets were very different and the problems the world was facing were very different. And today the world is arguably more complex, perhaps more volatile, and the people that are best equipped to solve the problems of today will come out on top.

Michael McDowell: From hiring a Russian rocket scientist to deep sector expertise, he said he didn’t want to be the smartest person in the room. What did that tell you about how he views the importance of people?

Michael Liu: I resonated with that so much. I thought that was an incredibly humble comment, and I think it also showed how aware he is of the amount of intellectual horsepower there is out there. I think everyone can be an expert in a certain topic, but it’s hard for someone to be an expert in everything. And so identifying where people have more expertise and have spent more time and have done better research is critical for putting together the best team with diverse perspectives to solve the hardest problems.

Michael McDowell: Yeah, yeah, very interesting. I want to ask you about a strategic reframe he offered, which was we spend way too much time analyzing what goes wrong than what goes right. What did you learn from Ken about reflecting on wins as opposed to fixating on losses?

Michael Liu: I think it’s incredibly important to acknowledge when you’re wrong, to learn from when you’re wrong, and then to apply that to your future learnings. I think everything in moderation. So not getting too excited when you’re right, because it could be luck, and then not getting too bogged down when you’re wrong, but acknowledging what you can learn from it and becoming better, iterating your process to become a better investor, a better problem solver, and a better entrepreneur.

Michael McDowell: No matter where you are on the climb, don’t forget to check your P&L.

Michael Liu: Absolutely.

Michael McDowell: Michael, thank you so much.

Michael Liu: Thank you. You’ve been listening to View From The Top: The Podcast, a production of Stanford Graduate School of Business.

This interview was conducted by me, Michael Liu, of the MBA Class of 2025. Michael McDowell is our managing producer and Michael Reilly edited and mixed this episode. Special thanks to Liz Walker.

View From The Top is the Dean’s premier speaker series. It was started in 1978 and is supported in part by the F. Kirk Brennan Speaker Series Fund. You can find more episodes of View From The Top on our website, gsb.stanford.edu/business-podcasts. Don’t forget to rate and subscribe and follow us on social media at Stanford GSB. See you next time on View From The Top.