Jeffrey Tarrant

Jeffrey Tarrant (April 4, 1956 – August 5, 2019) was an American investor and documentary-film producer who spent more than three decades identifying and backing emerging investment talent before it became famous. He earned a BA in economics from the University of California, Davis in 1978 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1985. After Harvard he joined Berkeley Asset Management in California as a vice president, co-managing the Sequoia Fund — described as one of the first funds of hedge funds in the United States — and managed money for wealthy families including film producer Sidney Kimmel and Germany's House of Thurn und Taxis. In 1996 he founded Altvest, "the hedge fund industry's first Internet-based commercial database and analytics system," which InvestorForce acquired in 2000.

In 2001–2002 Tarrant co-founded Protégé Partners with Ted Seides, a Manhattan-based firm specializing in seeding and early-stage investing in hedge funds. He initially served as chief investment officer and CEO, resumed sole CIO duties after Seides departed in 2015, and became chairman in 2017. At its peak the firm managed roughly $1.6 billion. Tarrant built a reputation for spotting managers early — he was an early investor in Renaissance Technologies' Medallion Fund and seeded or backed managers including Jamie Dinan (York Capital), Paul Tudor Jones (Tudor Investment Corp.), Bill Ackman, Marc Lasry, and John Paulson (a $60 million lead investment in 2006).

In 2017 Tarrant founded MOV37, a firm focused on "Autonomous Learning Investment Strategies" (ALIS) — emerging hedge-fund managers built around artificial intelligence, machine learning, unstructured/alternative data, and digital currencies. In parallel he made direct angel-stage investments in fintech and crypto startups. He was also a founding partner (2010) of Candescent Films, executive-producing acclaimed documentaries including *The Queen of Versailles* (2012), *Smash His Camera* (2010), and *Trophy* (2017), and was active in philanthropy through Absolute Return for Kids (ARK) and the human-rights organization WITNESS, where he co-launched an innovation initiative with musician Peter Gabriel.

Tarrant is perhaps best known publicly for the "Million-Dollar Bet": in 2008 Protégé Partners wagered Warren Buffett that a portfolio of hedge funds (a basket of five funds of funds) would beat a low-cost S&P 500 index fund over ten years. Buffett won decisively; the appreciated stake of roughly $2.2 million was donated to Girls Inc. of Omaha.

• Seed and early-stage capital to emerging talent was the core thesis across his career — "picking emerging talent" and incubating cutting-edge strategies before they were widely recognized.
• Autonomous / AI-driven strategies (via MOV37): he believed the next generation of alpha would come from "ALIS" managers — fully autonomous systems using unstructured non-financial data, data science, low-cost compute/storage, and continuously-learning machine-learning models.
• Frontier fintech and crypto (angel stage): he backed digital-currency and blockchain infrastructure early, including Polychain Capital and the MIT Media Lab's Bitcoin developer fund.
• Manager-selection discipline: his edge was identifying founders/managers before they became stars (Renaissance, Paulson, Tudor Jones, Dinan, Ackman, Lasry), rewarding conviction in unproven-but-exceptional operators.
• Check sizes ranged widely — from tens of millions seeding hedge funds (e.g., $60M into Paulson) to angel-scale checks in startups; specific startup check sizes are not publicly documented.