Embracing Peak Suffering with William England
Embracing peak suffering with William England In this episode of the CrossLead podcast, host David Silverman speaks with William England, Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Walleye Capital Partners, and world-champion rower who raced for Princeton, Oxford, and the US national team.They focus on lessons Will learned in crew teams and how those lessons translate to managing a high-growth investment firm. William talks about Walleye Capital’s operating model, structure, and culture and how they have managed through the last 18 months. He also discusses personal leadership philosophies, his weaknesses, and thoughts on personal development as a senior executive.“Greatest enlightenment comes after peak suffering.” Resources Want to discuss some of these topics directly with Dave? Join the CrossLead LinkedIn Group. Episode Transcript Welcome to the CrossLead podcast. I’m your host, Dave Silverman at CrossLead, we exist to help teams, individuals achieve and sustain optimal performance. In today’s episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Will England, who was a partner and the chief investment officer of Walleye Capital as chief investment officer, Will England oversees internal and external strategy allocations and is responsible for risk management. He earned a Bachelor of Science and Operations Research and Financial Engineering from Princeton and a master’s degree in mathematics and computational finance from Oxford. Throughout his time at Princeton, Oxford Will England was an accomplished rower appearing in multiple world championships for the United States national team and winning the Oxford, Cambridge poses Today we talk about lessons we’ll learn as a world and collegiate champion rower and how he’s applied those lessons to life in business. We talk about why capitals operating model and why decentralization is critical for their success. We talk about the impact of meme stocks encoded on their investment fundamentals and how they’ve adapted in the face of change. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoy the conversation about. All right, well, thanks so much for making time today. I’d love to introduce you to the audience and maybe just have you talk about your background a little bit if you’d be comfortable Sure Like starting from the beginning Yeah, yeah, take take us back, you know, through your life, sort of where you’re from and how you got to the position you’re at today So I like to say I grew up in a town that time forgot a little town called. Marblehead, Massachusetts, north of Boston, and it was the 10th largest town in the first census in 1790, and I don’t think it’s changed very much since then It’s kind of one of those places where if you don’t wear boat shoes, you’re kind of shunned. So, like, not in the normal world at all. But yeah That’s where I started. And I sort of break my life down into four stages and not all of which are necessarily obviously connected, but there is a sort of a logic to it and a flow in hindsight So as I said, I grew up in this little town where. It’s very sheltered upbringing. I wasn’t like flying around on jets, but you know, I had pretty much an idealistic way to grow up, frankly And sort of the first part of my life, which I’d say up until the end of eighth grade, I I wouldn’t describe myself as employed as it was now. Frankly, I I didn’t work very hard I was fairly lazy, a little bit fat. I had a lot of raw talent Unrealistically, realistically Both in regards to academics and athletics, but just really didn’t ever have to work that hard because of, you know,