Oakcliff Capital

Bryan Lawrence

Bryan Lawrence, a Yale and Cambridge-educated investor who spent years as a partner and managing director at Lazard Frères, left that firm in 2004 to found Oakcliff Capital, a small investment partnership built around concentrated, long-term value investing. He is also a member of Yorktown Partners, the private equity firm focused on energy, where he helped develop its renewable-power practice, and he co-founded Public Prep, the New York City network that ran the first all-girls charter school in the state. Lawrence has described his approach as deliberately narrow: the firm adds only a couple of new investments a year, holds them for the long term, and prefers businesses that act as natural monopolies, rational duopolies, or lowest-cost operators in fragmented industries, plus companies with genuine pricing power. He favors intensive primary research over management presentations. In Oakcliff's early years he leaned on event-driven "special situations," and one trade from that era has become part of his story: he owned shares of Porsche while shorting Volkswagen, isolating what he saw as a mispricing between the two. Over time he has pushed the portfolio toward higher-quality, durable businesses, staying as concentrated as ever.