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 also serves as a member of the Easton Volunteer Fire Company in Easton, Connecticut. Rusty spends his free time smoking meat, working his apple orchard, enjoying whisky, badly butchering progressive rock drumming and jeopardizing long-term relationships through high-stakes board games.
Articles by Rusty:
The obligation of the news media when major events are unfolding should be to act with more discretion and care, not less.
They failed at this most critical task this week. Utterly.
Awareness of narrative is a necessary tool for the politically engaged citizen.
Up to a point.
If obliviousness to narrative is the easiest way to shut off our brains, narrative derangement syndrome is a close second. The citizen must be vigilant against both.
Physical viruses sometimes jump from one species to another.
Narrative viruses sometimes jump from one culture to another.
All it takes is the right virus and a susceptible host.
Narrative viruses are not immune to events in reality world – especially when we have made those narratives part of our identity.
And when a narrative becomes part of our identity, it changes what we need to be true.
Surprising outcomes in reality world that seem to confirm a narrative often produce explosive growth in its scale.
But also in its scope.
Men of God prophesied as early as 2007 that God would make Donald Trump the President of the United States.
Our narrative virus gave these predictions fertile ground to take root.
Every narrative is built on memes that have evolved and adapted to human culture over centuries.
But some environments change the way that those memes are expressed. The effects can be explosive.
Today we announce the beta launch of FiatNews.com, an Epsilon Theory sub-site devoted to the measurement of opinion content in news.
Our goal? Giving citizens the ability to know when they’re being told how to think.
In the same way that genetics governs how physical viruses reproduce within a host, memetics governs how narrative viruses reproduce within a culture.
And the memes which govern our narrative virus are powerful.
Every virus needs carriers to spread. Even a narrative virus.
We can learn a lot from what they have in common.