The Exchanges

Q When everyone's reading all these memos, everyone's making comments and learning, how do you actually make a decision?

A The asset class head ultimately Could take or not take it with Ellen. So Ellen overarching had responsibility for the full portfolio. If the person who did hedge fund, Lee Tan had a comment on your thing and you didn't agree with it and Ellen didn't agree with it. Simple. If Ellen agreed with what Lee said, it made you think, should I be paying attention to this? And sometimes you could still argue. I felt like there was a lot of freedom to argue and disagree and come to conclusions. And I think that Ellen gave us a lot of rope to hang ourselves. It was your portfolio. She had a lot of opinions, and we respected and trusted her, so we weren't going to ignore those. But ultimately, we got to build a portfolio that we thought was a good portfolio, and I think that was powerful for me, and absolutely something I took into managing teams later.

AI assessment note: “The asset class head ultimately Could take or not take it with Ellen.”

Q What was the impetus for you moving to Columbia?

A When they first came to me with the Columbia job, I said I wasn't interested. I loved Carnegie. No place is perfect, but I felt supported. I felt like my opinion mattered in the senior leadership space. I really felt like Vartan was a mentor and coach to me and a father figure to all of us in real meaningful ways. And so I wasn't necessarily looking to leave, although I knew that one of the big problems with CIOs is they stay too long. And I do think portfolios need refresh. And I knew that I had a team of such quality talent that if I didn't leave, they were going to leave at some point. And so I was just like, not interested. And then the headhunter was like, you should at least talk to them. I just, I can't believe you would not Take this interview. If you're not going to take this, what are you going to take? That's literally what he said, and I was like, all right, I'll do the interview. And so in the middle of the interview process, COVID happened, and I didn't realize what was going on with the rest of the team. The only person that I knew was looking was Alisa, because she had shared with me what was going on with her. But I didn't realize that everybody else, because you could interview just like I did over Zoom and not have to go anyplace. It got to the end, and I Still wasn't a hundred percent sure I wanted a job, but the competitive instinct kicked in, as everybody …

AI assessment note: “I Still wasn't a hundred percent sure I wanted a job, but the competitive instinct kicked in”

Q Did you notice any particular difference on the side of race or gender?

A I will tell you that the first job that I had after college, I left because of gender issues, not race issues. When I went to Chemical Bank, which is where I worked, I particularly chose the areas of the commercial bank, because I was in middle market banking that dealt with Long Island and Brooklyn and Queens, because I wanted real businesses, and if you worked in the city, you ended up with financial institutions, and so I sort of wanted to See what it was like to be real businesses, and it tended to be a more diverse population. They were slightly different than the New York City crowd, but The sexism was profound. I remember being in a meeting. This is going to sound like a flippant comment, but it was, I was 21 years old, and I'm in a meeting with the head of credit and the head of the group that I was in, so pretty senior people in the bank, and they were talking about this deal that they wanted to get. It was a big company, one on the larger side of the middle market. It's turned into a great company since, but they were anxious to get this deal, and they said, We will do whatever we have to do to get this deal, even if it means putting Kim on the table. And I was like, oh, did I just hear that? And the youngest person in the room, the most junior person in the room, sort of flipped, obviously not completely intentional, but the impact that made on me was, okay, so this …

AI assessment note: “I left because of gender issues, not race issues.”

Q to take the helm at Carnegie, there's sort of two sides of how you think about one is sort of what happens on your team. And then the other is how you make your investments and how you think about the importance of diversity inclusion across that. So why don't you start with your team and what have you tried to do in running a team and building a team?

A When I began, I was co-CIOs with Meredith, as you know, and one of the best people on the planet, full stop. She approaches and receives people in a way that is just so generous, right? Like she's just a good person. And I think that sort of set the tone for who we were as a team. And we thought and talked a lot about diversity and what that meant for us. And honestly, we started with trying to add a man. Because our team was so heavily women, and I said that in a conference one day, because Ken Lee was the hire, and he's a, obviously a man, and he's an Asian man, and at a conference, I said he was our diversity hire, because we didn't have enough men on the team, and there's truth to that. We thought of him in diversity for a lot of reasons. One, we wanted to add men to the team. We also wanted to add somebody who Thought about investing in a different way than the typical ENF person. He had come from a hedge fund of funds, and we thought that perspective would challenge us and make us think differently. So we were always trying to have a primary, secondary devil advocacy relationship with everybody on the team, and in order for that to be effective, we thought we had to have people who thought differently and had different backgrounds, but who were really good communicators, which is hard. You can have people with very different backgrounds, but everybody feeling free to voic…

AI assessment note: “we thought we had to have people who thought differently and had different backgrounds”

Q Outside of your direct activities at Carnegie, you know, with the team and investing, how have you engaged in kind of the broader professional community on these issues?

A I went in at one time for, I think it was a Twigo gala. Twigo is a foundation that supports diverse talent in business schools and the investment management industry, and they had a gala, and Michelle Obama was the speaker, and she said, if you are In a seat. And you are not challenging people on these issues. You're wasting that seat. You should get out of the way and let somebody who's willing to may have those conversations, have that seat. And I think there's truth to that, right? And so I will engage in those conversations. And as often as I can, I also, I give my time to organizations like SEO, where I'm on the LP advisory board, and I spend a lot of time with that group of talented young people.

AI assessment note: “I give my time to organizations like SEO, where I'm on the LP advisory board”

Q And in your upbringing and pre say professional career, what did you find from that perspective of being seen as different in lots of different ways? What did you find through your childhood and life?

A So it's really interesting. I've thought a lot about this, because being half black and half Chinese brings with it two very different stereotypes, and sort of navigating through that meant different things to different people, and so I could find myself in an uncomfortable position everywhere. It could be uncomfortable in the black community. It could be uncomfortable in the white community. It could be uncomfortable in the Asian community, so you sort of sit in a place where you're always Trying to figure out whether you fit or not. So I remember when I was really little that I would start out a conversation with the fact that I was half black and half Chinese, right? Just in case anybody didn't know. Because if you were going to be mean to me, or if you were going to treat me badly as a result of it, I wanted to know right away before I wasted my time becoming your friend or trying to become your friend and then learning that you were that person. So, you know, it's a heavy load for a little kid, but I remember it from when I was really young. Like, Kindergarten. First grade.

AI assessment note: “being half black and half Chinese brings with it two very different stereotypes”

Q Why don't you touch on what SEO is?

A Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. They have both a careers program, which is getting underrepresented minorities into investment banks, law firms, used to be accounting firms, just different places where they are underrepresented. They also have a scholars program, which is they pick students that are in disadvantaged backgrounds. I think the average income of the families is something like 25,000 dollars a year, and they take these kids and they mentor and tutor them Through college, every Saturday from, I think, freshman year of high school, they go to SEO, and they, they get tutoring, and they learn classes, and they are building a network amongst themselves. They get into college, and then SEO sort of provides a backstop for them through college to make sure they get out of college. So they have the careers program, they have the scholars program, and they also have a private equity program, where after you finish the Careers program, you can apply to be at one of the private equity firms or hedge funds for the two-year internship before you go back to business school, and that's been a hugely successful endeavor. It's been around for a fairly long time, I think, 85 or 86 is when it started. I'm close, but maybe not precise on that number. They had a phenomenal alumni network, just all the highly successful people who are Black and Hispanic people have come out of the i…

AI assessment note: “Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. They have both a careers program”

Q What are some of the ones you've done recently?

A We did one on demographics. We did one on the retail sector where we had people talk about how retail was going to evolve over time. We had someone come in and talk about contagions and how diseases spread and what that meant. We had someone come in and talk about active versus passive, which is over here right now, more of a here right now phenomenon, but sometimes they're really, we're doing one on cryptocurrency. We did one on the future of work, and what robots could replace, and what they couldn't replace, and we did one on real estate, and how self-driving cars, and the way millennials think about housing would change how cities were built, so sort of an urban design kind of thoughts, and so all those don't affect right now investments, but they will have us look for sort of weird Off the run type of investments and make us think about what might be coming. Um, so we always dedicate some time to that, which is hard when you have to manage a portfolio right now, but I want the team to come to me with weird stuff.

AI assessment note: “We did one on demographics. We did one on the retail sector”

Q How have you taken that lens and tried to think about it in the managers in your portfolio?

A I think one of the biggest things that gives Carnegie an advantage, and I'm not in any way implying that we have been great about hiring diverse managers. We have them. I don't think we've done a great job, and I think we've not done a great job because by nature of Foundations. The turnover in our portfolios is really slow, so if you're not purposeful and deliberate about it, it's difficult for it to happen, and I also think we have really small teams, so we're always trying to have really concentrated portfolios, and so all that stands in the way of actually adding talent, but what I do think that I have tried to do, and I think is really important, is having people question the biases and make sure that there's nothing fundamental in the way they think about things that will Automatically disadvantage a diverse manager when they come through the door. And also making people question the shortcuts they use, why they use them, and are they relevant? So, for instance, people will spend a lot of time talking about, I like somebody who's worked on a team, because it shows they can be a team player. And I particularly like people who have been on the lacrosse team because it requires a lot of teamwork, and it requires a lot of finesse, and a lot of good communication, and so that's who I choose. Well, if that's your bias, you are going to disadvantage people of color. Let's just i…

AI assessment note: “what I do think that I have tried to do... is having people question the biases”

Q Where do you see today the biggest obstacles to making this change happen over time?

A I think it's the perception that the pie is shrinking. It's the biggest obstacle, right? Like it's really hard to For people to think outside of themselves when they feel threatened. If you think as a person in a position of power, if you think that in order for me to support this population, my son, my daughter might not have access, much harder than if you don't have a scarcity mindset. I always give this example. So it's just over 50 years of the African American Student Union at HBS. And so they had the founders of that organization come and speak at a conference, and they said the way that they were able to increase the number of black students at HBS is by adding a new section. So no one felt threatened. We just have a brand new section. It's not like all the African-American people are in that one section. We sprinkle them throughout, but the number of slots that were available for everybody else has not changed. We've just made the pie bigger, and it's from that moment forward that they were able to increase the diverse population at HBS. There's a little bit of people feeling like it's the same number of sections. And now I have to divide it over more people, and that feels threatening. And I think that even the best intentioned people It's in the back of their minds and it gnaws at them in a way that sometimes feels uncomfortable. So people have to be willing either t…

AI assessment note: “I think it's the perception that the pie is shrinking. It's the biggest obstacle”

Q about, what would happen if you had to make a shift, and that's really a shift in mindset and skill set and behavior. We've all learned a lot in the last couple years about behavioral bias and how human behavior makes it difficult for us to make good decisions. How have you thought about the lessons of behavioral finance and how you apply them to making decisions on your team?

A I think it was two years ago I asked everybody on my team to give me a list of their biases. Tell me what you think gets in the way of you objectively looking at investments and that may either create an environment where you're taking risks that you should not take or that you are missing out on an opportunity that you should pursue. And I did that, one, just to force them to think about it, because I was like, and if you come up with nothing, you've failed, because we all have biases. But I also wanted to make sure that we as a team agreed on what our biases were. Did they come up with something that I didn't even recognize that they had, or were we aligned in what we thought? And I also asked them to provide to me what they thought would help them balance on the other side. What did they need? Did they need a devil's advocate, or would that make them more strident, and it would not, did they need data? What about this bias Could be overcome, and how would we do that? So it really gave us an opportunity to look at those things and try to figure out how we can make our team better. And there's a very similar exercise we do with our managers. We spend a lot of time talking to them about just that thing, just like when you think about things, how do you think about your team, and how do you think about whether you've created a team full of people who all pat each other on the ba…

AI assessment note: “I asked everybody on my team to give me a list of their biases.”

Q So if you dive into, you know, now they call it private equity, but the old buyout portfolio then, so almost 20 years ago, geez, um, what was it like in sourcing managers? If you compare that to picking up something relatively new today, We're trying to put capital to work in a new area today, and sourcing new managers today.

A There weren't nearly as many source of capital back then as there are now, and so the competition for getting into these things was very different, and also, as much as the foundation and endowment community is the bit insular now, it was even more so at the time, so for sure, if you were Add another foundation, and you found this great manager. You would tell your peers at other foundations, I found this great manager. You should look at them too. Now, not everybody did everything together, obviously, but part of your sourcing was other people, and those managers didn't have a lot of options, because the pension funds weren't investing at the time. We didn't have all the sovereign wealth money. You had corporates in, you had strategics in, in some way, but it was a very different environment, and so The foundations in the dynamic community had a lot more leverage. So you had leverage with managers. That's what made them become known as the smart money because you were doing these sort of more interesting structures and strategies. Very different than it is now.

AI assessment note: “There weren't nearly as many source of capital back then as there are now”

Q And is that as relative to the population? Is it one person?

A It's around whether it's a relevant percentage. And to be honest with you, I can't remember if that relevant percentage is 30% or 50%. I think it's 30% if I'm remembering correctly. So you have some relevant amount of diversity in your team. So that's a one. And a three is you have none and you have no program. Not relevant for me. That's a three. Everything else is a two. You're trying, either you are building a pipeline, or you have some, maybe you just have one person, and they're not yet a full decision maker, but you're cultivating, you're building them, and you're bringing them along. So there's a lot of twos. There's a lot of people who are trying to do something. Not graduating at some point to a one is going to say something, right? You can't just keep saying you're trying and never getting there. So this is the first time we've added diversity score. It'll be interesting to see what the next time, three years from now, looks like, and how many people have gone from a three to a two, and a two to a three, because the way we do our scorecarding, it's about trend. It's about improvement over time, not necessarily where they are at any moment. We don't want anybody in the portfolio not to be at least a two over all the different metrics, but it's about being better. I think there were, like, maybe three different dimensions of diversity, and each one Was scored one to thr…

AI assessment note: “It's around whether it's a relevant percentage. And to be honest with you, I can't remember”

Q All right. What is your most important daily habit?

A So I have new daily habits that have been very different. So my new daily habit, which has had a profound impact on me, and this is something that I'm, other people have done already, but it's new for me. I get up and I get out of my house. My alarm goes off at six 45 and I'm on the streets at seven a.m. Mostly walking, sometimes running if I feel a need to, but like getting out, and I think we're in a pandemic. We're trapped in our house. It's been huge for me to start my day outside. No matter the weather, I start my day outside, and it sort of sets my mind right for the rest of the day. I try to walk at least three miles, or run at least three miles, or depending on how much time I have, I run if I don't have much time. I walk if I have a lot of time, and, and clear my head, but that has been huge for me.

AI assessment note: “my new daily habit... I get up and I get out of my house.”

Q Kim, what was different coming to Carnegie about Carnegie's process from what you'd experienced before?

A Literally everything was different. The point that Elisa just made about the length of our memos, you just can't overstate that. And at the time it feels like, oh my God, we have to write this long memo. But this is how you really figured out if you understood the risk of what was going on. And I think that people lose sight of the fact that there's value in documenting what your thought process were. And I think that we spent a lot of time really thinking about how a manager would treat you When things went wrong, because the documents don't protect you. Ellen talked a lot about that. We have to know that they'll make the right decision when something goes wrong. Every single person on the team read every memo.

AI assessment note: “Literally everything was different. The point that Elisa just made about the length of our memos”

Q Kim, what was different coming to Carnegie about Carnegie's process from what you'd experienced before?

A Literally everything was different. The point that Elisa just made about the length of our memos, you just can't overstate that. And at the time it feels like, oh my God, we have to write this long memo. But this is how you really figured out if you understood the risk of what was going on. And I think that people lose sight of the fact that there's value in documenting what your thought process were. And I think that we spent a lot of time really thinking about how a manager would treat you When things went wrong, because the documents don't protect you. Ellen talked a lot about that. We have to know that they'll make the right decision when something goes wrong. Every single person on the team read every memo.

AI assessment note: “Literally everything was different. The point that Elisa just made about the length of our memos”

Q And as you look at the way your team worked, knowing that you're the leader, them knowing that you had a friendly relationship with them, how do you think you were able to navigate kind of a clean process to get to a decision about Sycamore?

A I think it was because I was the most critical, ultimately. I actually went in with many more lists of, here are the things that we should be concerned about. Not to be overly specific, but has not managed a team before. People who are new to managing teams will always think they can do better. They will have foot faults. Here are the list of foot faults I think that might be possible. Also, this is a person who is incredibly confident, not always sure he's going to be able to recognize the moments at which He's getting ahead of himself. Think about this. Here's some questions you need to ask. And also this fund size, is this an appropriate fund size for a new manager? Let's go back and do some work on that. And what does that look like? So I think that I tried to get ahead of it by being very clear that I did not think this was a slam dunk. Here's all the things that I think we need to do a lot of work on. This underwriting happened when I was at Carnegie. It just so happens that he's also in the Columbia portfolio. It'll be interesting to see how it evolves over time, because he's growing as an investor. It's a difficult space. He had a tremendous amount of success out the gate, and now everything is different about retail, and so I think a re-underwriting by everybody is going to happen, so it's going to be really interesting.

AI assessment note: “I think it was because I was the most critical, ultimately.”

Q And then when you look at the portfolio construction of those buckets, how many do you think fall into this idiosyncratic off the run?

A Not as much as I would like, but they take a lot of work, so it takes a lot of work managing them, and it takes a lot of finding them. But I would say right now, it's probably not more than five or 10% of the portfolio, but do I think it's gonna have to be more? Yes. I think it's gonna have to be more if we're gonna continue to outperform, because I think returns are coming down, and if returns are gonna come down, and our five percent payout is not coming down, we're just gonna have to find different ways to create alpha, and so that's gonna have to become a bigger part of the portfolio. And portfolio construction is going to have to become a bigger part of how we gain alpha. And so we're going to just have to tweak all the different tools a little bit. So I'm not abandoning the endowment model. I still think it's a great model. It's just the tweaks as we think about how we're going to do that. And so, you know, a lot of times I think about, does that mean that the skill set you looked for And your team has to change? And arguably, yes, right? Like, we looked at great manager selectors. This person has expertise in real estate, and they know every single person, and they'll be able to pick the best real estate manager from the worst real estate manager, and so that's how I chose the real estate person. That's, she's amazing. So now, I actually just have to know about the real …

AI assessment note: “right now, it's probably not more than five or 10% of the portfolio”

Q And was that just personality that allowed you to be so extroverted about it?

A Well, I think it was a function of my parents. I think they were always very clear that we were in an unusual position. I think my father, particularly being in Harlem, and then being in the Bronx, sort of always felt slightly not a part, and felt that pretty strongly, and then I think that probably translated a little bit to me, my brother, a fair amount. I remember my brother, when he was really young, he used to get in fights all the time, and I remember one particular fight he got in, and I think he was maybe second grade, Because a boy told him he had mishmash parents, and it turned into a whole big thing, and you know, it was sort of always present in our lives, and so we were keenly aware that we were different, like, so we were in a Black and Hispanic community, and we were the different people there, and in all of our environments, but not to say that that didn't benefit us sometimes, so let's be clear, I'm also painfully aware that the positive stereotypes of being Asian also helped us In those environments, like it gave us access to a lot of things, or people assumed, like they assumed I was good at math for some reason, and so when I was good at math, people didn't think that was strange. So I think that I don't want to underestimate the things that worked in our favor as well.

AI assessment note: “Well, I think it was a function of my parents.”

Q And some of those illiquid asset classes, you think about sort of private equity deals or a venture capital ecosystem where some of the prerequisites for success are having the right relationships. Does that create bottlenecks for diverse managers?

A Yes, but I do think that that's the importance of having people train in the big firms. And build networks in the big firms and then spinning out and doing their own thing. I do think networks are important. I do think we all shortcut to people we trust and however you define that trust. And it's really about getting people to widen the lens of how they define who they trust, but it's a protective human instinct to go with people who you have some shared understanding with. And so, There is some value in us going out and getting that or cultivating it. Some people are just so outgoing and so great about networking that they can do that independently. It's rare. For those who don't, it's still good to go to schools where you meet people who will help you. It's still good to go and apprentice at organizations where you will meet people who will go on to do great things. You have to find people who are unlike you. We all do. Everybody has to find people who are unlike them to sort of broaden the opportunity set for them, and so that's still the case. So the pipeline is still important. It's still important for people to have programs that cultivate diverse talent at investment banks, at commercial banks, at private equity firms as analysts. I mean, that's still hugely important because that's where the networks come from.

AI assessment note: “Yes, but I do think that that's the importance of having people train”

Q What did you find when you went through that exercise?

A There were for sure things that, like, one of my team members tell me that, which I didn't recognize, that there was a certain constituency that she was affiliated with that she says, I think I'm biased against that group because my expectation is I feel such an ownership of this group of people that if, in fact, they fail, it's personal to me, and so I'm doubly hard. So we had to think about what that meant and how we were going to balance that out so we didn't miss out on opportunities of people because no one looks perfect. Perfect. And so she felt like she was really quick to just keep eliminating people that had real opportunities to outperform. So it worked out really well.

AI assessment note: “one of my team members tell me that... I think I'm biased against that group”

Q Were there things you learned from your experience at Carnegie that helped you exercise that muscle at Columbia?

A I think the thing that I started with, and I think was partially because we were in a pandemic, was just being on a listening tour. Everything about it was so different. I look back on this now and think, I can't believe I took this job without information, but they wouldn't give me any of the portfolio before I joined. They said they had signed NDAs with their managers, and so they couldn't disclose anything. So I had big picture portfolio information, but not a single manager name. So I walked into a portfolio November second, That I had seen for the first time on November second. And there were two managers that overlapped. That's it. Columbia had such a different philosophy on how they managed assets that it literally, there was nothing that was similar. I didn't know these names and it was in COVID. So I couldn't know these names. I knew that it was a priority to keep the team intact, but I also knew that the way they were structured and how they did things was not a way that I could keep. Ellen managed us. She gave us a lot of authority and a lot of ability to express our own opinions and disagree. They disagreed a lot, and they had a lot of really strong opinions, but they didn't take responsibility for the ultimate decision because that wasn't the role that was set up for them. So now I was asking them to be a very different organization than they had been before. I thi…

AI assessment note: “I wanted to get back to a culture that was much closer to What we had at Carnegie”

Q of the industry is evaluated on performance, and there's always this question of will these changes get made if it doesn't look measurable in terms of just investment performance outcomes? Clearly, today people are more interested after this wave of Black Lives Matter for the right reasons, but will that sustain itself unless there's some way of tying Outcomes kind of like what you saw in your initial diversity score.

A So it's interesting. So I had a conversation with a group of CIOs at one time, and I said, well, look, the research has shown that the distribution in diverse and women managers is exactly the same as the distribution in the general funds without a diversity lens. I said, I think that there is arguably a sourcing issue But if you're good at choosing managers and you've been successfully able to be a great manager selector and pick the top quartile, you should be able to do that in diverse managers too. It's the same game. And one CIO took issue with that. She was like, well, I just don't believe that's true. And so my answer is, then that means that you fundamentally believe Women and people of color are less than. Of course it has to be the same. Like, just by the very nature, it has to be the same distribution. Arguably, They should be better because it's so hard for a diverse talent to get capital. If you do, chances are you're good, right? Like you may not be great, but you probably weed out all the average because there's not a lot of rich dads who give their diverse people money who are marginal. They're not a lot of that. So That bottom 10% is naturally gone, right? Like, so arguably it should be slightly better, not slightly worse, right? But I do believe that there is a sourcing issue, and there is a size of fun issue, and there is a, for sure, business issue. Because …

AI assessment note: “the research has shown that the distribution in diverse and women managers is exactly the same”

Q And then as you move to Carnegie, I know Ellen Schumann, who was the CIO at the time, was someone who always prided herself on diversity on her team. How did that play out?

A I was the youngest person when I went to Ford. I was one of the oldest people when I went to Carnegie, so I came at it a little differently, and she and I always had a good rapport. I knew her before I got there. She's a person who's super easy to talk to. She believes in mentorship, and she believes in the importance of teamwork and collaboration, and so she sort of fosters that amongst the people that work there. I will say that ultimately it was very different At the Ford Foundation, I had a lot of conversations there that were more uncomfortable around race, and I had much more confrontational conversations there than by the time I left. When I first got there, I was too young for anybody to engage with me that way, but by the time I left, I was 40 years old. I was in a different place. The nature of the conversations were very different. Carnegie was never like that, and I do think it's a function of who Ellen is and the nature of who she was as a person. I do think she is a very merit-based person. The way she thinks of things.

AI assessment note: “Carnegie was never like that, and I do think it's a function of who Ellen is”

Q I have one more question, which is, Towards the end of your conversation, Stefan talked about potential product expansion into credit. How do you think about assessing your interest in re-underwriting the private equity strategy, whether you'd look at a distressed or credit strategy, and how those fit together?

A It's a different underwriting, and it's not a strategy that's typical for us, and there are for sure managers that we give a lot of leeway to branch out into new directions, especially when we think that the other business gives them a leg up in being able to be successful in the ways that they're branching out, and so the stories have to be told. I have to say that over the years, I've heard Stefan talk about other areas that he's thought about branching out into, I think he's very thoughtful about it. He'll come up with an idea. I think I can leverage this, and I can be successful with this. He'll go down the road. If it turns out that it's not what he thought it was, you'll never hear about it again. So he brought up credit. I think he's exploring it. I don't know for sure that he's going to do credit, but I think that if he does it, it's because he's analyzed it and decided that there's an opportunity there. Because like I said, he's in the past named a number of things that he hasn't ultimately done. And that's one of the things I appreciate about him. He sort of tests the waters. He, he doesn't just assume because he thought of it that it's something that he should do. He does work on it.

AI assessment note: “It's a different underwriting, and it's not a strategy that's typical for us”

Q Were there things you learned from your experience at Carnegie that helped you exercise that muscle at Columbia?

A I think the thing that I started with, and I think was partially because we were in a pandemic, was just being on a listening tour. Everything about it was so different. I look back on this now and think, I can't believe I took this job without information, but they wouldn't give me any of the portfolio before I joined. They said they had signed NDAs with their managers, and so they couldn't disclose anything. So I had big picture portfolio information, but not a single manager name. So I walked into a portfolio November second, That I had seen for the first time on November second. And there were two managers that overlapped. That's it. Columbia had such a different philosophy on how they managed assets that it literally, there was nothing that was similar. I didn't know these names and it was in COVID. So I couldn't know these names. I knew that it was a priority to keep the team intact, but I also knew that the way they were structured and how they did things was not a way that I could keep. Ellen managed us. She gave us a lot of authority and a lot of ability to express our own opinions and disagree. They disagreed a lot, and they had a lot of really strong opinions, but they didn't take responsibility for the ultimate decision because that wasn't the role that was set up for them. So now I was asking them to be a very different organization than they had been before. I thi…

AI assessment note: “I wanted to get back to a culture that was much closer to What we had at Carnegie”

Q Take an example in your head of something you've done recently. Either share what it is or the type of investment, and what does that mean, the risks of what could go wrong?

A So someone brings a manager in, somebody else on the team says, you know, I had a structure like that before. It wasn't in this space, it was in this other space, and here's what happened. And I got burnt. And here's the thing that the manager did that maybe wasn't exactly what I wanted. Or I co-invested, not co-invested, but I was a co-LP with this fund. Here's what motivates them. That's very different than what motivates us. And they're asking for this term because this is how they run their portfolio. And that will hurt us if they get that term. So either you have to decide you don't want to be in there, or you need to find a term that protects you if they do their stuff. Or someone will say, I know these three people who have invested with them before. Before you do that, you should talk to these three people, because one of the things I've heard about them is that they're quick to get scared when the markets get choppy. And so that's a portfolio construction, a portfolio management risk, and maybe you should think about that. And It's all sorts of things. I mean, you name it, someone has seen it Before, if you're experienced enough, I've seen it before, something that other people that we'll talk about, we try a lot more to leverage our relationships with peers outside of the organization, and just let everybody spend a lot of time just figuring out what the risks are, be…

AI assessment note: “someone brings a manager in, somebody else on the team says”

Q Was there anything in your formative years that led to business from being around, whether it's grocery and dry cleaning or AT&T?

A So it's so funny, because I actually, when I was applying to high school, I, at the time, there was a high school in New York's John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx that had a dental program. And if you graduated from that high school, you graduated already able to be a dental assistant, and I wanted to be a dentist. And why did I want to be a dentist? Because it seemed like a good job, and I wanted to be a doctor. I was at Bronx Science, and I was good at science and math, and I wanted to be a doctor. And I didn't like blood. So I was like, I can't, I was like, I'll either be an eye doctor or I'll be a dentist. And this program came along and I was like, I'm going to do that. My father was like, stop it. That's ridiculous. You're not going to be a dental assistant. You're not going to be a dentist. And you know, and there went from that.

AI assessment note: “I wanted to be a dentist... My father was like, stop it.”