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 plays guitar and drums on the worship team at his church in Connecticut, and dabbles in cooking, whisky, progressive rock and beating Ben at trivia.
Articles by Rusty:
We’re looking for a Data Engineer to help build and maintain the data pipelines that power our AI-and NLP-driven Narrative analysis platform. You’ll work with everything from structured financial data to unstructured news and social media content.
Second Foundation Partners is looking for a Business Analyst to help us build tools that make sense of the world’s narratives using generative AI.
Second Foundation Partners needs a talented, passionate writer intrigued by the opportunity to bring data to life through engaging daily content about media, markets, and sports.
Humans evolved to acquire symbols as quickly as possible.
Language and storytelling evolved to be acquirable as easily as possible.
That’s why our tales spin us.
Our brains evolved to tell stories before they evolved to speak.
This has fundamental implications for our susceptibility to communication in the networked age.
If we care about the influence of social networks on our minds, why are we talking about bipedalism and the 8 million year cycle of co-evolution it kicked off?
Because it defined how our young were parented, how we taught them, and what they were exposed to. Because it changed how our symbolic brains evolved.
Man’s road to becoming a storyteller began with a single step.
That step kicked off millions of years of co-evolution of the human brain, society, language – and our relationship with story.
There are a lot of ways to define a “story.”
But to understand how story interacts with human consciousness requires us to be more specific.
Shakespeare invented the human by inventing a device which spoke the language of consciousness:
Story.
David Bowie was right.
Social networks aren’t a tool. They are an alien force that transforms human consciousness.