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There’s no CEO or dress code. But there is a feng shui consultant and nostalgia for the early days of the hedge-fund craze.

No reception desk or smiling gatekeeper greets you at the entrance of Satori Investment Partners LLC’s office. There is just one big, red Oriental rug, courtesy of the feng shui consultant who helped the new hedge-fund firm incorporate the five Zen elements into its office.

The red rug signifies fire. The loftlike office’s concrete walls are earth, and overhead ducts are metal. How to incorporate water is an open question, but the partners have nixed cheesy fountains. To find the fifth element, wood, you only have to walk ahead to the heart of the evolving business, where two light-colored tables

are pushed back-to-backplaceholders for a round maple centerpiece being handcrafted by an artisan. It will anchor a semicircle of desks, each a chair-spin distance away, so Satori’s founding partners can swing around anytime for impromptu meetings. Trying to take ego out of the equation will be a key to our success, says the head of trading, a former Big Ten football player named John Kiple.

It’s all part of an effort to distinguish Satori as a softer, more sustainable hedge fund and to summon the collaborative spirit Mr. Kiple and his four partners say they felt early in their careers at pioneering Chicago options trading firm O’Connor & Associates and a branded successor. That was before an explosion of growth in the industry changed the marketplace and the nature of their jobs. We’ve all worked together for a long period of time, and so we do know, like and trust each other, says Rich Excell, chief investment officer and primary pitchman.

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Satori Investment Partners LLC’s John Kiple, from left, Patrick Whalen, Michael Taylor, Rich Excell and Chris Dardanes Photo: Manuel Martinez

With every decision, from incorporating feng shui to adopting the name Satori, which is a Japanese Zen Buddhist word meaning awakening or enlightenment, they are intent on distancing themselves from the stereotypical image of megalomaniac hedge-fund managers. Most hedge funds are autocratic and single-partner entities with strong hierarchies where the employees are just contracted and functionaries, says Patrick Whalen, a New York transplant who is chief operating officer. We are building a team approach where everyone is asked to contribute in numerous ways.

To be clear, there’s no mistaking these middle-aged traders for New Age gurus: They can’t always remember all five Zen elements, and the vibe they’re going for doesn’t extend to socially conscious investing.

And while being distinct is one thing, raising $250 million from investors, as Satori aims, is quite another.

Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP attorney David Matteson, who has long worked with hedge funds, says it’s easy to launch a fund. The challenge is luring investors. It’s just hard to be successful, he says, to attract the capital necessary to make it a viable concern.

At Satori . there’s no CEO and no dress code. On a recent Tuesday, one partner wears a T-shirt stamped with the word intrepid, and another a long-sleeved golf shirt. Sometimes, they say, a meeting shifts at the last minute to the golf course, a place where the future partners hatched the idea for the firm.

Both 46, Mr. Excell and Mr. Kiple have known each other since 1990, when they started at O’Connor the same day. They collaborated on and off over the next 20 years, even as their firm went through a tumble of transactions. (It was acquired in 1992 by Swiss Bank Corp. which in turn was absorbed in 1998 by UBS AG, Switzerland’s biggest bank.) Through it all, O’Connor employees grouped together.

Eventually the two men went on to other companies, but by 2012, each had returned to the O’Connor fund at UBS. Over lunch one day, they reflected on how much the firmand the industryhad changed from the independent days when trading managers pulled together and shared in gains and losses. That spirit, they agreed, had faded as teams grew more specialized and siloed in their work, with certain groups rewarded for performance more than the whole.

At some point in time, the structure of the hedge-fund industry changed. Collaboration was lost along that path, Mr. Kiple explains.

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quote|John Kiple, head of trading

Trying to take ego out of the equation will be a key to our success.

Their shop talk spilled over onto golf rounds with another O’Connor pal, Chris Dardanes, 50, who had left the firm along with Mr. Kiple in 2003 to found statistical consulting firm Van Buren Advisors. (They’re still stakeholders but no longer in management.) They also reached out to Michael Taylor, 48, an O’Connor portfolio manager who sat near Mr. Excell at the office for years.

Casual talk soon turned into long lunch meetings at Monk’s Pub on Wells Street. To make up for squatting at a table for hours intently brainstorming how to recapture that old O’Connor rhythm, they left big tips for Monk’s waitresses.

Then, in 2012, prompted by financial losses and intense post-crisis government scrutiny of the industry, UBS began a massive restructuring . Mr. Kiple, Mr. Excell and Mr. Taylor exited one by one. (They won’t say whether their departures were voluntary; Mr. Excell notes only that UBS is generous in its breakups.) They began seriously plotting their firm. Soon, Mr. Dardanes came on board.

At the suggestion of a big bank sales manager, they contacted Mr. Whalen, 51, a New Yorker whose views of the industry were similar and who had worked for O’Connor early in his career before shifting to such Wall Street firms as Morgan Stanley and Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. With a divorce in the works and his four kids in high school or college, he agreed to sign on as Satori chief operating officer and chief compliance officer and move to Chicago.

For what they consider the culminating chapter of their careers, each of the five partners ponied up equal investments for equal ownership stakes to start Satori. All endeavors require taking riskespecially startups, Mr. Taylor says.

Hedge funds largely are a phenomenon of the past 25 years, with the amount of capital invested in them rising nearly every year since 1990. At the end of the second quarter of 2014, an astounding $2.80 trillion had been invested.

In the early days, hedge funds mainly catered to high-net-worth clients who sought steady strong returnsand who wanted to avoid extreme swings in the marketthrough the funds’ hedging techniques. Under federal law, such funds are open only to individual investors with a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding their primary residence, or $200,000 in annual income. That’s because they’re generally less transparent, with fewer federal disclosure requirements than, say, mutual funds. They’re riskier, too, because there are fewer limits on the types of investments they make.

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In their first decade, hedge funds demonstrated impressive early returns, often of 20-plus percent, so gradually they attracted a flood of big institutional investors such as pension funds and endowments. With the influx, firms swelled and grew more bureaucratic. New funds proliferated: niche funds, copycat funds. But returns mellowed. In 2013, the average return for hedge funds was 9 percent, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. while the S&P 500 Index was up 30 percent.

The total industry has grown, but much of it is in the most well-established funds, says Ken Heinz, head of Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research. To become established is the challenging part.

That’s because institutional investors often have a strong bias toward well-known names, such as Chicago giant Citadel LLC. Nearly 90 percent of hedge-fund capital last year flowed into funds that already have $1 billion under management; the remainder mainly went to funds with less than $100 million.

Satori is the latest in a long line of O’Connor spinoffs trying to gain a foothold. Successful local spawn include Peak6 Investments LP, Getco LLC, Chicago Trading Co. and Wolverine Trading LLC. There doubtless have been failures, too, but those are mostly forgotten. In 2013, almost as many hedge funds liquidated as launched, with 1,060 starting up and 904 closing down.

Mr. Heinz argues that the bulk of failures are at funds started by novices who rely on friends and family for investments. New managers who can call on former customers are much more likely to succeed, he says. Still, it’s tough to find investors willing to take first-fund risk.

Mr. Taylor, Satori’s head of research, sees an advantage for smaller firms like Satori over larger ones, where rules and bureaucracy have choked the mission. Somewhere along the line, those rules kind of distort or lose sight of the fact that there’s this end consumer, this investor, for whom we need to deliver the best product, he says.

Satori’s partners are in constant communication. They frequently text each other business ideas, to the point that Mr. Excell’s teenage daughter tells her father that he spends more time messaging his partners than she does her friends.

To build the firm, it’s all about luring capital right nowthe trading comes later. In addition to their own contact lists, they’ve hired Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. as brokers to introduce them to prospective investors. So far, they’ve contacted some 100 prospects since mid-March, meeting some and calling or emailing others.

But it’s a steep climb. Mr. Excell says one potential investor told him he looks at 600 to 700 new funds each year.

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Nearly as many hedge funds liquidated in 2013 as launched.

For now, they’re meeting mainly with investment firms that put together funds made up of hedge fundssuch as Chicago-based Grosvenor Capital Management LP. They are also meeting with managers that invest for wealthy families and with institutional investors, though the latter are harder to lure in the early stages. They decline to name any of the prospects.

The ask: a minimum $5 million to $10 million investment, with the goal of collecting $250 million. New York is the epicenter of fundraising, so the partners have spent most of their time there. But they’ve made the occasional trips to California and Texas. The hard part, Mr. Kiple says, is that it’s a long, slow, iterative process, with an average of six to nine meetings or other touchpoints over as many months before someone writes a check.

That slow burn is not the kind of work these Chicago traders know. They’re all about fast outcomes, good or bad. It’s an immediate, says Mr. Kiple, snapping his fingers. The market tells you how smart or how dumb you are every single day. Being on the sixth meeting with four or five big investors is great, but interest is still hard to gauge, he says.

The Satori partners won’t get to invest and trade until later this year. They’re developing a strategy that takes long and short positions in stocks and stock options, with an interdisciplinary approach that draws from all of their skills. Mr. Excell is the big-picture guy, scanning the world for economic and geopolitical trends, while Mr. Kiple focuses on event-driven ripples in the markets, like acquisitions mounting in certain industries. Mr. Taylor drills down, monitoring headwinds and tailwinds in industries and at companies. Mr. Dardanes is the quant man poring over data from world economies and industries for patterns.

As for Mr. Whalen, he tends the operations, overseeing accounting and human resources, among other things. Following the Bernie Madoff scandal, in which investors were bilked of $64 billion, potential customers want to know the business is sound, he says.

To demonstrate their commitment, the partners tell prospects that they’ve personally got a majority of their liquid net worth wrapped up in the fund. They won’t say how much that is, but it’s likely at least millions of dollars, thanks to each of their two decades of earnings.

While they’re asking a standard 1.5 percent to 2 percent annual management fee on capital invested and 20 percent of returns, early investors may be able to negotiate better deals. On the cost side, some vendors are allowing a long-term payment schedule.

Satori’s partners aren’t locking themselves into any particular growth goal, but they’re optimistic. They draw inspiration from their headquarters’ previous tenant: a software company that grew so fast it tripled its staff and was forced to seek bigger digs.