From Scratch to Stardom

As the son of Iranian immigrants who were forced to relocate during the 1980 Iran-Iraq conflict, Cameron Khajavi is no stranger to building things from scratch. His father, an accomplished engineer in Tehran, started mowing lawns in Houston, Texas in order to provide for a young family. His example provided Cameron the motivation and inspiration to later start his own fund, named with his parents’ initials.

Cameron is the founder and CIO of MIK Capital, a long/short hedge fund specialized in consumer businesses. His introduction to the financial world came while accompanying his mother to their local Fidelity branch, where he was introduced to the idea of mutual funds. This idea drove him to move away from the family tradition of medicine to pursue a career in finance.

MIK’s investing strategy includes a focus on team dynamics, probabilistic thinking, and looking past current market perceptions to see the underlying potential of a security. In this episode, Cameron discusses market fads and the market’s tendency to overvalue companies based on fads.

“It's not uncommon now to have a SaaS business trading at 30, 35 times sales.” Cameron explains, “If the company can continue to grow at 35% for the next X number of years, then potentially that is justified, but there's not a lot of base cases that you can point to historically that suggest that's a common occurrence. And that's kind of what you need just to justify the current stock price.”

Cameron Khajavi was born in Boston, grew up in Houston, Texas, and attended Duke University. Cameron also received an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career as a consumer-focused M&A analyst in the investment banking division of Lazard. Prior to launching MIK, Cameron worked at Citadel Global equities from 2007 to 2014.