If you ask Greenwich resident David Kabiller — a founding principal of AQR Capital Management — about resiliency, he’s likely to respond with an episode from his early professional life.
In 1987, after graduating from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, he landed a job with Goldman Sachs and was ushered into a training program at the fabled firm.
Soon after that, on Oct. 19, the stock market suffered one of its worst drops in history, plunging some 22% in one day.
“I remember the head of our training program came in and he said, ‘You’re all dismissed today,’ ” Kabiller recalled in a presentation last year.
At the age of 23, with the world appearing to be “on the brink of financial collapse,” Kabiller realized that the Goldman Sachs section he had been assigned to, the fixed income division, “wasn’t a good fit.”
Despite the turmoil, “we are all empowered to change our lives,” he said, and the then-23-year-old newbie had the guts to tell a supervisor that he wanted to move to a different division, one that focused on equities — even though doing so meant he had to resign from Goldman Sachs and re-interview for the position.
Kabiller, who’s worth about $1 billion now, according to Forbes, got the job and said his takeaway, which he never forgot, was that taking a measured risk — after all, he was still living with his parents at the time — “can create a lot of happiness.”
After more than 20 years at AQR, he’s still taking chances and creating happiness, having initiated AQR’s international growth and its introduction of mutual funds and reinsurance, as well as creating the “AQR University” symposia series and the AQR Insight Award for outstanding innovation in applied academic research.
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