A Hedge Fund Manager's Staggering Rise and Fall

Just after his 30th birthday, Gregory Blotnick was on top of the world.

Born in 1986 to Srully Blotnick, a PhD in cell biology from Harvard Medical School, Blotnick was raised in the affluent suburb of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at the tony private school Buckingham Browne & Nichols. After receiving a Finance degree from Lehigh University in 2009, Blotnick spent the next ten years steadily rising through the hedge fund industry, stopping briefly to collect an MBA from Columbia Business School in 2014.

In 2019, following stints at hedge funds Citadel LLC and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, Blotnick launched his own fund: Brattle Street Capital LLC, named after the street he grew up on in Cambridge.

Everything was going his way—until it wasn't.

In 2021, Blotnick was arrested by the Manhattan District Attorney and charged with wire fraud related to Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loans he had taken out during the pandemic. In 2022, he was sentenced to prison and served 27 months before being released at the end of 2024.

"When you're right, you're right, and when you're wrong, you're wrong," Blotnick says. "I was dead wrong. I got exactly what I deserved."

He says his arrest was a shock to everyone around him: his family, his friends, and his investors.

"It just didn't seem like the kind of thing I'd do. I was always living life to the extremes, work-hard play-hard, but I never let any of the playing get in the way of my career or my relationships when it was time to handle business," Blotnick reflects. "But in 2020, when the pandemic started, everything came unglued all at once; poor investment decisions, drug abuse, dishonest behavior, I just kept putting myself in a deeper and deeper hole. It was all self-inflicted, self-sabotage, as if I abruptly chose to just make a hard left and drive my entire life off a cliff."

"In prison, you meet guys here and there that say getting arrested saved their life. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it was definitely a wake-up call that I needed to make serious changes to the way I was living my life."

Following his arrest, Blotnick went to rehab for thirty days to get sober before spending the next year out on bond as he awaited his sentencing, filling the time that he used to spend partying and drinking with volunteer work, writing a book for charity, and teaching English as a Second Language.

"My life changed so drastically and so quickly that it almost began feeling like I'd started an entirely new existence," Blotnick says. "There is a famous quote: we have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one. I can't emphasize enough how true that is."

Since being released from prison, Blotnick says he's been overwhelmed with gratitude.

"A lot of days, I feel like the luckiest man on Earth. I don't think I deserve all the blessings I have. My friends are incredible and so is my family who supported me throughout all of this. It's one of the strange things about life, and perhaps it's cliché to say, but you don't know what you really have until you've lost everything."

What does the future hold? Blotnick says he's been hard at work on two new ventures backed by friends and former investors from Brattle Street Capital.

"The one great thing that failure teaches you is how silly all your old fears were; fear of humiliation, of judgment, of embarrassment, all that stuff. When you get knocked down it's painful, but when you finally get back up, brush yourself off and look around, you realize that all the things you feared aren't nearly as bad as you'd expected. It's freeing in a strange way, and you get a lot more comfortable with taking risk because now you know firsthand what it looks like if things don't pan out."

"And if there's one last thing I've learned recently," Blotnick adds, "it's that everyone loves a good comeback story. So I'm going to do my damn best to give it to them."

Blotnick's book, Blind Spots: A Riches to Rags Story, was published in January and is available on Amazon.

For more information, visit https://www.gregoryblotnick.com/.

Originally published on vcpost.com