Origin Story

Doug Hall

The man who handed Glen a spreadsheet and accidentally created a finance career.

The Garage, the Spreadsheet, the Chicken

Summer of 2006. Or maybe 2007. Glen genuinely cannot remember which year it was, which tells you everything about his attention to detail at that age.

Doug Hall was sitting in an open garage in Kentucky with a laptop and an idea: pull historical financial data for hundreds of companies and deseasonalize all of it. Not at a trading desk. Not at a university. In a garage. The tools were Excel, a Costco rotisserie chicken, and an unlimited supply of Coca-Cola.

Glen showed up knowing roughly nothing about financial modeling. He was an engineer. He could solve differential equations but had never heard the phrase “LIBOR spread.” Doug didn’t seem to mind. He just pointed at the screen and started explaining.

By the end of that weekend, they had deseasonalized financial data across hundreds of companies. Glen had gone from “what is a 10-K?” to building models that would later form the backbone of everything he did in finance.

What Doug Actually Did

Taught Financial Modeling

From zero. Glen didn't know what deseasonalizing meant. Doug didn't laugh (much). He just taught.

Showed How to Read Filings

10-Ks, 10-Qs, the actual numbers behind the headlines. The boring stuff that makes you money.

Demonstrated the Work Ethic

Hundreds of companies in a single weekend. Not because someone assigned it. Because the data was there.

Lit the Match

Everything that followed — the fund, the books, the Fannie Mae crusade — traces back to that garage.

The Setting, for Context

Kentucky

Location

~2006

Year (probably)

1 Weekend

Duration

Not a Bloomberg terminal. Not a corner office. An open garage, a rotisserie chicken from Costco, cans of Coca-Cola, and two guys who thought deseasonalizing financial data was a reasonable way to spend a Saturday.

Glen Says:

“I was an engineer who thought finance was for people in suits. Doug was in cargo shorts in a garage and he understood more about how companies actually work than anyone I’d ever met. He handed me the match. I just happened to find things worth lighting on fire.”

“Without Doug, I might still be an engineer who doesn’t know what a LIBOR spread is. Which, honestly, would have been a perfectly fine life. But this one is more interesting.”

“People always ask about my ‘origin story’ like it happened at Goldman Sachs or Wharton. It happened in a garage in Kentucky over a Costco chicken. That’s the real story. Doug is the real story.”

The Ripple Effect

That weekend in Kentucky set off a chain reaction that Doug probably didn’t see coming. Glen went from deseasonalizing data to building discounted cash flow models, to launching a hedge fund, to writing books on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to a years-long campaign to recapitalize the GSEs. All of it.

Glen would be the first to tell you that he is not the hero of this story. He’s the guy who got lucky enough to be in the right garage at the right time, sitting across from someone who actually knew what he was doing. Doug did the hard part. Glen just kept running with it.

Every financial model Glen ever built has Doug’s fingerprints on it. Every spreadsheet, every valuation, every pitch deck that convinced someone to listen. The foundation was laid in that garage.

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