Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

Ari Paul is the co-founder and chief investment officer of BlockTower Capital, a crypto and blockchain investment firm he started alongside Matthew Goetz in 2017 with backing from Andreesen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. He started his career as a trader at Susquehanna International Group, and later found his way to the University of Chicago endowment as a portfolio manager, overseeing an int...

Seth Ginns is Managing Partner and Head of Liquid Investments at CoinFund, which he joined a year ago after a seventeen-year run as a large cap growth equity research analyst at Jennison Associates.  While in that role, Seth began angel investing a decade ago and became an early investor in Coinbase, Bitcoin, and Ethereum, which eventually led to diving into the space full-time.   Our conversation...

Michael Sonnenshein is the CEO of Grayscale Investments, which is the world's largest digital currency asset manager with $40 billion under management.  Grayscale offers investors access and exposure to digital currencies in the familiar format of publicly traded vehicles. Our conversation discusses the basics of how institutional investors can participate in cryptocurrency investing, including co...

Eric Peters is the founder and CIO One River Asset Management, where he searches for high conviction strategies coming out of his team's expertise trading and investing in thematic macro, volatility, systematic, and inflation strategies – each as it turns out, turned his focus on study bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.   Eric made news in November when he executed a $600 million purchase of bitcoin, t...

Chris Dixon is a General Partner at Andreesen Horowitz, where he focuses on the a16z Crypto Funds.  Before joining Andreesen in 2013, Chris co-founded, built and sold two technology companies and was a prolific seed investor, founding member of Founder Collective, and personal investor.  At various spots along the way, Chris was an investor in BuzzFeed, Uber, Venmo, Hotel Tonight, Coinbase, and Oc...

Alex Shahidi and Damien Bisserier are the Co-CIOs and of Evoke Wealth and ARIS Consulting, a $19 billion registered investment advisor they co-founded in 2014.  Alex came at the business from a long tenure advising portfolios at Merrill Lynch, and Damien joined after nine years at Bridgewater.   Our conversation covers their respective backgrounds, shared investment philosophy, and strategy of sea...

Rostin Behnam is the Acting Chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. He was nominated and approved by the prior administration in 2017 to serve as one of five Commissioners of the CFTC and in January, accepted the role as Acting Chairman. The CFTC has a mission to promote the integrity, resilience, and vibrancy of the U.S. derivatives markets, working towards effective price discove...

Jennifer Prosek is the founder and CEO of Prosek Partners, a leading international public relations and financial communications consultancy and a popular past guest on the show.  In our first conversation, we discussed branding an asset management firm and many of Jen's leadership nuggets of wisdom.  That conversation follows on the feed.   Our second conversation discusses the evolution of marke...

Jennifer Prosek is the founder and CEO of Prosek Partners, a leading international public relations and financial communications consultancy with offices in New York, London, Los Angeles and Connecticut. Prosek Partners ranks among the top 10 independent public relations firms in the U.S., and among the top financial communications consultancies.  The firm has been listed as an Inc. 5000 Fastest G...

David Baran and Kazuhiko Shibata are the co-founders of Symphony Financial Partners, a twenty-year old Asia-based manager of $1.3 billion in assets. Symphony focuses on deeply undervalued companies in Japan, with a long-bias, constructive engagement strategy to work closely alongside willing management teams to see intrinsic value reflected in the share price.   Our conversation covers their early...

I am excited to share the first episode of a new podcast called The Decision Education Podcast .  It's the brainchild of the Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit on whose Advisory Board I serve, whose mission is founded on the belief that better decisions lead to better lives and a better society. In the first season of the podcast, Dr. Joe Sweeney talks to experts and shares tips on all...

Today's show is a preview of a mini-series coming in a few months, where I'll be speaking with some of the preeminent leaders in private equity to learn more about what the continuing insatiable interest in the asset class is all about.   Paul Salem is a Senior Managing Director Emeritus at Providence Equity. Providence is a premier private equity and asset management firm focused on media, commun...

Collette Chilton is the CIO of Williams College where she has overseen its $3 billion since 2006. Collette is nothing short of a legend in the business. She has sat in a CIO seat since the early 1990s at the helm of public pension MassPrim and corporate pension Lucent before joining Williams. Institutional Investors bestowed its Lifetime Achievement Award on Collette in 2019, and Barron's named he...

Fran Kinniry is a twenty-three year veteran at the Vanguard Group, where he's led the teams that spearhead Vanguard's research into new products. Fran helped Vanguard enter the direct advice business, developed Vanguard's Advisor Alpha concept, started its Investment Strategy Group, and most recently heads Vanguard's latest initiative investing in private equity. Our conversation covers an overvie...

Chris Dixon is a General Partner at Andreesen Horowitz, where he focuses on the a16z Crypto Funds.  Before joining Andreesen in 2013, Chris co-founded, built and sold two technology companies and was a prolific seed investor, founding member of Founder Collective, and personal investor.  At various spots along the way, Chris was an investor in BuzzFeed, Uber, Venmo, Hotel Tonight, Coinbase, and Oc...

James Clear, author of last year's New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, which has already sold 3 million copies worldwide.  James also publishes a weekly email entitled 3-2-1 Thursday that works to deliver the most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web. You can sign up at  jamesclear.com   Our conversation covers James' entrepreneurial missteps that led to writing, following what worked...

With a big thank you for your enthusiastic engagement with the show, Ted offers a year in review of the podcast and the business behind the podcast.  He closes with a countdown of the top episodes of 2020. Learn More Read the  Transcript Subscribe to the  Capital Allocators Blog or Monthly Mailing List Don't Subscribe, but  Let Us Know Who You Are Write a review on  iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at...

Rahul Moodgal has spent 20 years as a fund raiser across long only strategies, hedge funds, fund of funds, customized solutions, start-ups, and non-profits.  Collectively, Rahul has raised and helped raise $60 billion for firms since 2005.  He started his career in the industry at powerhouse TT International, and later joined The Children's Investment Fund (TCI) where he led the marketing effort t...

Dan Rasmussen is the Founder and portfolio manager at Verdad Advisers, which he launched in 2014 to replicate the historical success of private equity in the public markets.  He's an outspoken critic of the market's enthusiasm for private equity, resulting from research he conducted in the business while working at Bain Capital. Our conversation covers Dan's early education in the Socratic method,...

Gregory Zuckerman is a special writer at the Wall Street Journal and the author of five books, including his most recent, The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution .  Greg joined the Journal in 1996 and writes about big financial trades, firms, and personalities.  He's a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb award, the highest honor in business journalism, and his...

In the midst of this unprecedented time, I thought it would be helpful to hear from James Aitken, the extraordinary macro strategist who specializes in understanding the functioning of the financial system. I reached out to James with one key question in mind – are we facing a systemic risk outside of what we see happening to the economy and markets.  That conversation follows. Please stay safe an...

Morgan Housel is a partner at Collaborative Fund and one of my favorite writers about investing. Morgan recently released his first book, The Psychology of Money, and I'll go on record and predict it will be a best-seller in short order. Our conversation starts with Morgan's non-traditional education, his path to writing, and his process for writing each week. We then turn to the book and discuss...

Annie Duke, former professional poker player, decision-making expert, best-selling author, and regular guest on the show. Annie's latest masterpiece is her book entitled How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices, and it releases next week. How to Decide follows her best-seller Thinking in Bets, shifting from highlighting causes of bad decisions to discussing process for making better o...

André Perold, the Co-Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of HighVista Strategies, a $4B firm with roots in endowment-style investing that searches for inefficiencies across asset classes. André was the 2nd guest on the show, where we discussed his background as a renowned investment professor at HBS and the founding of HighVista.   Our second conversation covers the evolution of HighVist...

André Perold is the Chief Investment Officer and Co-Managing Partner at HighVista Strategies, where for the last dozen years he has sat at the helm of a now $3 billion fund that takes a multi-asset class, endowment-like approach emphasizing broad diversification and risk management. Over this period, André has definitively rebuffed the cliché that those who can't do, teach. In his prior career, he...