He might live in Rowayton, Connecticut, and work in Greenwich, but Eli Combs isn’t your cookie-cutter hedge fund manager. For starters, he’s a vegetarian. Ohio native Combs, 43, graduated from Miami University with a liberal arts degree before earning an MS in finance from City University of New York and an MBA from Yale University. In 2001 he became a private banker with Goldman Sachs Group in New York. Over the following decade Combs and his family settled in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, as he moved into hedge fund management. In April 2012, with seed capital from asset manager BlackRock, he and Matthew Meehan, a former colleague from New York hedge fund Eos Partners, launched MeehanCombs, a Greenwich-based hedge fund that manages just shy of $300 million and focuses on credit and distressed investing. It’s important to Combs and Meehan that their firm be not only best-in-class when it comes to investment performance but a model of good governance. They have sought to establish best practices, appointing mostly independent directors to its board and better aligning the interests of fund managers and investors.
