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“We came from a place where there was injustice and a lack of opportunity,” Mr. Benamer, 36, recalled of his banlieue, Bondy. But there he was in the heart of tourist Paris, on a winter afternoon in 2007, with his mother pointing incredulously to truffle-and-foie-gras maki being rolled out to patrons at Eat Sushi, which since then has expanded into a chain of 38 restaurants across France. “How did you manage to do all this?” she asked. His answer was simple: he did it on his own. “I was not going to let this feeling that we have no chance keep me closed inside the banlieue,” Mr. Benamer recalled recently. For decades, the disadvantaged suburbs that ring Paris and other large French cities have been places of privation, plagued by discrimination and poverty. France has long vowed to improve the plight of the banlieue populations, often Muslim and primarily people with Arab or sub-Saharan African family roots in the French colonial past. Despite pledges by Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president to address economic and social inequality after a series of violent riots in 2005 and 2007, though, critics say little has changed. That is why a new generation of people like Mr. Benamer are trying to turn the suburbs into incubators for entrepreneurs, who see using their own initiative as the only way up and out of the banlieues, which are home to an estimated 10 percent of France’s 63.7 million people. Through persistent lobbying, banlieue entrepreneurs have been founding “angel” investment funds, persuading big French companies like AXA Insurance and BNP Paribas to contribute seed money that fuel start-ups ranging from trash removal to taxi fleets. It was one such fund that recently helped finance the national expansion of Mr. Benamer’s Eat Sushi chain. No one can yet quantify the new businesses emerging from this movement, or measure its success. But the activity is occurring largely outside the sphere of the French state. “If we wait for the government to do something, people will just remain stuck,” Mr. Benamer said. “If we want things to improve, we have to do it ourselves.” As part of the self-help effort, banlieue-based organizations that promote ethnic diversity have been aggressive about placing minorities into mentoring and jobs programs at French companies that as little as a decade ago routinely rejected applicants with non-French names. “Things are changing,” said Majid El Jarroudi, a consultant of Moroccan origin, who grew up in the Paris banlieue of Montreuil. Mr. Jarroudi, 36, started his career operating a small restaurant. He founded an organization, Adive, to assist banlieue entrepreneurs after visiting the United States and marveling at how much easier it seemed for minorities to move ahead. Attitudes have shifted slowly in France, he said, but these days, “there is a growing recognition that the banlieues should not be seen as a place to fear, but as a source of dynamism, full of people who are eager to work and to succeed.” Mr. Benamer is a case in point. One of the youngest in a family of 10 children, with illiterate parents, he grew up in the gritty Bondy suburb, which was engulfed in the 2005 and 2007 riots, although he and his family avoided the trouble. After getting a vocational degree when he was 18, he started a small sandwich business with his younger brother, Yahia. Working 13-hour days, they were quickly selling more than 2,000 sandwiches a day to local colleges. Soon, they set their sights on takeout sushi, a market in which Mr. Benamer saw greater potential. In 2006, the brothers co-founded Eat Sushi, with a flagship outlet in the heart of Paris. Last year, an angel investment fund, Citizen Capital, took a 30 percent stake, with plans to double by 2015 the number of stores and sales that last year topped 20 million euros (about $26 million). Today, Eat Sushi employs 550 people in cities and banlieues around France in a work force, including managers, with origins in 30 different countries. Stefania Rousselle contributed reporting. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/global/in-pariss-banlieues-new-recipe-for-success-is-local.html?partner=rss&emc=rss" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">View the original article here</a>

“We came from a place where there was injustice and a lack of opportunity,” Mr. Benamer, 36, recalled of his banlieue, Bondy. But there he ...

<img alt="Ewan Kirk, left, and Erich Schlaikjer of Cantab Capital Partners, whose fee structure, investing strategy and entrepreneurial spirit have generated buzz." height="395" id="100000002223451" src="/Hedge-tmagArticle.jpg" width="592">Andrew Testa for The New York TimesEwan Kirk, left, and Erich Schlaikjer of Cantab Capital Partners, whose fee structure, investing strategy and entrepreneurial spirit have generated buzz.Ewan M. Kirk never quite fit the Wall Street mold.As a partner at Goldman Sachs, he wore a kilt to the firm’s annual black-tie dinner in New York. After leaving Goldman, Mr. Kirk, an astrophysicist by training, set up a hedge fund in Cambridge, England, a world away from the fashionable neighborhood of Mayfair in London where many hedge funds are based.But Mr. Kirk’s firm, Cantab Capital Partners, has been turning heads recently in London and New York with a new fund that aggressively undercuts its competitors on fees. The fund, which uses computer models to trade on trends in markets around the world, opened to outside investors in the first quarter and grew to more than $600 million by the beginning of April.Unlike rival funds, in which the price of investing is often 2 percent of assets and 20 percent of profits, Cantab charges a 0.5 percent fee and 10 percent of profits for its new fund. That structure has generated buzz in Mayfair at a time when lackluster returns have some big investors wondering whether hedge funds are worth the expense.“They’ve lowered the fees to a point that not everybody can afford to do,” said Phillip G. Chapple, an executive director at KB Associates, a consulting firm that advises London hedge funds. “It’s quite scary.”Cantab is not the only fund to lower its fees. Since the financial crisis, some other hedge funds have also moved to lower the cost of investing. The Children’s Investment Fund, which is based in London, charges performance fees of 15 percent to 16.5 percent, with hurdles that must be cleared before fees are paid, according to a person close to the fund. Two funds run by Renaissance Technologies, in East Setauket, N.Y., have performance fees of 10 percent, a person close to the firm said.About 11 percent of hedge funds in Europe charge performance fees less than 20 percent, compared with 5.7 percent of hedge funds in the United States, according to Hedge Fund Intelligence.To Mr. Kirk, 52, who founded Cantab in 2006 with Erich Schlaikjer, a colleague from Goldman, the new product is a logical outgrowth of his primary investing strategy. With the technological infrastructure in place, it was relatively inexpensive for Cantab to introduce the new program, which takes a more conservative approach with lower volatility.That technology puts Cantab — a relatively small firm with about 40 employees and $5.3 billion under management — in a position to shake up the market.“Do I think that another random hedge fund is going to suddenly decide to cut their fees to a half and 10? No, I don’t,” Mr. Kirk said. “That would effectively destroy their business model.”Run by scientists and mathematicians with ties to the nearby University of Cambridge, Cantab fosters an eccentric laboratory atmosphere. Certain devices, like a 3-D printer and a rice cooker powered by a neural network, are in the office simply to amuse the employees.A technophile, Mr. Kirk claims to have no view on the political and economic dramas that obsess some money managers. Even his Friday lunch order is steeped in science: the office uses an algorithm to determine what type of food to buy.But almost despite himself, Mr. Kirk is gaining recognition as a financier. Last year, Cantab’s flagship fund returned 15.3 percent when comparable funds in London suffered losses. In 2008, with the financial crisis gathering, Cantab returned 48.7 percent.Though the firm’s record is mixed — it lost 9.2 percent in 2009 — it has attracted billions of dollars to manage, growing from just $30 million. Last November, with investors clamoring to get in, Cantab determined it had reached capacity and shut the doors on its fund.As if to signal his arrival among the Mayfair elite, Mr. Kirk made his debut in April on a ranking of the wealthiest hedge fund managers in Britain published by The Sunday Times, which estimated his net worth at £280 million, or $433.3 million.Born in Swindon, England, and brought up in Glasgow, Mr. Kirk did not set out to work in finance. He developed a model of gravitational radiation for his Ph.D at the University of Southampton and started a career in computer systems design. When he landed at Goldman in 1992, he devoured books on futures and options to get himself up to speed.“I couldn’t balance my own checkbook,” he told an audience of Ph.D mathematics students at the University of Cambridge several years ago.But Mr. Kirk learned finance quickly, rising to become the head of the strategies group in Europe, where he oversaw Goldman’s quantitative technology.“Ewan was known to be very — at Goldman, we used the term ‘commercial,’ “ said Jay S. Dweck, a former head of equities strategies at Goldman, who was in Mr. Kirk’s partnership class. “He was good at generating profit for the business.”Mr. Kirk’s success helped him secure a deal on his departure to pay for continued access to Goldman’s in-house software — what Mr. Dweck called the “magic that every firm wanted to try to reproduce.”That deal, according to Mr. Dweck, who was involved in the negotiations, was “unique.” A spokeswoman for Goldman declined to comment.Cantab said in a letter to investors in December that it had been making progress in developing its own information-technology infrastructure. As part of that transition, the hedge fund revised its deal with Goldman last year; instead of fees, Goldman now has a small ownership stake in Cantab.As the only prominent hedge fund in a region dominated by technology companies, Cantab can make a unique pitch to university students who might not have considered finance as a career. One such hire, Tom Howat, now a partner at the firm, hurried to finish his Ph.D in mathematical biology so he could join Cantab on its first day.During the job interview in a local pub, Mr. Kirk described Cantab as a “start-up technology company that happens to apply itself to finance,” Mr. Howat, 31, recalled in a recent essay.That entrepreneurial spirit means Cantab can have some fun. Last year, in the Cambridge Dragon Boat Festival, a race on the River Cam, the team from Cantab finished second in the mixed division.The team also won best dressed, outfitted in the style of Noah’s Ark with zebra, giraffe and meerkat costumes.Such self-expression wasn’t part of the culture at Goldman, as Mr. Kirk learned the hard way.He wore the kilt only once, “given the slightly strange looks I got turning up at a fancy New York partners’ dinner wearing a dress,” he recalled. “It certainly created a little bit of a stir.” <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/british-hedge-fund-finds-success-by-forging-its-own-path/?partner=rss&emc=rss" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">View the original article here</a>

Andrew Testa for The New York TimesEwan Kirk, left, and Erich Schlaikjer of Cantab Capital Partners, whose fee structure, investing strateg...

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