I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Eddie Brown, founder of Brown Capital Management. My interview with Eddie was part of this year’s The Twelve-In-Twelve Book Club Meet the Author Forum in Columbia, Maryland. Eddie, who last year published his memoirs entitled Beating the Odds: Eddie Brown’s Investing and Life Strategies (John Wiley & Sons), was the invited author.
Beating the Odds has a potential dual meaning. First, Brown Capital Management, founded by Eddie Brown in 1983, has a history of slightly outperforming and sometimes significantly outperforming the market. A deeper meaning arises from the fact that Eddie was born in 1940 Jim-Crow-era Apopka, Florida to a teen-age mother and into poverty. He beat the odds of those less-than advantageous circumstances to become a Howard University-educated electrical engineer; a valued worker at IBM; the first African-American portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price; a regular financial commentator on national television show, Wall St. Week; the founder and president of a financial services firm with $6 billion under management; and a philanthropist.
During our interview, Eddie and I discussed his childhood in Apopka, Florida; what it means to have an entrepreneurial gene and how he has exercised that gene throughout his life; the role and importance of family in his life; his attitude towards and approach to handling racism; his approach to investing; and the impact of his philanthropy.
All those topics are of course covered in Beating the Odds, written by Eddie Brown with co-author Blair S. Walker. I highly recommend you pick up a copy.
