News Feature
Good Business: Love and Money
August 3, 2007
“If you pursue your passion, you’ll be successful financially.” Alexander W. Casdin ’96BUS recalls the words of a guest speaker during his value investing class at Columbia Business School. The speaker was Warren Buffett ’51BUS and the words have resonated with Casdin for over a decade.
Taking Buffett’s advice, Casdin has pursued an investing career that melds his varied interests in technological innovation, business, and health care. His first job in the investment field was as a health care analyst for the Dreyfus Corporation. 
He then managed $1.4 billion as portfolio manager of the Pequot Healthcare Fund and is now CEO of Cooper Hill, a health care–dedicated hedge fund founded in 1997 by his father, Jeffrey W. Casdin. Cooper Hill invests in all areas of health care: biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and services.
True to Buffett’s prediction, doing what he loves has enabled Casdin to give back in a big way to Columbia. In 2001, five years after graduating, he made his first major donation to the business school: $25,000 to the annual fund. Casdin believes that “philanthropic participation—regardless of the amount—with those institutions that have helped personally and professionally is important throughout a career, not just at the end.”
He also believes that business can be a crucial vehicle of social change. So he has now donated $250,000 in all to the business school’s Social Enterprise Program. While Wall Street beckons many MBAs, this program helps inspire students to explore how business ventures can help improve society.
“An attractive aspect of giving to Social Enterprise,” Casdin says, “is that you can see your gift having a direct positive impact in a variety of situations, whether you’re funding new course development or summer internships for students who are thinking creatively about applying their MBA skills.”
One of Casdin’s early gifts helped students travel to Costa Rica to perform clean–energy investing. Other Social Enterprise students have pursued private equity opportunities in Kabul, Afghanistan, and microfinance development in Madagascar. Some work closer to home, at not–for–profits such as the Doe Fund or on projects including the creation of micro–lending banks in underserved neighborhoods. Casdin now sits on the advisory board for the Social Enterprise Program and is a strong advocate for the sense of social responsibility it engenders.
This sense of responsibility plays out in his own business as well. Noting that health care spending is now 16 percent of the GDP and forecast to grow by 10 percent annually, Casdin says, “The only way to lower costs and improve quality is through technological innovation. By addressing a major societal need—better health care at lower costs—the private sector is creating significant benefit to overall society.”
Casdin calls personalized medicine the next big frontier. “This means providing the right drug for the right person,” he explains. “For example, instead of taking a general drug for all people with high cholesterol, we’ll have tailored drugs, designed to address a patient’s specific genetic makeup and disease subtype. We’ll use molecular diagnostics to identify and stratify these patients and make sure the drugs they are taking are working.” Casdin believes that personalized medicine is the wave of the future in drug therapy.
The future for Columbia as he sees it is in continuing to offer new educational opportunities and to take advantage of being situated in New York, often called “the number–one social laboratory in the country.” Columbia Business School leads the way at the University in finding the resources to develop transformative programs like this. Casdin adds, “By strengthening good programs and adding new courses, the business school continues to improve the breadth and diversity of its curriculum, whether in Social Enterprise or finance. This allows Columbia to keep turning out some of the nation’s top business leaders.”
— Regina Lewis Barboza ’84JRN
