Speaker

Gaurav Kapadia

Gaurav Kapadia

Founder and CEO of XN, a deliberately low-profile New York investment firm, and a serious collector of contemporary American art who sits on the boards of the Mellon Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Trust for Governors Island, and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

Kapadia grew up in Flushing, Queens, the son of immigrant parents who ‘house-hacked’ a two-family home into a four-family one and made him its de facto landlord as a child. He studied finance at Wharton, then chose Boston Consulting Group over Goldman Sachs and Blackstone at a fraction of the pay to learn how corporations and leadership actually work. After a formative partnership at TPG-Axon, he co-founded the hedge fund Soroban Capital Partners, later stepped back from managing outside capital, and rebuilt XN — first his family office, then a firm — around the same philosophy. Beyond investing he has launched Totei, a magazine celebrating craft and craftsmanship, and describes his own craft as investing itself. [?] Tyler Cowen introduces him as ‘one of our generation’s Warren Buffetts’.

Core positions

  • Concentration over diversification. XN holds only 10–15 public positions and even fewer private ones, adding just one to three ideas a year, because genuinely good ideas are rare; it excludes whole sectors (healthcare above all) it judges it cannot be the best at.
  • Asymmetry is the test. A good investment has bounded downside and large, forecastable upside, and is ‘obvious in retrospect’ but hard at the time — a narrative you could write in advance.
  • Founder mode belongs in finance. The best investment firms are entrepreneurial and self-renewing; complacency starts at the top, so the discipline is ‘rigor and kindness’ and hiring for ‘something special’ beyond the résumé at every role.
  • Art is intellectual exercise, not an asset class. Collecting sharpens the taste and judgment investing also demands; he collects living American artists of his own generation and insists on developing his own taste rather than borrowing another’s.
  • Optimism and density for cities. Building more housing is the most valuable civic act almost everywhere; optimism is the scarce, decisive quality he looks for in leaders against pervasive doomerism.

In the wiki