In 2004, I sold 51% of my software company to a VC. The marriage didn't last long - they didn't have much interest in a 24 year old CEO, and I didn't have much interest watching the company I built get burned to the ground by a bunch of overconfident sociopaths. So, I did the only sensible thing a young man with a Physics degree and some money in his pocket should do - I became a professional poker player.

During those days I would spend a lot of time at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Their poker room was right next to the nightclub. When the club got out at 3 am, the drunk patrons would often sit down to play cards. They were well-dressed, while the poker pros were wearing sweatpants and basketball jerseys. The key was to "count the neckties" as the expression went - the more dapper people at the table you played at, the easier it was to win. But there was a tension - the smaller stakes games would get more clubgoers, while the highest stakes games would get fewer. So you could win smaller amounts of money more consistently, or try to win more but have to compete with better players and greatly increase the chances you would get smoked by someone better than you.

Little did I know how valuable that framework would be for my future career in investment management. Knowing who you have to beat in your markets - and their strengths and weaknesses - is a critical part of being a trader. Also, too many managers shun the "small stakes" games and instead let their AUM bloat to a point where they can only trade the biggest, hardest markets to beat. Some can still make money. Most cannot. We like the "small stakes" games quite a bit at Avos.

But there was a much bigger and more important lesson to be learned from those days in casinos - the casino always wins. They always win because the casino doesn't gamble, or in our analogy, actively trade. They set up a diversified portfolio of assets - roulette tables, slot machines, craps tables - each of which might lose money tonight but will make money in the long run. Casinos are the ultimate laboratory for understanding the prospect of disciplined buy and hold investors - in the long-run you win. The beauty of financial markets is you get to decide how much you want to gamble and how much you just want to be the casino, and it is ok to more or less do 100% of the latter.

At some point I realized that spending my days sitting in a casino getting fat off of casino food and lying to strangers wasn't the most fulfilling life. And, my first child was born, so it seemed like a good time to get a grown-up job. Bridgewater had been wooing me for a while so I succumbed to their persistence - with a big head start thanks to the Bellagio.