Given the prevalence 'youth worship' articles on here lately it is good to point his age out to people.
Get out there and make an impact regardless of your age or situation.
It is, but not an overly expensive one. I worked for a couple of years in an asset management operation where we managed a variety of funds, all with different risk-return mixes. The smallest fund was a few hundred thousand pounds, the largest around three billion. Total assets under management were about five billion pounds, the most complex of which was a pension fund.
Front office consisted myself (the most junior member of the front office) plus 4 others, including the chief investment manager. Middle office consisted one person who was also the back office manager, and back office, including the department secretary, was four people.
Total department budget was less than a million per year - including office rent, taxes, information services (Bloomberg, Datastream, etc) yet we substantially outperformed (usually within one standard deviation, occasionally outside) performance and risk budgets, as they were defined to us by trustees. And we worked eight hour days, a rarity in the City at any institution.
In hindsight, what we did was quite simple - invest in what we thought was wise, and not worry too much. Much mainstream investment management seems to be embodiment-in-large of the Peter Principal: create work in order to seem busy / important. The upside of the Peter Principal is to collect large bonuses by virtue of seeming important, of which none of us did, as it was simply a job - look after the organisation's funds and the pensioners' pensions. This organisation was somewhat unique in both mandate and people attracted to it.
tl;dr Fund management costs, for a collection of a pretty good performing funds, was 0.02%. This excludes broker fees and management fees of indirectly invested funds.
Byline: I am of course aware that having a single middle office manager is far from ideal, and that the middle office manager managing the back office is bad from an operational control perspective. This was changed after I left.
I think that means he was not acqui-hired. He didn't work for Google after the sale. He just took his money and moved on. Lots of employees of acquired companies don't join their acquirer for one reason or another. I suppose that can work for founders too. I've read of a few founders that were disappointed once they were acqui-hired because they lost control of something they had built... but still have to work on it.
It's hard for me to undertsand if that's what happened here: "After selling map-software provider Waze to Google for $1.1 billion last June, the 49-year-old Israeli decided not to join the ranks of his famous acquirer." that would seem to read like he never went over at all.
