- Albourne Partners created Albourne Village, a quirky online community for the hedge fund industry, nearly 20 years ago when the internet was still in its infancy.
- The firm threw a launch party for the site on the banks of the Thames River in London, and had the band The Wurzels there to perform for guests.
- Names listed on the site originally include industry big wigs like Millennium founder Izzy Englander and former pension fund CIO Daisuke Hamaguchi.
- Now, Albourne is considering an upgrade to the site as LinkedIn and others have started offering similar services to the industry.
- “I thought it was quite imaginative,” said Anthony Hodges, the founder of hedge fund consultancy Hodges Associates. “Everybody who was anybody in the UK hedge fund space was there.”
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Two years before a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs got together to make LinkedIn, and roughly 10 months after EA released the first version of life-simulation video game The Sims, London-based hedge fund consultancy Albourne Partners created a website that’s a relic of a simpler, more innocent internet era.
Albourne Village, which the site describes as a “small ancient village in Sussex” that provided the inspiration for the name of the firm, was launched on Thanksgiving of 2000.
It’s a place where a partner from the firm, Sam Lewis, is dressed in mayoral robes, and hedge fund industry folks could browse job listings, find new research, and network. The layout is of an old-timey village, with a town pub and school, among other buildings. Residents are given “apples” (I currently have 500) to buy items at the gift shop, which does not currently have anything for sale.
“I thought it was quite imaginative,” said Anthony Hodges, the founder of hedge fund consultancy Hodges Associates. The firm threw a launch party for the site on the banks of the Thames River in London, Hodges said, and had the band The Wurzels there to perform for guests.
“Everybody who was anybody in the UK hedge fund space was there.”
Nearly 20 years later, the site is still up with its design more or less unchanged. It looks almost like a computer game from the mid-2000s, except it’s for hedge funds, lawyers, and accountants instead of teens interested in fantasy.
“It’s easy to look back 20 years later and say ‘that’s a bit of an unusual thing,’ but it wasn’t at the time,” said Vanessa Gibson, a former hedge fund investor who is listed on the firm’s “Founding Fathers” page.
But an update is coming, maybe because the firm is realizing it’s hard to compete in 2020 with a 20-year-old website. While Albourne declined to expand on what upgrades are going to be made, the site is going to be updated over the next 6 to 12 months, according to a firm spokeswoman.
Billionaire ‘Founding Fathers’
The Founding Fathers page lists billionaires like Millennium founder Izzy Englander and Morningside Founder Gerald Chan, fund managers like MKP Capital co-founder Maurice Perkins and Ikos Asset Management co-founder Elena Ambrosiadou, and bankers like former Lehman Brothers alternatives head Randall Yanker and JPMorgan’s current head of prime and alternatives sales Brian Besesi.
Other founding fathers listed on the site include Daisuke Hamaguchi, who was chief investment officer for Japan’s Pension Fund Association from 2009 to 2019, and Iain Jenkins, the founder of industry publication HedgeFund Intelligence.
“Twenty years ago, the world was obviously very different,” Gibson said. The sites and technology that people today rely on to keep track of professional and personal happenings in their colleagues and friends’ lives had not yet been created.
“It created a community,” Gibson said. “It was pretty pioneering at the time.”
The mayor’s office lays out what the vision is for the site that reportedly once had more 25,000 members and was growing by 40 people a day in 2005.
“In order to pay homage to its spiritual roots, Albourne Partners has etched this lovely village into virtuality as a place for the residence, knowledge-commerce and better living of the alternative investment community,” the site reads.
“The site has been designed as an ideal environment for evolving hedge-fund, private equity, real assets and real estate news, intellectual property, content and debates on current issues, as well as a valuable source of commercial contacts. Albourne Village is a place for the alternative investment community to be seen and heard, to act and interact, teach and learn, amuse and recreate, yearn and earn. Don’t just join the Village, be the Village.”
Increased competition has pulled users away
It has become less useful and used for the industry, though, as different sites and apps have jumped into their virtual real estate.
“I don’t know who still keeps in touch on there,” Gibson said.
LinkedIn now lets firms post job postings to a wider audience, while the ubiquity of email and messaging platforms like Bloomberg’s chat function and Symphony means industry gossip gets around even quicker.
Still, there remains dedicated users from the highest end of the industry.
“It really has a really high class and base of users,” said Jacob Wolinsky, editor of industry publication ValueWalk, which posts its articles on the site.
“I’m very impressed with the quality of the readership.”
According to those who have used it, the village filled a need the industry didn’t know it had.
“At the time, the industry was starting to grow up, particularly in the UK,” Hodges said. “It needed something like that.”
And it’s unlikely someone would offer up a similar product today, for free, said Gibson. If it was created in 2020, “someone would try to monetize it.”
“They did a lot of social connecting” before Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites were doing it, she said.
“It was very advanced, if you think back to it.”
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