From Seoul to Portage to Wall Street: Hard work pays off for Nikki Anderson
All through school, Nicole Anderson persevered on the Portage Area High School girls’ basketball team, mostly warming the bench because she was barely 5-foot-1 and, by her own admission, not very good.
During one game — she thinks it was her senior season about two decades ago — her Lady Mustangs were trailing Bishop Carroll High School’s team so badly, she finally got to play.
“I threw the ball up and scored three points,” Anderson recalled. “The entire side of our bleachers went crazy. We were losing by 20 or 30 points, but they were so happy that Nikki Anderson finally scored.”
Hard work pays
That game not only represented the close-knit community in which she grew up, it showed that hard work pays off.
Anderson used that philosophy to get into Harvard Business School and navigate to and through Wall Street and the country’s financial crisis. She emerged as the co-owner of an investment firm now housed across from Grand Central Station in New York City.
Anderson and a friend from her Harvard days co-founded Virgo Management in 2009 and a related but separate investment firm, BlueVirgo Capital Management in 2013.
Securities and Exchange Commission laws prevent her from describing in detail the privately held companies. But she said, “We have demonstrated growth every year” since their founding.
Anderson said she used the anecdote from her high school basketball days to get into business school, and she reminds herself regularly of that character-building pursuit.
“I can’t describe how bad I was at basketball, but it taught me a really valuable lesson about teamwork,” she said. “It taught me that I don’t have to be the best at everything to get something very valuable out of it.”
Driven
Her mother says her drive started long before high school.
“She had it pretty tough for a while before we got her,” said Jane Anderson. “I think that made her a strong person.”
Nikki was 6 when her parents adopted her from an orphanage in Seoul, South Korea. Now 39, she has vague memories of living with a family that was not her own before “they decided to give me up for adoption.” She went to live in an orphanage for two years.
Meanwhile, half a world away, Barry and Jane Anderson had been married for about 15 years. Unable to have children of their own, the couple was getting anxious as Jane turned 36; they turned to an adoption agency for help.
“They told us how hard it was to get babies and how long it would take,” Jane said. “We told them we were open to an older child. (Nikki’s) was the first picture and information they sent us. We decided we would go with her.”
Coming to America
Nikki knew no English when she landed at LaGuardia Airport in New York City on Columbus Day 1983.
“That was the day I discovered America,” she said.
The Andersons took her home to their half-acre spread that backs up to woods south of the borough of Portage.
“The first week or so was tough,” Jane said. “You didn’t know what she wanted. It was frustrating at first. But she adapted quickly.”
She hid half-eaten apples or bananas in her sock drawer, a habit left over from her orphanage days.
“When she learned that food was always going to be on the table, she stopped doing that,” Barry said.
Learning the language
A month after moving to Portage, Nikki started kindergarten and she picked up the language in a matter of months.
“It was a little bit of an adjustment, but I don’t really recall struggling,” Nikki said.
She gained a sister two years later when Barry and Jane decided to adopt another child from South Korea, Lindsay, who was 8 months old at the time. The two girls are not related and Nikki said she knows nothing of her biological parents.
Jane said that shortly after Lindsay’s adoption, another Portage area family adopted three siblings from Asia “that might have helped a little bit.”
But Nikki, who clearly doesn’t look like her parents, doesn’t remember any discrimination growing up.
“One of the great things about growing up in a small town like Portage, everyone knows you and your family,” she said. “I think they never really thought or saw me as being different. They saw me as Nikki Anderson. I don’t really recall any racial discrimination. If you get to know people as people … cultural stereotypes go away.”
Barry worked on the railroad. Jane worked off and on at a local car dealership and as a stay-at-home mom.
Idyllic childhood
The family went to church regularly at Trinity United Methodist Church, where Jane worked as secretary after the girls were grown.
“I played the piano, took dance lessons, stereotypical kids’ stuff,” Nikki said. “It was a nice neighborhood with the kids getting together and playing outside.”
Kickball, bike riding and playing “house” in the woods were favorite pastimes.
“I had a pretty idyllic childhood,” Nikki said.
To stave off boredom in her teen years, she kept busy, largely with sports that she wasn’t very good at — basketball, as well as track. While she was good at tennis, Portage High didn’t have a tennis team.
Nikki also was a good singer and made the high school chorus and the girls’ ensemble, “a select group that she had to audition for,” said teacher sponsor Annette Bernazzoli.
“She was at all the practices, all the rehearsals,” Bernazzoli said. “She was like a perfectionist. Very ambitious.”
Nikki also was on the school’s Scholastic Quiz Bowl team, which always was a league championship contender and qualified for the state tournament at least once.
Restless in Portage
As busy as she stayed, Nikki said she “started feeling a little bit restless, a little claustrophobic” in Portage, and her interest in the outside world grew, stoked, in part, by relatives who hosted a couple of German foreign exchange students for a time. She learned German on her own.
When Nikki bought the book, “Investing for Dummies,” Jane got an idea of what her daughter planned to study. The book still sits on a shelf in her childhood bedroom, alongside Nancy Drew and Harry Potter books. The youngster always preferred playing the board games Hotel, Monopoly and Life, too, according to her mother.
Nikki said she forced herself to join the high school debate team to improve her public-speaking skills. And she was the valedictorian for the class of 1996.
Top of the class
“She was always at the top of the class, very focused and very driven,” said Richard Bernazzoli, one of Nikki’s high school teachers and Scholastic Quiz Bowl advisor.
Bernazzoli went on to be school superintendent for a time. “She just stood out as one of those kids that comes along once in a lifetime.”
Nikki accepted a full academic scholarship to Susquehanna University for its strong business program. She was on the university tennis team and was selected to the Mid-Atlantic Conference Tennis All-Academic Team, and also was president of the Student Association for Cultural Awareness.
Although she had planned to major in international business, she changed it to finance when an advisor recommended that it would give her more job opportunities abroad. And she kept studying German and then studied abroad in Germany and Austria her junior year of college.
Nikki graduated second in her class at Susquehanna in 2000 with a double major in finance and German.
Harvard
She interviewed at a couple of German banks, but ended up at J.P. Morgan in Delaware for several years before applying to Harvard Business School for her masters in business administration.
“I was completley shocked I got in,” she said, noting that her essay on persevering as an untalented player on a basketball team must have worked.
On the first day of classes, while standing in line for orientation, she struck up a conversation with a fellow new student, Ali Rahimtula. They started dating later that year when their paths kept crossing at financial workshops and recruiting events.
“It was the most unromantic courtship ever,” she said, with a laugh. “We would go to the Goldman Sachs presentations together.”
She earned her MBA in 2005 and went to work for a hedge fund in New York City that she had interned for the previous summer.
She and Ali got married in Central Park in 2006; he went to work in the same industry and works for a venture capital firm today.
Crisis management
The following year, she joined a startup hedge fund as a vice president. And shortly after, the financial crisis hit Wall Street.
“It was a horrible time for any finance company, let alone a startup,” she said. “It was one of the most stressful periods of my life.”
Nikki didn’t like some things she had seen in her industry.
“When you are in finance, you do see lots of questionable behavior that I was really uncomfortable with, and so I thought hard about it,” she said. “I was sick and tired of watching people make decisions that I didn’t agree with. That was definitely when I had to think hard about what I wanted to do next.”
She could have gone to work for other large hedge funds, but she decided to start her own firm and “run it in a way I felt comfortable.”
Sign of the times
A friend from her Harvard days, Joanna Alpert, was similarly situated, and the two started Virgo Management in 2009. It is an investment firm that invests in real-estate related assets and its name is based on the astrological sign.
“We’re both Virgos,” Nikki said. “Character traits of Virgos are very meticulous, very trustworthy, very analytical. We thought that was a perfect name.”
Less than four years later, they started up BlueVirgo Capital Management. And, they’re not finished.
“It’s been eight years and our firm is very much a work in progress,” Nikki said. “We have large goals and ambitions. I’m only 39 and I definitely am motivated to continue to build the firm. I’m really proud of what we’ve built, but I definitely feel like I have a lot more to grow.”
Personally, she has grown as well. Nikki and Ali had their first child, Sara, in 2009. The twins, Aiden and David, came in 2014.
Grand Central
They now live in the Riverside section of Greenwich, Conn., and she takes the train to work.
“It takes me a little over an hour to get there, but it’s a pretty pleasant train ride,” she said. “One of the perks of being the boss is we get to decide where the offices are and we’re across from Grand Central Station. I get off the train and walk across the street.”
She said she no longer has the itch to live abroad, but she cannot practice her career in Portage, either.
“Family has become just a lot more important to me,” she said. “I can never envision moving somewhere overseas, especially since my dad doesn’t fly.”
Since her parents are retired, they drive often to visit Nikki and her family, but holidays in Portage are important, she said.
“As I get older, I definitely appreciate a lot more the way I grew up,” she said.
Two working parents with three young children is a challenge, as well, so Nikki indulged her love of all things German and hired an au pair from Germany to help with the kids.
“I still love the German culture and the German people,” she said.
Her parents, Barry particularly, aren’t fond of Nikki not being closer (It doesn’t help that Lindsay lives in Chicago where she is a successful store executive with Nordstrom’s).
“She’s still my baby girl,” he said.
Work ethic
But they aren’t surprised with her success.
“I think we knew early on that she was going to be moving on to big things,” Jane said. “We never worried that she wouldn’t be able to make her own way, but she really excelled even more than what we thought.”
They seemed surprised that Nikki gave them much credit for her success.
“I always studied very hard. I think it’s just kind of like a really strong work ethic that I got from my parents,” Nikki said. “I don’t ever remember my dad missing a day of work.
“Whether it is easy or hard, you always work and study hard. I think it’s a western Pennsylvania thing, that engrained sense of responsibility.”
Mirror Staff Writer Cherie Hicks is at 949-7030.
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