Dr. Ashby Monk

“When I moved over to venture capital, which was my hope that, you know, this would be much more aligned with long-term value creation, even there, because I was doing financial services venture capital, the focus was as much on fee streams and transactions and…”

“And by the way, you cannot innovate without failure. The two are inextricably linked. It's like saying we want to be efficient and innovative at the same time. They're opposites. Innovation is failure and learning how to manage failure.”

“And when we got done with all of the analysis on a risk adjusted basis, It was much worse than I thought. And then there was a sense for me that this was a governance challenge and that because the board struggled to understand the complexity of the portfolio …”

“My interview at one of those organizations was me sitting in a room with 40 people, and every single person had to say what they were going to say to me in front of the other 40 people.”

“What was really hard to do was to get all the data unified, to get it into the system. It could take six months. It's like when you said at Yale we had all this data. It's a huge lift to get this stuff out of The custodians, out of the general partners, out of…”

“That's what I'm mostly excited about, and that inference is gonna benefit the long-term pension fund investors. They're the ones that are managing assets over longer horizons, where inference, insight, have enough time to get priced.”

“The classic one is a crisis, internal or external. The next classic one is a leader. That leadership change Leads to some new innovation and on and on and on.”

“If you only invest in fund three, you've decided you're going to overpay for managers because they don't need your money.”

“I don't love that framing. I love thinking about how technology unlocks additional basis points of return. It gives permission to pension funds to spend more money. Especially on the initial setup cost of getting your data right.”

“The sign of a good partnership is you help drive a change in your partner's portfolio that you don't get paid for.”

“There's some neurodiversity throughout our industry, and we're trying to write a paper that says this is how you can see the same data set differently. That's the pathway to alpha.”