The Exchanges

Q So clearly, you know, a formative lesson for you in discrimination and what we'll come back to that. Where did your interest in business first get started?

A So when I was about 14 years old, I created a bagel sale at my high school in Washington, D.C., and it expanded to multiple other high schools. I also had a wonderful mentor that helped me understand business through running a carpet cleaning company when I was about 1415 years old. So by having the opportunities to really Be exposed to a 30 or 40 person operation and company and seeing the difference that it made in the lives of people. We had a team that span, uh, West African, Honduran, Russian, Czech, people from many different countries working together in a synergistic way to clean the largest hotels in the country. And that taught me a lot about sales processes and, and leading people at an early age. And I was really excited by the idea of business and then also how business can make a difference in society and people's lives.

AI assessment note: “when I was about 14 years old, I created a bagel sale”

Q What's a common example of one of the situations that you see come up that people can become more aware of and correct?

A I'll give this one for those that are excited about becoming allies and have been allies to women and people of color within their organizations. One of the common mistakes that people make in mentoring women and people of color Oftentimes is that in their organization will during a performance review go easier or not. They're like, well, this person's really experienced a lot of pain in their life. They're constantly overlooked and underestimated. And now I don't need to pile on by giving a lot of critical feedback in a review. Well, the opposite is true based on research, that those that don't get the feedback that they need in order to punch through the next promotion or place in their career will ultimately not be as successful as those that do. So that's just a common misunderstanding. It can be true in an entrepreneurial investment process. It can be true in a hiring promotion process, and it can also be true in sharing feedback to somebody that's a interviewing for a board position. So those are things that we have to be cognizant, aware of situationally. That our brain shortcuts to make us think we're doing something positive to help the world, and actually, we're reinforcing a system that underestimates people and doesn't prepare them for success. That's just one nugget within an entire forty-module journey of a training.

AI assessment note: “One of the common mistakes that people make in mentoring women and people of color”

Q I always love to start with someone's background, and my understanding is for you, we need to go all the way back to kindergarten, and maybe it's everything I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten. Maybe it starts back there for you. Why don't you take me back to that one memory you have?

A So when I was in kindergarten in Washington, D.C., mostly white kindergarten, which I'll leave nameless, I was asked to leave kindergarten, and it's spelled for Running around the class like a superhero was what my mom keeps in her framed report card, and my parents took my side as a young black boy at the time and took me to, uh, another kindergarten that was more conducive to superheroes, but I would later learn in some of the research that we do within our firm in collaboration with Stanford University from one of the leading folks in the world on Implicit bias that black boys are over it spelled by four X the rate of their white counterparts. And that does two things that end up in almost every industry and every academic program governments across the U S spectrum. And what that does is it artificially inflates the idea that students that aren't black boys or white students in class Are doing something better when they aren't, and it automatically over disciplines black students for doing the exact same thing. So it's powerful research, and that's one of the insights that is true, not only within early K through 12 education, which is one of the areas I love to invest into in ed tech, and why it's so important to get bias out of the products and services and the firms that are developing those critical Interventions, and also it's a really important upstream within investm…

AI assessment note: “I was asked to leave kindergarten, and it's spelled for Running around the class”

Q What advice do you give your peers today?

A Like Einstein would say, if you're trying to solve a problem and you have 60 minutes, spend 55 minutes trying to frame the problem. And I think that When you're looking at the things that you care about and the vulnerabilities in the system that you're trying to solve or create a solution in, it's okay to spend a lot of time and iterate some action, but a lot of time thinking about what that specific problem that you want to solve is, and then spending a lot of energy in your life and your commitment trying to solve that problem. But I think that what I really appreciated about many great entrepreneurs is how intimately they understand the problems that they're trying to solve, and how much work they've put into framing that and understanding it.

AI assessment note: “if you're trying to solve a problem and you have 60 minutes, spend 55”

Q So how did that roll forward into the beginning of your professional career?

A One story that I'll share Is that in a program I did that taught young people entrepreneurship, it's called Nifty. It reached 270,000 kids around the world through that curriculum. And, you know, one of the things that I had the privilege of doing is having a teacher named Walter Benson, who was a luminary professor at Georgetown University, who was just incredible in terms of teaching all of us in his class who were 1516 years old, like his life counted on it. He was in late stages of brain cancer when he was teaching us, and he just really poured into us some amazing tools and lessons, and one of those was, I remember the teacher and he were kind of at the board getting ready to write, and he said, well, what's the most important word in entrepreneurship? And this is when he had been taking Some pretty heavy medicine to attack the cancer, and he would show up full hundred percent every day, and he drew a big F on the board as a shill kind of moved through the class, and then he drew a couple letters away, a C on the board, and then he turned to us and he said, it's got a U! And it turned out that the word was focus. He said, focus! And I think that that's always been a word that has stuck with me since Walter Benson shared it with us in the class at that time that has guided my entrepreneurial mindset. And when I ended up going to Duke, spent some time working with the studen…

AI assessment note: “immediately after leaving, found ways to help unlock the dream of Not only home ownership”

Q We need to unravel all of that, but I guess I need to start with what kind of superhero were you trying to be?

A I was probably trying to be Black Panther, but I didn't know it. I mean, we had one of the things that we're also working on funding as a firm is Companies that build images of black and women superheroes. And whether we were looking at He-Man or Superman or Batman or, or all the folks that I was seeking to be like at the time, I think there's a new set of superheroes today that are helping others to see the possibilities in their lives and careers. And making a difference in society. So that's been with Luke Cage and others being launched within the last couple years. That's been really exciting to watch. I think I was pretty much Superman trying to fly around the classroom and to make a difference for students that sometimes we're getting some flack from the teacher at the time.

AI assessment note: “I was probably trying to be Black Panther, but I didn't know it.”

Q more on racial difference because, and one of the reasons he says is when you start talking about women, it ends up only being white women. And so I'm curious, as these cross-sect and you go through your process, let's say you have a big pool, does it matter to you if it's a black man or a white woman? And when does the race and the gender differences cross-sect?

A Yeah, it's an interesting question. When I say women, and I'm familiar with the way the world views it, I mean, Afro-Latino women, black women led funds of which we've invested in both black and Afro-Latino led funds that are female led. So I think if at the macro level, What we're seeing is that the likelihood of half of that 69 trillion dollars rather than one percent of it should be the normalized number. Then we've got a long way to go and looking at women of color, for example, as investment areas of focus. But what we also realize is that implicit bias affects all people, not just white men, not just white women, but black women. And black men too. When we look at the research, what we see is that it happens to be mostly white men currently in the asset management business have power and control, which is one of the reasons why at a looming capital, our investments look like the optimal portfolio of the world. It includes Women and people of color within our portfolio and structure, which to me and us at the looming capital means black women and Afro Latino women and other women of color led organization and funds, but also includes white male led funds, because we realized that reducing the bias that all of us has is the challenge that we're setting out to solve for such that we can achieve higher returns. And if you think about it from a systems basis, if you develop a …

AI assessment note: “When I say women... I mean, Afro-Latino women, black women led funds”

Q That sounds like a huge number of entrepreneurs. What was the range of activities of entrepreneurship that you helped underwrite?

A So the entrepreneurs varied widely from butchers and Slim Goodies, one of the diners in New Orleans. Dookie Chase, Leah Chase, who created and was known as the grandmother of Creole cooking, was a part of that portfolio, essentially a cultural ambassador. And one of the reasons why helping entrepreneurs in that portfolio were so critically important at that time is I can remember like it was yesterday, Leah Chase was interviewed in the time where the government at all levels, the city level, the state level, and the federal level were trying to decide whether to rebuild New Orleans or not. I've seen throughout my career is that if entrepreneurs are able to have agency in society, they end up fighting to build a better life and wealth for their family, but fighting against systems that might hurt lots of people. And what one of the systems was the shutting down of the city, which was shut as many of us will recall for six months. And there are questions about whether rebuilding would happen. And Leah Chase, I believe she was. 90 years old at the time she made the statement said, they said, are you going to leave New Orleans? And she said, no, I'm going to die on the battlefield. And then another people started to rebuild and come back home because they knew that in the chaos and uncertainty that entrepreneurs are quite familiar with, someone made a decision. And a leadership dec…

AI assessment note: “the entrepreneurs varied widely from butchers and Slim Goodies, one of the diners”

Q One of the things you mentioned earlier was a 10 year training process. And I'm curious, what's different in thinking about the changes that need to happen over a 10 year period compared to a, probably a two or three year period that most in the industry think?

A Well, many of the challenges that we're working on were cemented over 400 years. So I kind of think 10 years is a short time frame for innovation, given how difficult the systematic embedded processes and wiring in our brains are. Kahneman's research inside of behavioral economics cites that people in their own fields of speciality will be subject to biases by the changing of just very small Framings of questions and processes. So in this training and process, I think in some martial arts practices, Like, uh, achieving a black belt, you don't know exactly when you're gonna be there, but for those of my friends that are martial artists, usually what happens is when the white belt and early age five, six-year-olds come marching in, their first question is, when do I get my black belt? And then one of my friend's dads used to, who was a black belt, and one of those that brought karate to the United States, he would Take off his black belt and give it to the five-year-old. And they say, no, no, no, I want to earn it. And in this process of behavioral change, the process of developing situational analysis, what we see within the research of implicit bias and bias in general is that it's situational. So what you're training to see is the situations where it's most likely to occur. And then once you identify those situations, then you have your intervention set To focus on those speci…

AI assessment note: “I kind of think 10 years is a short time frame for innovation”

Q What's one more nugget? Because that's so interesting. Gotta ask for another one.

A One of the interesting things about this work is that Awareness is really important, and it may seem obvious from the thinking fast and slow work from Kahneman that he's basically saying, figure out the times when you need to slow down. And shift from your system one automatic brain processing to your analytical system to brain processing, where you can catch some of the likely stories that system one is telling. And what I like to think about is a looming capital and our managers and our investors are holding a mirror to the financial system. And that mirror is asking folks to be accountable to the optimization and fiduciary duty that they've signed up for and realize that without bias reduction, that is not being met, and there needs to be a big investment in innovation and getting these tools right. So I think more so than me sharing a tip or two, the integrated process of Reducing bias and the commitment to multiple years. Ultimately, the question is, what's it worth to do that work? And what's the magnitude of investment that we should see to solve a 35 trillion dollar problem? And it's much more than it's currently going in to the system. The fact that our investors are some of the first in the world to fund and conduct and pioneer research at the intersection of behavioral science. And the overlooking due to implicit bias around race is, I think there's a very good reaso…

AI assessment note: “shift from your system one automatic brain processing to your analytical system to brain processing”

Q It's amazing. How did you decide to go from that type impact driven micro entrepreneurial activity to the asset management industry and practicing this?

A Well, one of the profound things that happened when we were organizing at Stanford to bring down students and Eventually, that led to me to move to New Orleans was, I wrote a number of letters while I was at Stanford to alums in seeking support for the student teams in the city of New Orleans, and one of those letters was to Jim Coulter, the founder of TPG, and his family, and they had a powerful connection in New Orleans, but one of As a trustee of Stanford, Jim as well, wanted to support something that was using entrepreneurship and innovation to rebuild the city. And I think part of what happened each year is that we ended up creating on the platform of the idea village, an entire challenge to identify The best entrepreneurs in New Orleans to build the culture of entrepreneurship, revitalize really the culture of entrepreneurship, because it's always been there in New Orleans, one of the cities that contributed jazz and lots of different spices and foods. And so the innovation has always been present there, but really to catalyze and take that to the next level by identifying, funding, leading entrepreneurs. So that was to your question. How did I begin to think about the micro scale to the macro scale of venture capital? I do still see incredible connections between them, but Jim would present and share the TPG journey that he had in his early entrepreneurial days. And buil…

AI assessment note: “one of those letters was to Jim Coulter, the founder of TPG”

Q How do you think about investing in what's called minority led funds as compared to investing in existing funds that have outstanding minority recruitment and promotion practices, but maybe majority led?

A If we look at the amount of species of birds in the sky, we see a lot of diversity. When we look at A garden, and we look at the biodiversity, we see a resilient ecosystem, a prosperous ecosystem, has a lot of biodiversity. And Yellowstone recently reintroduced wolves, and suddenly all the flowers came back and things that were out of balance for many years, because the rabbit population overgrew, resulted in a rebalancing of the ecosystem. And part of what I see is that the question really is what makes the current system optimal that should be answered rather than what makes Darren's philosophy or investment analysis on a manager of color. And I'm careful to not name them minority fund managers, mostly because they're the majority of what we would expect in the world by population. And also, when we look within the complexity of different populations of people of color as it maps to the talent that we'd expect to see within the asset management business, There's a big opportunity, just like there would be in many other areas that are sort of under investigated, misunderstood. I remember when Andy Ryclef, my venture capital professor at Stanford Business School said, there are two conditions that need to exist for a major win in, in venture capital. The first is that the entrepreneur is non-consensus. In other words, if you went around to most of the people in the world, they'…

AI assessment note: “the question really is what makes the current system optimal that should be answered”