Cantillon Capital Management

William Von Mueffling

William von Mueffling is the founder and manager of Cantillon Capital Management, the investment firm he launched in 2003. A Columbia man twice over—a BA from Columbia College in 1990 and an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1995—he worked for Deutsche Bank in Germany and France before joining Lazard Asset Management, where he rose to managing director in charge of the hedge funds. Still in his early thirties during the dot-com boom, he made his name shorting technology stocks, then left Lazard in 2003 after a compensation dispute with its chief executive and set up his own firm. Cantillon began as a long-short hedge fund but shifted to a long-only, value-oriented strategy in 2005, and it has stayed there. His approach is closer to Warren Buffett's than to Benjamin Graham's: rather than chasing broken bargain companies, von Mueffling searches the globe for high-quality businesses with durable competitive moats and high returns on invested capital, buys them at a discount to their intrinsic value, and holds for the long term—an idea he describes as buying financial productivity at a discount. He has kept close ties to his alma mater, serving on the Columbia Business School Board of Overseers, and Cantillon counts institutional investors among its clients.