The Exchanges

Q Let's turn to some of the investment process. Elise, I'd love to start with you. So you're coming into this. How did you learn about manager selection from this team?

A Really through apprenticeship. I mean, in the beginning, went with Ellen, Meredith, or Kim to kind of everything. A few instances, actually my first day on the job at Carnegie was at a manager meeting in Atlanta. So I showed up, I took the MARTA to the meeting. I didn't know one person. I walk in, it's like all these ENF people and the GP. I didn't really know what I was supposed to do, but really watching the way That initially Ellen and Kim and then Meredith, when she came back, engaged with managers and everything Ellen just described, like we had lots of dinners and just spent a lot of time trying to get to know the managers as people. All the things about their strategy obviously had to make sense, but we would write these extensive investment committee memos. And my first couple of months at Carnegie, Ellen basically gave me a huge stack of memos that She said, get to know the portfolio. This is how you need to learn the portfolio, and so I read them all, and the section on team was as much a part of the memo as the track record, case studies on actual investments, and general strategy thesis, and risk. Like, the team section was a huge chunk, and that was really my introduction to manager selection, and realizing that At the end of the day, it's so much a people business, and it is so much about, as Ellen said, their passions, their judgment, who they are as people. I le…

AI assessment note: “Really through apprenticeship. I mean, in the beginning, went with Ellen, Meredith, or Kim”

Q Alisa, there are all these manager meetings happening. The team is growing. You get to a point where you can't have everybody in every meeting. How did you see that evolve? Like, when you were included, when there was a meeting, maybe you wanted to be in, but you weren't included.

A It changed actually after Ellen left and Kim and Meredith became the co-CIOs, which was just such a wonderful chapter. They created a matrix strategy where you were primary and secondary on a strategy because the portfolio was mature, it was fairly large, and the team, while not huge, wasn't tiny either, and you couldn't really bring seven people to a meeting, especially if you were traveling. So the way that Kim and Meredith set it up was, Everybody had primary on their asset classes, and then you were secondary on certain asset classes. So you always had both the option and were highly encouraged to attend a meeting where you were the secondary. And part of your job also was to play devil's advocate for that. The reality was over time for things that you were not the secondary or the primary, it became harder to go to all those meetings, and you just didn't most of the time. We did still have weekly team meetings where we would have tear sheets, and everybody would talk, and everybody was encouraged to play the devil's advocate role. But over time, as the portfolio became more mature, you did more or less spend physical time with the managers for which you were the primary or the secondary.

AI assessment note: “They created a matrix strategy where you were primary and secondary on a strategy”

Q Lisa, you had the full path here from coming in with no knowledge as an analyst to today as CIO. How did you see your trajectory within Carnegie?

A Initially at Carnegie, once I dove in, I viewed my path very much as linear, and when Ellen left, I lobbied for myself for a promotion because suddenly my responsibility got a lot bigger because the team was smaller. We later added people, but we were at this very lean moment, and I kept marching up that ladder, and I remember at one point I went to Kim and Meredith and I said I'd like To be made at some point deputy CIO. They were very thoughtful, but they were like, there's two of us. And shortly thereafter, we brought on some additional peers at my level, and then there was just no way that could happen. As my tenure increased at the foundation and the portfolio became totally mature, there wasn't that much that we could do from an investing perspective. And so I started to have questions of like, do I even want to stay in this? And I remember being very antsy. See, by that point, Meredith had left to go join Trinity, and Kim was the sole CIO, and Kim and I have always had a very open, honest, amazing relationship and friendship and mentorship, and I would just go talk to her, and I'd be like, ah, what should I do with my life? Do I want to be a CIO? And I will say one thing that Kim did that was always extraordinary was, and this is, I think, an extension of Ellen and Meredith's leadership encouraging everybody to be public in the industry. Kim encouraged our team to take e…

AI assessment note: “Initially at Carnegie, once I dove in, I viewed my path very much as linear”

Q Elise, as you were watching both of these different leaderships, what changed for you in how you went about your work?

A In the same way that we had primary and secondary at the team, actually Kim and Meredith had primary and secondary, so they divided the portfolio between them. I ended up working more with Meredith, but I just had a lot more autonomy and independence because I had more years of experience. So I was making many more decisions Independently, that I would then share with the team, the portfolio had also matured. The two other managing directors at the time, Ken Lee and Brooke Jones, would probably say the same thing. Over our portfolios, we had a lot of autonomy and influence over the portfolios for which we were responsible, and we had junior people on the team that we were now working with. They were supporting us, and that was new for me because Under Ellen's leadership, I didn't have that. So that was a change.

AI assessment note: “Under Ellen's leadership, I didn't have that. So that was a change.”

Q So Lisa, you're now circling back to spend some time at a manager. How did you take what you knew, both from your experience at Carnegie, and then what you saw on the outside, and use those lessons to impart your judgment in the CIO seat for the first time?

A This is such a wildly different environment than a foundation or an endowment that there are some learnings that are directly transferable, some that are adjacent, and some that are, like, totally irrelevant. In this role, I'm the chief investment officer for Michael Dell's family office, as well as his foundation. He is alive. He's brilliant. He's around. He's engaged. Unlike Vartan, he really likes investing and is very curious. So when I started, I came in, and I did a presentation at the end of my first week of what my initial plan was, and part of it was to do a listening tour, to go meet with as many CIOs as I could, particularly those that had large single stock positions in their portfolio, which was like Hewlett, Gordon and Betty Moore in the beginning had Intel, so I tried to find as many of those as I could, and then I went and talked to all the CIOs that I knew and trusted, these three women being very high on that list, And everybody gave me advice of, you got to get your investment policy statement. And so I collected a bunch of investment policy statements. I tried really hard and I was trying to craft it. And at some point, like a light bulb went off in my head. And we do have an investment policy statement, both for the family office and the foundation. But when it's one person whose capital it is, you can have a statement and it can have parameters, but it's a…

AI assessment note: “there are some learnings that are directly transferable, some that are adjacent, and some”

Q Elisa, you joined this crew a couple of years after that. First job in the industry. What did you think you were getting into?

A So before I even answer that, I have to say I'm sitting here and listening to you guys, and my head is exploding, reliving some of these memories in that if you told me in 2008, when you first made me the offer, Ellen, Carnegie was in the middle of the hiring freeze because it was the depths of the financial crisis. So you made me an offer, but you were like, we can't actually make you an offer because we can't bring anybody on that. I would be sitting here in this room with this group having this conversation. As now a CIO myself, I would have said, no way, impossible. I really had no idea what I was getting into. I'd started my career in enterprise software, then I went to law school, and then I became a real estate lawyer, and then I was at Tishman Spire. I was doing legal documents in the run-up to the financial crisis, which, if you remember, was really real estate-driven, so I saw the things that everybody in hindsight talked about in terms of flaws in documentation, and then I was at a huge owner-operator-developer in this Period of just insanity around pricing and acquisition frenzy, and I had met Niles Bryant at a real estate industry event. We'd become friendly, and he called me one day out of the blue, and it was in that time at Tishman that I learned about this whole LPGP ENF world, which I was not even aware of, and I thought, wow, that looks really cool. Maybe I w…

AI assessment note: “I really had no idea what I was getting into.”