Everyone is talking about an anonymous memo containing damning—and potentially fabricated—accusations against the hedge fund.
Twitter threads. Texts. Emails. Phone calls. All asking: Have you seen the Tiger Global memo?
Last week, finance circles were abuzz over an anonymously-written and damning memo that’s being sent around. The document, which extensively cites anonymous sources, details some pretty aggressive, and unsubstantiated, accusations against mega hedge fund and startup investor Tiger Global regarding its performance and personnel. While we reviewed the memo ourselves, we’ve decided not to print any of the specific accusations and details, as we have been unable to verify them by press time. Tiger sent a letter to investors on Friday, Forbes first reported, acknowledging the memo, but saying it is “packed with lies,” and that the firm was being “targeted with a series of information attacks.” The firm blamed the memo on a disgruntled former employee, according to the letter seen by Forbes.
The memo does include mention of some issues that have already been publicly reported, including a controversy around a reported large settlement with a female employee, and Tiger’s reported struggles with raising its new fund. The memo is also being circulated far and wide among investors and founders, leading to much speculation over who wrote it—and why. Tiger declined to comment to us beyond the contents of the letter to investors.
“It’s in everyone’s inbox right now,” one venture investor said, adding that founders have been texting them about it. Another fund manager told us: “I think I was sent this by six or more people in the last 48 hours,” they said Friday.
Interestingly, the memo is being billed as a draft of a big exposé from a New York media brand (The New Yorker). But we confirmed that isn’t the case. A spokesperson for The New Yorker told us: “This is not a draft New Yorker article, and we do not know its provenance.” The fund manager told us a similar memo was sent to them six to eight months ago, though The New Yorker was not mentioned in that one.
And from our perspective, as journalists, we highly doubt this was written by anyone in our field. There are some tells, like the fact that the writer doesn’t explain an “asset-liability duration mismatch,” the kind of jargon journalists almost always spell out to a general audience. Not to mention, it’s quite unheard of for drafts of stories to be sent around except to one’s editors. While it’s not yet confirmed who wrote or passed the memo around, one thing is clear: someone has it out for Tiger.
The memo comes at a time when Tiger is reeling from the cratering market. The hedge fund plowed massive amounts of cash into startups in 2021 at a rapid clip, investing at high valuations without taking board seats at companies. Now, the private market is going through a correction, and Tiger has struggled to raise more funding to invest in private companies. Meanwhile, the fund has been trying to offload swaths of its stakes in startups; and The Information reported last week that Tiger is nearing a deal to sell part of its stake in buzzy artificial intelligence startup Cohere at a $3 billion valuation—a boost from Cohere’s most recent raise at a roughly $2 billion valuation in June. (Tiger first invested in 2021 in a $125 million Series B round, although the valuation wasn’t disclosed, per PitchBook.) Per reports, Tiger’s performance has recovered somewhat this year from severe lows in 2022, though its public funds are still underperforming the rebound in public tech stocks so far in 2023. Tiger, which has backed prominent startups like Instacart, Databricks, and OpenAI, is subject to the same kind of valuation headwinds the rest of the industry is facing. Its most recent private fund had reported a 20% paper loss as of December 2022, The Information reported in April.
Whatever way you look at it, the mysterious memo has sparked fear in other fund managers.
“This is a new form of meme warfare that every fund should be petrified of,” the fund manager says. “You can essentially create longform, unsubstantiated claims that can go viral to every major decision maker and to refute them is to only give them more credibility. That’s scary.”
archive link: https://archive.is/BTSTS
Meme warfare isn't new, though. Just ask Comet Ping Pong.