Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry Ted Seides – Allocator and Asset Management Expert

Cliff Asness is the Founder and CIO at AQR, an investment management firm at the intersection of financial theory and practice that oversees $100 billion in assets. He is famously intelligent, comical, and irreverent, all wrapped into one.

Our conversation covers Cliff's journey from studying market efficiency under Eugene Fama to capitalizing on market inefficiencies at AQR. We discuss regime changes in factors, difficult periods for performance and AQR’s business, research innovation, machine learning, index funds, pod shops, areas of cognitive dissonance, private equity, and serving on investment committees.

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3G Capital’s buyout of Burger King may be the most successful private equity deal you’ve never heard about. Over the last fourteen years, or the length of a typical private equity fund, 3G turned a $1 billion investment into $28 billion in value. The annual dividends from the investment accruing to 3G today are around 70% of its invested capital. The deal is one of the highest earning buyouts ever.

3G is an organization with a storied history. Founded by Jorge Paolo Lemann, Carlos Alberto Sicupira, and Marcel Herrmann Telles, the group created an owner-operator model of investing. They rose to prominence through building the largest beer company in the world, initially buying local brewer Brahma in 1989, expanding it and merging with a competitor to become AmBev in 1999, merging with Interbrew to become ImBev in 2004, and taking over Anheuser Busch in 2008 to become AB InBev.

Twenty years ago, Alex Behring, a young star on their team, moved to the US to form 3G Capital and take the approach abroad.
Burger King was the second largest hamburger fast food chain after McDonalds in 2010 when 3G took it private. What it accomplished since then has been extraordinary.

My guests to discuss 3G and the deal are Alex Behring and Daniel Schwartz. Co-Managing Partners of 3G Capital.

Our conversation covers the history of 3G, Alex's journey to form 3G Capital, and the 3G playbook. We then dive into the deal, covering the sourcing and deal dynamics, improving operations, growing the business, taking the company public unexpectedly, and reloading to buy Tim Horton’s, Popeye’s, and Firehouse Subs. Today’s Burger King is part of Restaurant Brands International (QSR), a public company with a $32 billion market cap and $50 billion enterprise value.

This classic deal will widen your aperture on what’s possible with a long-term, compounding holding period and operational excellence.
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Alex Abell is a Managing Partner at RCP Advisors, which at $14 billion of committed capital, is one of the largest firms focused exclusively on lower-middle market buyouts. Alex has spent twenty-three years in the business, starting on the LP side, building Atlas Diligence – a research and advisory platform focused on advanced analytics, and then merging Atlas with RCP a decade ago. Today, he helps manage RCP’s research efforts, its customized solutions, and advisory services.

Our conversation covers Alex’s path and lessons learned investing in lower middle market buyout funds across assessing managers with data, benchmarking, blending quantitative and qualitative factors, and applying insights to primary and secondary investing.

Alex and I just scratch the surface on what’s possible with analytics in the private markets. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to Alex directly at alex@rcpadvisors.com

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Letitia Johnson is the CIO of Amherst College, where she manages the school's $4 billion endowment. After thirteen years working with twenty-five clients and attending over 1,000 Investment Committee meetings at Cambridge Associates, Letitia developed a view about investing that differs from many similar pools of capital and has applied that view over the last five years.

Our conversation covers the subtleties of managing an endowment with a concentrated, bottom-up manager-selected approach for the long-term, including portfolio construction, risk and liquidity management, long-term investing, and competition for capital.
 
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David Morehead is the CIO at Baylor University, where he oversees the $2.2 billion endowment. David came to Baylor thirteen years ago after an eighteen-year investment career that spanned every aspect of public markets investing. He created an approach to investing at Baylor that is quite different from others in the seat. David recently started sharing his insightful perspectives on the craft on Twitter/X under the handle @CIO_Baylor.


Our conversation covers David’s background and path to Baylor, the three styles of endowment management pursued in the industry, and the thematic top down approach he employs. We discuss his implementation of that approach across risk management, portfolio construction, private markets, manager selection, and turnover.
 

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On today’s show, we’ll discuss another empty room – an opportunity ignored by most investors because they either don’t want to or can’t participate. We’ve shared conversations under this theme about a range of forgotten opportunities from specific emerging markets to biotech. Previous episodes are available under the mini-series or topic search at capitalallocators.com. This time around, we discuss a room that was overflowing two years ago, has been abandoned since, and might be coming back once again - crypto and blockchain technologies.
 
My guest is Chris Dixon, a general partner at a16z and one of the leading voices and investors in the space. Chris recently published a book entitled Read Write Own, which explains the history, thesis, features, and importance of blockchain technology in his classic framework-driven, non-technical style.
 
Our conversation covers aspects of the book, including the history of the internet, rationale for blockchains, and tokenomics. We then turn to what’s happened in the ignored space since the fall of FTX across stablecoins, NFTs, DeFi, Bitcoin ETFs, regulation, and the devotees still involved in the space.
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