Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

Vik Uppal is the Founder and CIO of Mavik Capital Management, a $2 billion flexible special situations investment firm grounded in commercial real estate and hard assets that operates through a credit lens. Vik began developing properties as a teenager and after a difficult experience during the financial crisis, moved to New York to begin a career as a professional investor.   Our conversation covers Vik's path from developer to distressed investor and the principles he built Mavik around: stable capital, alignment, flexibility, and finding opportunities where capital is scarce. We discuss filtering a wide funnel for ideas, creating downside protection, identifying o...

Zack McGuire is Senior Managing Director of Investments at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.   Zack's career spans Citigroup, Emory University, the University of Georgia Foundation, and the Maine Public Employees Retirement System before joining Children's three and a half years ago.   His responsibilities extend well beyond investing into team leadership, overseeing the investment process, and strategic initiatives across the broader healthcare system.   Our conversation covers how an institution's capital base shapes its investment strategy, CHOA's thematic approach to portfolio construction, empowering a team of generalists, and leveraging investment relationships to support the broader institution.   Zack brings humility, curiosity, and conviction to his...

My guest on today's show is Scott Ramsower, Head of Private Equity Funds at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, where a 27-person team manages $33 billion in private equity for the $250 billion pension plan. Scott started his LP career at AlpInvest and joined Texas Teachers sixteen years ago, when the private equity program was six people and $7 billion. He also chairs the board of ILPA.     Our conversation covers Scott's path from equity research to the LP seat and the growth of the Texas Teachers program. We then turn to continuation vehicles and the reasons LPs have grown wary of them, fr...

Ben Harrison is President of Industries at Intapp, a leading provider of software solutions to professional and financial services firms. Ben first joined me three years ago to discuss DealCloud, Intapp's platform serving the private capital community. Since then, Intapp has nearly tripled in size, and the rapid development of AI has created an entirely new opportunity for the business.     Our conversation explores what Ben calls "firm AI" — moving beyond using AI to conduct research, build models, or create presentations to deploying agents that draw on a firm's institutional memory and execute its workflows.     We discuss how AI is changing sourci...

This Sponsored Insight features Ben Harrison, Founder and Co-President of DealCloud, our sponsor for Season 3 of Private Equity Deals.

My guest on today's show is Tracy Britt Cool, co-founder of Kanbrick, a long-term investment partnership that provides owners of family-owned, midsized businesses with a differentiated option from traditional private equity.     Tracy launched the business after spending ten years at Berkshire Hathaway as one of Warren Buffett's few deputies. She started out of business school as a financial assistant to Buffett, served as Chair of several Berkshire portfolio companies, and later became CEO of Pampered Chef.     Our conversation covers Tracy's journey, including lessons from Buffett and the value of operating experience. We turn to the application of those lessons at Kanb...

Our next guest on the Senior Decision Makers series is Erlina Yeo Terwelp, a Managing Director at Columbia Investment Management Company, where she oversees the endowment's private markets portfolio.   Erlina's path spans investment banking, private equity, growth equity, and family office investing before she joined Columbia nearly a decade ago. Our conversation covers her evolution as an allocator, how she thinks about manager selection and portfolio construction, the growing role of leadership and team development in her seat, and her perspective on generalist versus specialist team models after working within both.   Erlina is candid, thoughtful, and funny — with a deep comm...

Charlie Rose is the Global Head of Real Estate Credit at Invesco, where he oversees an $85 billion global platform. Before joining Invesco, Charlie worked in real estate as an academic researcher, jack-of-all-trades through the financial crisis, and investor up and down the capital stack for eight years at Canyon Partners.

Stephen McLennan is the Co-Chief Investment Officer of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, where he oversees asset allocation for the $300 billion fund responsible for the retirement security of 346,000 teachers. Stephen joined OTPP in 2003 and worked across credit, natural resources, infrastructure, and Total Fund Management, before splitting the CIO seat with Gillian Brown in 2024 — a dual-CIO structure that is unique among Canada's largest pension funds.  

Our conversation traces that path and discusses OTPP's total portfolio strategy, including the balance of top-down asset allocation with bottom-up investing, role of active management, liquidity, leverage, and internal and e...

Nancy Zimmerman is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Bracebridge Capital, a $13 billion alternative asset manager specializing in fixed income arbitrage that she founded over 30 years ago, in 1994, alongside Gabe Sunshine with capital from David Swensen at Yale. 

Our conversation traces Nancy's evolution from pricing securities to investing and the enduring sources of inefficiency in fixed income markets. We discuss the nature of arbitrage opportunities and their persistence over time and then turn to hunting for mispricings today across developed market rates, structured credit, corporates, and emerging markets. Along the way, we cover Bracebridge's process f...

André Perold is the co-founder and CIO of HighVista Strategies, an alternative asset manager overseeing $14 billion that searches for alpha opportunities in structurally inefficient markets. André has twice been a past guest on the show, starting way back with episode #2 and both conversations are replayed on the feed. 

This conversation starts with André's assessment of the most exciting and unusual investment environment he has experienced, alongside his thoughts on how to build capabilities and construct portfolios to navigate exponential change. We then turn to the beautifully inefficient markets where HighVista has built core...

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 HighVista over the last few years. We discuss changes in the business and the firm's response by focusing on inefficient markets. We then dive into examples of opportunities in biotech, private credit and litigation finance, and close with a perspective on act...

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 spent over 30 years teaching at the HBS, where he is the George Gund Professor of Finance and Banking, Emeritus.

André had a distinguished career teaching investment management at Harvard and is a legen...

AI is top of mind for everyone in the investment business. Our Summits are abuzz with curiosity about what others are doing.

I asked 8 CIOs to share how they're using AI today, including what's working and what isn't, the tools they've adopted, and where they're headed next. They range from a single-family office with one investment professional to one of the largest pension funds in the world with thousands.

What emerged is a range of use cases — from using AI as a personal productivity tool, to changing investment workflows, organizing institutional kn...

This week's Summer Series concludes with a two-fer on habits. There may be no better way to improve the investment process than to understand what it takes to improve ourselves.  We've got two of the best – James Clear and Katy Milkman, experts and authors of wildly bestselling books Atomic Habits and How to Change.

Please enjoy my conversations with James Clear and Katy Milkman, both from 2021.

We hope you've enjoyed this summer exploration in improving the investment process with some of the best conversations over the last nine years.

<...

This week's Summer Series concludes with a two-fer on habits. There may be no better way to improve the investment process than to understand what it takes to improve ourselves.  We've got two of the best – James Clear and Katy Milkman, experts and authors of wildly bestselling books Atomic Habits and How to Change.

Please enjoy my conversations with James Clear and Katy Milkman, both from 2021.

We hope you've enjoyed this summer exploration in improving the investment process with some of the best conversations over the last nine years.

We're excited to share something we've been working on for a while: we're bringing Capital Allocators University online.


For years, CAU has been an in-person, once-a-year cohort of 25 or 30 professionals, built around a set of disciplines that matter enormously for investors and investor relations professionals but rarely get taught explicitly. We put together a brief conversation to share more on what the course covers, who it's for, what we learned from the past five years, and why we decided to move it online.


Full details here. We look forward to welcoming you as...

This week's Summer Series is another two-fer, this time on negotiations. The first is with legendary former FBI-hostage negotiator Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference and founder of the Black Swan group where he teaches tactical empathy in negotiations.  The second is with Yale professor Daylian Cain, who opened my eyes to the importance of walking away.

Learn more about Capital Allocators University.

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A...

This week's Summer Series is another two-fer, this time on negotiations. The first is with legendary former FBI-hostage negotiator Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference and founder of the Black Swan group where he teaches tactical empathy in negotiations.  The second is with Yale professor Daylian Cain, who opened my eyes to the importance of walking away.

Learn more about Capital Allocators University.

Try ALEX by Admired Leadership.

Learn More
Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn
Subscribe to the mailing list

This week's Summer Series is a two-fer on the essential skill of storytelling. Whether pitching an investment fund to a prospect, an idea to a portfolio manager or CIO, or a request of a family member, storytelling helps you get what you want.

To help understand the art and science of storytelling, Matt Dicks – a retired middle school teacher and author of the best-seller Storyworthy, and Don Miller – creator of Storybrand, a business started with his book of the same name – describe how to improve your storytelling ability.

Learn more about Capital Allocat...

This week's Summer Series is a two-fer on the essential skill of storytelling. Whether pitching an investment fund to a prospect, an idea to a portfolio manager or CIO, or a request of a family member, storytelling helps you get what you want.

To help understand the art and science of storytelling, Matt Dicks – a retired middle school teacher and author of the best-seller Storyworthy, and Don Miller – creator of Storybrand, a business started with his book of the same name – describe how to improve your storytelling ability.

Learn more about Capital Allocat...

This week's Summer Series covers the pre-mortem analysis with its founder, Gary Klein. Gary discovered pre-mortems while working with fighter pilots and wrote a white paper applying the tool to investment analysis alongside Paul Johnson and Paul Sonkin. Please enjoy this discussion of the proper use of pre-mortem analysis with Gary, Paul, and Paul from 2019.


Learn more about Capital Allocators University: https://www.capitalallocators.com/capital-allocators-university/

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This week's Summer Series is a highly atypical episode, where I appear as the guest.  Matt Breitfelder from Apollo asked to interview me about interviewing, something I learned far more from hosting the show the last nine years than I ever did while interviewing managers for 20. The conversation has been sufficiently popular that it made the Summer Series on investment process.

Any leader should see for themselves the benefits of elite coaching. Try ALEX: tryalex.admiredleadership.com.

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Access Transc...

This What Ted's Thinking brings Situational Awareness to the underlying causes of hedge fund disasters.

Read Ted's blog here.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

Our Summer Series kickoff is with one of the all-time greats, Annie Duke. The former world-class poker player has become a noted academic and practitioner in the art of decision-making. Her best-seller Thinking in Bets is a one-of-a-kind set of tools and tips to try (emphasis on try) to get past our embedded behavioral biases.  And her follow-up works How to Decide and Quit pull different threads in the decision-making process.

Since writing Thinking in Bets, Annie has consulted several investment organizations to apply her insights to investing, including becoming a Special Partner focused on Dec...

Our Summer Series kickoff is with one of the all-time greats, Annie Duke. The former world-class poker player has become a noted academic and practitioner in the art of decision-making. Her best-seller Thinking in Bets is a one-of-a-kind set of tools and tips to try (emphasis on try) to get past our embedded behavioral biases.  And her follow-up works How to Decide and Quit pull different threads in the decision-making process.

Since writing Thinking in Bets, Annie has consulted several investment organizations to apply her insights to investing, including becoming a Special Partner focused on Dec...

Lauren Hochfelder is Head of Global Real Assets at Morgan Stanley, where she oversees a team of 300 investment professionals across 13 countries, managing $80 billion across real estate, infrastructure, equity and credit. Lauren joined Morgan Stanley as an investment banking analyst directly out of Yale 26 years ago and has spent her entire career at the firm, helping build one of the industry's leading platforms.

Our conversation traces Lauren's journey from analyst to Global Head and the evolution of Morgan Stanley's real estate business before, during, and after the Global Financial Crisis. We cover the firm's thematic approach to investing behin...

Michelle Knudsen is Chief Investment Officer of NYU, where she oversees the university's $8 billion endowment. Michelle joined NYU two years ago, after fourteen years as an allocator at Partners Capital and the Mellon Foundation, with a mandate to build a best-in-class endowment from a clean sheet of paper.

Our conversation traces Michelle's lessons learned working at Goldman Sachs, a growing OCIO, and a foundation that shaped her investment philosophy and views on portfolio construction, risk management, and manager selection. We then turn to the transformation of NYU's investment office from the ground up across governance, portfolio str...

Our next guest on the Senior Decision Makers series is Luis Laboy, Director of Public Equity at the Hewlett Foundation, where he's spent the last decade running the public equity book alongside CIO Ana Marshall — a mentor and colleague he first met nearly thirty years ago. The foundation's assets stand at roughly $14 billion today.

Luis spent fifteen years as a direct emerging markets investor at Everest Capital before crossing to the LP side, and our conversation digs into how he's leveraged that experience as an allocator. We discuss how the cadence and depth of decision-making changed when he went fr...

Frank Danieli is Head of Global Credit Solutions at MA Financial Group, an ASX-listed alternative asset manager that oversees A$15 billion ($10 billion) across a broad range of private credit and lending strategies and A$179 billion ($125 billion) in a lending ecosystem platform. Frank began his career in restructurings, the self-described 'dark side of credit', and has used the lessons from special situations and distressed loans to build a performing credit platform across asset backed finance, direct asset lending and corporate private credit.

Our conversation discusses what global investors can learn from the model of private credit in A...

Baroness Dambisa Moyo is a global economist, author, board member, and investor who sits at the intersection of public policy, corporate governance, and capital allocation. Dambisa serves in the U.K. House of Lords, sits on the boards of Chevron, Starbucks, Condé Nast, and Oxford University's investment committee, is Chair of the Economic Club of New York, and oversees Altered Trajectory alongside her husband, Jared Smith, the family office formed after his sale of Qualtrics in 2018.

Our conversation traces Dambisa's journey from growing up in Zambia to becoming a leading voice on global economic development and g...

This WTT, 5.5 Lessons at 55.5 reflects on what five-and-a-half decades of investing, podcasting, and mistakes have taught me about people, markets, and myself.

Read Ted's blog here.

Pat Dorsey is the Founder of Dorsey Asset Management, a $1.7 billion global public equity manager focused on companies with competitive advantages and long investment runways. Pat created Morningstar's moat research framework and led its equity research efforts for a dozen years before launching his firm in 2014.

Our conversation covers the nuances of investing in businesses with wide moats across quantitative analysis, switching costs, network effects, brands, management, alignment, capital allocation, and reinvestment runways. We then turn to Pat's application of moat analysis to his investing, including concentration, global scope, position sizing, decision making, and lessons learned.

Any leader should see...

Our first guest on the Senior Decision Makers mini-series is Nick Csicsko. Nick is a Managing Director at the Trinity Wall Street endowment, where he joined CIO Meredith Jenkins at the founding of the investment office in 2016 and has spent the last decade helping build a young endowment inside a 320-year-old institution. Today the endowment has grown to over $6 billion.

Nick's path into investing is a fascinating one. He studied composition and earned his Doctorate of Music at Juilliard. While there, he talked his way into an internship at Juilliard's endowment and never looked back.

...

Abigail Wattley is the Chief Investment Officer of Williams College, where she oversees the school's $4.5 billion endowment. She became CIO three years ago upon the retirement of Collette Chilton, whose past conversation is replayed in the feed.  Abigail has spent two decades in the Williams investment office, and her tenure manifests the benefits of duration and institutional knowledge in the seat.

Our conversation traces Abigail's nearly twenty-year journey inside the Williams Investment Office, from joining as an early analyst to becoming the internal successor CIO. We discuss the consistent mandate throughout alongside Abigail's evolution from analyst to deputy to d...

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 her one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Finance in 2020.   Our conversation covers Collette's career path and lessons learned before joining Williams. We then turn to her arrival at Williams in 2006 to a phone, a computer, and a...

This WTT, AI: Fundamentals, Valuation, and the Next Allocator Dilemma takes on a high-level assessment of AI companies as late-stage private winners prepare to go public, and the next big challenge allocators face as a result.

Read Ted's blog here.

Jonathan Wang is the founder and CEO of EOS Investors, where he has built three real estate investment platforms totaling $2 billion in assets under management across the hotel and residential sectors. Jonathan also created a wholly owned hotel management company that oversees 60 properties for the EOS funds and five core partners.  
 

Our conversation covers Jonathan's path to hotel investing and EOS' hotel investment process across market selection, property type, underwriting, vertically integrated operations, and managing through cycles. We also discuss extensions into residential real estate, hotel credit, and opportunities and risks going forward.

Rajiv Jain is the Chairman and CIO of GQG Partners, a global equity manager he founded in 2016 that has soared to $160 billion in assets, rebuffing the challenging decade for active managers.   

Our conversation covers Rajiv's path from trading in India to his long tenure at Vontobel and founding of GQG. We discuss the periodic crisis lessons that shaped his approach, his definition of quality, team dynamics, and portfolio construction to avoid losses. We then turn to Rajiv's contrarian views, including current significant positions in energy, utilities, steel, tobacco, and emerging markets, avoidance of hyperscalers and semiconductors, and nimbleness...

Erik Brooks is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ethos Capital, a middle-market private equity firm built to bring seasoned C-Suite operators into every aspect of the investment process. Erik's experience prior to founding Ethos in 2019 spanned privatizations in Eastern Europe, value investing at Baupost, and twenty years at Abry Partners.

Our conversation covers Erik's path to private equity, lessons learned about risk, the importance of betting on people, and the evolution in his thinking that led to forming Ethos. We then cover Ethos' focus on durable business models, one-deal-a-year cadence, operating system to evaluate and...