The first thing visitors see after stepping off the elevator at Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners is a 10-foot-tall statue of the Incredible Hulk.
“My guys and gals are young,” the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner said with a grin. “The Hulk is there to remind them to be a little pissed-off, a little hungry and a little angry, in the midst of having $10 cappuccinos.”
Cardinale, 51, has also stayed hungry. During his stint as a private-equity executive at Goldman Sachs, he worked on deals with some of biggest names in sports, including Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and the New York Yankees’ George Steinbrenner. For the past four years, he’s focused on building his own firm, which aims to leverage the connections and expertise of billionaire entrepreneurs to help build businesses.
“He’s not only brilliant, but he’s also very charming,” said Jones, who’s a RedBird investor. “He’s right at the top percentile of bankers of having fun, and he joins me right at the top of people in sports having fun.”
RedBird is currently negotiating a deal to help the Yankees buy back the YES Network from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox Inc., according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the transaction hasn’t been completed. Fox has owned 80 percent of the sports network since 2014, when it was valued at about $4 billion, while Yankee Global Enterprises owns the rest.
Cardinale is among a group of money managers, including Tony Pritzker’s PPC Partners and Byron Trott’s BDT Capital Partners, looking to attract family offices and wealthy individuals who want to be more than just passive investment partners. What they’re pitching is a hybrid of traditional private equity and venture capital that offers a more active role for its limited partners, many of whom have built their own successful businesses.
“This is the first stage of evolution away from private equity,” Cardinale said in an interview in his Madison Avenue office.
To be sure, RedBird still has many of the trappings of traditional private equity. An $800 million revolving commitment from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan buttresses its operations, supplemented by a $300 million fund raised from a network of families and entrepreneurs. Some of the families and individuals also contributed $600 million to be invested alongside the fund, giving them a bigger voice in how the companies they back are run.
Investments are meant to last beyond the three years to five years favored by many private-equity funds, with RedBird and its partners adding cash as businesses grow. And unlike venture capital’s boom-or-bust returns, the success rate is meant to be high.
“It’s inconceivable that we would ever lose money on an investment,” Cardinale said, a hint of his native Philadelphia accent coming through. “If something comes out of left field, we’ll grind it and work through it. I don’t care if we hold it forever, we’ll get back to where we need to be. I will never lose anybody’s money.”