Chris Heller
Co-Managing Partner, Cordillera Investment Partners. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Chris Heller co-founded Cordillera Investment Partners in 2014 to invest in niche, non-correlated assets. Prior to launching Cordillera, he was a partner at Makena Capital Management and worked in investment roles at Stanford Management Company.
1shows
2appearances
43statements
2resolved
1supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
Everything Chris Heller said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Heller: Niche alternatives exploit the gap between perceived and actual risk
“And I think our original supposition and now bolstered by 10 years of being in this business is that that's not actually the case. Now, there are absolutely risky things in this niche space, and there are lots of things that you don't want to invest in, but wh…”
Non-correlated cash flows suffer secondary correlation if reliant on PE exits
“And we might find the most non-correlated business and its cash flows are not correlated with general GDP cycles. But if we own that asset or that company and we want to exit it to another private equity firm or take it public, even though we might have a non-…”
Intellectual thinkers who espouse compelling theses often cannot run operating businesses
“Sometimes these deep philosophical thinkers are not always the right people to run business. They can usually espouse a really interesting view, but they can't run businesses.”
Heller: Luxury assets like art and wine are cyclical, not non-correlated
“Those investments for us are really tough because they are not non-correlated. They are tied to the economic cycle. Art, wine, diamonds become much more valuable as the economic cycle accelerates, and then as it turns, as so does the price of those things.”
Heller: Alternatives' promise is early outsized returns and idiosyncratic diversification
“What was the original promise of alternatives? It's twofold. It is first, by being early to finding an asset or an idea or an investment, you can extract outsized returns before the world finds them. And secondly, finding assets that have non-correlated idiosy…”
Heller: Most PE firms lack time to source and structure niche assets
“I mean, we have to spend a lot of time to find these things. We have to spend a lot of time to structure these things. We have to spend a lot of time to understand these things. And I think it's something that a lot of other Private equity firms, asset manager…”
Cordillera exits niche strategies when large funds enter and compress returns
“As soon as a big player has raised a big fund around it, or something has happened that is widely adopted and returns have been arbed down, we're moving on to the next thing, and that's a huge piece of our ethos.”
Heller: Cordillera avoids fast auction deals to maintain diligence time advantage
“So I think the thing that we think about most is our single biggest advantage is time. If we're doing our job correctly, We are not looking at assets or looking at deals with a ton of competition where you have to have an LOI or a term sheet in within two week…”
Heller: Decide on niche asset investments at 80% to 85% understanding
“Oftentimes, we have to get 80 to 85% of the way there, and that extra 10 to 15, always, you could spend another year or two to try to understand it, but sometimes you have to move and you have to make a decision, and that's typically about then understanding T…”
The best operators always leave behind an easily discoverable wake of superfans
“The best people in the world in any industry always leave behind a wake of superfans. People that just love them, are shouting from the rooftops about them, and it's not hard to find them. When you have to really search to find someone to give a reference, or …”
Heller: Initial work product quality strongly predicts management's execution success
“The quality of a work product that comes out of an individual or a group is highly correlated With their success executing whatever they're going to do.”
Heller: Unscalable operational friction and bespoke structuring create niche investing's moat
“Our business is not super scalable. By definition, if we've got twenty billion dollars in a fund, we're not doing niche things anymore. And so there are lots of things and struggles that keep people away. But in that struggle and in the fact that it's hard and…”
Heller: If a business is easy, others will arbitrage the opportunity away
“If you start something that's easy, other people will come quickly and arbit away. The struggle is the moat. It is what keeps the value in whatever you've started.”
Siloed deal sourcing fails when investing across disparate niche alternative assets
“It's not like we can send people off in their own little silos to go find deals and come back and put them in the portfolio because they're so disparate and so different.”
Heller: Broad institutional adoption steadily degraded returns across traditional alternative assets
“And as there became more and more adoption of those assets and asset classes, You know, what you would expect happened. Returns came down, whether you were trying to do individual deals or make investments in those spaces, or whether you were investing in mana…”
Heller: Mainstream alternative asset classes failed to provide diversification in 2008
“When we went through 2008, we got very little diversification from our quote unquote alternative asset classes.”
Heller: Entering undiscovered asset classes yields outsized returns before competition arrives
“One prong is being early to an asset class before competition and capital has competed away returns. Is useful and beneficial, and we came at this first and foremost from a return perspective. You can be early to a place where the world hasn't found yet. That'…”
Cordillera exited music publishing and litigation finance after returns compressed
“When we were early on, we were investing in things like music publishing and litigation finance, which was in our minds, very cutting edge at the time in 2014, you know, fast forward to today and the whole world has found music and litigation finance, and subs…”
Heller: Whiskey barrel pricing predictably appreciates compared to traditional commodities
“You never know how steep or how flat that aging curve might be, but it is typically positively sloped. Whereas some other commodities can be up, can be down, you know, if you didn't sell your corn or your wheat or your timber this year, next year you might be …”
Heller: Cordillera rejected alligator farming deal due to ESG concerns
“We actually really liked that investment from an economic perspective. We ended up saying no to that investment from an ESG perspective, and we have a pretty heavy ESG overlay to our fund.”
Heller: Cordillera requires viable exit markets to exist at underwriting
“When we underwrite a deal, we have to know exactly that there's a viable market to exit that deal today. It can't be, hey, look, this is a great idea. Let's invest in it now and figure out if five years, six years down the road, something will develop to sell …”
Heller: Litigation investments take far longer to liquidate than anticipated
“Like, I think the big takeaway, whenever somebody asks me, because we've done lots of things in litigation, what is your takeaway? It's that they take forever. And it takes way longer, no matter where you are in that space. It just generally takes longer to ge…”
Heller: Cordillera structures deals to take revenue share in operating partners
“Today, the way that we structure is we will, the fund, our funds and our LPs will get a revenue share in that business. So we will get the return of the assets themselves. And then if the operating partner can build a big business around that, our LPs will ben…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Chris's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Co-Managing Partner, Cordillera Investment Partners | 2 | 43 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Capital Allocators → |