President, Lawndale Capital Management
Andrew Shapiro
Andrew Shapiro is President of Lawndale Capital Management, an investment manager of small- and micro-cap activist hedge funds for over 26 years, one of the longest periods of experience deploying an activist/relational investment strategy today. In addition to leading Lawndale, Mr. Shapiro has also served as an Officer, Director, or Observer on many boards and debt and equity bankruptcy committees. He was most recently Chairman of the Official Equity Committee in the Premier Exhibitions/RMS Titanic bankruptcy. He also serves as Board Chair/President and on the Investment Committee of the Mill Valley Library Foundation, on whose board he has served for many years. Mr. Shapiro is a long-time member and Board Leadership Fellow of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) and, via Lawndale, an Associate Member of the Council of Institutional Investors (CII) for almost two decades.
Mr. Shapiro has more than three decades of portfolio management and analytically varied experience from a number of buy-side positions, employing a rare combination of credit, legal, equity and workout skills. Prior to founding the Lawndale organization in 1992, Mr. Shapiro managed the workout and restructuring of large portfolios of high-yield bonds, distressed equities and risk arbitrage securities for the Belzberg family office, First City Capital. Before joining First City, Mr. Shapiro was involved in numerous corporate LBO and recapitalization transactions for Manufacturers Hanover Trust and the Spectrum Group, a private equity firm.
Mr. Shapiro was selected to the NACD Directorship 100 in 2012, a list of the most influential leaders in the boardroom and corporate governance community. He is a frequent speaker on matters of corporate governance, fiduciary duty and activist investing, including panels for the Council of Institutional Investors, National Association of Corporate Directors, Society For Corporate Governance, SEC Advisory Committee on Small Public Companies and the National Investor Relations Institute. Mr. Shapiro has been a recurring faculty member of the corporate governance/director’s education programs of UCLA Anderson and the National Association of Corporate Directors and presents often at several other director education programs. In addition to being a Contributing Author to Seeking Alpha, Mr. Shapiro has received national recognition through feature articles, in Forbes, Barron’s, Institutional Investor and a Business Week article that labeled him “The Gary Cooper of Governance.”
Mr. Shapiro received dual JD and MBA degrees from UCLA, where he was an Olin Fellow at the UCLA School of Law and a Venture Capital Fellow at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Mr. Shapiro received a BS in Business Administration from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he periodically guest lectures.
