Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Angel

David Baran is the CEO at Symphony Financial Partners. A seasoned investor and entrepreneur, David Baran has over three decades of experience investing in Asian markets. During this time, David built a wide-ranging career with investments across a variety of industries and co-founded Symphony Financial Partners, a resilient, high-performing investment firm specializing in Japan.

As a longtime resident of Japan (and a fluent speaker of Japanese), David Baran has deep insights into Japanese economy and society. In contrast to other investment firms, which approach investing in Japan with the same tactics, strategies, and mindsets as Western markets, David understands that Japan’s unique financial ecosystem is heavily informed by social and political factors. From the controversial history of shareholder meetings to the distinct characteristics of corporate boards, David’s extensive knowledge of Japan allows him to understand its challenges and capitalize on opportunities as they appear.

Further, unlike other investors, David Baran is uninterested in stripping companies for parts in order to maximize short-term gains. Instead, David and his colleagues prefer the long game: work with portfolio companies to help encourage growth and improve governance where necessary, serving as a trusted partner rather than an unscrupulous corporate raider.

Using this approach, David and his team have built Symphony into one of the top Japan investment firms, boasting impressive, year-to-year returns and weathering a number of crises, from the Asian financial crisis of 1997 to the global financial recession of 2008. David attributes this success in the turbulent Asian equity markets to the strong emphasis on long-term value and careful acculturation: when faced with inefficiencies or areas for improvement, David and his team will seek to address these obstacles in a careful, socially acceptable way.

Prior to co-founding Symphony Financial Partners with longtime friend and colleague Kazuhiko Shibata, David Baran worked in senior roles at the Tokyo offices of Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Barclays Capital. David graduated cum laude from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Political Economy, and from Columbia University with a Masters Degree in International Finance.

Today, David Baran splits his time between Singapore, where Symphony is headquartered, Japan, and the United States, where his family resides and his children attend school. He remains as fascinated as ever with the nuances of Japanese society and culture, with a particular interest in art and architecture.