Erik Serrano Berntsen
Founder & CEO, Stable Asset Management. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorstableam.com ↗
Erik Serrano Berntsen leads Stable Asset Management, an investment firm that backs and builds emerging alternative asset managers and GP stakes. Prior to founding Stable, he was a consultant at Bain & Company in its Private Equity Group.
1shows
1appearances
22statements
1resolved
0supported
0contradicted
0%fully supported
Everything Erik Serrano Berntsen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Berntsen: Great Investors Are Contrarian, But Business Builders Must Build Consensus
“Great investors are typically contrarian and you need that to generate returns. You have to see things others don't. You have to believe something that others don't. And that involves strong analytical skills, being very detail oriented. Whereas successful bus…”
Berntsen: 90% of First-Time Fund Allocator Meetings Are Purely Educational
“Everyone takes a meeting when you launch your first private equity fund or your first venture fund or your first hedge fund. But 90% of them are just learning from you. They're not necessarily going to invest in your first fund or in the first three years of y…”
Berntsen: Complexity and Fund Size Are the Enemies of Performance
“And something I often share with my founders is you want to keep complexity low, because I think both complexity and size to a certain extent are the enemies of performance. And a quick definition of complexity when you're running investment firms is number of…”
Berntsen: Fund Managers Who Faced Early Adversity or Poverty Outperform
“Research that shows that, for example, managers, founders from poor
Backgrounds tend to outperform managers from richer backgrounds, or managers that lose a parent young, or have divorced parents, or face adversity young, are better performers.”
Berntsen: Established Asset Managers Are Inherently Misaligned With LPs
“What I found on the investing side was on top of those challenges that come with growth, I felt the structure as it related to their investors was fundamentally misaligned from day one. I think that's no secret. There's dynamics that over time make the GP and …”
Berntsen: Emerging Investment Firms Have Highly Asymmetric Win-Loss Profiles
“When these investment firms fail, they don't actually fail much. There's many ways to protect downside across asset classes. And when failures occur, it tends to be pedestrian, uninspiring performance, or it's related to the team gelling Or it's really not ver…”
Berntsen: Emerging Managers Should Discount Fees for Strategic Institutional Allocators
“So I find myself actually saying, yes, you should discount fees. You should agree to these requests from the institution. May it be around transparency. May it be around governance. May it be around structure. They're really meant to align incentives. And you …”
Berntsen: Intermediaries Push Emerging Managers to Pitch Prematurely
“So a lot of emerging managers tend to go to market way before they're baked. And it's interesting because structurally the industry propels them to do so. So for instance, in public markets, you have, you know, cap intro teams and private markets, you have pla…”
Berntsen: A Manager's Character Is More Durable Than Their Investment Strategy
“I think understanding the person
Is as important, if not more than understanding their investment strategy.
And I would argue in some ways, the core characteristics of the person are more likely to stay the same than that of markets.”
Berntsen: Alternative Asset Consolidation Is Driven by Allocator Career Risk
“I actually think a lot of the consolidation of assets in the industry is more correlated to the allocator side of the equation. Like I mentioned, this career risk and desire to play it safe.”
Berntsen: Successful Managers Shift From Competing on Performance to Status
“Once you're successful, you go from competing on performance and self-improvement to competing on status or legacy. And that's all great for humanity, but I'm not sure it's great for performance. In your day job.”
Berntsen: Strategic Co-Ownership Beats Internalizing Investment Teams for Sovereign Funds
“And some have tried to internalize a lot of these teams, but I think there you really bump into compensation issues, headline issues. You know, if you take teams and you put them inside large bureaucratic Pensions or sovereigns. I think it's hard to do right, …”
Berntsen: The Investment Industry Unfairly Penalizes Managers for Changing Their Minds
“Our industry tends to penalize changing your mind because it's seen as some sort of weakness or vulnerability, but actually changing your mind is the most logical thing ever if the evidence is changing as well.”
Berntsen: Skills for great investing differ from building investment firms
“The challenge on the founder side is that a lot of the skills that make you a great investor are typically not the ones you need to build an investment firm.”
Berntsen: LP Preferences Change Faster Than Their Stated Long-Term Views
“What people are looking for changes more rapidly than you'd think, given everyone espouses a longer term view.”
Berntsen: Inbound Founder Pitches Predict Favorable Investment Strategies
“What we find incredibly powerful in trying to predict which investment strategies might face more benign market environments is actually just look at the data of the ideas that are being presented to us.”
Berntsen: Large Institutional LPs Better Tolerate Periods of Underperformance
“We find them to be more understanding in periods of underperformance because they are so long-term and they have less pressures in terms of clients or stakeholders that some of the other LP segments might have.”
Berntsen: Allocators Have a Higher Bar for Re-Evaluating Discarded Managers
“And in our industry, we see so many opportunities that revisiting something we've discarded actually has a higher bar than looking at something new, which is also kind of an interesting behavioral bias.”
Berntsen: Private Market Alpha Is Easier to Diligence Through Management Referencing
“I think in private markets, it's a bit easier. It tends to be clearer in an organization who has sourced the deal, who was involved with management team, who was structuring it. And so a lot of the focus in private markets is to go to previous deal, previous p…”
Berntsen: The Best Public Market Managers Launched Their Firms at 33
“We took, you know, in our view, all the best public and private investors, and the age at which the public managers launched their business was 33”
Berntsen: Investment Firms Rarely Apply Analytical Rigor to Their Own Operations
“So what's kind of fascinating is that although investment firms do a lot of work on the investments that they make, they often don't take the same approach and the same critical and analytical lens on themselves. So what we find is that in investment managemen…”
Berntsen: Non-Pedigreed Investment Talent Creates Arbitrage for Early-Stage Seeders
“There's a scarcity of willingness to go early, but there's so much talent out there that doesn't get funded, and often they don't get funded because they don't fit the right buckets, they don't have the right pedigree, they're not very good at presenting. And …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Erik'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 | Founder & CEO, Stable Asset Management | 1 | 22 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Capital Allocators → |