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:
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 Office Hours, 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.
There ARE real threats to both the rule of law and our cherished capitalist system today.
But you won’t find either on the streets of Portland or Seattle.
Like all abstractions, extremes can be misleading. They can also be revealing. Using extreme times to learn what our leaders and institutions are sensitive about is a critical, unmissable lesson.
The war over reopening schools is a proxy war.
The real war is between political parties, but they’ve set up the fight as teachers on one side vs. parents on the other.
This is not our war. This is THEIR war.
How to stop it? We refuse to fight.
Sometimes good news comes from unexpected places.
And sometimes it’s best just to go with it.