Masters in Business · Friday, July 31, 2026
Som Seif founded Claymore in 2005, identifying an opportunity in the nascent Canadian ETF market. He was inspired by research into non-market cap weighted indexes, believing that traditional market cap indexing, which favors buying high and selling low, was fundamentally flawed.
“So in Canada specifically, there were fourteen ETFs listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, basically all by Barclay's Eye units at the time I shares, and in the United states. You know, of course ETFs were starting to become popular, specifically in the institutional crowd, retail crowd.”
“However, I just hated the fundamental principle of what market cap indexing did, which is basically buy high and sell low.”
“And they had published this article around non market cap weated indexes, smart data, Yes, and it was I read this article and I'm engineer, so I love these technical things, and I just got excited, and basically a couple of months later, I reached out, We went down and spent time with Rob in Pasadena.”