Brave Warrior Advisors

Glenn Greenberg

Glenn Greenberg runs Brave Warrior Advisors, a concentrated value firm he built in New York after a long career running money with a longtime partner. He did not start in finance: he earned a BA in English from Yale, taught school, and served as a middle school principal before going back for an MBA at Columbia. From there he moved into investing at Morgan Guaranty Trust and the paper company Central National-Gottesman before co-founding Chieftain Capital Management with John Shapiro in 1984. Greenberg and Shapiro ran Chieftain together for a quarter-century, until the two split in 2009 over personal differences. Shapiro and other partners left and kept the Chieftain name; Greenberg stayed with the original firm and renamed it Brave Warrior Advisors. His approach has always been extreme concentration—usually five to ten positions, each a meaningful slice of the portfolio—and a patient, hands-off style. He looks for good businesses trading below what he thinks they are worth, favoring companies that are inexpensive rather than dirt cheap, and he tends to hold for the long term rather than push management to change course. His best-known call came in the late 1990s, when the market assumed satellite TV would wipe out cable operators. Greenberg disagreed, arguing cable's two-way wire would prove more valuable in the internet age, and at one point Chieftain put close to two-fifths of its portfolio into cable stocks bought at beaten-down prices. The bet proved out as cable's infrastructure won the day, and it became the trade most associated with his name.