GoKawiilListen to this post
Key Takeaways Alec Litowitz helped build Citadel’s equity businesses as assets grew from roughly $100 million to $10 billion.
His central lesson from decades spent building investment firms is about how people respond when their assumptions stop matching reality.
Litowitz asserts that the defining skill for founders and workers is adaptability quotient, or AQ: recognizing when your assumptions no longer match reality and changing course quickly.
Alec Litowitz arrived at investment firm Citadel in 1994 with minimal prior experience. He lacked a traditional investing background, and his Bachelor’s degree from MIT was in Mathematics and Anthropology, not Finance.
However, his business partner Ken Griffin saw something else, something that made him confident that Litowitz would thrive as one of Citadel’s four founding partners: how Litowitz thought.
“It was how my brain worked that he was interested in,” Litowitz tells Entrepreneur in a new interview.
Over the next decade, Griffin’s bet paid off. Litowitz helped build Citadel’s equity businesses as the firm expanded from roughly $100 million in assets under management to $10 billion in 2003. Citadel grew from about seven employees to 750. Then, Litowitz spent 18 years leading another firm called Magnetar Capital, which he says grew to manage about $20 billion by the time he left in 2022.
His central lesson from decades spent building investment firms is about how people respond when their assumptions stop matching reality.
He calls the mindset adaptability quotient, or AQ: the capacity to recognize that your mental model is outdated, reshape it and act before circumstances force your hand.
... continue reading