Shannon O'Leary
Chief Investment Officer, Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutiveauthorspmcf.org ↗
Shannon O'Leary oversees roughly $1.9 billion in institutional assets across donor funds, nonprofit endowments, and partner foundations. She is known for integrating diversity, equity, and ESG principles into asset allocation, as well as authoring the newsletter Say It Out Loud.
1shows
1appearances
42statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Shannon O'Leary said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
O'Leary: Forced liquidity will drive down private market marks
“I don't know that that's going to be the reality that gets experienced, and at a certain point, you're going to have to create liquidity. And it may mean that you're going to see marks coming down. It may mean that you see folks willing to show their hand on w…”
O'Leary: Private market outperformance in 2022 was merely volatility laundering
“Anybody with a private book looks like a genius, but really you're just a volatility laundering.”
O'Leary: Founders talking over new CIOs destroys succession confidence
“And I said, when you do that, zero LPs in the room believe that you have a succession plan.”
O'Leary: I have ordered fund CIOs to stop talking during diligence
“There's been meetings where I've invited the chief investment officer of an organization to stop talking because he's being significantly less effective than I think if I heard from the staff.”
O'Leary: Nonprofit LPs act as reputation laundering for investment managers
“Having nonprofits and squeaky wheels like myself on your cap table is a little bit of reputation laundering”
O'Leary: I would love market volatility despite board aversion
“It's not a popular opinion that I would say to say like a board or a committee, but I would love some volatility.”
O'Leary: AI is bubblicious and could trigger public market volatility
“AI is a little bubblicious. We started to see a little bit of the potential fall that can happen if it turns out the thesis of AI is that you have to spend a hundred and eighty billion dollars on chips every 18 months. If that's not correct, maybe some of that…”
O'Leary: Professionals often mistake rapid honesty for bluntness
“I think that people mistake Rapid honesty with bluntness. And my goal in communication is let's not beat around the bush. We don't know what's going to happen next. We're planning for a long-term relationship with manager ABC. We're planning for these assets t…”
O'Leary: Presentation skills differentiate career analysts from senior leadership
“Things that differentiate individuals who are gonna be a perfect analyst forever do include that presentation ability, that executive presence, and frankly, that desire. Managing people is hard. Managing sideways to your executive leadership peers is work. Man…”
O'Leary: Manager behavior reveals investment process and partnership fit
“If you don't spend a little of that time getting to know folks, understanding how they think, how they operate, that not only informs their investment thought process and how they treat their staff, how they approach their underlying assets, it's a really good…”
O'Leary: Direct LP feedback to founders relieves internal IR teams
“And generally what I find with those tough conversations is that this is a huge relief for the IR staff and the business development professionals is they know what the issues are. They would rather they have an allocator come in and be like, hey, I know what …”
O'Leary: Foundation ensures endowment investments align with grant making
“And we are also very intentional and active in that portfolio about ensuring that the investments and the managers that we're choosing there Are not invested in ways that are in conflict with our grant making.”
O'Leary: Engaging disengaged boards requires private wealth management communication skills
“The skills are exactly the same, because all of it is talking to the human's head. Whether you're in a board member who tunes out when the investment person starts talking, or you're the non-financial spouse, those are the same responses, and I'm going to use …”
O'Leary: Meeting allocators outside fundraising enables non-transactional relationships
“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.”
O'Leary: Foundation manager diligence takes at least six months
“A diligence process from when we meet you to when we make an investment decision at the fastest is six months.”
O'Leary: Allocators learn most about firms from non-executive staff
“And we learn a lot by interviewing not the top brass. You can learn a lot about a firm by how they treat the staff.”
O'Leary: Having managers pitch a teenager exposes their true character
“What was so interesting to me was the shift in language, the shift in how they talked about the strategy, the degree of care and interest in explaining it to a seventeen-year-old revealed A lot about the nature of the people that I was meeting with, some of wh…”
O'Leary: Hedge funds must have empowered risk managers to discipline traders
“You need a risk manager at a hedge fund, someone who oversees all of it and understands positioning and is willing to take trader's To task. One, you need to have the right person. Two, you have to empower that person.”
O'Leary: Diligence pauses immediately if a manager dodges a question
“The experience gets baked into the process by us ensuring that if I don't get an answer, There's two other folks on this relationship that are gonna ask the same question, point out that it hasn't been answered, and it basically empowered us to be a lot bolder…”
O'Leary: Getting managers to reveal concealed truths is 90% of diligence
“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…”
O'Leary: Many aging fund co-founders lack robust succession planning
“There's a lot of co-founders out there in their sixties and seventies. Some have done robust planning. Many have not. A few have attempted some planning and then had to back up the truck and start over again a few times.”
O'Leary: LPs should stick with founder issues if next-gen leadership is better
“The reason you decide to work through that situation is the next tier of leadership is excellent. Their overall investment process is actually even better than the original co-founders.”
O'Leary: A communication void exists between allocators and managers
“There's a communication void between, I think, the allocator community and the managers. The IR folks generally are pretty well aware of what that gap is. It's that they have a hard time, I think, sometimes solving for X with whoever the investment professiona…”
O'Leary: Many allocators refuse to share pacing schedules with managers
“So I bump into allocators who do not provide managers with any information of any kind. They don't want to say what they're looking for this year. They don't want to tell a manager that your category is a priority or not a priority this year. They're not inter…”
The other half of the tape: Shannon O'Leary's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 7 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 7
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 7
2024 7 mentions in 7 episodes 1 per episode
- Michael Mervosh - Invest in Yourself (EP.402)
- CIO Transition – Roz Hewsenian and Joshua Fenton, Helmsley Trust (EP.401)
- Succession - Sarah Samuels on Generational Transitions (EP.400)
- Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399)
- Rob Small and Anil Seetharam - Public Equity Adjacent to Private Equity at Stockbridge (EP.397)
- Charles Duhigg- Secrets of Communication (EP.394)
- Yann Robard - Liquidity Solutions for Private Capital at Dawson (EP.392)
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Shannon'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 | Chief Investment Officer, Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation | 1 | 42 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Capital Allocators → |