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

Anne-Marie Fink is the Head of Private Markets and Funds Alpha at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board or SWIB, which manages $140 billion of pension funds in the state. SWIB is not your typical U.S. pension fund manager. It invests with outstanding governance, alignment with beneficiaries, delegated authority, a competitively compensated team, and cutting-edge strategies, all of which have contributed to a fully funded plan. Anne-Marie joined SWIB to lead its external manager efforts four years ago following a career that spans both direct and fund investing.

Our conversation highlights Anne-Marie’s path, applying the skills of picking stocks to assessing stock picking managers, the history and governance of SWIB, its unique payout structure that creates alignment, and their investment approach across portfolio construction, internal and external investing, asset classes, and risk management.
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My last post, The Investment Office Playbook: What Managers Don’t See, discussed part of what happens inside an investment office that managers don’t see but that significantly influences the cadence of capital deployed to managers.

Of course, there are two sides to every coin. This post discusses what allocators don’t see when a manager chooses to grow.

Read Ted’s blog here.

Alexis Ohanian is the General Partner and Founder of Seven Seven Six, an early-stage venture capital firm with $1 billion under management that he describes as a technology company that deploys venture capital. Alexis was the co-founder of Reddit, one of the most popular online forums in the world, which he sold 18 months after its 2005 launch for $10 million and returned as Executive Chair in 2014 to help lead the turnaround of the business. In between and since, he has invested in early-stage ventures as a partner at Y Combinator, a co-founder of Initialized Capital, and most recently founder of 776. Despite his success in entrepreneurship and investing, Alexis is most well known in the world at large as the husband of tennis star Serena Williams.


Our conversation covers Alexis’ initial ride at Reddit, taste of early-stage venture capital, and return to Reddit to scale the business alongside the challenges of managing a modern social media platform. We then turn to his investing as a technology company, including Cerebro – 776’s transparent operating system, thematic ideas, traits of successful founders, social media engagement, investments in women’s sports, and lessons learned from his wife Serena.
 
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Dan Tennebaum is the Managing Director at India Capital, a thirty-year-old investment firm focusing on public equities in India. Dan moved to the country twenty-five years ago and spent time in the start-up world and venture capital before pivoting to the public markets in 2007.

Our conversation covers Dan's path from a U.S. Midwesterner to India, the challenges of venture capital investing in the country, and the case for public equities. We turn to India Capital’s perspective on sourcing, research, management, regulation, valuation, portfolio construction, risk, and misperceptions, colored with some examples along the way.
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Brett Barakett is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Tremblant Capital, a 23-year-old long-short equity and long-only firm focused on deep fundamental stock research with a senior team that has been together for at least sixteen years. Brett has invested through rising and falling tides in the industry, ups and downs in fund flows, and alongside friends and peers who have since retired. Yet he keeps skating to where the puck is going.


Our conversation covers Brett’s path to launching Tremblant, including lessons from hockey, operational experience, and the early days in a terrible market for the strategy. We discuss the long-short and long-only models, primary research, portfolio construction, sell decisions, risk management, compensation structure, and Tremblant’s launch of TOGA, one of the first active ETFs run by a longstanding hedge fund manager.

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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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