Ted Seides

“For the last 1520 years, people became familiar with behavioral biases, all the Kahneman and Tversky work. But most of that just prescribed the problem. Didn't tell you what to do about it.”

“One of the things you hear when you listen is that the best investor relations people, the best salespeople are far more listeners and question askers than the stereotype would tell you that they are.”

“He also was someone who, when you were on the team, it was white, and when you were off the team, it was black. He hadn't want me to leave to go to business school, so in those four years, I occupied an unusual gray role.”

“David made many people's careers. He could have made mine had he chose to. After that day, he decidedly chose not to.”

“What I tell leaders all the time, Ted, is they need to get out of the feedback business and get in the recommendation and suggestion business. They're going to be able to give a lot more feedback a lot more often with a lot less resistance and defensiveness ju…”

“A how question, if it's done and carries feedback, actually embeds the feedback inside the question. When I say to you, Ted, how are you going to upgrade the talent on your team? The feedback is that your team talent needs to be upgraded. But I don't say that.…”

“If our investment results are the same and our tenure at Capital Group's the same, our bonus is the same. Meaning we don't incentivize a money grab to manage as many assets as you can.”

“Well, there's tons of dry powder, trillion two of dry powder. You need debt capital, and there's almost an infinite amount of corporate private credit available. You need companies that are willing to transact, and there's tens of thousands of private companie…”

“You could say that private equity is frozen because of fear. It's fear on the GP side of, you If they sell, returns aren't what their LPs would have thought. They're afraid they're not going to be able to raise their next fund. So rather than say, we'll just t…”

“Private equity firms only want to buy if they get a great deal, and they only want to sell if they're getting full value. There's a few turns of multiples in the middle, and you haven't seen that thought quite yet.”

“I've asked at every AGM I've spoken to this year, please raise your hand if you think your private equity portfolio is median or below. And there isn't a single hand that's ever gone up. Everyone playing is playing for the top quartile.”

“At the end of the day, there wasn't anyone to take the public equity side of the bet. I reached out to some friends at Vanguard, but Vanguard isn't just a public equity index fund manager.”

“The biggest impact of that over the next couple of years is that when private markets unlock for liquidity, the first wave of that money from the institutional market is going to go back to the public markets. It's not going to get recycled in the private mark…”

“So I will say whether it's next year or the year after the year after, I would be shocked if there isn't a significant compression. Maybe starts with the valuations of private AI companies and significant down rounds, and maybe that has downstream effects beca…”

“I think people will be talking about public markets and the potential for outperformance from active managers because you're teed up pretty well to have a good period of time for active managers.”

“The six to eight is the sweet spot, but let's just even take the 20. I still think that that person can meet with his folks once a week, and it doesn't have to be an hour conversation. It could be Knocking on the door, popping by. Say, Ted, what do you got goi…”

“Size is always the enemy of performance.”

“What is the investment philosophy of this organization? That will eliminate about 60% of all organizations who actually don't have a very clearly defined philosophy of how they think about what works in their markets.”

“I could look back at my time at Yale and say, boy, investing in hedge funds was so easy. You could invest in a diversified group of mergers, doing merger arbitrage, and make 14% net with very little risk.”

“Ultimate decision maker should speak last. Because if they speak first, everyone wants their bonus, and so everyone's gonna start agreeing, and the person who's not sure because of this one obscure thing that ends up being the biggest risk factor that no one t…”

“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…”

“Earlier this year, I had Ed Grefenstedt, who's the CIO of the Dietrich Foundation. And I'll just tell you one thing, then you'll say, wait, that's possible. 90% in privates, like half of that's in venture, like as much as 20 or 30% in China.”

“Gavin, at least in the public markets, is the most knowledgeable person I've ever met on a sector, let alone it just happens to be that sector is AI.”

“I think holding people's feet to the fire on tough stuff, like the conversation around the succession planning, those conversations where this is a safe venue for us to talk about hard things and really having managers understand that, and then feeling empower…”

“And while that's pristine, there's a part of that that doesn't consider the necessity of a successful business in generating optimal investment performance. Oftentimes, allocators see a manager, they like getting there early, someone who's great, delivering pe…”

“And I also made an investment in Oldwell Labs run by Campbell Wilson, Which is the very best software I've seen to help allocators find and monitor managers.”

“When you talk to allocators, they're not actually worried about liquidity. This is nothing like 2008, but they are wondering when will distributions come back and how will they address continuing to invest in the private markets?”

“On the capital side, fundraising has been really hard. You've had this bottleneck in the private markets that's also affected public market fundraising.”

“You're starting to see consolidation. We just put out a conversation about consolidation on the allocator side. There's certainly a lot more of that happening on the manager side as well.”

“And what we find is that it's just really engaging in the process of relationship development, which is probably the most important aspect of capital flowing over time.”

“And on the back of that was born IADEI, Institutional Allocators for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which today has 800 institutions across the world that quarterly sifts through minority owned organizations. Minority led organizations in a certain asset cla…”

“When a CIO departure occurs, the growing manager will have more options to continue a productive working relationship with the new CIO.”

“What actually matters in investing is not what the highest returns that you can earn are in any given year. It's what returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time. And I think the dirtiest secret in investing is that average returns sustained fo…”

“Amazon went from 40 to 260 the summer I worked for them, and they were short.”

“So he picked the Vanguard S&P, 500 index fund. We picked five fund of funds for 10 years for a million dollars for charity. The bet started in January one of 2008.”

“In the meeting itself, it's really hard to listen to someone properly if you're evaluating them at the same time, if you're thinking about anything else at the same time.”

“Capitalizing businesses fund by fund, instead of deal by deal, resembles a holding company in which the sponsor can efficiently acquire and allocate financing.”

“With long track records of low losses at the portfolio level, maybe all sponsors would generate higher returns by exchanging cross-collateralization for a lower cost of capital.”

“I've already seen presentations from lenders offering NAV loans for up to 50% of a private equity portfolio value.”

“What most people do across the conference room is a physically confrontational setup that's probably the worst way to make somebody open to sharing information with you.”

“And a lot of times, particularly say manager, investor, if you lead to a leading question, they're going to agree with you. You're going to feel like they're smart because they just agreed with you.”

“So one of the things that I coach the allocators and the Capital Allocators University to try to help them improve is create that feedback mechanism for how are you performing and your team, individuals on your team, in interviewing managers. You need to have …”

“And I'm going to approximate the math, but roughly a hundred percent of the panels that I've been involved with are not interactive, despite the goal.”

“Sequencing it so the person who you think is going to speak the most speaks last, and vice versa, has a really nice way of balancing that out to begin with.”

“Which is the audience wants you to succeed. All of these people that could feel scary if you're not accustomed to public speaking, they're actually on your side. Nobody wants to see a complete train wreck or somebody fumbles all over themselves.”

“About five percent of my brain is thinking about making sure that I'm spacing out my words so that I don't say like while I'm not doing that. And if you practice it, it's not that anyone will be perfect, but practicing it and saying, okay, I'm not fully presen…”

“Preparation. Can't underscore how important it is, but it's got to be the appropriate level of preparation. If it's too much, you can get too wedded in it.”

“You have to do your own work. And whatever that means in a different situation, you can't just take for granted, even with someone who was perfectly aligned. He had so much of his own capital in this name, and he missed something that was totally obvious.”

“And yet the facts are that if you and I, Ted, decide we're going to buy some listed asset today, well, we're going to be five to 10% of the turnover. Because the way the world works today is that the flow is dominated by the machines, and that's not a criticis…”

“We experienced the lows of a failure to launch an asset management business alongside the highs of growth in the podcast and new initiatives with storytelling and summits.”

“This year, I started new engagements with Fund Evaluation Group, 10 East, and Marblegate Asset Management.”

“Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early.”

“It struck me that the podcast creates far more value than what I could deliver in incremental investment returns.”

“Things like venture capital and private equity and real estate investing all require a lot of resources to either find the deals or to find the managers who are conducting those deals globally. Those investment areas, the winners tend to be very plugged in and…”

“When I decided to leave protege, I really no longer believed we could deliver in the way we had in the past. small hedge funds were at this sort of inflection of feeling like the supply and demand for capital was no, no longer in their favor.”

“We started actually doing some AI work on assessing the conversations of the podcast to try to see different themes. And one of the things we found is that the allocator community, so the CIOs talk a lot more about risk and the managers talk a lot more about u…”

“People tend to focus much, much more on return than risk. Return is easy to measure. Risk is hard to measure, even after the fact.”

“If I'm not doing things in the markets, it's less stimulating to me. I just enjoy it. Even if I'm subtracting value over time, like it just adds to my Intellectual curiosity and those types of things that come.”

“I do think that it's likely that the new wave of technology innovation is happening on blockchains. The applications that we're using every day, the most powerful ones, 20 years from now may well come out of this web three ecosystem. But I think that's a decad…”

“You go about a year and a half into the bet. And I think the hedge funds were up at one point about 50%.”