Institutional Allocators

“One thing we've learned is if we're going to step into a burning building, it's helpful to have lived in the neighborhood before. We've had great experiences stepping into burning buildings in our portfolio, less good experiences stepping into new burning buil…”

“When you're talking to institutional allocators and professional LPs, family offices and endowments, when you've got a basket of SPVs, they don't look at it the same way as a pooled capital vehicle for obvious reasons. and so if you really think ultimately w…”

“I never had a feedback loop. I never came out of a meeting with a manager and said, how did I do? It was always, oh, what do we think of them? Are we going to have another meeting? Or thank God they're in our portfolio, or we got to get out of that manager. Th…”

“I'm sure there will be times in the future where we have venture booms again, but the odds of systematically finding firms that are Consistently producing 20% plus returns and the occasional 80% returning fund. It's going to be very, very hard for that to happ…”

“When people are doing this strategic asset allocation, you're about the third derivative from choice. Their first thing is, what's our funding ratio? What's our actual rate of return? What should the portfolio look like? How should we populate it? And then who…”

“What I appreciate is when folks come in when they're not fundraising, it sets up a fundamentally non-transactional relationship, or can, obviously not always.”

“Number two, there's certain questions you never ask. Are you going to invest with me? Do you like me? How do I compare? Did I do a good job? You don't ask those questions. You follow up more elegantly.”

“We're not going to be able to influence managers by our size. It has to be because they think we're smart. So how do you show people you're smart? You serve on panels, you ask good questions in meetings, you become engaged and offer advice to managers.”

“The truth is, this business is such a long sales cycle. You can come here and have 20 or 30 meetings. You may not get an allocation from any of those investors for years. If you're a really big, well-established manager, it's probably less than 12 months. If y…”

“The ones that you have today will not be the people who take you to the next opportunity for five years from now. It just won't be the same people. If it is, great, but it probably won't be.”

“Focus on the guy who's going to get you three or four X your money for whatever the fee is, as opposed to the guy who's going to get you two X for a discounted fee.”

“Most of the institutions are non-taxable, so this idea of owning things for the long term and trading off volatility for after-tax return, I think, is less relevant for them. They've got current funding needs. Looking at a public equity strategy with a five or…”

“What is hard is that you're always looking at managers who have done well recently. That's why they're raising capital. So you have that behavioral bias, you want to get in, And you're willing to overlook things that in retrospect were always there.”

“The other issue that happens that we see is there's these pockets of money that you have to be majority owned by a woman, and I think that also just kind of is hurting the women who are leading firms, but maybe had to take outside capital to get started becaus…”

“I think it's difficult to onboard a manager in general, so I think probably the biggest hurdle to overcome is when we're an emerging women-led manager, so there's a lot of assets that are looking for opportunities to be able to help firms like us grow. However…”

“The best allocators, especially in, I grew up in the institutional community, like the best allocators They underwrite people philosophy process. They're not looking for the best five year track record. If they were doing that, they'd be performance chasers an…”

“Over 20 years, we've never had a formal sales and marketing effort. We don't have any, you know, institutional sales people on staff or anything, and we closed one out of every three conversations we had with institutional allocators back in 2000”

“Most people don't know this, but like large institutional allocators tend to act in concert, but they're also in this game theory problem where if there's, you know, five investors in somebody's fund, everyone's sort of pointing at each other, wondering what t…”

“Everyone I know doesn't think that a portfolio of hedge funds, generally speaking, will get them the returns that they need for their portfolio, but they do believe that their hedge funds will get them there.”

“There are some current projects in process in those institutions, but I think it's not the right application. It really is the most people-driven portion of the investment industry.”

“The big secret, just so you don't have to buy the book, was the advantage of the small investor has is patience. There's much more data available. Time horizons are shrinking. They're not growing.”

“Because you don't really learn about these issue areas and the best practices until you actually start doing it in some capacity. And we find that those clients who start off with an eye towards fully integrating the portfolio in a sustainability lens, but are…”

“There was a much, much bigger group of interested investors who loved the idea of being able to tilt their portfolio with the types of themes that we developed. But when push came to shove, we looked so different that they didn't have the investment team infra…”

“In a time like this where things are rapidly changing and we're going to be required to communicate with our committees and asset owners, time is too precious to have a manager meeting.”

“As you grow in assets, I think it's a very difficult thing to try to keep to that 10 core managers and focus just simply because you can't get enough access.”

“When people are thinking about investing, they need to think about what they're doing, how it correlates to the rest of the portfolio. Is this really what we think it is? And really look at the quality of the returns, and it's a much bigger thing than that. Do…”

“One of the challenges for many investment managers these days is that a lot of their clients are both investing through managers and investing on their own account. And so investment managers rationally sometimes can be Scared of showing their positions to, Yo…”

“I would say on the institutional side, allocators are very good at creating confusion and problems that don't exist.”

“The problem is if that were the case and that were the only way to get into business and have a successful business, you'd probably only have 20 or 30 Investment funds in the world, because very few people have the alignment of, they have the capital, they hav…”