Founder
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Five thousand miles away from Wall Street at his office in Honolulu, a brainchild was born that would land Jay Shidler on the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange five years later, for the ringing of the opening bell.  That’s when Primus Guaranty—the first-ever stand-alone AAA/Aaa rated derivatives product company—went public with an IPO in 2004; its ability to write credit default swaps and hold them to maturity made the Primus multi-billion dollar business model unique.  Even more unique, though, was its founder’s record of creating new companies and crafting innovative solutions to emerging real estate and capital market trends.  The Primus offering was Shidler’s fourth of five trips to the NYSE balcony and marked the birth of a financier.

Jay Shidler is a deeply involved, whiteboard-scribbling, numbers-crunching visionary who had the chutzpah early on to believe that world-class real estate and financial companies could be created from a remote location in the middle of the Pacific.  His keen instincts date back to his undergraduate years at the University of Hawaii, when a thesis he wrote formed the basis for a successful condominium development project.  It was also then that he began dispensing real estate advice in a weekly column he penned for Pacific Business News, the most prominent Hawaii business publication which described him as "one of the best-informed young men in his field." He was 22 years old.

After college and upon fulfilling his commitment as a Lieutenant in the Army Corp of Engineers, Jay struck out on his own, seeking properties with strong upside potential and whose value he could maximize.  To this day, the creation-of-value mantra for Jay Shidler starts with understanding a set of complex, seemingly disparate circumstances and crafting a comprehensive solution that includes committing Shidler’s own capital in the form of debt and/or equity to every initiative.
 
From its single-man, single-office start in 1971, The Shidler Group now includes affiliated operating partnerships and corporations that have acquired and managed over 2,000 properties in 40 states and Canada.  Jay Shidler has founded and been the initial investor in over 20 public and private companies, five of which have been listed on the NYSE.​

While Jay’s success has been wild, his methods are not.  His highly disciplined approach to incubating new financial concepts and capitalizing new companies is a mix of meticulous research and measured risk.  A typical Shidler "frontloading" session starts out with a plethora of ideas and ends up with only a few; those that survive the brutal vetting process have been transformed into innovative financial structures.
 
Jay’s ability to assess risk is apparent not only in his businesses, but also in his U.S. patents awarded for a system of pricing financial instruments involving credit risk transfer.  Shidler’s versatility—whether formulating complex probability models or structuring innovative transactions—demonstrates an uncanny combination of engineering and entrepreneurship.

The impact of Jay’s groundbreaking work has been recognized nationally throughout the industry and, as significant to him, much closer to home. Renamed in his honor in 2006, the Shidler College of Business at Jay’s alma mater, the University of Hawaii, is attracting top-tier students from around the world with its programs geared to today’s complex world marketplace.
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One lasting lesson Jay has demonstrated is that business strategies must be formulated to be bulletproof. In Shidler’s world, a superior strategy is one that can survive imperfections in implementation, undulations of an unsettled economy and any distance from its maker.