Jesse Lindenberger-Schutz — Compliance Associate
When I was about ten years old my dad designed a superhero board game that combined chess and superpowers. At the time I didn’t think too much about it - in fact, I was annoyed (to put it mildly) that he had cannibalized many of my precious comic books to do research for the game. He shopped it around to a few distributors but there weren’t any takers, so he put it up on a shelf and we mostly forgot about it.
Over a decade later, when I was home from William & Mary for the summer, we took the old game out for a spin. Playing it again I had a new appreciation for the difficulties that go into game design. For the rest of the summer, my father and I tinkered with perfecting it, devising new rules, new characters with different superpowers and paying attention to optimizing gameplay.
That experience encapsulates many of the driving factors that have motivated me in all spheres of my life, including my career in compliance (believe it or not!). Solving problems and understanding how things really work - whether it’s a board game, a painting, or the stock market - is endlessly fascinating to me. I love to look at a system and learn how its moving parts work. That’s why I was equally happy studying painting, computer science and game theory: I like to learn the ‘rules’ of a practice, absorb its vocabulary and then get to put what I’ve learned to the test, taking the reins to hack a computer game or paint a challenging landscape.
When I found myself in New York City with an MFA in Painting but no way to pay my bills, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I get the same problem-solving kick out of understanding compliance regulations that I get out of building a board game or making an artwork. In 2005 I started at Baron Capital, where I worked for seven years, initially in the Legal department and then shifting to Compliance. I did Code of Ethics monitoring and training, as well as 13G and 13F filings and trade cost analysis. When the company implemented an automated compliance monitoring system I became the team’s expert on rule programming and resolving trade alerts.
I’ve worked at Daruma since 2013. It’s exciting to work with a team of problem-solvers like myself who are eager to build systems and put frameworks in place to tackle the various challenges each of our roles face. In other words, it’s like we’re our own band of superheroes, using our varied powers to tackle whatever obstacles come our way.