Investing, Inflation, Tariffs and the Search Fund Model with Adam Patinkin, of David Capital Partners LLC 4-3-25
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this is scott becker with the becker private equity and business podcast thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant founder and managing partner of an investment firm we're joined today by adam patinkin he's the founder and managing partner of david capital partners it's an alternative investment firm headquartered in chicago also has offices in london Adam, can you take a moment and tell us a little bit about David Capital, yourself, how you decided to get this started, and a lot more?
Yeah, great. Scott, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I've been really looking forward to this conversation. So just a quick background. I'm a Chicago guy, as you know. Went out east to college, and after graduating, I joined a long-short equity hedge fund here in Chicago called Sheffield Asset Management. They managed about a half a billion dollars. And then when I was 25 years old, the principals there offered to back me to go out on my own. And so I created David Capital Partners. We're a long-term oriented alternative investment firm based here in Chicago. Our flagship strategy is a long-short equity strategy where we purchase stocks that we think are undervalued but have a clear catalyst path to being fairly valued.
And we also go short companies that we think are overvalued and that we call supply-side shorts, where there's a lot of supply coming in, overbuilding of an asset class, too much production, competition, something supply driven to cause the share price to go down. And we've been doing it for over a dozen years. And that's our main focus. In addition, we also manage some co-investments. And then we also have an investment for a management company and a private company called Flamingo, which is a SaaS company for the multifamily apartment industry. And I sit on the board of that company as well. So we do a number of different things, but for the most part, our focus is on finding these really terrific undervalued businesses with a clear catalyst event path across developed markets and the public markets and investing in them.
And let me ask you a question. At what point, college, after college, before college, that this was the world you wanted to be in. And what sort of inspired you to go in this direction? Talk a little bit about what the background was to wanting to become a professional investor and thinker about the markets and so forth. And you are a brilliant thinker about the markets. Talk about how that interest was sparked.
Yeah. So when I was little and growing up, I loved sports, as you can imagine. And I would, I kind of learned to do math by going through baseball, you know, box scores. And if a hitter goes two for three, what's his batting average? If he goes three for five, what's his batting average? And I got really into numbers. And I think I always had a facility with numbers and wanted to use that in some way. And so I met with a family friend when I was early on in college and I said, you know, I'm thinking about doing something in the business world. What should I do? And he said, you should go work for a hedge fund. And I said, what's a hedge fund? And he said, let me let me make some introductions for you.
So he made some introductions. And one of them was with Brian Felsen, who's this amazing, wonderful person here in Chicago who ran Sheffield, continues to run Sheffield. And I met with him and he gave me a list of books to read. And a year later, I came back and met with him and he said, oh, did you ever read any of those books on the list? You know, the 30 or 40 books they gave you. And I said, yeah, I read them all. And I think he kind of was surprised by that because no one read all the books on the list. And I think that kind of opened the door. He gave me a shot to be a consultant for a couple of weeks and then he hired me full time to join. And so that's kind of my path to being in the investment world.
It was kind of the facility with numbers, getting a couple introductions and then kind of making the most of it.
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