Ramtin Naimi

I rolled my money into that fund, which is the largest check in the fund.

And then I raised digital $3 million from 45 individuals.

So lots of tiny checks that didn't really mean a whole lot to anybody and launched a fund in January of 09.

So timing was definitely on my side.

focused on concentrated positions and triple levered ETFs, momentum trading on high vol tech stocks, and then derivatives on those two strategies to get even more leverage on the first two strategies.

I just had no idea what I was doing, but thankfully the market was forgiving of a strategy like that, but extreme volatility along the way.

I had certain months where I was down 37%, one month that I was on 51%.

August of 2011, I remember as distinctly being one of the worst months of my life because it was the European debt crisis.

When Greece was on the crux of defaulting, I think the market had 13 consecutive down days and I was short vol.

I actually experienced why you could actually go into debt running a venture capital firm.

But thankfully, I recovered from that.

It took a few months, but that was a very, very painful month.

I was in the Bay Area, and I just kept hearing more and more about tech.

And I didn't particularly enjoy running a hedge fund.

I did well financially relative to my age doing it, but I didn't like sitting in front of a computer screen for 15 hours a day.

It's a very lonely job, and it's a very stressful job.

People in venture complain that the feedback loops are too long.

I agree the feedback loops and hedge funds are too tight.

I think you can convince yourself you're a good investor or convince yourself you're a bad investor too quickly in hedge funds.

If you look at hedge funds and default, they tend to have a shorter duration of life than a legacy private equity firm or legacy venture capital firm because it's just very hard to outperform in public markets for extended periods of time.