Maverick Capital

Lee Ainslie

Lee S. Ainslie III is the founder and managing partner of Maverick Capital, a long/short equity firm he started in Dallas in 1993 at age 28. He studied systems engineering at the University of Virginia and took an MBA at North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler school before a stint as a consultant at KPMG. His real education in investing came at Tiger Management, where he worked as a managing director under Julian Robertson—a period that earned him a place among the so-called "Tiger Cubs," the analysts who trained in Robertson's demanding shop and went on to run funds of their own. Maverick came into being because a Texan saw something in Ainslie. Sam Wyly, a Dallas entrepreneur, invited the young manager to leave New York and build a fund in Texas, backing him with seed capital of roughly $38 million from the Wyly family. From the start Ainslie ran Maverick the way Robertson had taught him: deep, bottom-up research on individual companies, married to a view of the broader economy, with an emphasis on the quality and integrity of management. Maverick is a traditional research shop rather than an activist one—Ainslie prefers to build relationships with companies and hold for the long term than to push them publicly to change. What people repeat about Ainslie is the apprenticeship itself. Robertson ran Tiger's trading floor as what his analysts called an "intellectual gladiator arena," taking apart every long and short idea, demanding his analysts prove their thesis and answer his favorite word: "Why?" Ainslie has said those years taught him more than any other period of his career, and he has carried that insistence on rigorous, well-defended analysis into Maverick, which grew into one of the country's larger long/short shops.