A New-Age Corporate Culture Transformed a Fund Manager’s Fortunes
Chris Freund’s private equity firm in communist Vietnam was a mess. He took some pretty eccentric measures to rescue it.
Chris Freund had reached one of life’s nasty crossroads, and he was in despair. Six years earlier he’d set up a small private equity firm, Mekong Capital Ltd., in Ho Chi Minh City. Now it was 2007, the firm was a mess, riven by gossip and office politics and a lack of discipline, and the companies it had invested in were just not performing the way they should. “I never was going to give up on Mekong Capital, but I was about to give up on myself,” he recalls. “I didn’t quite know what to do.”
His search for answers took him back to the 1990s, when he was studying psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. There, in a stretch of the West Coast that still bore the imprint of 1970s New Age experiments and lifestyles, he’d come into contact with an organization called Landmark Worldwide. Founded in 1991 as the continuation of Werner Erhard’s est (for Erhard Seminars Training) movement, Landmark specialized in personal-development programs. Freund even took one of its courses at the time. He was impressed but over time gradually forgot about it.