He earned his M.B.A. from Harvard University. Between 1980 and 1984, he worked for Mars & Co. as a senior consultant and from 1984 to 1990, he was a consumer-retail analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co. before working as a consumer analyst (and then a managing director) at Tiger Management, a hedge fund founded by Julian Robertson. He left Tiger Management in 1997 and founded his own hedge fund, Lone Pine Capital LLC, named after a Dartmouth College pine tree that survived a 1887 lightning strike. Forbes listed Stephen Mandel as one of the 40 Highest-Earning hedge fund managers in 2012 and as one of the 25 Highest-Earning hedge fund managers in 2013.
Mandel is chairman of Dartmouth's board of trustees and also serves on the National Board of Directors at Teach for America (an American non-profit whose mission is to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting high-achieving recent college graduates and professionals to teach for at least two years in low-income communities throughout the United States). He also founded two charitable foundations: Zoom Foundation and Lone Pine Foundation
