Rusty Guinn
Co-Founder and CEO
Rusty Guinn is co-Founder and CEO of Second Foundation Partners, LLC, and has been a contributing author to Epsilon Theory since 2017.
Before Ben and Rusty established Second Foundation, Rusty served in a variety of investment roles in several organizations. He managed and operated a $10+ billion investment business, led investment strategy for the second largest wealth management franchise in Houston, and sat on the management committee of the 6th largest public pension fund in the United States.
Most recently, Rusty was Executive Vice President over the retail and institutional asset management businesses at Salient Partners in Houston, Texas. There he oversaw the 5-year restructuring and transition of Salient’s $10 billion money management business from legacy fund-of-funds products to a dedicated real assets franchise.
He previously served as Director of Strategic Partnerships and Opportunistic Investments at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, a $12 billion portfolio spanning public and private investments. Rusty also served as a portfolio manager for TRS’s externally managed global macro hedge fund and long-only equity portfolios. He led diligence, process development and the allocation of billions of dollars across a wide range of indirect and principal investments.
Rusty’s career also includes roles with de Guardiola Advisors, an investment bank serving the asset management industry, and Asset Management Finance, a specialized private equity investor in asset management companies.
He is a graduate of the Wharton School, and lives on a farm in Fairfield, Connecticut with wife Pam and sons Winston and Harry. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Houston Youth Symphony, and with Pam has been a long-time supporter and founding Friend of the Houston Shakespeare Festival. He dabbles in cooking, whisky, progressive rock and beating Ben at trivia.
Articles by Rusty:
This is a short-form summary of our long-form note The Projection Racket (Part 2), located here. While it attempts to present the most accurate picture of the arguments made, we always think that the long-form note provides the most helpful context. In any representative democracy (RD), your vote is never your full expression of political …
The Projection Rackets will say that the solution to two-party dominance and the erosion of political self-determination is, like everything else, is to vote. Express yourself! Don’t you believe in democracy?
They are wrong. We, the people, CAN fix this. And if we want it enough, we will.
In today’s episode, it’s all about BITFD and the almost hilarious extremes to which the Long Now has infected our financial world. Don’t forget to refresh your browser if your video doesn’t start promptly after 2:00 PM ET.
Some of us are uncomfortable with BITFD, and that’s OK. Small-c conservatives should be uncomfortable. Small-l liberals should be uncomfortable.
They should also get on board.
This is a series about why.
Seeing cartoons made from data doesn’t give us license to ignore the underlying feature of the world being measured – it gives us a duty to cut through the abstractions obscuring that feature of the world.
In a world awash with cheesing, being lawful good doesn’t mean being lawful stupid.
But for God’s sake, don’t lose your soul in the process.
Citizens must be capable of holding multiple ideas in their heads at once.
We can believe that the aims and intents of political powers are not equal while also focusing explicitly on the misuse of the tools of narrative to manipulative the populace by BOTH.
No, I don’t think there’s a bubble. No, I don’t think a crash is coming. But when Mark Cuban says this reminds him of 1999 and 2000, he’s right.
And the reason worries me more than either of those things.
It’s the August 11th…I mean, August 13th edition of ET Live!, an interactive livestream in which Ben and Rusty discuss all things narrative in the world today.
There is nothing wrong with wanting the US to bring back certain critical manufacturing industries to its shores.
But don’t buy the narrative that a crazy scheme like the Kodak grift is the only way to make it happen.