Kamal Gupta is a consummate negotiator, a highly successful hedge fund manager, and a professional blackjack player. He is the author of Play It Right, a memoir that chronicles his journey from India to America, from computers to gambling, culminating in a quarter-century on Wall Street.
For the past twenty-five years, Kamal has negotiated on behalf of numerous individuals as they struggled against large companies. In virtually every situation that he was involved in, David triumphed and Goliath was none the wiser. Despite this impressive track record, Kamal has never profited from any negotiation. Instead, his reward was the satisfaction of knowing that he had played the game well and potentially helped to bring a greater sense of fairness into the world.
Kamal spent twenty years (1999-2019) managing money for some of the largest hedge funds in the world (Millennium, Brevan Howard, ExodusPoint). In 2018, he played a key role in raising eight billion dollars for the largest hedge fund launch ever, ExodusPoint Capital.
Bored in the tech world earlier in his career, Kamal devoted two years of his life (1990-1992) to the single-minded pursuit of becoming a professional blackjack player, growing his bankroll to thirty-two times its original size, and getting barred from several casinos in the process.
Kamal earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi — entering the elite institution after only completing eleventh grade — and received a master’s in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in just eleven months.
His books:
Play It Right: A Gambler Takes on Wall Street
Game Changer (forthcoming)