The Exchanges

Q When someone on your team brings you what's called a passion-based project, how do you balance the thought of whether that research will be compounding knowledge that you can express either directly or somewhere else across your portfolio versus something that ends up just being very specific, and if it doesn't turn into an investment, it ends up being a little bit of lost time?

A There's always a risk of losing some time doing these projects, but typically we're having a discussion that unfolds over many months. So it's not just, hey, Jenny, I have this great idea. I'm going to go pursue it. It's, you know, this is interesting to me and here's why. And in this case, it's, well, it's a space with a lot of complexity to it. It's a space that has really interesting after-tax possibilities for us. We've already found one avenue that's appealing. So I think the interest came from a place of With a fiduciary mindset of thinking there could be an investment at the end of this. And typically all of the deep dives we've done have had that framing around it. So I had two of my more junior team members did a deep dive into crypto, which did end up leading to a small investment. Another team member did a deep dive many years ago into the quick service restaurant space, because there were some characteristics of that space that we thought were really appealing from a private equity perspective. So there has to be that initial hypothesis. And then beyond that, you have to limit the amount of these that you can do as a team at one time. So part of being both creative and disciplined, I think, is prioritizing very carefully as a team. And we have a process at the beginning of the year where we get together for a couple of hours and everyone on the team notes the deep d…

AI assessment note: “part of being both creative and disciplined, I think, is prioritizing very carefully as a team.”

Q When you get to the point where you are today, you've made an initial investment. You said it's small. How do you think about that space from here going forward?

A It's actually one of the biggest challenges in my seat is making small investments, or we make them as a team, and then really trying to use those investments as tools to something bigger. Because for us, if we make, let's say, a ten million dollar or less investment in a fund, that's really what I would call a venture-size investment for us. And it is an investment where you're acknowledging that there's a lot of risk that you might, you know, there is that risk of permanent capital loss to some degree, but you're also hopefully doing that with The belief that there's enough upside potential that that investment alone could be somewhat meaningful, but really it's with the hopes that you can start to stack those investments on top of each other. And I think the reality of venture, which is where we tend to write the smallest checks by far, is you're always constrained. You're constrained by the risk, or you're constrained by the manager not giving you the allocation that you want, because the best managers do tend to really limit their fund sizes dramatically in that space. When we're making little investments in venture, it's not with the belief that one day we're going to be writing a thirty million dollar check to a fund because it's just not realistic. It's a space where you have to place more bets. But there's other times where we'll make small investments, not that small,…

AI assessment note: “really trying to use those investments as tools to something bigger”

Q wanted to throw a question back at you that you asked me when you interviewed me on my little book tour, and it was just such a great question. And I thought maybe it'll add some insight into our conversation. This line you said that everyone's genius lies adjacent to their Either weakness or eccentricity. And I just wanted to ask you, what is your genius and perhaps the adjacency?

A I think my genius is probably that I still approach everything with a beginner's mind. And I think that's really critical for the way that Brandywine is structured because everyone on my team is a generalist and we're often exploring things that are really unknown. But I think it's also Really easy to get jaded when you've been an allocator for a long time. So I think having a beginner's mind allows me to connect the dots sometimes across asset classes or in unusual ways. It allows me to keep fresh and love my work. And I think it also allows me to bring a lot of humility to what we do and sort of a restless humility where I'm humble about what I don't know, but I also am never satisfied with the status quo. The counterpoint of that is that sometimes that humility can work against me. It's taken me a while to learn where to stand firm in my beliefs. That can be challenging. Actually, it's sort of a joke on my team. We go through this process, a pretty formal process of assessing investments before we put them in the portfolio. And I listen to all of the team's views because I'm always the last person to speak. And I am always the person that changes my scores the most by the end of the session. And it's at the margin. And I always share my revised scores with the team because it's important to me that they know that they can change my mind. But I'm sure it's also always a littl…

AI assessment note: “I think my genius is probably that I still approach everything with a beginner's mind.”

Q What's an example of one of those deep dives?

A One example is the affordable housing space. So we had made an investment in securitized affordable housing bonds, and they produce a really fabulous post-tax return, even a pre-tax return in the mid teens, and they have very low default risk, and they're just a wonderful asset for our multi-strategy portfolio. And they were such a good asset that one of my team members said, I would really love to look at this asset class more broadly. It's a very complex asset class and see if there's other ways that we could invest in it. Maybe it's not just the credits that we want to invest in. Maybe there's ways we could be partnering with developers, investing in equity, investing in tax credits. This is my team member, Greg. He refers to the research process around a deep dive as discovery, connect, and identify. So the discovery part of the process is To understand an industry's history, its development, and how it works today across all stakeholders. The connect part of the process is to build relationships and connections across the space and then build a market map of the space. And then the identify part of the process is to really identify the investable universe. So that comes at the end of the process. And he and his colleague, Steven, spent months, and they were doing this as a 20% project while they had 80% other work. Really building out the history of the industry, understan…

AI assessment note: “One example is the affordable housing space.”

Q So on the public side, now there's a big wave of discussion and movement of capital towards passive strategies. And certainly in the U.S., large cap companies It's been very hard for anyone to know that you should have owned Google and Facebook and Amazon, and if you didn't, you're probably going to underperform the S&P. How do you think about active versus passive in the portfolios you're managing?

A It's interesting. We just had a big discussion about, to our families about this. We view passive investing, I have a very healthy respect for it, and we view it as essentially our break-even. So it's the hurdle for anything we do, and I'm specifically talking about, let's focus on long-only investing first, because I think In long-only investing, any retail investor knows that there is this tax-efficient, cheap way for them to invest their money, and that is a market cap-weighted index, and that's a very sensible option for a lot of people. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and I think that has to be the benchmark for institutional investors as well when they think about managing money, but especially when they're taxable, because tax efficiency creates, you know, an additional 150 to 200 basis At this point, annual hurdle for every active manager in the portfolio. That's what you can lose through turnover, and it can get worse than that. It can also be better than that, depending on the manager's strategy. So we actually model out a break-even alpha for every active manager we invest in on the long-only side to understand what we have to believe they have to earn to be able to put them in the portfolio. And we use passive indices in the portfolio, and we acknowledge that when I think about active and passive investing, and the team and I have done a lot of work …

AI assessment note: “we view it as essentially our break-even. So it's the hurdle for anything we do”

Q So on the public side, now there's a big wave of discussion and movement of capital towards passive strategies. And certainly in the U.S., large cap companies It's been very hard for anyone to know that you should have owned Google and Facebook and Amazon, and if you didn't, you're probably going to underperform the S&P. How do you think about active versus passive in the portfolios you're managing?

A It's interesting. We just had a big discussion about, to our families about this. We view passive investing, I have a very healthy respect for it, and we view it as essentially our break-even. So it's the hurdle for anything we do, and I'm specifically talking about, let's focus on long-only investing first, because I think In long-only investing, any retail investor knows that there is this tax-efficient, cheap way for them to invest their money, and that is a market cap-weighted index, and that's a very sensible option for a lot of people. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and I think that has to be the benchmark for institutional investors as well when they think about managing money, but especially when they're taxable, because tax efficiency creates, you know, an additional 150 to 200 basis At this point, annual hurdle for every active manager in the portfolio. That's what you can lose through turnover, and it can get worse than that. It can also be better than that, depending on the manager's strategy. So we actually model out a break-even alpha for every active manager we invest in on the long-only side to understand what we have to believe they have to earn to be able to put them in the portfolio. And we use passive indices in the portfolio, and we acknowledge that when I think about active and passive investing, and the team and I have done a lot of work …

AI assessment note: “we view it as essentially our break-even. So it's the hurdle for anything we do”

Q So I'm going to turn a little bit to the environment. Doesn't look like there are any easy ways of making a buck these days. So what are you excited about?

A I'm not super excited about all that much right now. What I'm excited about is that we have oriented our portfolio for many years towards quality and towards businesses across the portfolio that can compound their earnings through cycle and that have a lot of ways to win and some structural advantages. And these businesses typically trade at a premium on the public side. But I do think that given there's a lot of uncertainty around inflation, it's one of the better tools that we have, again, thinking long-term to protect against that. I also think that given there's probably equal risks, some might say towards deflation, given that we don't know what's going to happen with pandemic, three point oh, four point oh, you name it. We don't know what's going to happen with China. We don't know what's going to happen with the regulatory and political environment. So to me, again, just orienting towards companies that are really durable and have one of my favorite managers refers to it as customer experience compounding, meaning he loves investing in businesses that thrill their customers and have multiple ways to win and will compound on their own competitive advantages over time. And I love that as a framework. I think more tactically, I do think it's interesting that there are these little segments of the markets that Where insurance would be an example of a pricing environment that…

AI assessment note: “What I'm excited about is that we have oriented our portfolio for many years towards quality”

Q What are those KDIs? Given that you can imagine you're giving money to someone, you're getting to know them better, and ultimately they're going to deliver performance or not. So how have you mapped out those KDIs that help you understand when you want to get to a more full-size position?

A Well, it looks really different depending on the opportunity, but again, from sort of a first principles basis, we're typically testing some initial assumptions. So One assumption that we might be testing is, is the manager playing an easier chess game, which we thought they were. So that might be, is the sector as uncompetitive relative to other sectors as we thought, or if tons of market participants came into the space, that might be something that would destroy that hypothesis for us. Another hypothesis we might be testing would be, does the manager have any unique advantages? So we might say, we think they have a particular informational advantage or analytical advantage In underwriting this asset class. And there's a number of KDIs that might fall out of that in terms of the accuracy of their decision making, not necessarily on an outcome basis, but on a process basis, because of course you can't control what the market's going to do, but just looking at the depth of their research and does that meet our expectations? And are they asking the questions in the way we thought they might ask them? Are they using the tools to get those questions and answers that we thought were Or we might have a KDI around their sourcing advantages on the private side, especially. Some managers that we've looked at have built particular tools around sourcing, which sometimes are a little unte…

AI assessment note: “A big KDI around re-upping with them is, is that, has that tool provided actual utility”

Q When you're doing that deep dive and you really feel like you've got your hands on something that you know, how do you think about sizing it enough that it's not dwarfed by the other 80% of the work that that team member is doing?

A Sizing is something that I have had to learn a lot about over my time as a CIO, because I think when I came to Brandywine, my instinct was to want to size everything too small. And then I think I course corrected too much. And actually it was one of my, you know, talk about having a beginner's mind. It was one of my colleagues who said to me, we're not taking enough risk in the portfolio. We really need to size things bigger. And I think I went to the other extreme for a Put a couple of things into the portfolio that were pretty new as full size positions up front. And the problem with that is when that position does something you don't expect, let's say the returns are horrific for the first couple of quarters, it puts huge pressure on the internal process. And I also think it puts a lot of pressure on your relationship with the manager because there's just no wiggle room. You can't add to them when they're down because they were sized too big initially. I don't think that there's a perfect answer, but What we do now is to have an understanding up front of where we want a position to get should things work out. On the long-only and on the hedge fund side, those positions tend to be pretty chunky. We only have about 10 active relationships in our long-only portfolio, and it's something we're always trying to whittle down, actually. We have a few more closer to 15 in our hedge f…

AI assessment note: “with any new relationship, we'll typically start it at a half-size position”

Q And then when you get to the decision-making stage, you mentioned these assessments, you're bringing the team together, getting everyone's opinions. How do you then ultimately make the decision?

A So the decision is ultimately between the director associate team and me, and it's most of the conversations at the very final stage are happening with the MD and myself. I am not a believer in consensus decision-making, so we aim to have a process that's highly collaborative where we can gather as many viewpoints as possible. The MDs hold themselves to an exceptionally high bar to really recommend that anything goes in the portfolio. So if they feel that there is a Substantial question that has been asked by the team that they haven't answered. They are going to answer it to their own and my and the team's typically satisfaction before that manager gets in the portfolio. Or sometimes we'll acknowledge this is an unknowable that we're willing to live with and it will impact our sizing decision. Typically, I find that I am pushing them sometimes to take a little bit more risk. I have a very, very thoughtful and cautious team. And sometimes my role has to be That this is something we do need to take a risk on, but ultimately that's a decision between me and the MD.

AI assessment note: “most of the conversations at the very final stage are happening with the MD and myself.”

Q And what different roles did you play? I know it's, it's a small team.

A It was, it's, it was a very small team, remains a small team. But when I started, it was me, Bill, and Joe Borer. So there were three of us managing the portfolio. I was one of two directors and had the least experience by far. Both Bill and Joe had been working together for a long time. We're both very experienced investors. I came in right out of business school, and I think they were willing to take a chance on me because it seems like I've top ticked a lot of places I've worked. I, I went there just before the global financial crisis. It ended up being this incredibly exciting period there because I got to be the new opportunities person by default. We were all generalists, but Bill and Joe had built this portfolio and then had to see it through a period of crisis, which they did remarkably well, but I had the benefit of, and I mean, everything we did was team-based, but the fact that I hadn't been there when the investments are made, I think just allowed me to kind of step out and troll around for new stuff, and You know, Bill gave me the freedom to do that, so I ended up getting to spend some time, you know, looking at the structured credit market and mortgage-backed securities and all the things that, you know, had blown up all of a sudden became incredible opportunities for investment. So that, that was the investment side, and in terms of other roles, I think there, yo…

AI assessment note: “I got to be the new opportunities person by default. We were all generalists”

Q And what is it, what was it about Bill and mentorship that you learned from him in this business?

A Well, for anyone that's listening that knows Bill, he is honest, maybe to a fault. He has one of the most active minds I've ever seen. He never stops thinking. He never stops questioning. He, he viewed himself as the chief cynic and could get to the heart of what mattered in like 30 seconds or less. He's deeply passionate about investing and he was, you know, deeply passionate about the institution he worked for. He really built that endowment for 16 years. I hope I have that time period right, Bill, if you're listening to this. And he, he's someone that taught me by doing and by acting. You know, he wouldn't, he wasn't one to sort of sit down and have lengthy conversations with me about the meaning of life. He would show me how to invest just by being actively engaged in every aspect of our portfolio, asking really hard questions of me and of our managers, and just being up for any type of discussion on investing. And I think it was a powerful way to, he would always tell me that he enjoyed mentoring more than managing, but I think that's what he needed to do, and he, you know, it's a statement that everyone that's left the Sloan Foundation has ended up in really interesting spots, I think, because, because of Bill's teaching.

AI assessment note: “he's someone that taught me by doing and by acting”

Q I want to turn a little bit to Something different in your life than many people in your seat. So your husband, Scott, is a hedge fund manager. What is dinner conversation like at your household?

A Well, this is maybe not the answer you want, but we try not to talk about work that much. I think we recognize that our worlds are very closely intertwined, and there's a little bit of a danger, I think, to, to making that too much a part of our dynamic. You know, Scott and I have We've been together 17 years. We're, we're hitting on our 10 year anniversary this year of marriage. So we've grown up together in many ways. But while we don't, while our dinner table conversation doesn't focus on the investments in our portfolio, and in fact, Scott won't even tell me how they're doing usually until year end, even though I have edited a letter or two for him. It's always with the numbers blocked out. I do think we've been helpful to each other in terms of thinking about various challenges that might have come up for each of us. And Scott in particular is He always keeps me really focused. You know, he's just, he's incredibly disciplined. We have very different personalities. Not saying that I'm not disciplined as well, but Scott kind of takes it to the next level in everything he does. He's very deliberate about everything he does, and he keeps me on my game. So even when it came to getting this job, he said, you know, what are you going to do to, to really stand out? And he's always asking me that and sort of asking me how I can up my game and keeping me honest. Um, And I really app…

AI assessment note: “we try not to talk about work that much.”

Q And now, back to the show. So does the, the necessity going in, not the necessity, the desire going in to have a really long investment horizon Does that translate into your looking for a certain type of existing stability in a manager from the get go? So maybe they're a little bit larger in size because you don't have to worry that, that there's business risk is one example.

A I would say in some ways the opposite is true. We do, we have some managers in our portfolio for sure that have been in existence a really long time. Interestingly, in some cases, We put those managers in business. In one case, over 20 years ago, we put a manager in business, and it's still the largest part of our global equity portfolio. But in some ways, and this might relate back to your beliefs from, from being a protege, I think that there can be less business risk earlier in a fund's life. No, it really depends on the strategy. I think that can be really true in private equity, where we tend to want to invest. Well, we, we love investing with folks that Don't ever want to sell, and we could have another conversation about that. It's hard to find those folks. Within the fund model, we'd like to be there for at least three funds, and we'd prefer to be there for five, six, seven funds. It's much easier to do that if you invest in funds when they're small, when the alignment is high, when they can buy businesses more cheaply. If you're investing at fund five or six when there's a really stable business, often the life cycle on the strategy is just shorter. I think on the public side, It's a mixed bag. Hedge funds fail, so you need to be really careful when you're investing early. I've made some mistakes in that regard, investing early with folks where, just frankly, their LPs…

AI assessment note: “I would say in some ways the opposite is true.”

Q I want to turn a little bit to Something different in your life than many people in your seat. So your husband, Scott, is a hedge fund manager. What is dinner conversation like at your household?

A Well, this is maybe not the answer you want, but we try not to talk about work that much. I think we recognize that our worlds are very closely intertwined, and there's a little bit of a danger, I think, to, to making that too much a part of our dynamic. You know, Scott and I have We've been together 17 years. We're, we're hitting on our 10 year anniversary this year of marriage. So we've grown up together in many ways. But while we don't, while our dinner table conversation doesn't focus on the investments in our portfolio, and in fact, Scott won't even tell me how they're doing usually until year end, even though I have edited a letter or two for him. It's always with the numbers blocked out. I do think we've been helpful to each other in terms of thinking about various challenges that might have come up for each of us. And Scott in particular is He always keeps me really focused. You know, he's just, he's incredibly disciplined. We have very different personalities. Not saying that I'm not disciplined as well, but Scott kind of takes it to the next level in everything he does. He's very deliberate about everything he does, and he keeps me on my game. So even when it came to getting this job, he said, you know, what are you going to do to, to really stand out? And he's always asking me that and sort of asking me how I can up my game and keeping me honest. Um, And I really app…

AI assessment note: “we try not to talk about work that much”

Q So it's really fun starting just at the beginning. How did you first get interested in investing?

A Well, I'm not one of those people that has been interested in investing since middle school or grade school. My dad is a doctor. My mom is a attorney and an art historian. And when I got my first job at Merrill Lynch in investment banking, they both thought I was going to be a stockbroker. And the reason I ended up there, quite honestly, is because I developed a little bit of an interest in microfinance in college. I spent a semester in South Africa, and I was a liberal arts political economy major. And I knew that I knew nothing about what a balance sheet was or an income statement was, and I needed to get some training. So that's how I started in banking, and even then, I wasn't sure where I was going to go, but I, I learned a little bit about the endowment world when I was there, and...

AI assessment note: “I developed a little bit of an interest in microfinance in college.”

Q Talk about that a little more. What happened that changed that thought process?

A Well, I was working for, you know, a really interesting NGO there that had a big microfinance arm and a public-private partnership arm. It was very well funded by the World Bank. It seemed like sort of the perfect institution to really explore that passion, and I, I frankly found the work incredibly frustrating, and it was frustrating Probably because I came in with a degree of arrogance about what I could bring to an organization that I knew nothing about. There was no reason they needed me there, quite frankly, but the pace at which they moved was not only slow, but I, I think I was frustrated because the institution was more focused on getting grants from the World Bank than they were on making a difference. I think they wanted to make a difference in people's lives, but they didn't always know how. And so, so much of the program ended up being oriented around earning the next grant, that there wasn't enough focus sometimes on just the blocking and tackling that was involved in trying to make very poor women's lives better. And I think there's some things the organization did very well, but You know, as an outsider looking in, there are times when you come into a new place and you see things that seem glaringly obvious. They were involved in some public-private partnerships, for example, that were actually losing money for the people that they were trying to support, but the…

AI assessment note: “the institution was more focused on getting grants from the World Bank”

Q And what is it, what was it about Bill and mentorship that you learned from him in this business?

A Well, for anyone that's listening that knows Bill, he is honest, maybe to a fault. He has one of the most active minds I've ever seen. He never stops thinking. He never stops questioning. He, he viewed himself as the chief cynic and could get to the heart of what mattered in like 30 seconds or less. He's deeply passionate about investing and he was, you know, deeply passionate about the institution he worked for. He really built that endowment for 16 years. I hope I have that time period right, Bill, if you're listening to this. And he, he's someone that taught me by doing and by acting. You know, he wouldn't, he wasn't one to sort of sit down and have lengthy conversations with me about the meaning of life. He would show me how to invest just by being actively engaged in every aspect of our portfolio, asking really hard questions of me and of our managers, and just being up for any type of discussion on investing. And I think it was a powerful way to, he would always tell me that he enjoyed mentoring more than managing, but I think that's what he needed to do, and he, you know, it's a statement that everyone that's left the Sloan Foundation has ended up in really interesting spots, I think, because, because of Bill's teaching.

AI assessment note: “he's someone that taught me by doing and by acting”

Q So how does that translate into, because these managers have clients that might be thinking shorter term than that. So how does it translate into how you go about either looking for certain managers or the research you do or the decisions that you make?

A Sure. So, you know, we have a framework that we use that actually permeates everything we do in many respects, that, where we really focus first on what a manager's process is, what their strategy is, and then what their team and culture is. And those are really, you know, in many ways, sort of, there's a lot of touchy-feely qualitative stuff going on in there, trying to figure out whether a manager has a competitive advantage in what they do relative to what is often a very efficient market. That's a piece of it. And then thinking about The complexity of what we, what they do. Is it something that we can really understand? Is it something that they understand? It's shocking. I think sometimes managers use a lot of jargon when they talk about what they do, and when you ask really basic questions, even they have a hard time explaining it sometimes. And then understanding whether they've built a firm and a team that marries with their process. So there's no one right way to build a firm or a team or a culture even, but it really has to marry with what they're trying to achieve. And then we back that up with looking at what we call their quality of returns. So rather than just saying have they performed well, it's trying to really disaggregate their returns and understand how they've made money. Has that changed over time? Is the way they've made, they're making money, does it mar…

AI assessment note: “we have a framework that we use that actually permeates everything we do”

Q And what does that, what does that mean?

A Again, it's back to this idea, and maybe I seem obsessed with this, but it's, it's, I've gotten religion over the past couple years. It's a different Animal to manage money for taxable investors. And I think what we share with an endowment, and I have lots of great friends in the endowment world. I love that world. And our investment committee has endowment folks on it. It's a small committee, but we share the long time horizon. We share the focus on the bias towards investing in people who do deep fundamental research, who are heavily aligned with us in terms of being heavily invested in their own strategies. But Because we pay taxes, we have to think even longer term than an endowment, I would say. We have to be even more conscious of turnover, both at the fund level and at our portfolio level. And it also means there's some opportunities for us. Um, you know, there's some strategies that just make, you know, we really love private equity as an asset class here. It's a wonderful asset for families. Also, it's a wonderful asset, not just from an investment perspective, but from an estate planning perspective, it has some wonderful benefits. You know, when I was at the Sloan Foundation, We wanted current income. That was fabulous for us. When you're paying out five percent every year and you don't have money coming in the top, current income strategies are a wonderful, wonderfu…

AI assessment note: “It's a different Animal to manage money for taxable investors.”

Q And so, was there a moment or an insight you had in that experience in South Africa that stayed with you till today?

A Oh my goodness, that's a great question. I think, well, it's interesting. I've, I've now spent time, a little bit of time living in two countries very, very different from the U.S., so I spent that That period of time in South Africa, and I also spent six months living in India prior to business school, working for an NGO, trying to scratch my microfinance itch, and I think some learnings have coming, have come out of both of those experiences. One, that you have to have a lot of patience for the time and the pace in which things move in other countries. You often have to slow yourself down a lot, largely because Especially at the times I was, I was there, you know, these economies were a lot less efficient, and, you know, in India, for example, getting a package to my parents mailed meant spending an hour at the post office. Watching someone tie up the package with strings, and it could be incredibly infuriating, but I think there's a lot of value to slowing down and learning to take your time, and allowing that time, allowing yourself, I guess, the time and the space To open up and really absorb a culture. There's just such tremendous value in that. It's something I want to offer my kids.

AI assessment note: “One, that you have to have a lot of patience for the time and the pace”

Q So over the years you've been doing these deep dives, what's the prototypical example you hold up of one of these that turned into something very meaningful for your portfolio?

A Well, I'm going to use a recent example because I think the process has been very robust. I actually don't know if it's going to be meaningful yet. I mean, I would say our QSR deep dive did lead to a meaningful investment for us. Affordable housing came out of a meaningful investment, but insurance is a space that we're looking at now, and it's sort of a hybrid deep dive meets actual underwriting process, but I'm calling it a deep dive because one of my colleagues has been looking at the space since 2015. Actually, I was looking through our notes because we're doing active work on it now, and it amazed me that he had had a real interest in the space and a lot of aspects of the space, too. I mean, at one point, we looked at life settlements. Now we're focusing on the Lloyd's market, but he's really taking this on as just a side project over the years, understanding that, at least with the part of the market we're focused on now, the pricing environment has been pretty Horrific for a number of years. And actually the managers he'd gotten to know in the space as part of his initial deep dive really were high integrity enough to say to him, this isn't a good time to invest, but there were a lot of aspects of the space that still appeal to us. So what's happened in that space is we got a call from a manager saying the pricing environment has moved from sort of a soft market to a har…

AI assessment note: “our QSR deep dive did lead to a meaningful investment for us.”

Q here anymore. So most of them didn't work. Was there any chance that the organization you were working for was making these sort of higher profile, presumably with multinational partnerships to build their brand so that they could Do something better with it in the future? It sounded the way you were saying it, a little more like, eh, you're not sure the business plan was, was along those lines.

A You know, I think it's an interesting question, and there can be value to brand building at any organization, and maybe at times you do that at the expense of the bottom line, whatever that bottom line looks like. I frankly am not sure that, well, a couple of things. One, I I think sometimes the best, and I feel a little silly talking about this given where I work and given that it's not my expertise, but outside looking in, I wonder if sometimes the best nonprofit ideas aren't easily scalable. Paul Farmer talks about this a bit, and it's, well, at least in Mountains Beyond Mountains, the book that was written about him, you know, he had this incredible way to bring healthcare to the developing world, but the scalability piece was the reason he didn't get funded for a long time, and Yet, his outcomes were phenomenal, so I think figuring out how to scale a non-profit is an incredible challenge. This organization was doing some things incredibly well that worked at scale. They had built a movement of women in, who really didn't have a voice in rural India, and that was powerful, and I think there, their brand did matter, but I think their issue was that they weren't focused anymore. Um, so they had, they built this movement, and they gave women a voice, and They organized women, which was a powerful thing at the time, and then they built a microfinance bank, which was very succes…

AI assessment note: “I think they were building on their brand to do that, but I don't think”