THE CEO’S GUIDE TO THE INVESTMENT GALAXY
NAVIGATING MARKETS TO BUILD GREAT COMPANIES
Not all shareholders are created equal. Knowing who your investors are — and what drives them — is key to building a great company. This essential guide demystifies the investment community and gives CEOs the strategies to attract the capital they need.
What Every CEO Needs to Know
When chief executives first engage with the investment community, they often feel as though they are traveling through an alien galaxy — full of strange inhabitants with their own incentives, languages, and agendas.
This book is your guide. Drawing on three decades of investment experience, Sarah Keohane Williamson maps the "planets" of the modern investment galaxy — from pension funds and sovereign wealth funds to hedge funds, activists, proxy advisors, and the financial media.
Armed with this knowledge, CEOs can build deliberate investor strategies, access the right kind of capital, and insulate their companies from short-term pressures — while focusing on what matters: building great companies that create long-term value.
Know your Investors
Gain deep insights into the personalities, motivations, and strategies of all 25 investor types you will encounter — from quiet giants to the Reddit crowd.
Manage Expectations
Learn effective communication tactics to engage shareholders, manage their expectations, and keep your focus on what matters: building a great company.
Attract Long-term Capital
Explore practical approaches to aligning your business with long-term investment goals and attracting the patient shareholders who will support your vision.
Build Durable Value
Discover why long-term investors drive higher R&D, lower earnings volatility, and stronger performance — and how to build toward that horizon.
Insulate Against Short-termism
Understand how activist campaigns, index fund power, and quant trading create short-term pressures — and how to build resilience against them.
Navigate Key Journeys
Ride alongside CEOs through pivotal company moments — going public, pivoting strategy, accessing foreign capital, and going private.
“Many CEOs and board chairs gain hard-won wisdom about the investment world only after years on the job. This book offers new and aspiring leaders a head start—unpacking the priorities and particular emphases/hotpoints of the wide range of investors out there, before the pressure is on.”
Dominic Barton, Chairman, Rio Tinto; Global Managing Partner Emeritus, McKinsey & Company
Testimonials
“As a former CEO and advisor to many CEOs, I found The CEO’s Guide to be incredibly educational on the investment and capital markets processes. It really provides an all-encompassing, detailed view of the different players and how the capital markets work, which is not easily understood by many senior executives, including CEOs. It does all this with a witty sense of humor!!”
Carmine Di Sibio, Board member, PayPal, Prudential Financial: Former Global Chairman and CEO, EY
“The CEO's Guide to the Investment Galaxy is an essential resource for CEOs and others who want to understand where the capital they need to fund their businesses comes from, who makes the decisions around that capital and what is important to those decision makers. As someone who leads an organisation which invests in thousands of companies from around the world, I wish more of our CEOs understood the simple answers to those questions. Now they can read this book and find out.”
Raphael Arndt, CEO, Australian Government Future Fund
About the Author
Sarah Keohane Williamson is the Chief Executive Officer of FCLTGlobal, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to focus capital on the long term.
Her career in the investment community spans nearly four decades. She spent over 21 years at Wellington Management, one of the world's leading independent investment managers, rising to Partner and Director of Alternative Investments. Before Wellington, she worked at McKinsey & Company, the US Department of State, and Goldman Sachs in mergers and acquisitions.
Since assuming leadership of FCLTGlobal in 2016, Williamson has built the organization into a global community of CEOs and investors committed to long-term value creation across more than a dozen countries. She is a Director of Evercore and EXL Service, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.