Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

Anne - Marie   Fink  is the Head of Private Markets and Funds Alpha at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board or SWIB, which manages $140 billion of pension funds in the state. SWIB is not your typical U.S. pension fund manager. It invests with outstanding governance, alignment with beneficiaries, delegated authority, a competitively compensated team, and cutting-edge strategies, all of which hav...

My last post, The Investment Office Playbook: What Managers Don't See , discussed part of what happens inside an investment office that managers don't see but that significantly influences the cadence of capital deployed to managers. Of course, there are two sides to every coin. This post discusses what allocators don't see when a manager chooses to grow. Read Ted's blog  here .

Alexis Ohanian is the General Partner and Founder of Seven Seven Six, an early-stage venture capital firm with $1 billion under management that he describes as a technology company that deploys venture capital. Alexis was the co-founder of Reddit, one of the most popular online forums in the world, which he sold 18 months after its 2005 launch for $10 million and returned as Executive Chair in 201...

Dan Tennebaum is the Managing Director at India Capital, a thirty-year-old investment firm focusing on public equities in India. Dan moved to the country twenty-five years ago and spent time in the start-up world and venture capital before pivoting to the public markets in 2007. Our conversation covers Dan's path from a U.S. Midwesterner to India, the challenges of venture capital investing in the...

Brett Barakett is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Tremblant Capital, a 23-year-old long-short equity and long-only firm focused on deep fundamental stock research with a senior team that has been together for at least sixteen years. Brett has invested through rising and falling tides in the industry, ups and downs in fund flows, and alongside friends and peers who have since retired. Y...

Cliff Asness is the Founder and CIO at AQR, an investment management firm at the intersection of financial theory and practice that oversees $100 billion in assets. He is famously intelligent, comical, and irreverent, all wrapped into one. Our conversation covers Cliff's journey from studying market efficiency under Eugene Fama to capitalizing on market inefficiencies at AQR. We discuss regime cha...

3G Capital's buyout of Burger King may be the most successful private equity deal you've never heard about. Over the last fourteen years, or the length of a typical private equity fund, 3G turned a $1 billion investment into $28 billion in value. The annual dividends from the investment accruing to 3G today are around 70% of its invested capital. The deal is one of the highest earning buyouts ever...

Alex Abell is a Managing Partner at RCP Advisors, which at $14 billion of committed capital, is one of the largest firms focused exclusively on lower-middle market buyouts. Alex has spent twenty-three years in the business, starting on the LP side, building Atlas Diligence – a research and advisory platform focused on advanced analytics, and then merging Atlas with RCP a decade ago. Today, he help...

Letitia Johnson is the CIO of Amherst College, where she manages the school's $4 billion endowment. After thirteen years working with twenty-five clients and attending over 1,000 Investment Committee meetings at Cambridge Associates, Letitia developed a view about investing that differs from many similar pools of capital and has applied that view over the last five years. Our conversation covers t...

David Morehead is the CIO at Baylor University, where he oversees the $2.2 billion endowment. David came to Baylor thirteen years ago after an eighteen-year investment career that spanned every aspect of public markets investing. He created an approach to investing at Baylor that is quite different from others in the seat. David recently started sharing his insightful perspectives on the craft on...

On today's show, we'll discuss another empty room – an opportunity ignored by most investors because they either don't want to or can't participate. We've shared conversations under this theme about a range of forgotten opportunities from specific emerging markets to biotech. Previous episodes are available under the mini-series or topic search at  capitalallocators.com . This time around, we disc...

Chris Dixon is a General Partner at a16z where he leads Crypto investing, overseeing the largest pool in the space at $7 billion across four dedicated venture funds and a team of eighty professionals. Chris is one of the leading voices in the crypto ecosystem and topped the Forbes 'Midas List' as the most successful venture capitalist in the world in 2021. He was a guest on the show last year, and...

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...

Shiloh Bates is the Chief Investment Officer at Flat Rock Global, an alternative credit manager specializing in the junior tranches of CLOs. Last year, Shiloh published CLO Investing, a comprehensive review of the structure, payoff rules, and historical performance of CLOs. Our conversation covers Shiloh's twenty-five years spent in and around the space, an overview of the market, the characterist...

Nigel Dawn is the global head of Private Capital Advisory at Evercore, where he leads the secondaries business he started a decade ago. Under Nigel's leadership, Evercore had become the market leader in transaction volume and is involved in approximately 30-40% of all secondaries market activity . Our conversation covers Nigel's observations on the growing secondaries market, including its history...

I've been thinking about the investment office playbook and what managers don't see when they meet with allocators. Read Ted's blog  here .

Today's show is the first in an ongoing mini-series discussing Training Grounds, organizations that have developed and spawned future industry leaders. We'll cover both allocators and managers to see what we can learn about developing talent. In the first episode of the mini-series, we discuss Carnegie Corporation of New York. Ellen Shuman became Carnegie's first CIO in 1999 after working for Davi...

Blythe Masters a Founding Partner of Motive Partners, a $6 billion specialist private equity platform that builds, backs, and buys technology companies that enable the financial services industry. Blythe spent 27 years at JP Morgan, starting as a teenager and rising to the firmwide Executive Committee. Her path included roles as the head of global commodities, head of corporate and investment bank...

Jonathan Tepper is the CIO of Prevatt Capital, a $450 million long only firm he founded in 2020 that takes a quality and value approach to own a concentrated portfolio of global monopolies. He is also the author of The Myth of Capitalism, a book we discussed alongside his career path on the show five years ago. That conversation is replayed in the feed. Our conversation this time around bookends o...

Jonathan Tepper is the founder of Variant Perception , an economic research group that works with institutional managers, hedge funds, and allocators to provide objective and comprehensive data to form actionable ideas from leading indicators and emerging trends. He is also the author of three books, the most recent of which, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition , receiv...

Mike Freno is the Chairman & CEO of Barings, a $400 billion global manager that invests across public and private fixed income, real assets, and capital solutions on behalf of its insurance company parent MassMutual and other institutions. Barings emerged from a combination of four investment brands in 2016 and has expanded its capabilities by acquiring partners with complementary skills that fit...

Michael Leffell is the Managing Member of Portage Partners, Chairman of Canoe Intelligence, and Founder and Chairman of 10 East, an investment platform for sophisticated investors to access private markets by co-investing alongside Michael. Michael was former Deputy Executive Managing Member of Davidson Kempner, where he spent twenty-one years before retiring in 2010. He formed a family office sho...

A long time ago, 33 years to be exact, Mike Milken pled guilty to 6 counts of violations of securities laws, went to jail for 2 years, and received a lifetime ban from the securities industry. He was at the time the most successful and powerful man on Wall Street and remains one of the smartest and most successful backers of talent in finance, cancer research and education.   Most of us have forme...

Michael Milken is a legendary financier and philanthropist. Mike is best known for his role in creating the high yield bond market in the 1970s and 1980s at Drexel Burnham Lambert, his guilty plea, and his remarkable philanthropic efforts over fifty years supporting medical research, education, and public health. Under Mike's leadership, upstart Drexel became the most successful securities firm on...

Michael Mauboussin is the Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global, a $70 billion equity manager. Michael is renowned for his ability to articulate important investment concepts backed by academic research. His first of three prior conversations on the show is replayed in the feed. You can find the rest at capitalallocators.com . Our conversation explores Michael's most recent piece on p...