After getting a law degree from Indiana University (on a full scholarship), Gerstner worked as an attorney for a few years until he decided to go into government. Then, after a stint as Indiana’s Deputy Secretary of State in the late 90s, becoming a founding principal of venture capital firm General Catalyst, cofounding and exiting two internet startups (making him an actual founder, not a Bay Area LARPer subsisting on tier-3 VC checks), and running his own book as a hedge fund portfolio manager investing in airlines — he started his own fund, Altimeter Capital. He spun it up with $3 million dollars of cash right after the financial crisis.
When Gerstner’s sons were born, he opened custodial investment accounts for the two of them. As he tells it, his son, Lincoln, asked him at dinner one night, “Why don’t other kids get to have the same thing?”
An idea was born.
Gerstner tells me, “the motivation was very simple. We needed an at-scale industrial change to the social contract if we were going to deal with two major problems: the growing wealth gap and the increasing drift away from capitalism — which less than half of Americans under the age of 40 have a positive view on.”…