Biography

Angela Samfilippo Gorder is the Founder of Samfilippo & Co, the engine behind The Retention Project. Angie has spent over 25 years in the alternative investment industry in a range of roles and is a trusted advisor to investment managers and institutional investors. During her career, she has been passionate about meeting the needs of institutional investors, and today those investors are demanding access to women-run funds. To address this need, her goal is to change the way the industry views and supports working parents, enhancing opportunities for all women within the investment management industry by creating long-term solutions that can be implemented by the industry today.

Prior to forming Samfilippo & Co, Angie was best known for her time spent in business development, raising capital and delivering client service at institutional, credit-focused investment managers:  Pine River Capital Management, O’Brien Staley Partners and Argentem Creek Partners. In recent years, she was a managing partner and shifted her focus to strategic decision making, business risk assessment and management of the firm. Across each of these organizations, she served on various firm committees overseeing operations, risk, compliance and other functions related to institutional fund management. 

Angie was classically trained as an accountant and joined Arthur Andersen in the late 1990’s at its headquarters in Chicago as part of its specialized Hedge Fund Advisory Group. She became a licensed CPA and, at Andersen, she focused on tax-related consulting for private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, family limited partnerships and high net worth individuals in the industry. In the early 2000’s, she developed her investment skills as a stock analyst on Piper Jaffray’s health care team and, a few years later, she joined Bank of America’s Chicago-based prime brokerage team, where she focused on helping fund managers launch and find investors, during a time when the industry’s hedge fund assets were nearing $1 trillion and growing exponentially.

Angie currently serves on the Investment Committee for the St. Paul, MN-based Northwest Area Foundation and is a member of 100 Women in Finance. In 2020, she was recognized as part of the Hedge Fund Journal’s 50 Leading Women in Hedge Funds and in 2011 as an Institutional Investor Rising Star. In 2007, she founded the Twin Cities Committee of Help for Children (f/k/a Hedge Funds Care) that raised money for local abused and neglected children. She graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Accounting and an MBA with a focus on Finance and Taxation.

Angie splits her time between Grand Rapids, Michigan (near her family); Bottineau, North Dakota (where her husband farms) and Minneapolis (her professional home base). When she’s not working, you’ll find her in the garden or with her nose in a book.