Aoifinn Devitt: This series is kindly supported by GCM Grosvenor. GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset management firm with a longstanding commitment to supporting small, emerging, and diverse investment managers. For over 30 years, the firm has developed expertise in funding and guiding these managers as part of its broader activity across alternative investments. With over $20 billion in AUM dedicated to small and emerging managers and $16 billion in AUM dedicated to diverse managers, GCM Grosvenor leverages its experienced team, broad network, and proprietary sourcing capabilities to support their success. Through the Small, Emerging, and Diverse Manager Program, the firm creates opportunities for investors to access a wide range of talent while seeking to drive strong returns and impact. For more information, visit www.gcmgrovenor.com.

Sarah Fromson: What you could sense was this kind of frenzy. It came across with the pressure on us to take more risk in the managers we selected, the portfolios we constructed. It was visible in the private equity exposure. It was visible in the scale of the buildings. It was obvious in a variety of subtle ways—marketing, branding—and it just made you uneasy. I can’t blame the pressions, that would just be unfair, but it didn’t feel right. And there was a very great lack of diversity. We all know the outcome, we all know what happened, and with hindsight it’s very obvious. At the time it was subtle, but you could feel the pressure cooker.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Sarah Fromson, who is Chair of the Cambridge University Endowment Fund Investment Advisory Board. She also holds a number of other non-executive board and committee roles, including at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Quilter Investors, Capital Generation Partners, and Arrow Street, among others. She spent 11 years as Head of Investment Risk at the Wellcome Trust, and prior to that was the Chief Investment Risk Officer at RBS Asset Management. Welcome, Sarah, thanks for joining me today.

Sarah Fromson: Thank you.

Aoifinn Devitt: Let’s start with your journey into a career in investing and risk in particular. How did that start and did it take any surprising turns along the way?

Sarah Fromson: So it’s a long and winding road to have got here. I started off as a first-generation immigrant growing up in Blackburn and St. Annes in the north of England, and both sides of my family were refugees from Nazi Germany. And my father and grandfather had a scrap metal recycling firm in Blackburn, and it was fascinating to hear their stories over the dinner table. There was a lot to hear. About commerce, a lot to hear about economics, a lot to hear about politics, very little about investments, but it started me thinking about how the world works in an economic and a financial sense. I was definitely not encouraged to join the family business because clearly as a girl that was not going to happen. And I managed to get to Cambridge University, to Girton, which was single-sex then and remained so until my third year. And took a degree in metallurgy. Now, what do you do with a degree in metallurgy? I wanted to work with bright, interesting people, and I wanted a fast-paced environment, and I didn’t want to spend 3 years doing a research project. So I started at the gutter end of the city in commodities. I got an introduction there and started there in 1980, working in commodities in a subsidiary of Beresford, which was the famous sugar trading firm. And I did metals research and I did trading and I did working with clients and quickly worked out that I was good at the research, absolutely hopeless at the trading without a poker face, and okay with the clients. So that was helpful. And then moving swiftly on, stayed in commodities for a while, decided that I needed an MBA at London Business School and moved into pension fund management, and later with Coutts and RBS into manager selection, hedge fund selection, portfolio construction, and then risk management. And I got to the risk management, well, when I really needed it, which was in 2006, 2007. I didn’t know at that stage that RBS was going to go spectacularly bust, but I did feel the testosterone in the air. Fred Goodwin was contagious, and it became clear to me that it was a good time to look for something else. And I was fortunate enough to be taken on at Wellcome Trust to be their head of investment risk. And that was like being on the side of the angels. Because you’re working with an absolutely amazing investment team for a huge endowment that wanted to support medical science and research. And it felt like the best of both worlds and stayed there until the end of my executive career. But it was the risk and the investing that really I loved all the way through. I’ve had less time available and less capacity as a client or development manager, you know, marketing person. But I always wanted to focus on the investing and the risk management.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, that’s an absolutely fascinating backstory you’ve told us there, and I can’t let a few of those, the nuggets you’ve dropped, go without following up. So first of all, back to those dinner table conversations at the metal business or around the metal business. I’d love to know what attitude to taking risk. You said the family didn’t talk about investing, But they clearly talked about business and politics. And how do you think, in business there are failures, there are investments as part of business that work out or don’t. Did you think you picked up any attitude to taking risk in listening into those conversations?

Sarah Fromson: Certainly, and it was quite an interesting spectrum. My grandfather, who was very Germanic in his approach, believed very firmly in risk management and he was quite a cautious soul. He was the one who insisted on having so much in cash, so much in stock, and so much in receivables and he would vet his clients very carefully. Whereas my dad was the younger and the more risk-taking chap, and he would be looking for fascinating new business avenues. He’d be looking for interesting folk to buy metals off. He was the one who took them into nickel, which was new in those days. It was a new recycled metal, and he was the one who took them into overseas activities. Which I must tell you didn’t always work out. So I learned something from the blend of their two approaches and from the heated arguments that often took place over the dinner table, learning along the way that it’s good to disagree, but if you share a common purpose and you know where you’re aiming for, then those disagreements can be for the common good.

Aoifinn Devitt: Fascinating. And then metals are such a curious topic of focus at undergraduate level and probably not many were choosing that route. And what was it about metals in particular that fascinated you? Was it the scientific aspect of it, some of the physics behind it?

Sarah Fromson: So I did natural sciences, and as you probably know, that means you have a broad base of subjects in your first year and you progressively specialise. And it was serendipity. The metallurgy and materials science department was a modestly sized department with lots of care for each third-year student, really great lecturers, They didn’t have quite the arrogance of the chemistry department, which had a slew of Nobel Prize winners to their credit, as did physics. And I ended up with a crew of great peers in my third year in metallurgy and just loved it. I hadn’t gone into Cambridge thinking I would end up doing metallurgy. I really hadn’t. But it was a good opportunity and a good way of learning.

Aoifinn Devitt: And then just finally, a career in risk management, and we’ll talk a little bit about what investment risk means today, but the words you used about RBS pre-blowup, did a lot of work there, the testosterone in the air. What does it feel like when something is approaching that level of high risk, I suppose? How did you sense that having been in many different organizations? How did you sense that things were just getting a little too much?

Sarah Fromson: Well, I was in the asset management arm and we were managing money for external clients, high net worth, medium net worth clients. But, and I wasn’t sufficiently senior to be best buds with Fred Goodwin. But what you could sense was this kind of frenzy. It came across with the pressure on us to take more risk in the managers we selected, the portfolios we constructed. It was visible in the private equity exposure that RBS had. It was visible in the scale of the buildings that Fred Goodwin was sponsoring, particularly outside Edinburgh, the Gogoburn Building. It was obvious in a variety of subtle ways, marketing, branding, and it just made you uneasy. I can’t blame the pressions, that would just be unfair, but it didn’t feel right. And there was a very great lack of diversity in Ken Goodwin and his best cronies. We all know the outcome, we all know what happened. And with hindsight, it’s very obvious. At the time, it was subtle, but you could feel the pressure cooker.

Aoifinn Devitt: Really interesting because, of course, diversity probably would have meant challenge and perhaps checking of biases, etc. And then that goes to my next question around the evolution of investment risk throughout your career, because I think you’ve hit on something really crucial. I would expect your answer will be around the increasing data we have, the machinery, how we measure and manage risk has clearly changed a lot over the course of your career. But yet you’ve spoken to sort of an instinctual reaction to a growing appetite, which is not something that can be easily measured. There is an art and a science clearly to this. So maybe can you talk a little bit about the field of investment risk, given this is where your last executive role was focused on that, how it evolved in importance throughout the course of your career?

Sarah Fromson: So in between managing pension funds and being at Coutts RBS, I had a shorter-term job in investment risk consulting, and that was in between babies 2 and 3, but we’ll talk about that later. And that was with Quantec. And what was fascinating was to see the evolution of the use of data and the manipulation of data right at the early stages. Computers were gaining in power at that point, and the idea that you could use the risk models that had previously been theoretical constructs and actually use them sensibly within portfolio construction, these were new ideas to most portfolio managers who basically at that stage flew largely by the seat of their pants. The advent of the quants was really the end of the ’90s, the 2000s. Early in the late ’80s, early ’90s, this was still relatively new. And when I moved to RBS Asset Management, We developed a proprietary risk model at that point, which took lots of data, absolutely right, lots of return type data, lots of portfolio construction data, and sought to use it to build portfolios at two levels, one level at the asset allocation and one at the stock selection or security selection level. But I’ve always been very conscious that risk depends on humans, and risk depends on the degree to which individual human beings can take in a risk model and have the intellectual acuity and the humbleness to use it effectively, not to disdain it, not to use it as a Bible, but to say, this is a tool for me. And as we’ve moved on, at Wellcome, the team there was particularly thoughtful in terms of risk management, with a very thoughtful way as to how much they were willing to use risk models and how much they relied also on an assessment of the other types of risk—operational risk, liquidity risk, control risk. Sentiment risk, not all of which, very few of which can be quantified in the same way as sort of traditional investment models, but are nonetheless vital to avoiding the impact of a major blowup. So I’ve never forgotten the mantra that we had at Wellcome, which is for any manager, for any situation, think of the return and the risk that you expect and can deal with but also think about liquidity and think about control. And with control comes the agency issues, the economic issues of who gets paid when, what happens, and to what degree you can influence those. So I think there’s the two aspects of risk management. There’s the quantitative aspect, and there’s the qualitative aspect, which rely on an understanding of calibrating the other dimensions. And that’s not easy. I enjoyed very much the development of my investment risk role at Wellcome because I was lucky enough, for those geeky to understand this parlance, to be both first line of defense in risk terms, in other words, helping management, but also second line of defense in risk terms, which is the oversight role. And there’s not many places you can straddle both. You can’t do it under FCA regulations, but you can do it when you’re managing your own money as for an endowment or for a trust. And that’s a fascinating and a challenging place to be because you’re a poacher turned gamekeeper and you’re helping both sides of the equation. Very interesting and very challenging.

Aoifinn Devitt: It’s so interesting, as you were speaking, the old adage— and I’m going to get it wrong— about the drunk and the lamppost and using a lamppost for light but not a crutch seems how you would recommend using the risk as system, you prefer light but not necessarily aimlessly leaning on it blindly. And equally, my impression of what’s sometimes missing in risk reports is there’s a lot of data, but it’s sometimes an interpretation of that data and sometimes a sense of that qualitative overlay. So I think what you’ve really mentioned beautifully how those two are fused together, and we’ll probably return to risk a little when we go to your now portfolio career. Because clearly that backdrop will be very useful to your current roles. So maybe we could just shift to that now in terms of your portfolio career. I’ve listed a wide range of investment committee roles and NED roles. So why this career pivot? Was it a natural one?

Sarah Fromson: Well, I was coming up to the age of 60 and I felt I’d given some great years to Wellcome, had a wonderful time, contributed and felt I’d, you know, given my best there for that period of time and felt it was time to move into a different set of roles. And so since leaving Wellcome in September 2019, I’ve got a variety of NED and investment committee roles. And the non-executive directorship roles are on the boards of various companies and so on. And that’s where you have to learn that you’re not an executive anymore. That’s when you have to learn that it’s nose in, but fingers out. You want to know what’s going on, you want to be involved, you want to have the final say when it comes to some of the key players, the chief executives and so on, but it’s fingers out, no needless meddling, no getting involved in topics that are properly the province of the executive team. The investment committee roles are fascinating because they split into two types of committees. Some where the committee actually makes the decision. So, for example, at Capital Generation Partners, we’re actually making the decisions at that meeting about which managers and strategies to employ. And some investment committee meetings where the role is oversight and constructive challenge and support to the CIO and the team. And that would be the case at the Cambridge University Endowment Fund, their advisory board, and that would be the case for the Gulbenkian Investment Committee. And again, it’s a complex mix of being fascinated and involved in the investment aspect, but also the soft skills and managing the people and being involved and supporting the people thoughtfully and challenging them come very much to the fore. And I wanted to make that move into that category of roles. And I must say, I started a little bit before I left Wellcome, and I very much enjoyed the last 5 years. It’s been amazingly exciting. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve given a lot, and I’ve had a lot of enjoyment out of it as well.

Aoifinn Devitt: My next question, which I think you’ve already answered, is what makes a good director or chair? Certainly on the director side, this knows In, fingers out, I think is something I’ve heard before. Yes. And knowing how to draw the line, I’ve heard that. And clearly preparation and the usual things you’d expect. And given you’ve seen many committees, the chair role, how have you seen that at its most effective?

Sarah Fromson: So the role of all of these boards and committees often can be summarized with foresight, insight, and oversight. We try and exercise all three. And as the chair or as a director or committee member, what you bring to the table is a combination of expertise and experience and skills, but you also bring the soft skills, the ability to respectfully but deeply challenge, the skill to question, to support, to occasionally cheer up. To coach, to mentor, and to work with your colleagues to provide a coherent team that gives the best outcome for that committee or that board or that enterprise. It’s quite holistic. I think the soft skills are very important. As, as I see it more, you realize even more so how important they are.

Aoifinn Devitt: So on governance, size, board, challenge, you’ve seen a lot of boards. You spoke about the role of a chair, and what is best practice in terms of what you’ve seen, whether it comes to size, kind of building that trust and cohesiveness in a board? Anything that you’ve noticed works particularly well?

Sarah Fromson: The size varies, and it varies according to what you need. I think if you have a shared purpose and you know where you’re aiming to get to, then in your mind as a chair, you need to conduct a skills and— if not gaps, a skills and experience audit and think, what do I need to give the best outcome for this enterprise or this committee or this board? And it’ll come quite quickly. And then you also need a little bit of resilience in case one person’s ill or not doing their best that day. So in terms of size, anything from 3 to 6 or 7 people. More than that, and it starts to disintegrate because people step on each other’s toes. People feel that they can leave it to others to contribute, and you get a lot of— freeloading is the wrong word, but folk who perhaps haven’t had the time to read the papers and develop questions and be thoughtful. You’ve got to be careful about size and to get the complement of skills. And then you want to think about how those people are humanly going to work together. That’s almost like playing an orchestra. Will they humanly work together? Will they enjoy it? Will they stand in each other’s shadow? How do you balance that off? That’s an important part as well.

Aoifinn Devitt: And when you said size, I automatically think of the size of board packs that arrive at times with you the, know, 300, 400 pages. Do you find that needs to be managed carefully?

Sarah Fromson: I do. I think if you’re getting to the 300, 400 pages, something needs to give. People need to provide summaries. People need to be more thoughtful of the papers. I mean, I work with the co-secs and the chief executives that I’m involved with to try and slim papers down. There is a view that if you add in all the last details, then the non-execs are ultimately responsible. You can blame them that they didn’t read page 392 carefully. Now, I do read board packs carefully. Properly, but there’s no way I can take every single thing in. So it’s a constant struggle to say, what do you really need to tell me? What do I need to know? And what haven’t you told me? And those are the 3 questions.

Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely. Yeah, I know that one issue that I’m seeing more and more is more self-efficacy reviews by boards. There’s a bit more introspection to check that they are in fact doing what they should be doing and that their governance is where it should be. And besides that, what do you find is top of mind for some of the investment committees you sit on today? Just for example, are you spending more time on sustainable investing, on DEI, on focusing on return? Where do you find the focus has been?

Sarah Fromson: So for endowments, it’s perennially on what I call the golden triangle, which is what return do we want to have? What risk are we prepared to take to get it? And at what rate do we want to spend? And that has to be reviewed, and it has to be reviewed regularly and thoughtfully, given evolving expectations of what you can get from different asset classes, or what you might expect to get, and in terms of what you think the downside might be at any point. Because if you can’t bear that risk, then you can’t be taking that asset allocation, and then you have to shade back what you might get for returns over a longer-term period, and then you have to think again about how you might spend. So it’s that constant iteration of how to deal with those 3 issues. And once you’ve got some kind of agreement and understanding amongst all the stakeholders of what that could involve and what it could involve in a nasty year as well as in a long-term reasonable run, then you can start to think about the sustainable investing which feeds in, because the alternative assets are woven into what your asset allocation might be. The ESG responsible investment, I think, has to be part of everything that we do now. We want to leave a world that’s fit for our children, and now I’m also conscious of grandchildren, for our grandchildren to live in, and we have to think about how we manage our assets, how we can be a force for good in terms of the environment, or at least reduced harm. And we have to think about social implications of where we’re investing. Now, the different investment committees and boards I work with are at different stages on this, and often that’s a response to their clients if they are not managing their own money. If they’re managing their own money, then it’s the trustees of the endowment that have to be super clear on where we stand and share that view iterated with the investment committee. And that’s sometimes a difficult path because you have to think about what might you be giving up in the short term if you don’t invest in certain stocks or areas who have refused to improve. You might say that we only invest in companies that are doing the right thing environmentally, or you might say let’s invest in ones that might not be doing the right thing now, but that our managers or we can influence to do better. And I think that’s a more defensible thumb. But whatever it is, we somehow have to get to the stage where we’re not facing 2.5-degree increases in heat. Over the coming decade or so.

Aoifinn Devitt: And I do think regardless of which approach you take, you mentioned you investing with those that are polluting today but are on a path, communicating that is key because that I think, you know, the why often gets lost in the translation because we have snapshots and soundbites and the why might help with stakeholders who would disagree with that position. And I also love what you said about the scenario analysis that you seem to bring in, in terms of ensuring that a strategy is future-proof because you’re kind of almost automatically being the risk manager in you is going through the scenarios that could go wrong, which I think is the important role of a board because often a team, an investment team doesn’t have the capacity necessarily to do that kind of thought experiment, that the day job takes a lot of time. So I think that’s a wonderful example of the use of a board. Building on some of the themes of ESG, if we use that term just in terms of the S part and diversity and inclusion, So your career spanning the investment industry came from a particularly perhaps male-dominated one, commodities and trading, I’m sure had, was well represented or not well represented by women, very well represented by men. Can you talk a little bit about your own journey to a leadership role as a woman in the investment industry? How was that and what did you find as particularly helpful for you to advance your career?

Sarah Fromson: So that was interesting. I joined the city in 1980. And basically it was the era of the dinosaurs. I worked with the first woman on the London Metal Exchange. It was only 5 years past the 1975 watershed when women were able to open bank accounts in their own name. Can you imagine that? Younger women today can’t even think of that, and I’m glad they can’t. I joined a commodity trading firm at a time when the trading floor still had strippograms coming for birthdays. Which was just something else. There was a small number of senior women, but they often didn’t have the time or the energy or the predisposition to help younger colleagues. But I did get support from senior colleagues who were men, and we may talk about it later, but I’ve had excellent mentors and excellent senior folk who I’ve worked for who, who helped me. And I think the key challenge was being able to balance different parts of my life. I’ve always been outspoken, I’ve always been blunt, a northern lass, although the accent’s kind of rubbed off over the last 40-odd years. And so I never— I didn’t find it problematic being the only woman in a room, but I did find it difficult when the odds were so heavily stacked against you, and you just at that point You couldn’t ask easily for help. You just worked harder and did it better and stayed that bit longer. That was a very good strategy. Thank goodness now in most areas that isn’t needed in quite the same way. But now it’s more the difficulties of becoming really senior where the glass ceiling is less apparent in many firms, but it’s still there in some. What have I done to help? I’ve tried to help women wherever I can. I’ve tried to— I’ve mentored a number of women on a formal basis and supported on an informal basis, and also aimed to ensure that hiring shortlists included women and made sure that when we looked for people to do projects, an extra sort of plum opportunities, made sure that women were included in those opportunities. And I felt that that’s, that’s really key because it’s the informal routes for career development that women have really needed and still continue to need. And perhaps now the focus is also on the BAME exposure where the city’s been very traditionally white except for a few small areas.. And I think the onus is, is on all of us to ensure that we include less well-represented groups. We’ll benefit. We’ll benefit from the thought diversity. We’ll benefit from the different approaches. We’ll benefit from just a wider pool of raw talent. But I must say, I’ve never forgotten the strippogram in 1981.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, that’s exactly why we share these stories. Just a little reminder of how far we’ve come. Even if for many of us it’s still not far enough, but at least some, some things are well left in history. And of course, part of the reason for sharing these stories is because I believe that when we share our stories of setbacks, resilience, overcoming those setbacks, that we, we add to the body of knowledge that can build resilience in future generations. So I’d love if you could share over the course of your career in risk. I know one does encounter ups and downs and volatility. Anything whether it be setbacks or challenges or mistakes that you learned lessons from over the course of your career?

Sarah Fromson: Well, there’s two sides to that. One is the personal and one is the professional. On the personal side, the challenge was always balancing my career with motherhood of three children and changing jobs after each child because maternity pay and leave weren’t then what they are now. It helped me to learn resilience. And it helped me to learn there’s always a way forward and the importance of staying in contact with peers and with industry groups who helped me find the next opportunity and to get back into work. And that juggling continued for many years. And boy, does it hone your time management, delegation, and efficiency skills when you know that you want to be an active parent, but you also have an important and time-consuming and thought-provoking job to do. Helps you focus on the important things. And then I think the risk management challenges have come through the crashes that we’ve seen. You might not remember the crash of 1987 or the tech bubble bursting in ’99, 2000. We all remember the great financial crisis in 2007, 2008. And because of course it started before 2008, there were the warning signs and some issues in 2007. And the challenge was always, did I alert the right people at the right time? Did I foresee enough? Did I highlight the risks sufficiently clearly, or did I react sufficiently thoughtfully in my portfolios? And the answer is not always. And I think that happened to Almost everyone. And it teaches you humbleness, and it teaches you the importance of being aware of what’s going on and reacting with a cool head and working effectively with your colleagues. Because after a while, things improve again, but it just takes its time. And some companies and some folks and some institutions are out of the game, and you want to avoid that terminal failure.

Aoifinn Devitt: And we already touched on some of the mentors that were instrumental in allowing you to progress. Can we turn to them now? Anyone in particular? And I always do say it’s not exhaustive, so don’t feel you have to list everyone, but just any one or two that were particularly influential for you.

Sarah Fromson: I guess there’d be Herschel Post, who was chairman of Coutts UK, who I worked for as a pension fund manager after business school. And then after my third child, I took a 2-year career break and he phoned me up after 2 years and said, Sarah, I think you should come back to work. And he convinced me and gave me leeway to come in on a graduated basis because I wasn’t sure that that was my, my plan and come in, help portfolio construction at Coutts, help me develop the new set of products. And that was just brilliant because he was a lawyer turned asset manager. With a hugely wide bank of knowledge and understanding, and he was just great. And then, of course, there’s Danny Trewhill, the late great CIO of Wellcome Trust, who was a superb horizon scanner, a Catherine wheel of ideas. And I worked with him to protect the Wellcome Trust portfolio in the event of Brexit. I can remember waking— I was on holiday that day with my younger daughter. And I woke up on that Friday morning and saw the news and swore into my pillow— politics alert here— but the truth was that the positioning of Wellcome Trust under his leadership and my help was immaculate. We made a ton of money that day on being underweight sterling because the view was that it probably wouldn’t happen, but if it did, the downside to sterling would be immense. And so it proved. So those were two very key figures in my career, and I’d like to raise a glass to each of them. Unfortunately, both of them passed away, but much missed and well remembered.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, their legacy lives on thanks to us capturing it here. So, so thank you for sharing that. And throughout this array of, of roles you have now, are there any causes that are particularly close to your heart that, besides advancing some of the endowments that you’re, providing key input into the investment side. Any charities or causes that you’d like to mention here that are particularly important to you?

Sarah Fromson: Well, my husband and I are practicing Jews, so our synagogue and the related activities are important to us. And we’re Zionists and support Israel, and that’s received some of our support and attention and work over the last however many years, and particularly now We pray for the return of the hostages, but also for peace and security for all the people of the Middle East, because that’s such a difficult place to be. So those are the main causes outside of work that I spend my time on in a charitable and general context.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m coming to a conclusion now. Clearly a career that’s had so many different aspects and started in the field of metals and taken its way through to the field of medical science and research. And now in a portfolio career, you probably have picked up many words of wisdom and already shared some, but a creed or motto or two, anything that you can leave us with in terms of words to live by?

Sarah Fromson: I guess my first boss said to me, be good to the people you meet on the way up because you’ll surely meet them again on the way down, and there will always be downs. And I’ve tried to live by that and to be honest and good to people.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, very well said, Sarah. Thank you so much. The term Iron Lady didn’t always have great connotations, but given your starts in the metal field, it seems particularly appropriate to apply here. I think you embody everything that is good about iron and metal. You are, you are strong, you are resilient, you bend occasionally, and you’re still here sharing your wisdom with us. And sharing it with the investment committees that you’re participating on. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing this wealth of knowledge with us.

Sarah Fromson: Thank you very much.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: Maybe just to give the listeners the scale of the problem in the UK, 1 in 3 have less than 1 month’s living expenses in savings, so they can’t go more than 1 month if they lose their job. The average pension pot of a 40-year-old in the UK is £15,000. That’s not a year, that’s full stop £15,000. That is just way too low. That is definitely sort of inadequate.

Rob Gardner: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Rob Gardner, who’s the CEO and co-founder of Rebalance Earth, which redirects the flow of capital to protect and restore nature at scale. He was a guest on this podcast in 2021, and that show is linked in the show notes. He’s recently written a book with the title Freedom, which advocates 3 money moves to transform your finances: earn it, keep it, grow it. This is just one part of his career-long mission to further financial literacy, education, and investing for a world worth living in. Welcome back, Rob. Thanks for joining us here.

Aoifinn Devitt: Great to be back, and it’s— I can’t believe it’s been 3 years.

Rob Gardner: 3 and a half actually at my count. So yes, that’s been smart. Well, so let’s start with a quick update. Clearly 3 and a half years since we last chatted online anyway in this forum. Can you quickly update us on your career moves when you arrived at Rebalance Earth and something about the vision of that organization?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so 3 and a half years ago, I was the Director of Investments at St. James’s Place. So responsible probably for about 100, at that time, probably about 120 £125 billion worth of assets on behalf of probably three-quarters of a million individuals, and really about a) getting the right financial, long-term financial performance to deliver their— what they needed, and also embedding responsible investing. And I was really passionate about this idea of how you can make your money as a force for good. So I kind of live by these three mantras: money is a force for good, financial markets is a force for good, and business is a force for good. And just to kind of recap, Reddington, the first business I founded, and Mallory Street, the second business I founded, are both B Corps. And our intention is that Rebalancer should become a B Corp as well. So kind of really trying to demonstrate that, that business can be a force for good. I suppose it was whilst I was at St. James’s Place, we were doing a lot to not just embed ESG, but we were the first wealth manager to sign up to GFANS. And at COP26 launched at the time what was the largest sort of Paris-aligned global equity fund. It was about £14 billion and we’d not only committed to take our portfolio to net zero by 2050, but also to achieve those goals by 2025. And we wanted to do it without divesting. We wanted to do it through engagement, and we wanted to do it thoughtfully across listed equities, across bonds, across emerging markets, and across property. This is the segue because it was at COP26 that everyone suddenly started talking about biodiversity, and this stat just hit me in in the, the face, which is Since 1970, we’ve lost nearly 70% of our wildlife. And it just, I’d seen that stat before from the WWF, it’s called the Living Planet Index, but it was just a real wake-up call. At the same time, that’s when I came across sort of Isabella Tree and her book all about rewilding. And there was the beginnings of a movement around natural capital and how do we put a price on the value of nature. And so from 2021 onwards, I started making personal investments in startups like Rebalance Earth, BZero, Tierra Foods, all foods, all small company startups trying to solve this climate nature nexus. And just, you know, just for context, I’m in my mid-40s, I’m married, I have two girls. And for those listeners in that situation, you probably know that you start to think about your children rather than yourselves. And I kind of started saying, well, like, where do I want to be in 10 years’ time? I had an amazing job and I still had amazing opportunities where I was. The sad truth is, once you really understand what’s happening with climate change and, you know, without sounding too bearish, just how bad it is, I thought, you know what, I’m really lucky. I’ve been working for 25 years. I studied geography. I understand glaciology and hydrology. I’ve worked in investment banking, I’ve worked as a pension consultant, I’ve been an asset owner. I, I have an opportunity to connect finance and nature, which is really the missing piece. So I decided to quit SJP in 2022, a bit like when I quit Merrill Lynch to start Redington. Everyone was like, wow, are are you, you crazy? You had a really good job. Why are you leaving? And sort of fast forward 20 months You know, Rebalance Earth has just taken seed funding from the largest in-house local government pension scheme in the UK, and we’re about to launch as a fund manager, really positioning nature as infrastructure to solve the problems of climate adaptation as, as well as mitigation and restoring nature. And through all of this, obviously we had COVID, and it was during COVID when everyone was making banana bread that I decided to write a book called Freedom: Earn It, Keep It, Grow It. I think last time you had me on, we talked about my first book, Save Your Acorns. And really, I wanted to write a book aimed at young professionals aged 18 to 35, earning money, probably not really thinking about their pension, maybe at some stage thinking, do they want to save for a deposit to buy a house? And just thinking about ISAs and investing. And I cover a whole host of topics. And so it’s really important to remember that that book was written for a younger audience. And actually, just a few weeks ago, I got a book review from a 16-year-old, which made me really happy. His mum had bought it for him, and he wrote a blog that got posted, and he really enjoyed it, which is great because I didn’t write it for 16-year-olds. And yeah, he really— he read it cover to cover, and he wrote a great blog article about, like, how much he took out of it, which is just awesome.

Rob Gardner: Well, I do think that some of those financial literacy themes are ones that we can always be reminded of. We can forget, and I think it’s important to relearn time to time, and we’re going to dive into them. But first, to recap on Rebalance Earth, I think you are one of the few in the industry that really embody your values and has been able to tie together the nexus of, as you said, the financial industry and the good it can do with real meaningful change in in the, the nature sphere as well as elsewhere. So very excited to see what comes of that. And we’ll have to get you back for round 3 when Rebalance Earth is the star. But today it’s financial literacy that’s the star. So yes, it may be organized as designed for a younger audience, but it’s not that basic either. I think there are some pretty core tenets of this book, which is designed as a toolkit. So can you talk a little bit about what a toolkit generally is to fix something? So is there something broken that you think needs to be fixed when it comes to attitudes to money?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah. So look, if let’s say this was a conference, I normally start by asking 3 questions. So the first questions I’d ask of the audience is, who here received high quality financial education growing up? And if I was in a room of 100 people, I’d be amazed if I got 5 people put their hand up. The second question I ask is, who here wish they’d received financial education growing up? And maybe two-thirds of the hands go up. And then I asked the third question. I said, I want you to be honest here. Who here, either as a teenager or as an adult, has made a financial mistake that they regret? And I promise you, every hand in the room goes up and everyone starts laughing because every single one of us has made a financial mistake that we regret. Now, you know, most people listening to this podcast probably have good jobs, have good financial resilience, and therefore are able to overcome those bumps. But sadly for many people, those mistakes can become costly. And if you make too many in a row, it can send you on a horrible pathway. And just maybe just to give the listeners the scale of the problem in the UK, 1 in 7 adults have no savings at all. 1 in 3 have less than 1 month’s living expenses in savings, so they can’t go more than 1 month. If they lose their job. The average pension pot of a 40-year-old in the UK is £15,000. That’s not a year, that’s full stop £15,000. That is just way too low. That is definitely sort of inadequate. And currently the state pension is about 5% of GDP. So imagine you’re Rachel Reeves. By the way, that’s projected to grow to over 8% by 2070. So that’s going to have a huge impact that we’re just going to have to tax just to keep that going. And then the crazy thing is, is if you look at mental health, over half of all mental health issues are to do with some kind of money issue, typically indebtedness. It’s a major cause of breakup in marriages and relationships, and this just isn’t sustainable. And I suppose that’s, that’s the scale of the problem. And As you know, since 2012 I’ve been passionate about teaching children about money through Redstart, and that’s why I write Save Your Acorns. And this is just another part of the toolkit in an age-appropriate way, using stories. So it’s not like a tell-you book. I use anecdotes and stories about famous people, about, about people that you probably know, people that I’ve worked with. I’ve changed their names where I share their real-life stories and anecdotes to bring to life, as you say, the kind of key tenets that I think to create financial freedom, which are kind of earn it, keep it, and grow it. And then I kind of break down each of them under those, under those 3 categories.

Rob Gardner: And it’s fascinating because I think if I were in that conference and you were asking me, did I receive a financial education? No formal financial education, but I think it’s true that we’re all receiving an education. Educations don’t have to be good. Educations come from what we’re seeing and what we soak up around us. And the, you talk about wiring. And I think our wiring is set by the environment we grow up in. Some of us are wired to save, some not. Some of us are wired not to spend or not to enjoy spending. And some of that can come from the upbringing that we’ve had. So I suppose when you’re thinking about a toolkit, obviously there will always be individual attitudes to money that will always be different. And therein is the diversity that I suppose makes an economy interesting. And different spending patterns. How do you adapt this toolkit to recognize that there’s always going to be a variation?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so I very much try not to be tell. I was trying to give guidelines and rules of thumbs and frameworks. So absolutely. I mean, you know, my parents are probably at the end. I just keep telling them to spend their money, you know, but they can’t. They were hardwired because of the way they were born to save everything. They just can’t spend any money. I think what I’m trying to do is just point out the other way. What’s the opportunity cost of not saving and growing your money? And just for context, my mom and dad were both teachers and they taught all over the world. They, you know, I was born in Holland, we lived in Argentina, and a lot of my insight into money came from growing up as a 7 to 10 year old in Argentina when inflation was running at like 30% a month, 1,000%. A year, currency devaluation. And, you know, my parents, very hardworking, very good at saving money, but they had no idea about how to invest their money. So when interest rates started to fall, they had no way to grow their money. And I was very lucky. I started my career at Deutsche Bank, then Merrill Lynch, and then in pensions. And then this sort of crazy idea that you could buy shares and own a little bit of Apple and Microsoft and Google.. And over time, if you could hold on to it and not panic, you could make money. And so hence I thought my parents taught me how to earn it and keep it, but they didn’t know how to grow it. And I just wanted to share, I think I had a successful, good career in investment banking and as an investment consultant. But in 2008-9, I panicked and I sold all of my investments. And I remember saying to myself, I will never make this mistake. Again. And so there’s a chapter called sort of In It to Win It, which is this idea that you’ve got to be invested. But I acknowledge just how hard it is to stay invested, and I tell the story of Ulysses and the sirens because it’s easy to look back and see the S&P 500 go up in what looks like a straight line over the last 10 years, but it’s a bumpy ride. So a lot of the things in the book are kind of easy to say or easy to write or easy to read, but they’re kind hard to do. So it is definitely behavioral. And I’m just, as I say, just sharing guidance on how much money should you have set aside for cash to cover bills, to give you peace of mind, how much you might want to save, how much you might want in retirement. But they’re definitely guides. And crucially, because I was writing for a younger audience, I’ve got 2 chapters on crypto, which many people— some people think that that’s almost sinful that I have 1 chapter on crypto. But I I think you’ve gotta know your audience and you’ve gotta kind of go to where they are. And sort of 2 years on from having written it, I’m really pleased that I think I get the tone right, that I’m not, it’s rubbish, but neither am I, you know, it’s great and it’s gonna save the world. So I really wanted to write a book that was kind of evergreen. And so given it’s coming up to 2 years since I kind of finished writing the copy, I’m quite pleased that it has stood that sort of test of time.

Rob Gardner: Yeah, not addressing crypto instead of unicorns, but tied to the mast would be like the ostrich head in the sand, it would not really be reflecting, I think, the generational priorities. There’s a few kind of, maybe they’re tropes, maybe they’re true, that I’d like to just cycle through to see whether there’s any truth in them and maybe how we tackle it. One is around perceived shifting of priorities of the younger generation in favor of experiences perhaps, and owning less. So whether it’s maybe the property market has become prohibitively expensive and they cannot get on that market, or just kind of the rental mentality and owning less and experiencing more. How do you, would you tackle that? Because that might kind of hit up against some of the, of the growing part.

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah. So one of the things I did, I wrote the first draft of the book in about 6 months. So June 2020 to December 2020, and then it took me almost 2 years to publish it. I had quite a lot of people working for me at SJP. I had 18-year-olds, I had 21-year-olds, I had 25-year-olds. And so I gave a copy of my book to probably 10 different people under the age of 30 to read it. And I practiced this concept called radical candor, and they all read it and gave me some really good candor. I mean, the basic stuff like, you know, Rob, people don’t use credit cards now, it’s buy now, pay later. People don’t use eBay, they use these other sites. Don’t pigeonhole, don’t pigeonhole us as the kind of avocado and toast generation. We hate that. We hate the way that people position us as that. So I suppose I, you know, I didn’t obviously test 10,000 young people, but I went to a representative audience of the people I was writing it for and got that feedback. And pretty much the feedback from all of them is that we didn’t know any of the stuff you were telling us, Rob, and we wish we’d known, and here’s a better way of telling us these, these things. And that’s my point, actually. I Quite often people talk about this of 3 savings jars, and I use this analogy of a battery. When you have your phone, your smartphone, it’s fully charged in the morning, hopefully, if you plugged it in overnight. And then as you use it, it goes down and then it goes into low power mode. And I kind of analogize your sort of financial freedom. You fully charged, you’re financially free, or you depleting it. And then I talk about your kind of today fund your tomorrow fund and your day after tomorrow. Your day after tomorrow is retirement, but your tomorrow fund is to do whatever you want. It might be go on holiday, it might be to get married. So I’m not prescriptive about is it experiences, are you going to buy a guitar, or are you going to buy a road bike, or whatever you want to do. But I’m just trying to say you’ve got your today fund and you’ve got to manage it, and you’ve got to read your payslip. I mean, I’ve got an entire chapter on reading your payslip because people don’t even understand their sort of payslip. And then I’m saying, well, then you might want to divvy up and think about what are you saving for your tomorrow fund and what are you saving for your day after tomorrow? And by the way, your workplace probably takes care of it, but you probably need to engage with it and understand what’s going on. And let me show you some, some simple maths where actually saving an extra £50 a month because of sort of tax relief, and maybe your company does matching, can be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds when you’re retiring., and you may or may not want to do that, but no, understand the opportunity cost is how I’ve kind of framed everything throughout the book.

Rob Gardner: And then on the this is wiring, again, going to, it’s a related question, but you talked about people being wired to save or not wired to save. And of course, you’re saving your acorns was even an attempt to, to sort of lay that down, the concept very early for, for younger readers. Are saving levels dropping here in the, in the developed world? And is this getting worse?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, I mean, they are in, in, in the developing world. I think part of that is that, you know, we’ve had COVID, we’ve had inflation, you know, so people have been forced to eat into their savings. At the same time, you’ve got to remember that globally we spend billions of dollars. I mean, some of our most valuable companies in the world basically make money from monetizing our eyeballs to get us to spend stuff that we don’t need and make us want stuff. So look, some of the lower savings ratio— I I would, would say there’s probably 3 reasons. The first one, more localized, the last few years, has definitely been sort of COVID cost of living, and all the rest. People are just forced into it. The second is that just the level of consumerism and advertising has never been greater, which is just sort of compels us to want to buy stuff that we don’t need. And the number of people who buy stuff and regret it is, is huge. And then the, the sort of third, the third thing is that people don’t know what to do. So they’re like, yeah, but I don’t know where to save. I don’t know, do I buy a stock? Do I invest in a fund? I don’t understand what the S&P 500 is. I don’t know these brands. Can I trust these companies? So all three of these things are kind of blockers to, to saving and investing. I’ll I’ll show you a lovely anecdote of an example of— so my personal trainer read my book and he said, so Rob, what I do is every time I go on Amazon to buy something, I buy it and I put it in my basket, and then I immediately put that amount in my Nutmeg account, and then I go to bed, and then I wake up and decide if I want to buy it or not. And 8 times out of 10, I end up not buying the thing I was about to buy on Amazon. So I think that’s just a great example. Obviously, I don’t tell him to do that in that book, but that’s what he took out of out of reading the book is a sort of behavioral hack to address a habit he had and turn it into a positive habit.

Rob Gardner: The other trend we’re seeing is a rise in these buy now, pay later schemes, and just which are really just forms of leverage. How do you see them as a danger, I suppose, to young people with rising levels of leverage?

Aoifinn Devitt: I think it’s a huge problem because obviously what credit and buy now pay later is just that on steroids, is it allows you to buy something big that you can’t afford. So for my parents and certainly for me growing up, if I wanted something big, I’d have to save for it and I’d have to save for a very long time to get something. So the idea that I can own a car or buy a new iPhone every year or all the rest on these kind of credit and buy now pay later is horrifying. And I think what is horrifying is that many young people, or many people who use these sort of buy now pay later apps, don’t, don’t really understand it’s credit or debt. They literally just think it’s like free money. And one of the characters in the book who I know really well, she came to work for me years ago at Readington, and when she was in her early 20s, not with buy now pay later but with store card, Specifically, she would just go up, sign up to all these store cards. Typically you get a 10-20% upfront, buy a load of stuff. By the time she started working for me in her early 30s, she was drowning in credit card debt, compounding at 25 or 30%. So the money she owed was like 3 times the money she’d spent in the first place. And of course, all the clothes and things that she’d bought, you know, she no longer used, were probably already already gone and buy now, pay later is just even worse. So it it is, is a it is a big, big problem. But obviously that’s one of the reasons it’s been so successful because it gives people what they want right now.

Rob Gardner: And then when it comes to the actual crisis that we’ve witnessed, because there’s that, we’ve we’ve clearly, already spoken about COVID being a crisis and some of the financial market crisis. Has there been anything learned from that? Is there, I know we all speak now by the fact that most of this younger generation hasn’t actually lived through that. But has there been any way of instilling discipline through some of those experiences?

Aoifinn Devitt: Look, I think like everything in life, there are people, you know, there’s an entire generation of, I think they’re called the FIRE generation, but it’s, I’m trying to remember what it, but these are the people who want to save hyper aggressively before they’re 40 and get to a million dollars and then sort of retire. It’s, I think it, I can’t remember what the F is, but it’s something retire early. You’ve got any extreme, and then you’ve got on top of that, you’ve got all the crypto bros who allegedly made millions of dollars during the sort of crypto run. I think the lessons learned, because obviously this is a personal finance book, are personal. And so what I wanted to do was have enough variety in there that some section of the book would speak to that person where they’re at. Maybe they’ve recently got divorced and they’ve realized that they didn’t know anything about money and their partner knew everything about money. And they’re like, oh, I need to know about money. Or maybe they’re a young person who’s been pumping around on crypto because their friends do, but it’s never felt right. And actually, something really simple like setting up an ISA and just putting in £200 a month in a broadly diversified stock market makes, makes a a lot, lot a lot more, more sense. So unfortunately, by the time it gets down to the retail investors, the number of outcomes is so varied, it’s huge. All I’m trying to do is say have you thought about this? Here’s a toolkit, here’s stuff that you could do differently to take control of your finances. I think what I tap into into the book is the sense that most people are out of control, don’t feel either out of control or don’t feel comfortable in the first place, and therefore are just not doing anything. They’re basically earning their money and spending it, or maybe putting it in the bank. And obviously when I wrote this, interest rates were— it’s before interest rates started hiking and that sort of inflation really really, really took off. So it is meant to be— again, you know, to be clear, I’m aiming this at people who are probably earning £30,000 to £80,000 a year. I’m not writing it— you know, it’s not written for people who are on very low incomes, and it’s not written for people on £250,000 or more. It’s very much that you have a good job, you might be a lawyer, you might be an accountant, you might be working for a big global brand earning good money but not silly money, and what should you do?

Rob Gardner: And then you also do more in the financial literacy space besides writing books for, for two very distinct age cohorts. You also are— you have a Redstart. Can you talk about your involvement in Redstart and KCL?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so back in 2012 when I was kind of running Reddington, we were really keen to give back, and we started this charity called Red Star. And to begin with, it delivered sort of financial education to secondary school kids. It was very much delivered as a kind of talk-at-type lecture. At that same time, so 2012, auto-enrolment came out, and the problem was that suddenly, all of a sudden, people were in a defined contribution pension, which was nothing like a defined benefit pension. And you might have two employees sat next to each other, both thinking they had a pension, but very different outcomes. And 2013, some research came out from Cambridge University that said that our money-saving habits are formed by the age of 7. And so there was a gap in the market because at the time a lot of the banks gave financial education to kind of GCSE teenagers. And so we pivoted in 2013 to focus on primary school And at the same time, we pivoted and turned it into a game. So this kind of concept called gamified learning, learning through doing. So there’s no sort of talk at— everything is delivered through this game called sort of Money Matters. And we teach concepts like earning money, like growing money, keeping money. We scam the kids. And it’s very powerful. And so we were doing that and then COVID hit and obviously we couldn’t go into the classroom and And so during COVID we created some collateral you could download. I used to read Save Your Acorns and run a session after school like 4 times a month for different age groups. But then as we came out of COVID the CEO of Red Star, a lady called Sarah Marks, she came up with a strategy because her challenge— and it was a good one— is like, look, we’ve delivered financial education to 45,000 children, but there were 4.7 million primary school kids in the UK. And can we look at ourselves in the mirror and say, have we honestly made a difference? So she came up with what’s called the Change the Game strategy, which is in order to get 4.7 million primary school kids understanding money, we need to get high-quality financial education on the primary school syllabus. And by that point, I’d been lobbying and engaging in government a lot of time, and not everyone believes that financial education works, should be on the primary school syllabus, and if you did put it on the primary school syllabus, what would you take out of it? And there’s very little longitudinal research. So we were like, okay, instead of reaching more and more schools, let’s focus. Let’s pick 6 locations: London, Cardiff, Bristol, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Lowestoft. So some urban, some coastal, and some countryside, all social deprivation 5 and below. So these children come from very poor families, but huge ethnic mix. Some of these schools are almost like 99% white, some of them are 99% ethnic minority depending on where they are in the UK. And what if we did a study that tracked from reception right the way through to year 6? So this is like a 7-year longitudinal study rolling of 18,000 kids. And this can’t be done by us. This needs to be done by high-quality academic research. And so we found a partner with King’s College Policy Institute to carry out this longitudinal study. And so these kids are getting age-appropriate financial education all the way through their school years. We’ve created like a, a bank app where the kids can earn Redstart pounds because these kids don’t have any money. So they’ve got like a little app where they can take math questions and earn money. There’s a shop where they can apply and work in the shop, and there’s a small shop that sells rubbers and rulers and small things, and there’s a big shop where at the end of the year you can buy Lego and, and big items. We’re tracking all of that data, and we’re now sort of into our second year and, and answering two key questions. Can we teach young children about money, i.e., the attitudes, the behaviors, and the knowledge? And two, is there a scalable model that allows us to go from 18,000 pupils to 4.7 million? And the goal is that by 2030, hopefully, if the research carries the way we’re steering and, and everything else, we’ll be able to go to whoever’s in government in 2030 and say, yes, it works, here’s a delivery model to do it.

Rob Gardner: I love it. The scale phenomenon is just exactly finance at its best. I think it’s taking what works and taking it from there. So let’s end on the topic of education. And now I’m going to turn it on you. 3 and a half years ago we spoke, we clearly had it, we’ve emerged from the pandemic, you’ve moved on, you’ve, we talked about Rebalance Earth. Any life lessons that you’ve added to over this time or anything new that you now are living by?

Aoifinn Devitt: I think the big one for me as I get older is my health and just really prioritizing sleep, exercise, and diet. And it becomes harder. I like my food, I drink, but at the same time, I understand that to be a good dad, to be good at my— to be hopefully a good business person, I need to be fit and healthy and vital. And so, so I think that’s as a pillar of what I do. Health is— I listen to more and more health podcasts. I’m much more thoughtful about what I eat. I’m much more thoughtful about how much exercise I’m, I’m doing. So that has definitely been something that’s been a big shift. I put on a lot of weight in, in lockdown, and, you know, it’s taken me a few years to sort of shift it. I think the second one is just reconfirming mantras or kind of concepts that I, that I already knew, which is there’s stuff that you can control and there’s stuff that you can’t control. So focus on the things you can control. So what I eat and how much I exercise and how much I sleep are things that I can control, right? So that’s a good example. And then I think the second thing is that big changes don’t happen. They’re just a series of small steps. REDDStart will be a big change hopefully in 2030, but it will have been a journey from 2012 to 2030 with some really bigger steps. Readington is 18 years old now. You know, Rebalance Earth is sort of coming up to 2 years old. I think it’s just a reminder that you’ve just got to keep taking those steps. And a bit like money and a bit like in the book, these things kind of compound. So You know, one of my mantras in the book is decades, not days. And I apply that to everything. I apply that to my relationship with my wife and with my good friends. I’m trying to apply that to sort of health. And of course, it applies to investing. So yeah, they would— there’d be some classics that I’ve doubled down on and some new ones.

Rob Gardner: Well, fair play for actually identifying those values, because many of us don’t even take the time to go that far. So Rob, it’s been a great pleasure to talk about this. I think an only an interim of what I think will be a series of podcasts we’ll do together because this has been, I think, critical to remind ourselves of some of the most fundamental lessons of financial literacy and reiterate them and remind ourselves to bring them to our children and beyond and to scale what we do know. So thank you so much for sharing this with us. I’m delighted to keep watching the next next phase of this adventure?

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you for having me back. And yeah, I look forward to being back, hopefully in 2027, if not sooner.

Rob Gardner: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This series is kindly supported by GCM Grosvenor. GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset management firm with a longstanding commitment to supporting small, emerging, and diverse investment managers. For over 30 years, the firm has developed expertise in funding and guiding these managers as part of its broader activity across alternative investments. With over $20 billion in AUM dedicated to small and emerging managers and $16 billion in AUM dedicated to diverse managers, GCM Grosvenor leverages its experienced team, broad network, and proprietary sourcing capabilities to support their success. Through the Small, Emerging, and Diverse Manager Program, the firm creates opportunities for investors to access a wide range of talent while seeking to drive strong returns and impact. For more information, visit www.gcmgrovenor.com. Our next guest has a passion for learning. Hear from him about his career, which saw him cycle through finance, found a private equity firm, fulfill a role as Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer in the US Department of Education, and now found a private equity firm focused on education startups. I’m. Tony Miller: Aoifinn. Aoifinn Devitt: Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Tony Miller, who is Managing Director of Excolari Equity Partners, a private equity firm focused on the education space. He holds a number of board roles, including Apollo Education Group, ACT, Criteria Corp, and GoGuardian. He was co-founder of the Vistria Group, a Chicago-based private equity firm, and prior to that was Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer in the US Department of Education. Welcome, Tony. Thanks for joining me today. Tony Miller: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be able to join you today. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, you’ve had extensive background that it’s kind of hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with where we are today. So why education? How did you become so interested in this area and what excites you? About the education area right now? Tony Miller: I must say, I arrived at the education, which I would almost characterize as a capstone of my professional career. I mean, the short answer is I believe there’s tremendous opportunity to deploy private capital in education and to do so in such a way that you not only meet the demanding expectations of your investors, but frankly, you can have impact at a scale that’s both needed and can be lasting. And that’s a very fulfilling and satisfying place to be in one’s career. It also happens to be the culmination of a set of, if you will, career opportunities that have, I think, almost perfectly prepared me for this opportunity and our firm for this opportunity. And what I mean by that is we learn more about my background, having been an operator and kind of learned the importance of being an operator and growing and scaling a company to then transitioning to private equity and the importance of deploying capital. And then for me, having a stint serving in a public service role at the highest levels in the US Department of Education, really allowed me now to blend all 3 of those kind of experiences along with my colleagues to deploy capital again at a scale that really can deliver like significant impact. I think that’s very, very satisfying. Aoifinn Devitt: Let’s just dig into that a little bit. So delivering capital at a scale that can deliver impact. What do you mean by that kind of scale? And is it in terms of countrywide? Because sometimes we’ll say like making impact one school at a time, one educator at a time. What does scale mean to you in this context? Tony Miller: For me, what it means is it’s measured in the students, but in the thousands or tens of thousands in students. And I think one of the challenges in education in particular, human capital broadly, is having an innovative solution, having a better product, right, is necessary but not sufficient. It needs to be a product that can improve learning, but it’s got to be a product that improves learning and can scale across 10,000 school districts if you’re talking K-12, across 3,000 higher education institutions, across small, medium, and large enterprises if you’re talking about assessment and skill-building practices in the enterprise space. And so oftentimes what you find is they say, how do you actually then, you know, take an idea that has the potential to be disruptive, to potentially be significant value add, but really can scale to be something that’s, you know, servicing thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands? I think that’s the aspiration. And then for us, when you’re looking at the scale of enterprises in which we typically invest, companies that may have on the low end $50 million in revenue, on the higher end, you know, several hundred millions of dollars of revenue, you’re talking about how do they go to the next level of scale again. And so that’s what puts you in the, you know, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of satisfied customers or students or adult learners. Aoifinn Devitt: I’d love to trace just how your prior career kind of trained you for this role, or at least, what aspects of it you bring to it. So McKinsey, public service, private equity, and the order, I think I’m probably getting that wrong. McKinsey, industry, private equity, public service. Can you talk us a little bit through the journey and what motivated each change? Tony Miller: Sure. Yeah, for me, McKinsey was very satisfying, but like many consultants, even successful consultants, I never consider myself a lifelong consultant, meaning the notion of being able to influence a company of scale is not quite the same thing as being able to be an operator and to do it at scale. And so I was always intrigued with going back into an operating role. And so for me, I had the opportunity to join a founder entrepreneur at a growth equity stage company that was in the technology space. And I’d been doing work in software and say we’re a compliance software company. And it just so happened, an e-learning company serving the enterprise sector. And so for me, this was a unique opportunity to scale down all the things you learn as a consultant and then kind of how do you actually scale? What you realize very quickly is scaling a company, you have to have your products and services, of course, and that’s paramount. But you also have to build the team and you have to build your processes that can scale, that can systematically capture customer feedback, that can evolve the product to meet those needs. And so it’s those elements of, okay, it’s very different to have a working product versus having a working company that’s 3 times. And so that was kind of very formative for me. And having had that success, which you also realize is, boy, you know, the investor and their view and their ability to influence and align incentives is very, very compelling. And as an investor, you get the benefit of being able to have, if you will, a portfolio effect. So you actually be able to, in fact, you know, deploy these sets of skills across multiple enterprises in a portfolio. And that to me was very tempting and compelling. So that’s what led my transition. That coupled with an opportunity when I transitioned to Silver Lake. This was when Silver Lake, a leading global technology investment firm, this is in the mid-2000s, they were a Fund II. I think today they’re over $100 billion in assets under management. They were on Fund II, which was a $3 billion firm. And so again, this notion that the management and the leadership team there recognized that you could combine technology sector expertise and a whole kind of access to the ecosystem of Silicon Valley and technology trends and really understanding that at a time when people saw technology as risk and cycles. As investors, they say if you really bring the technical understanding and the industry understanding and network, you can develop strategic themes and invest behind them. But they also realize that if you really could bring an operator’s know-how and their founding partner, some of them had an operator’s know-how, you know how to not just have the strategic understanding, but the operating understanding of how in fact you react and exploit those themes. ‘Cause we all know, right? Planning is everything. But plans themselves, it’s about how do we react. And so having that operator’s understanding, I thought was very critical. And so that was my journey into private equity, an appreciation that if you had a long-term view of private equity, not the classic public equities, that you really could capture significant value. So that was very, very compelling to me. And I have said, I might have ended my career at Silver Lake, which is a great firm. I was afforded the opportunity to pause that part of my career move to Washington, D.C., and serve our newly elected president and his team, President Obama at the time, to help improve public education. And so it was something that through the network I had done work in previously in my career in education, I was politically active, but not you a, know, huge bundler or not a huge politico. This really was an outreach of an opportunity. And so if we go back in time to late December 2008, We’re at the kind of the peak of the greatest recession since the Depression. It’s a notion of newly incoming president trying to put together a trillion-plus stimulus package in order to reinvigorate the economy. And a president and his team recognizing that getting that kind of authority from Congress was kind of a once-in-a-term opportunity. And so the notion that if we get this ask from Congress, how can we allow it to have the maximum good? And so part of that was from a domestic policy agenda, How do we think about what we can use, what we can do in education, right? Being a policy general, what can we use this for in education? And that was the context of a $100 billion one-time infusion in public education as part of the global stimulus package that passed in February 2009. And that was the context of we need a new type of leadership and leadership team who could organize us and move at a pace and scale that has been unprecedented, to kind of who can get the complexity of government but not be constrained by some of those restrictions. And so they wanted somebody in a team that was, again, more diverse, if you will, not just in terms of, you know, typical diversity, but diversity in terms of true experience and recognizing the value of that. And that really was what afforded me the opportunity to come serve something that I became very passionate about. And to have success in that role for me is what said, boy, if there’s a way to do this back in the private sector, deploying private capital, not just public dollars, this could be quite sustainable. And the potential to have impact at scale is very real. Aoifinn Devitt: And were there any lessons learned there during— from this phase in public service, having been in the private sector and moved back in subsequently? Anything that surprised you, maybe? Tony Miller: Oh, yeah. I mean, well, things that surprised me— first of all, what surprised me actually was the quality of some of the senior executives who were not political appointees. And so I think oftentimes your career civil servants, you know, will get mischaracterized as completely risk-averse, not really caring, just showing up to take a paycheck. And I couldn’t find that. To be anything more than just completely untrue for a significant subset. We were talking about highly educated, many with master’s and PhD programs. You’re talking about people who took utmost pride in their profession in terms of stewarding public resources, insulating, in fact, the programs from underqualified and perhaps a set of political leaders that may vary in integrity. Because you have to remember, these people serve year after year, decade after decade. So they see a lot of senior political appointees come and go with their own personal agendas, and they really do see themselves safeguarding the public interest, not in a partisan way, but in a professional way. And so I say first surprise for me was myself being subject to some of those stereotypes to say, wow, that’s just not true. And so I really do have a set of professional colleagues that I can collaborate with, which helped me be much more effective because again, instead of, if you will, not taking their advice, I’m like, hey, tell me everything you possibly can. How can I be more effective? And so built mutual trust. So that was a big surprise, but also a big advantage that I found. Being able to forge those relationships. Another surprise, quite candidly, is oftentimes you come up with the belief that you can’t have change at scale. Now admittedly, we had a number of factors going in our advantage in terms of this unprecedented level of spending at a time when resources at the heat of the recession, depth of the recession were scarce. So every dollar was magnified in its potential impact. So again, be able to exploit that, if you will, to influence behavior. The other thing that oftentimes you don’t realize, and I didn’t until you really study it in the US economy, is that the federal government in US education, in K-12 education, represents 7 to 9% of total annual spend. By statute, if you will, by authorizing statute, cannot affect curriculum, cannot affect standards. And so some would say it’s a role that lacks a lot of direct influence. And again, If at 7%, you’re not even using, if you will, the budget to drive. And so even with all those things said, the idea that with this level of one-time funding, with the ability to align the statutory authorities that you do have in a strategic way. So again, the terminology I might say, if you really are intentional of putting more wood behind the arrow, that’s how you can have significantly more impact than you might otherwise have. And if you couple that with, I’d say, in the department and in the White House more broadly, I’d like to say I don’t think I’ve ever met more authentic leadership. And so these were leaders who I work with directly, and I can honestly say the refrain was, what’s the right policy? Let’s not worry about the politics. You could say perhaps to a fault, but they’re like, we have this once in a generation opportunity to do what we think is the right thing. We’ll make mistakes, but let’s make mistakes because we’re trying to do the right thing. Not for any other reason. And that can be very inspiring. It mobilizes the team. So I think those are some of the surprises in terms of it’s not necessarily what I expected. And it’s one of the reasons why I decided what was going to be a 1-year stint, come in and come out, I ultimately accepted the offer to go through Senate confirmation, a little painful but not too, and to actually stay for the, for the full first term. Aoifinn Devitt: And taking that forward now to your move back into the private sector, Can you talk us through what motivated you to start Excolare and what is the problem you’re designed to solve, maybe including that scaling potential? Tony Miller: Yeah, I’d say at Excolare, we believe that if you do deploy capital and you can align it with an understanding, I’d say, of public policy, but not in so much the governmental sense strictly, but more in the outcomes, right? We want superior learning. We want adults who have the requisite skills that employers demand., right? You recognize that processes are being kind of re-engineered or being complemented with AI technology and are fundamentally transforming. And so how do I you then, know, ensure that my workforce can adapt, right, appropriately to that? Go at the other end of the spectrum. How do I ensure that one of the best investments is early childhood education so that truly the most formative years, right, of our youngest infants, right, that they’re preparing, right, to grow both socially, economically, intellectually, Right? How do you do that? And what you find is, and what we found during my time in government, is there were not many investors who had the breadth or depth of sector expertise. And that’s perhaps not surprising, but that’s just the reality of it. It’s technical. You have to have a real appreciation for pedagogy. You have to have the patience to understand the complexity of a very fragmented distribution system, be that K-12, be that higher ed, be that the learning and development, if you will, capability within enterprises that operated in a staff, but then with decentralized operator support. And so that’s something that is hard to just come by unless you— from experience. I’d say that would be one. I think two, what we found, and it’s changed quite a bit post-COVID, but what you found was the development adoption of data and technology at scale had been lacking. And so this notion of how do you actually deploy technology that are adaptive, How can you have a more personalized approach to learning? How can you you have, know, more real-time feedback from the labor market in terms of what’s needed? Those things didn’t characterize public education or human capital management 20 years ago, right? And so thinking about— and oftentimes I like to compare it to healthcare, right? If you think about kind of how healthcare has evolved in the last 20 years, I’d say education is similarly evolving, but starting at an earlier starting point. And so when you then think about the potential to deploy capital, to leverage data, to leverage technology, and candidly, as you move through this fragmented system, as momentum builds, you get to this notion of, of some of the traditional barriers of, you know, change management and getting people to change, right? The more penetration you had, the more examples of proven effective approaches, the easier it gets.. And I think that’s the opportunity that we saw. And I think that’s very much what we’re experiencing now at XLR is the ability to leverage all this expertise in such a way that you can make a difference. And I think the last thing I would say, which is from a customer’s perspective, I do think it’s oftentimes very, very important to align this notion of outcomes to the financial returns. And I think that can be easier said than done. And what I mean by that is not that people necessarily don’t want good outcomes, but the reality is financial returns are easier and more directly measurable, and outcomes can often lag, hard to get direct attribution. And so therefore you can use proxies. You can use a proxy like NPS or customer satisfaction. Does your customer really like your product? And the answer could be yes. That’s not the same as your product works as it’s intended to work.. And oftentimes you can say, as long as we got great NPS, I’m not really measuring if my learning outcomes are actually improving. And I think as a control investor, as we are, we are much better positioned to ensure and create a feedback loop of not just are our customers satisfied, but is learning actually improving at a rate that differentiates us versus competitive offerings? And we think that is incredibly sustaining. And that’s the basis, if you will, for not just differentiation, But if you do it as a capability, a real moat for some of the portfolio companies that we like to have in our portfolio. Aoifinn Devitt: How do you square that with some of the controversy that sometimes attaches itself to education? We think of exploitation, for-profit colleges. There’s some stuff that went on in China, and it’s a very sensitive area, obviously. I’m sure you’re well aware in terms of reputation risk. And then also the portfolio approach at Excolare. How are you ensuring that that is an all-weather portfolio across different sectors. Tony Miller: With respect to having margin, making a surplus, right, in education, is that fundamentally unprincipled? And unfortunately, right, you could say, and I will say it this way, unfortunately it’s not. And what do I mean by that? That having seen the capabilities of the public sector and its frankly inability to drive innovation, and to drive creative solutions to almost intractable problems of students 2 and 3 grade levels behind, right, with limited time to accelerate their learning. How in fact do you do that, right? It needs a level of innovation. It needs a level of investment. And so if not for the private sector and being able to drive some of these things with the appropriate financial incentives, I don’t know how we actually solve this problem. So I think it’s quite appropriate. The question is, is it exploitive and can you make a lot of money without actually improving outcomes? And I think that’s the risk. And that’s where people appropriately have gotten upset. And I would say as a regulator, frankly, we were kind of instrumental in leading some of the regulatory crackdown of for-profit higher education. You know, that said, I don’t believe in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And so the notion of were there abuses and should they be curtailed? Yes. But should the entire higher education system be held more accountable for better outcomes? Yes. And, you know, should you think about outcomes on a risk-adjusted basis? Because again, somebody going, you know, well-prepared high school, elementary education, high school education with all the supports, are they likely going to do much better than somebody who is just struggling, right, to exit high school, maybe not have exited high school and come back, gotten a high school degree, now as a young adult, you know, years out of any math course saying, now I want to go back to school, higher risk factors, working full-time, right? Do you need to have a solution that meets them where they are? Yes. Has our traditional higher education system done that? No. And so therefore, do you need to put not just the instructional delivery but the wraparound services? Yes. On average, will they have lower outcomes? Perhaps yes. But do we still need that level of innovation? And I would argue yes. And so I say all that because I do think now from an Excolari standpoint, if you really are holding yourselves accountable to delivering the right outcomes and you do that at the expense of just maximum growth, I think that is in fact a path forward that mitigates the risk of reputational if you will, exposure. And I would say quite the opposite. I’d say both public policymakers are looking for those kinds of solutions. So again, the apprehension is more because they don’t see a lot of that, right? And they’re not familiar with a lot of those at-scale models. When they see it, they celebrate it. I think the concern is, no, we’re more concerned about the incentives just driving growth at the expense of children. And I think they’re rightfully guarded. We believe we are in the best position to navigate both those worlds quite successfully. Aoifinn Devitt: And tying it together then to the typical private equity time horizon. I sit on the board of the MDRC and the social policy research they do, some of it’s over many, many years before they can ascertain impact of interventions around education. And then the private equity timeframe is a little bit, sometimes can be shorter than that, is longer term than other kinds of capital there. So how do you marry the two in terms of, you know, how soon are you measuring impact? And how do you ensure that that does, you know, deliver? Tony Miller: Yeah, I think we have the benefit of selecting the companies in which we invest based on the impact that they’ve already been able to demonstrate. And so we start, if you will, kind of not from scratch. And we’re also selecting themes where the ability to measure impact, even if not directly, at least indirectly, we have a lot of confidence in. And I think so part of this is a, well, it’s a filtering, it’s a sample bias that we purposely bias the sample so that the investments we’re making are predisposed to having measurable impact in a defined period of time. And so an example, right now we are actively considering an investment that provides dropout recovery services in partnership with school districts. And so clearly a need, right? Unfortunately, with chronic absenteeism also growing, you have many students who for different reasons drop out of high school. The question is, or the impact opportunity as we know, is the impact on lifetime earnings, on potential, you know, demand for social services support for non-high school degree completers is tremendous. So tremendous costs, right, to society, opportunity cost to the individual, well, well documented. The question is, can you reach these dropouts, right? And can you get them re-engaged constructively such that they can complete their high school degree and put them on a path? That is something that’s very quantifiable, right? They’re currently dropped out. First of all, can you get them re-enrolled? Can you get them back in and to sustain some kind of progression in an instructional environment where heretofore they have not been successful in doing that? So that’s kind of an easy thing to measure. Then it is, well, if you’re, you know, 2.5 years behind, if you will, grade level, so you’re not going to make it through the social promotion because you’re not going to have a 20-year-old, right, in your senior class. What you’re trying to then do is say, okay, can I put them on an accelerated pathway and can I have a flexible delivery and the supports to do that? Well, that’s a combination of technology and people, right, that actually allows them to be successful. And then you can measure, are they actually persisting? They’re not gonna graduate in 12 months, but they should have an accelerated pace that gives you confidence that they will graduate before they age out of the system completely. And then ultimately, you’re also looking at overall outcomes. And so in my mind, that is a case where Yes, if you can demonstrate demonstrable outcomes over the period of your hold, let’s say a typical 5-year hold period, we think you can do that. You should hold yourself accountable to doing that. And if you do that successfully, we think— and what we’ve seen is there’s significant appetite on the, if you will, on the exit side for the next level of investment. Oftentimes strategic acquirers is what we find, what we begin to gear towards, or frankly other financial sponsors who, again, you’ve de-risked this investment from a reputational standpoint. Because you demonstrated consistent and sustained outcomes. Aoifinn Devitt: And what has the response been to this as an investment proposition? I know we speak with a lot of early-stage funds and founders, or what might be called emerging in some lexicons. How would you say your fundraising experience or just that fund management experience has gone so far? Tony Miller: I’d say in the context of probably the most challenging fundraising environment, right, that we’ve seen for at least a decade, if not two, I think we have been pleased with the level of success and momentum we’ve been able to build. And so I think that’s a number of things I can attribute that to. I think first of all, as someone once described, we’re an emerging firm, right? But we’re not emerging managers, meaning having launched a private equity firm and co-founded a very successful private equity firm when I immediately left government in Chicago, my partners have had the benefit of working together, deploying capital successfully. And so again, as Excolare, right, a new entity, but not a new team and a set of investment experiences consistent with what we’re trying to do at Excolare. And so I think that helps a lot. And I think investors appreciate that. Has a team worked together? Are you working together on a strategy that you’ve had success in in the past? And is that strategy and opportunity relevant? And I think people are realizing it’s probably more relevant today because in a post-COVID world, people have said, wow, like the needs of the employer, work from home, how do I engage employees? How do I upskill them? Like we see that need, right? And so we have to hire differently, we have to train differently, we have to job configure differently. And so you see the demand on the work from home and people have realized it. Similarly, you’ve seen it in both higher ed and traditional education in that not only is instruction different, but what had been a heretofore barrier, which is the build out of the digital infrastructure, right? People didn’t do Zooms, right? So like, wait, Zoom and Teams. Now that is very much a part of the normal experience. And so that’s not to say that everything is online and virtual. It’s to say you have the flexibility to leverage in-person, hybrid, online in different ways. And so people now see the opportunity for some of these business models to scale. And then even going back to early childhood. So I’d say the demand has— people personally, right? At the end of the day, we’re still talking about people. You’re talking about limited partners who have their own experiences. And they see the relevancy of education and the scalability of some of the models they’ve experienced with. And I think we’ve been, again, not a new team and a need that’s growingly relevant at the personal level that people can relate to, right, with I think a thoughtful strategy that’s backed up by our individual capabilities, I think has been well received notwithstanding this very tough marketplace. Aoifinn Devitt: And I want to ask the diversity question in a slightly different way here. Because clearly education is key to social mobility. And part of this podcast, we speak generally about investment professionals who are within, and we ask them about diversity within the world of investment. And diversity also means social mobility and socioeconomic diversity. And I’d love to know just from your, over the course of your career, what have you seen in terms of that piece being, you know, where you would like us to see it in terms of diversity and inclusion? And any progress that you’ve seen over the course of your career? Tony Miller: Yeah, I’m— there are different facets to that question, of course. And so if I just say from my investment hat, we see that as tremendous opportunity and we would say we’re the 2.0 opportunity. And what I mean by that is oftentimes what you’ve seen is it’s been an access issue, right? People who’ve not had access to education, to a certain set of jobs, to a certain set of skill development. And so how do you provide access? I think the concern, as we touched on before, is you can provide access, but if you’re not improving outcomes, it’s kind of a false hope. And I think, and that’s where you can be kind of accused of being exploitive because you’re like, yes, I’d love, and then I incur debt and I don’t actually get the benefit of degree. I’m actually worse off than what I was. Or I spent a lot of time recruiting and I’m still facing bias because How I’m perceived, right, is subject to bias. Our view is more of, yes, now imagine the best of both worlds where you are in fact creating more opportunities, more viable opportunities on the access side that have real outcomes differential. Now you get the benefit of growth because you’re tapping into an under-marketed-to subsegment, right? Not exclusively, but it complements the value proposition to the full market. And you’re being able to deliver actual outcomes. And I would say in a world where Employers are looking for truly qualified talent. And to the degree that, yes, there may be bias in processes, but they would say, I would just as soon not have that. I don’t know how to move out of the biases. But if you could tell me you can deliver me 10 highly qualified candidates, that’s what I want. I’m not purposely trying to narrow my candidate pool, right? That’s just a byproduct of my current process. And so you see employers saying, I would like— again, I have a need for talented individuals. If you have solutions that can do that, I’m I’m a buyer. You have higher education institutions that say, hey, given the demographics, the more highly qualified people who are likely to persist in my institution, I would welcome that. And your K-12 system, similar. Boy, if you can help me improve progression and completion from some of those most at risk, that’s exactly what I’m accountable for. So I think that is the potential, right, to actually really commit yourself to being successful with a diverse customer base student population that’s inclusive. So I think on that dimension, we see this very much aligned with if you will, business incentives, growth incentives. And I think that’s helpful because again, you don’t see it as a zero sum. I think if you go on now as an investment firm, right? I still think unfortunately, you know, we are committed to diversity at our firm and I think many represent that they are. And I’m not saying that’s disingenuous. I’m saying what the challenge is, you know, investing is successfully, it’s a very, very challenging,, if you will, business. It’s very, very competitive, very, very challenging. You’re confronted with more, if you will, supply than demand, meaning LPs are always inundated. They’re always trying to say, who are my most highest performing on a risk-adjusted basis GP? And I think whenever you have that kind of market dynamic, it lends you to be risk-averse. There’s no penalty to being risk-averse. And so I think that’s the challenge with creating a more inclusive investment environment. Because again, if we just work backwards to de-risk it, it’s like, yes, I want everybody who’s worked for Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, who went to the top business schools, who’ve either been a, you know, maybe they were a successful venture, you know, their own business was venture for going to the venture, or they’ve been with an established banking and private equity firm. And when you look at the pipeline, that doesn’t yield a very diverse talent pool, right? In traditional metrics. And I think that’s the challenge that We see in firms like ours who are, you know, we’re led by a diverse managing partner and we’re committed to creating an environment of diversity. And we truly believe that on all dimensions. So it’s not just race, but it’s gender. It’s not just gender, it’s the whatever characteristics. We want everybody to feel like they can be themselves and thrive here. They don’t have to be anybody different. They just have to be talented. But then we say, this is an environment where you can make the best out of who you are without being anything other than who you are. And I think that’s the kind of environment we thrive. And I think as a new firm, that’s easier to do than as an existing firm with years of culture to change. So admittedly, I think we have an advantage. Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, absolutely. And I love how you tied all that together. And we probably would need to dedicate a separate podcast to this, and I’m gonna plant a flag there and, and a seed because hopefully you’ll do that. And that’s around AI and education. But maybe just for the purpose of this and the brevity of this podcast, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much of an impact is AI and its advancement having on your product and outcomes and the work you’re doing? Tony Miller: Oh, I’d say today, I’d say in actuality, 2.5, in perception, 3.5. But I think soon to you be, know, over some not too distant future, both of those will double. And so what we are seeing in AI, I’d say you’re seeing the actual application at the portfolio company level to improve operations. And so that’s what we’re seeing it where you’ve got large data. And so how do I take an advisor, right, of different functional? Now I am getting significantly higher productivity because I’m leveraging data, right, and technology to better coach them, arm them, route calls, et cetera, that allows them to be much more effective. You’re using AI on the development side that allows the software engineering team to be much more productive, right? So we’re seeing that today, right, across portfolio companies in different functions. So that’s why I say that’s a 2.5. Is it of the scale across all of them? No, but it is real. It’s tangible and it’s not pie in the sky. The 3.5 I would say is people, especially in education, right? I think they say, boy, there’s a huge potential and isn’t it just around the corner? And I think as hopeful as we might be, I think it’s hard to appreciate the incredible EQ that’s needed, right, to really educate children. It matters if a student is having a bad day. It matters if they’re hungry. It matters if they’re distracted because There’s a rivalry in there with their team. Like all these other factors actually influence learning. And what we’ve seen, if nothing but the pandemic, it’s a— there’s only a subset of people who can truly thrive in a self-paced, automated fashion where they’re interacting with technology. That is not the norm. We’ve actually seen learning loss. We’ve seen socioeconomic skill atrophy. And so again, the next generation of AI that will bring not just adaptive content, but these other factors in conjunction with qualified instructors, I do think has real, real power. I think that’s more on the horizon. That’s just not here today. And so I think it’s a little bit less disruptive in the immediate term in traditional education. But I don’t think it’s far where you’re going to see similar dual process improvements, not so much substituting the instructor, but complementing the instructor. Aoifinn Devitt: I have heard that’s the complementary part that is going to be the first to take off. I’d love to move to a few closing reflection questions. And having had such a varied career as you have, private sector, various forms, public service, now back to the private sector. What would you say were some highs and lows or one high, one low, and maybe a lesson from that low or that setback? Tony Miller: Yeah, I’d say the highs are somewhat consistent, right? And for me, they’ve been when there’s been that milestone kind of recognition at some point in your career that you worked hard for and it was a validation of sorts. And so you That’s, know, elected partner at McKinsey. It’s you being, know, confirmed by the Senate, actually probably appointed by the president more than confirmed by the Senate. That’s not a knock on my professional colleagues, but where it really is, again, a validation. And so one of the highs we experienced at Expelare was with our first close. And frankly, almost preceding that, it was with the selection by Grovner, right, to be an anchor investor in the firm. Now Grovner is, you know, well known for being a sophisticated investor and working with emerging managers. They were in a highly selective process by which they were considering new anchor investments to make. And so engaging with them, having been familiar with Grovernor from my prior firm, and to have them in essence validate both the strategy, the team that we had brought together, and the potential that they saw was especially satisfying. And so We couldn’t be more appreciative. And the kind of partner when you’re trying to build a world-class firm, not just a fund, but truly a world-class firm, you want to have a partner like Grovner who can really help you start off with the institutional quality, but which you’re committed to building. So those would be examples of some of the highs in my career. And again, with the notion of validation of a lot of hard work, but at the front end of the next chapter, I think the lows would be similar in terms of there was a characteristics. It was where the career took a change and it wasn’t completely anticipated. And so if I think about the dot-com bust, 9/11, and how that went from a very growth economy to then a nuclear winter, people were talking about it. And it really forces you to have an introspection of, okay, like, okay, what I was doing leading up to this is just gonna— it stalled. There’s incredible amount of headwinds. What’s next? And so that’s kind of a mindset that you have to In have. Terms of what are you gonna do next? I remember having that kind of similar perspective. I’d gotten promoted earlier in my career and took on a great opportunity. This was when I was at the division of General Motors Hughes Electronics post their merger and took on at a young age kind of a leadership responsibility for the western half of the United States. And then the company made a decision to frankly reduce investment in the whole field infrastructure. And again, very rational, but these things like, oh, I didn’t quite see that coming. And so those were some of the lows in my career only because, again, macro forces that you didn’t see and you weren’t fully prepared for. And each one of those, when I look back, they all seem to have led to something better. And so I think that’s one of the lessons learned, that as you face setbacks, they can actually be an opportunity for not just growth, but true inflection. And so in each of these, it led me to stints, you know, making transitions to very attractive, you know, next opportunities. The, the last example I gave was the catalyst for me to go back to grad school, go to Stanford, and that changed the professional arc of my career. Would I have done that? Aoifinn Devitt: Sure. Tony Miller: But at that time, that was the trigger for me. And so, like, it worked out kind of very, very well. When I think about what happened in the dot-com, it led me to a unique opportunity born out of the Enron crisis, which kind of correlated to that and led me to a great opportunity on the operating side, which then led me into private equity. So again, sometimes you can’t always appreciate the headwind when you see it.. But what I’ve learned is to, like classic, you know, as Rahm Emanuel said when we were in Washington at times, he’s like, hey, never let a crisis go to waste. And so that’s one of the things, you know, the lows really can be opportunities if you have the right attitude. Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely wonderful analysis of And, that. You know, of course, many of the, I ask this question on every podcast about key people in someone’s life. And so many times that comes down to a teacher or a Well, I coach. Say the person that played some sport, for example. So given you are now immersed in the world of education, Have there been any people throughout the course of your career that made a lasting impression on you? Tony Miller: Sure. Aoifinn Devitt: And this is not an exhaustive list. Tony Miller: So what I can— Not an exhaustive list, right? So we’ll stipulate my parents. And so for all the reasons that you can’t choose your parents, I must say I had a teacher in 3rd grade who recognized my academic potential and steered me to a different academic journey. And so I’m very supportive of Mrs. Gay. And so that changed my belief in myself quite you candidly, know? And so that was early on, which had a huge impact. I’d say similarly for me, post-undergrad, I had a boss who had come from the corporate HR, right? Was a very senior executive in corporate HR who then relocated. I had a chance to work for him and it was similar. It’s where he helped calibrate me as a young undergrad or a recent undergrad to say, hey, you need to understand like how talent in the corporation gets tracked, identified, mapped. Right? There’s high potential. Here are the career paths. It was just an education for me that I had not had any exposure to. And two things. One, it allowed me to realize early on, right, in a professional sense, how important and how systematic people were with identifying and developing and nurturing talent. If you’re not aware of it, you needed to be. And then two, I really give them a lot of credit for calibrating me to, like anything, almost like my parents, to giving you the confidence and the belief that you are or could be a just, you’re only limited by your own capability. That the opportunities would present themselves. And I think that was a very influential experience that I had because again, it was from that point on, it had you been, know, what you do in your home or in school setting, but to have that same kind of guidance in a true professional setting was the first time I had that in my career. It’s been very lasting. Aoifinn Devitt: Inspiring stuff indeed. And that brings me to the last question, which is around some of that inspiration. Is there any creed or motto that you live by or advice that maybe that you would give your younger self? Tony Miller: I guess there’s probably two things, right? And part of this is with maturity. One, it is nothing is a substitute for hard work. And I think that’s always important to keep in mind in that you can be talented, right? And you should take advantage of all the talent you have. But this notion of just a work ethic and working really hard, I’m a firm, firm believer in that, and it served me well. And so you have to kind of embrace that. I know a lot of the, you know, Gen Zers and et cetera, they get criticized for not fully embracing a work ethic. And, and you can get out of track of work-life balance. But I think it’s very important to truly under— and appreciate the value of hard work. That would be one. I think the other thing that I realize, and this applies to all facets of life, and again, maybe it’s, you know, Eastern philosophy, but it’s very simply put, it’s you’re very much in control of your own happiness. It has a lot to do with your expectations. And I remember earlier in my career, actually at McKinsey, when we were young associates, right, right out of business school, and you can imagine a bunch of somewhat professionally immature, high ego, very self-centered view of, you know, what the firm should do for you and how hard we had it, yada yada. And I remember the firm had started recruiting from outside of MBAs, and there was a young Army officer who had been recruited into the firm. He had been working in Europe, in Germany, and he said, hey, you know, to all of my classmates, you’d be a heck of a lot happier if you just lowered your expectations. You don’t know what it’s like to kind of have to bivouac, right, in the cold area, right? Even with success. And it was very telling. It was absolutely true that it’s not about settling, but it’s about the mindset. You can either have it to be constructive or less than constructive, and you control a lot of that. And I think that’s something that I constantly remind myself and tell my son and some of my younger colleagues. Aoifinn Devitt: Fascinating, that concept of expectations, because I think tied to that, not only managing expectations as the individual. I think educators need to have high expectations of the individual though, of the potential of of the, the student. I think that is key, and hopefully there will not be that tyranny of low expectations as to what can be achieved by an individual. Clearly your third grade teacher saw it in you, and I do think that expecting the most from our student body will hopefully allow many to achieve their potential. Tony Miller: Well said, and I couldn’t agree more. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much, Tony. It has been a pleasure to draw together the various fascinating strands of your career into this complex and often intractable area of education and reform. Because really, I think some of the impact you’re seeking to create will constitute reform. So I hope this is a conversation that we can keep having. And I’ll put a flag, as I said, in talking about the transformative effect of AI and where we go from here. But as at least a starter, a primer on the topic, it’s been excellent. Thank you so much for coming here and sharing your insights with us. Tony Miller: Thank you very much for the opportunity. I’ve enjoyed our time together. Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring professionals on their personal journey, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This series is kindly supported by GCM Grosvenor. GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset management firm with a longstanding commitment to supporting small, emerging, and diverse investment managers. For over 30 years, the firm has developed expertise in funding and guiding these managers as part of its broader activity across alternative investments. With over $20 billion in AUM dedicated to small and emerging managers, and $16 billion in AUM dedicated to diverse managers, GCM Grosvenor leverages its experienced team, broad network, and proprietary sourcing capabilities to support their success. Through the Small, Emerging, and Diverse Manager Program, the firm creates opportunities for investors to access a wide range of talent while seeking to drive strong returns and impact. For more information, visit www.gcmgrovenor.com.

Ilya: My dad was a big influence on me in terms of the way I think. He used to always say, “What do you know for sure?” or take things back to formula. So if you had a question about how something worked, dissect it back to what do I really know for sure here? We tend to avoid looking at difficult problems and assuming around them. And so he was very good at just not doing that. And I think, you know, you find that a lot of the answers you’re looking for are right in front of you. You just don’t want to look there.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people. And their stories. I’m joined today by Ilya Zaidis, CIO and founder of 14b. He started his career as a lawyer, eventually transitioning to an allocator role within two leading hedge fund allocators. He then made a switch into fund management, founding the fund 15 years ago. Welcome, Ilya. Thanks for joining me today.

Ilya: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, let’s start with your background and career journey. Can you start with where you grew up, some of your early interests, and how you came to enter the world of law initially?

Ilya: Okay, well, a lot of that was frankly by accident. So I was born in the former Soviet Union and my family immigrated to the United States in 1975. We moved to Orange County in California, which was where I grew up. And at that time, that was kind of a backwater. It was halfway between LA and San Diego, mostly known for its orange groves. My parents were trained as scientists under the old Soviet system, and my mom is a chemist, my dad was a physicist. But neither of them had any true passion for those fields. And it took them a long time to sort of figure out what they were doing work-wise. And I grew up sort of in a quintessential immigrant family where it was expected that I get an education that was aimed towards a career goal. So I looked around me and saw that all the successful people that I knew in our town were either doctors or lawyers. So I decided I’d be a lawyer. I was probably around 11 or 12 at that time, and kind of off I went. I ended up in law school in New York at NYU, and the first week of law school, I realized I had made a really big mistake. But with sort of my immigrant mentality, I just sort of kept at it for the next 10 years. So that’s kind of how I ended up as a lawyer. And, you know, I practiced for quite a long time, and it really In a lot of ways, you know, the finance was something I sort of discovered, I would say, sometime in college. I distinctly remember reading The Economist article on George Soros and how he broke the Bank of England. And I remember where I was reading that article, and it just sort of set off a light in my head. I didn’t know what to do about it, but it made me feel like there was something out there that I needed to learn more about. And so I spent a lot of time just reading anything I could get my hands on in terms of the finance world.

Aoifinn Devitt: Just love to ask a little bit more. I think we mentioned when we chatted before the podcast that I did spend time in Russia later than when your family left, obviously. But what was instilled in you in terms of values besides that kind of hunger, the hard work that comes from the immigrant experience? Any kind of family narrative from the former Soviet Union that race, your family, that you internalized?

Ilya: Well, so a couple of thoughts there. When I left the Soviet Union, I was 2 years old, so I didn’t get to experience it all firsthand in the same way that my parents and grandparents lived through it. But it obviously was very impactful in the way that I was raised and the way that they thought and the things that went on inside the house. So I’d say that the first thing was a real core belief in that, you know, there was a lot of just— I don’t know how else to put it— fear in the former Soviet Union. And the one way that I think that people equalized for that fear or rationalized their lives for that fear was really to work hard at some kind of task, to be good at something. And whether it took their minds off of the fear that they experienced in their daily lives or whether or not it was truly a method of survival during periods of time when people’s lives really weren’t valued highly by that society. So I think there was a real emphasis on learning something valuable and doing it well. And that translated down to me, I think. And that plus just the general, I would say, immigrant experience is always one I would would I say, of an outsider, where you feel very much that you have to prove yourself, prove your worth. And I think that goes for all immigrants regardless of where they come from, besides the fact that generally speaking, they’re coming from a place where wherever it is that they immigrate to, they’re seeking a better life, right? So there’s a lot that goes along with it, but I think that the general immigrant experience is always one of striving to achieve and really defining especially their early lives by career goals.

Aoifinn Devitt: And speaking of career goals, then, before we move on to what you ultimately pursued, why did you think being a lawyer was not for you? What was it about it in the first year that turned you off?

Ilya: It’s a good question. I remember the moment really well, but what it was specifically, I couldn’t tell you. I would say this: it felt like I was thinking about other people’s issues and not my own. And that I had always felt that there’s a basic concept in, certainly in American legal scholarship and in the legal system that, you know, everyone deserves representation and that you advocate for your client’s interests. And I agree with the idea, but it felt very difficult to me personally I like to believe in something and pursue that something. And it was very difficult to sort of play devil’s advocate all the time, arguing for a specific point regardless of whether or not I believed it was a good one. And the process of that, by the time I got to law school, it was no longer academic. It felt very real and it just didn’t feel right is all I can tell you.

Aoifinn Devitt: And moving then, so you made the move into finance. Finally, all that reading and that passion translated into application. And what then caused you to pivot again to found your own firm? And just in the origins 15 years ago of the fund manager and 14b.

Ilya: Sure. So, so I practiced law for almost 7 years and it got to the point where, and I was a tax lawyer, so I was very familiar with accounting and it kind of got to the point where a lot of the work I was doing for my clients, you know, it sort of started off in the frame of, I don’t really know what’s going on. I’m given a certain task, I can do the task, but the broader picture was sort of elusive. Over the years, I developed a sense of the broader picture. And what also started to develop was a sense that, well, okay, the people for whom I’m working, whether it was, you know, the bankers or other finance professionals, they didn’t see it particularly clearly either. They were also sort of doing their work and doing their task. That sort of stayed with me. By the time I started to realize that bigger picture, that, well, for lack of a better sense, I knew just as much as the guy next to me, right? I, I was working on the same transaction. I’d been doing that for years and years. By the time I got that sense, okay, I sort of had this feeling I can do this too. There’s nothing magical to it. There’s nothing particularly complicated or elusive about it that I can’t participate in. So in order to get into the finance field, I sort of had to take a step back. So, you know, I had had, call it 10 years of experience out of college, 3 years in school and almost 7 years in legal practice. And I took a step back and I was working with people who had maybe 2 years of experience out of college or 3. I was approaching 30 and they were in their early 20s and they had more energy than me and they were okay with working 80, 90 hours a week again. And I was sort of at the point where I was like, well, I’d like to end that part of my life and move on to a you more, know, normal career path. So in a sense, it was just a matter of proving myself in the new field. So after a couple of years, I think that that was done, and I didn’t particularly want to get onto a career path in finance. I didn’t see that as the goal. I thought that the real interesting thing was identifying investment ideas and being able to pursue them, and that required a certain degree of freedom in order to do. There was just simply no way around it. And so that’s really the genesis and why I decided to pursue it on my own. It’s not that I didn’t feel that there was anything left to learn, although to some degree I did feel that way, that the learning had happened, the majority of the learning had happened. And so really it was a matter of finding a spot to sort of develop. And I didn’t think that developing in a large organization was the right move for me, frankly. Or even necessary.

Aoifinn Devitt: And then what’s at the forefront of your mind today? Can you talk a little bit about the strategy in the firm?

Ilya: Well, most of the work we do relates to specific companies, right? So it’s really a bottoms-up approach. But at a high level, I think, you know, we’ve seen some pretty big changes in consumption patterns across a wide range of companies. I’d sort of branded as stimulated excess. A lot of it comes from the decade of zero rate policy. But I think that the pandemic really added fuel to the fire. A statistic I often cite is, you know, during the 2020 to 2023 period, government spending added about 7% per year to GDP while, you know, the money supply grew by about 40%. So I don’t know if all of that was necessary or not. Given the circumstances at the time. But there’s no doubt that that stimulus drove a massive increase in consumption. And I think that it’s hard to imagine that there’s not going to be a very large and significant hangover that’s roughly equivalent to the party that took place. And I think that we’re just at the beginning of that, both in terms of the scale, the magnitude, and the time that it’s going to take And one of the things that concerns me the most about that is that that excess spending has become to some degree habitualized. So now it looks like consumers, you know, especially younger consumers, have taken on a large amount of debt to keep up their consumption habits that they’ve grown acclimated to over the previous sort of, you know, 5 or 6 years. And I just don’t see that ending well. And I worry a lot about the younger generation’s ability to service their debt loads over time, and especially how that affects their ability to make good life choices. I mean, I think that one of the lucky things that I experienced was because of my immigrant background, I was frugal. And when I was in my 30s and still young enough and dumb enough to you make, know, risky changes, I was not financially strapped to the point where I couldn’t do that, or it was just irrational for me to try. And I think that that has been stripped from a lot of people in this younger generation. I don’t see that as a good thing at all, and I think that it’s not likely to end well. It’s likely to end in an exacerbation of social imbalances and general strife that can’t be easily corrected. It’s going to take decades to wean that out of the system. So that’s kind of the thing I’m thinking about from a big picture perspective.

Aoifinn Devitt: And how does that translate then into a portfolio? How do you express that concern of big picture looming strife, I And, suppose? You know, how do you kind of counter that with the short-term exuberance that we’re all feeling?

Ilya: Yeah, well, I mean, that’s the challenge. I think that, One of the big challenges I find in investing is not to allow your personal view of things to cloud your ability to make decisions from an investment perspective, especially over, say, the medium term. Since I was a child in the early ’80s, right, when we had the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, people have been calling for, you know, an end to the debt cycle, right? Maybe because that’s really when the big debt cycle got going. And if you waited on your hands for the last— I don’t know, what has it been now, 40 years? I you think, know, you’ve suffered by sitting still and doing nothing. So it’s a challenge not to take all the big picture considerations into account when making investment decisions. But that said, I do think there are pockets of opportunity that have been created from what we’ve seen in the last few years. I think one of my favorite examples of the speculative excess is in SPACs, which are special purpose acquisition companies. They’ve been sort of a backwater in finance for quite a long time now. Nobody’s really talked about them until fairly recently. Over, say, the 5 years before 2020, you had about $5 billion a year on average in SPAC issuance. And then in 2021, 2022, over that 2-year period, you had $250 billion done. So call it 50 times the average over that previous 5 years. In sum, right, that $250 billion was more than all of the SPAC issuance that was ever done in all history of SPACs. And I would say the vast majority of these companies have absolutely no business being in the public markets. Most of them have little or no revenue. I would say that the vast, vast majority have ridiculous business models, business models that really you can’t hope to achieve any sense of sustainable profitability. Over any reasonable company lifetime. And then there’s frauds, outright frauds. So there is a huge pool of these companies, and typically it takes them about 3 to 4 years to burn off the capital that they’ve raised. So you’re about halfway through that process and that cycle, and I think it’s a ripe place for finding short ideas. So that’s one thing that sort of comes to mind from that speculative excess that’s actionable. I also think that the excesses have sort of a ringing effect in the sense that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater from time to time. And I’m not talking about just SPACs, but generally that sort of happens with speculative excess. It swings hot and it swings cold. Those are more bespoke opportunities, but they’re still available. And so there is value to be found, but it’s more kind of one-offs, baby getting thrown out with the bathwater type of situations.

Aoifinn Devitt: What is it that you think is creating these excesses over and over again is causing memories to be so short and letting— we see this with governance as well— the same mistakes to basically repeat every cycle? How do you think the excesses aren’t detected?

Ilya: Well, that’s a good question. I do think that it is human nature. A friend of mine likes to joke. He says, you know, we live and we learn, but we don’t. We live and we make the same mistakes over and over and over again. We’re prone to making the same mistakes. I think that’s human nature to a large degree. So I’m not sure that they can be wrung out of the system entirely. I do think that once we started off on a debt cycle, that to a large degree, the road was laid. It’s very difficult, I think, for a society to pull back on consumption, on debt. Those things typically end in either massive inflation, austerity, which is very difficult, and ultimately, probably some forms of civil unrest. I don’t know that that’s really preventable. I think it’s really the human experience. And we’re lucky to have lived in a time of general stability. And if we’re lucky, the period of general stability will last a lot longer than we expect. But I do think that those types of excesses, they’ve been laid, that road has been laid, and there’s not a lot of ways around it. Productivity would help. Great invention, right? Thoughtful spending of capital that drives return. I don’t just mean financial spending, but, you know, innovation and development. Those things will help. But ultimately, I think that the next, call it 30, 40 years, are unlikely to be as calm and peaceful financially as the past 30, 40. I just don’t see that.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, before we go to fourth turning in this conversation, let’s go back to the business and the experience you’ve had with clients and how their needs are changing, as well as the fundraising experience, obviously 15 years now on your own in some form. How has that experience on the fundraising side been? How do you find that the clients’ needs are evolving?

Ilya: So in a sense, I’m lucky that we’ve been in business since really the end of 2008, early 2009. And we’ve curated a client base that knows us fairly well, and what they expect from us is returns performance. And I think we’ve been pretty successful in delivering that. So I think that is first and foremost in our clients’ minds. I had in, in 14b is really a spin-out of, of my former firm, which is KG. KG, I had a business partner and he and I separated at the end of 2021. And so that was a splitting off, some of our clients left and we’ve been sort of rebuilding ever since. But I would say that for the new clients that we’re speaking to, you know, they have very different sort of issues. They, they certainly look to us and our performance as something that they’re interested in, but they also have particular issues that they’re dealing with. So for example, one of the big ones that I’m sure everybody’s heard about at this point is the overallocation to private equity. And so whether or not that works out okay or not, I’m not here to tell you. But what I would say is that, you know, the illiquidity in people’s books as it’s allocated to equity is a real issue for them. And so that’s something that they’re dealing with that really doesn’t have much to do with us specifically, but it’s difficult for them to reallocate to say public equity, which is what we are known for when they’re so deeply embedded with the privates. Also, I think that the fact that we now have an interest rate, know, you I think Jim Grant put it really well. He was like, well, finally I have an interest rate to observe, right? That changes the dynamic for a lot of investors and their allocations, right? You can make a reasonably good return now in credit and in fixed income. And so I think that that takes up a lot of people’s attention and rightly so. Some of the clients that we talked to over the years have expressed a broader interest in sort of an educational capacity, right? They want to get more information from their investment managers. We’re happy to do what we can in that degree, but it’s really not how we’re set up as a small firm Right? We have our hands full with investing and just making the returns, and we’re happy to explain to people what we’re doing and how we’re thinking. But a lot of them seem to have gone to the larger firms, which they use for educational purposes. So that, I think, is a big theme that we’re seeing.

Aoifinn Devitt: That’s really interesting. And then you’re speaking earlier about the immigrant experience and the feeling of an outsider. And one of the focuses of this podcast series is around the financial services industry, investment in particular. How inclusive it is and how it deals with outsiders and includes them and embraces them. What would you say, just your assessment of the industry, given how long you’ve been in it and you started out in law, which is not dissimilar, how would you assess the inclusivity, the diversity of the industry today?

Ilya: Well, it’s interesting. I would say as compared to the legal profession, the finance profession is terrible at inclusivity. I’ll just give you an example. So today, I think the majority, I think a slight majority, but a majority of graduates from law school are women. And so the legal industry has been, and this has been a consistent theme that’s basically emerged since the 1970s. And so the legal industry has taken that reality into account and it has changed its ways of operating in a way that accommodates women better. Because again, the majority of their professionals are either women or going to be women in the next decade or so. There are meaningful differences that I’ve noticed between the legal profession and the finance profession, even though we’re so closely linked. One obvious example is how the legal profession treats maternity leave, which I think is probably the biggest single matter as it affects women’s careers. I know My wife has experienced that directly where you go on maternity leave and you sort of take a step back and you’re viewed as a part-time professional or you’re viewed as having two jobs or something, something of this nature. Whereas with men, it’s not been the same. And it’s a big divide, I think, between the legal profession and the finance profession. And honestly, it’s ridiculous because all that the financial profession has done is limit its pool of talent. Whereas in the legal world, which is by no means a less demanding field than finance, it’s simply, I think, done a better job. So I actually think they’re quite different if you peel back the onion. And I don’t have easy fixes, but I would say that the notion of maternity leave, both for men and for women, paternity leave, we really don’t have a concept of paternity leave in the United States. We do have minor maternity leave, but I think it really needs to get better embedded in society if you want to take advantage of the broader workforce.

Aoifinn Devitt: So, no, it’s a good point and a good, I suppose, point of differentiation between some European work practices and the US. I suppose not every European country is Scandinavian in its approach. But there’s certainly quite a bit of difference, and I suppose a different level. And I think it probably takes a generation to change attitudes, but maybe the hybrid working COVID has done something, as well as some high-profile tech executives taking— and government officials taking paternity leave. So I suppose it’s about role modeling, which is again getting back to the purpose of this podcast, is role modeling, inspiring people with different approaches and backgrounds. So In that vein, I’d love to move to some reflections now. And we’ve spoken a bit about your background and upbringing. Looking back at your career so far, would you say there were any highs and lows in there that you can tell us about?

Ilya: Sure. Well, I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges I faced certainly recently is the sort of separation from my former firm and partner and rebuilding the new firm. It’s been both very challenging and also gratifying. I think that the best part about it, frankly, is being able to reconstruct an investment firm that I think works for the future. It does incorporate a lot more hybrid work that serves, frankly, everybody. And look, what do we do for a living as finance professionals? We meet people. We can do that effectively either on Zoom, or we can travel. Nothing prevents us from meeting face to face. But the vast majority of the meetings that we do these days are really over Zoom. And honestly, that’s not that much different than what we used to do by phone. But the ability to work from home, I think, is a major change because, I mean, let’s be frank, what do we do? We read and we push buttons for a living. We can do that in almost any location. And I think one of the big arguments that I used to hear was something along the lines of, well, if you’re not watching them, then how do you know they’re working? And my answer to that was, if you’re afraid that they’re not working when you’re not watching them, you really did hire the wrong person. That’s, if your job is to watch people work, I mean, that’s a pretty bad job, frankly. So that’s been both a challenge and frankly a really great opportunity. And it’s been quite rewarding because I think we’ve been pretty successful. We run a, at this point, a completely virtual work environment. And one of our partners, she had a baby within the last 12 months and she was able to work at her pace through that period. And I think frankly, we got much more out of her allowing her to work at her pace than requiring her to commute in, show face time, and work in some kind of framework that served everyone and no one at the same time. It sounds very communist to me.

Aoifinn Devitt: That’s the beauty of a small firm, I suppose. I mean, the beauty and the challenge of a small firm in that wide-scale maternity and paternity leave could not be maybe sustainable. In a small firm, but equally the flexibility, the tailoring of approaches to individual personalities, and ultimately, as you said, hiring the right people and getting it right from the beginning is something that you can ensure in a small firm.

Ilya: Yeah, and I also think it requires a certain level of seniority for it to work because for younger people, they need sort of a forum in which they to some degree need people to look over their shoulder to give them course corrections. Otherwise they spend a lot of time flailing, I would say, you know, working on things that they’re not sure if it’s productive or not because they’re really just sort of learning the ropes. So it’s, it’s much more effective, I think, with a more senior team. But your point is well taken. It’s, it’s also probably much, much more difficult in a larger environment.

Aoifinn Devitt: And then in a similar vein, thinking about setbacks and challenges that you experienced and lessons learned, I suppose, maybe more in the kind of the wisdom of the years now, what have you taken from some of those setbacks and The reason we include this section is because I think that we’re not all going to have the same setbacks. So it’s important to learn from others so we don’t have to step in the same puddle twice.

Ilya: Well, I think that the major life lesson I learned that applies to business and life equally, but certainly in business, is what really matters is the people you surround yourself with and who you’re working with. Your people are most certainly your greatest asset and potentially your greatest liability. So that choice as to who you work with is crucial, absolutely crucial. I have plenty of specific investment lessons, but when it comes to business in general, that lesson is, gosh, it’s like, you know, the 80% rule. You know, if you pick the right people to work with, you’re going to do fine. Now, what constitutes the right people? That, that, that’s a hard question. And different people for different roles, obviously. But at the end of the day, a level of trustworthiness, work ethic, that’s probably 80% of the way there. If you find a trustworthy, hardworking person, the rest kind of does take care of itself over time. I think that would be my biggest, frankly, life lesson in business.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, that’s actually gets to my next question, which is around any particular person that was a mentor or influence on you? And that could be in your personal or your professional.

Ilya: I try to learn something from everybody I work with. I really think that that is important. I do think that, you know, everybody has something to teach you, good or bad. I will tell you one person who always stands out to me was my grandmother, frankly. Her amazing ability to sort of not focus her attention on trying to figure out what it was that was driving another person. In other words, not to try to figure out what their intentions were, what their motives were, why they were doing what it was that they were doing, but rather shift your attention to surrounding yourself and working with people who you trusted, who you felt that were additive to you, and simply not to spend too much time dissecting problems. That was my grandmother. She taught me that. My former business partner was very good at seeing what I would call things as good enough. He had a great notion for that where, you know, the idea that the great or the perfect is the enemy of the good. So he had a great sense of that. My dad was a big influence on me in terms of the way I think. He used to always say, what do you know for sure? Or take things back to formula. So if you had a question about how something worked, dissect it back to what do I really know for sure here? Usually the problem is fairly simple. It’s just you don’t want to look at it. We tend to avoid looking at difficult problems and assuming around them. And so he was very good at just not doing that. And I think, you know, you find that a lot of the answers you’re looking for are right in front of you. You just don’t want to look there.

Aoifinn Devitt: I love that. I also am somebody who embraces complexity, and I think that taking it back to formula, and before this podcast is over, I want to see if you can remember how your father would’ve said that in Russian, because I do, I have spoken some Russian and I’d love to know what that expression is because.

Ilya: It’S a— Yeah, he would say it in English actually. He would say it in English with a very thick Russian accent. So it would come do out, what you think for sure?

Aoifinn Devitt: That’s wonderful. And I suppose that maybe that gets to the last question, which is usually around creed or motto or advice for your younger self or other words of wisdom you can leave us with. And I think each of those individuals has really endowed their own wisdom, but anything you can leave us with as the last thought?

Ilya: I’ll give you two of them, I guess, or maybe even three. How about three? So there’s a great quote from Henry David Thoreau, and I’ll summarize it. I won’t get the quote exactly right, but he said, ultimately, we only hit the targets we aim for. So aim high. And I think that that’s a great— certainly in investing and in life in general, great advice. I would say again, probably 80% of the mistakes you make in investing have to do with really just not setting your standards high enough. So I think that’s a really good one. I like the Japanese concept of kaizen, which, you know, it basically translates to roughly, you know, continuous improvement. I think that a lot of good work is done simply through continuing to improve. If I were to give my younger self, you know, a piece of advice, I would say stick with it. If you find something that you enjoy or it really holds your attention and you’re interested in, stick with it. Focus on continuously improving your task. The path to success isn’t usually straight or linear. There are usually many, many deviations, and the ability to constantly improve will get you there over time. That’s two good ones I think I try to live with. My fifth grade teacher actually gave me a really good piece of advice that I, I quote to people a lot, and this one I remember verbatim. She said to me, the world doesn’t care about all the adventures you have at sea, but whether or not you brought your ship to port. And I thought that one has stuck with me ever since I was 11. And I think that way too much time is wasted trying to explain the mistake that was made rather than spending that time trying to improve or fix it. You And, know, I think that that’s a hugely important concept. The world really doesn’t care.

Aoifinn Devitt: I love that. And I think I, I listen to a lot of podcasts about entrepreneurs who don’t look backwards, they look forwards. And I think that’s not the same as not learning from that mistake., but it’s about not dwelling on that mistake and I suppose not ruminating and letting it cloud them. So thank you so much, Ilya. This story looking backwards and forwards has been fascinating in terms of your own origins and how that shaped you. And equally, your perspective on finance is refreshingly modern, I’d say. So thank you for coming here and being one of the few to express it that way. Thank you for sharing your insights with us.

Ilya: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been absolutely my pleasure.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: Don’t resign yourself to what you think you know. I feel like a lot of people make an assumption or an assessment of a situation and then they move on. Don’t resign so quickly. Sit with it and sit with the discomfort. Sit with the tension. What’s that expression? Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. I’m really encouraging people to be courageous and have tough conversations. And I’m trying to do my best to have those as well. I feel like that’s where the light is.

Jeanie: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment and beyond by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Jeannie Coomber, who describes herself as Chief Warrior Igniter and she is founder and creator of the Warriors at Work platform. With a strong interest in coaching and leadership, she spent 15 years at Alliance Bernstein before founding her own firm, where she coaches a wide range of executives, speaks at conferences, and hosts a podcast. Welcome, Jeanne. Thanks for joining me today.

Aoifinn Devitt: Thank you so much for having me here, Aoifinn. I’m really looking forward to the conversation.

Jeanie: Well, of course, I didn’t mention that you were kind enough to invite me onto your podcast.

Aoifinn Devitt: Yes.

Jeanie: So now I’m reciprocating and looking forward to developing some of those themes further. So let’s start with your journey into a career in coaching, because that wasn’t where you started, but it was where you found your passion. Can you talk about that and whether there were any surprising turns along the way?

Aoifinn Devitt: So my journey into coaching is a bit unusual. So I started to develop an interest in coaching before it was really well known in the US. It was very well known in Canada and Europe. My mother was a psychotherapist, and so I remember sitting down, having a conversation with her to say, I always had this knack for managing and leading people. I’m really good at helping identify what are the skills and attributes that make you powerful in the world. But it just wasn’t lighting me up in the current role that I was in. And so I found my way into coaching just through a lot of research, talked to my mom, and she was like, what are you doing? Go back, get your master’s degree. She was a licensed clinical social worker, had a private psychotherapy practice. And I was like, Mom, I don’t want people looking over their shoulder around where they’ve come from. I want the forward thinking and forward progression conversations. And so that’s how I found my way in. I got certified when I was still working at AB. And the twist to the story is that when I got certified, I was pregnant. And at the time, that was all your certifications were virtual. There was no immersions, there was no in-person stuff. My mom died suddenly when my daughter was about 10 weeks old. And when you go through something like that, it changes your whole perspective in a lot of regards. And she and I were talking about creating a practice together. She’d be the psychotherapy arm, and I would have been the coaching arm. And obviously couldn’t do that because of the circumstances. But I knew this was something that I was still meant to do. And I felt like that loss accelerated my growth because I started to ask myself some very direct questions. What do I really want? What do I want to create in the world? And I had a great relationship with my boss, was very honest with him. I’m going to come back from maternity leave, but I am going to leave in this time period. And so he did a great amount of things to secure my situation. I actually did exactly what I said I was going to do. And mind you, at the time, my husband’s English, he had to reschool as a chiropractor in this country. So he had just completed chiropractic school. I didn’t have any business leaving a corporate job with all the securities and starting my own thing. In a field that was unheard of in the US. I mean, it— when I think about it now, I think I must have been out of my mind, the amount of risk that I took in a short space of time. But I was sort of guided by, I want to play a bigger game. I want to learn from this loss and contribute in a different way. And the corporate gig had run its course for me. I just wasn’t in that place where it was lighting me up. And this was such a natural fit for me. So off I went in 2005. I’m about to celebrate 20 years this coming February.

Jeanie: Well, what a milestone. Well, it reminds me of something I heard in a podcast actually just this weekend, which is that change only comes from a place of pain, whether that’s a pain of hardship and it’s the resilience that it forces. So that is very poignant that you shared that story about your mom. And I’m sure she would be proud to see her psychotherapy expertise living on because I’ve always seen your coaching as really fusing that together, certainly the small that you shared with me. So tell us a little bit then about, before we move into the type of coaching you do, just I suppose the, the sort of energy that you need to bring to coach. How do you find that that energy gets replenished? Because therapy can be seen as a draining sort of a pursuit. Coaching is different obviously, but it is also very much a giving, a lot of giving. How do you get from that?

Aoifinn Devitt: I love that question because it’s really hard to answer and it’s a daily practice. It’s something that I have to have a lot of into. Consciousness Is so the way that I characterize my purpose is I’m here to create space and I’m here to create pause and reflection. And that’s how I know I’m really having a powerful conversation. If I can create a pause where someone steps back and is like, hmm, didn’t think of it that way or didn’t consider that point of view. And so I have a lot of extroverted attributes, but by nature I’m much more introverted. So I have to manage my energy. I have to have quiet. I have daily rituals and practices that I do to stop a lot of the noise. I’m a very ambitious A-type in many, many ways, but I have to preserve my energy. And I use my practices as a way to not only tap into myself, but to ask bigger questions, help me guide myself through different conversations. And sometimes it’s really hard, and especially if it’s going through weird, wild business cycles like we’ve seen really since COVID it can be very, very difficult to not intertwine my energy with the energy that I’m seeing. And a lot of the situations that I’m a part of are really high stakes, a lot of stress. So I rely upon those daily practices that I go back to throughout my day to say, okay, what did I set as my intention for the day? How am I feeling right now? Even just having consciousness to that, I learned from a therapist friend, is just this notion of naming wherever you are normalizes it. And so interrupting whatever I’m feeling and just saying, wow, I’m feeling anxious, worried, I feel drained, just those little, little moments will do a reset for me. And then I have a lot of really cool meditation practices and things that I’ll do throughout the day. Huge believer in just breathwork. In between conversations, will just— just to reset. I also am very active. I’m a big exerciser. I’m one of the crazy pickleball people too now. I wish I could play like every day. I just don’t have the time. So I just do anything and everything that I feel called to do to reset. And sometimes it may mean I don’t talk to anybody at the end of the day. I take an hour or two and I just go sit quietly. My family all knows sometimes I’ll say, you know what, I’m finished with the day. There’s nothing more for me to say or do. I will see you all tomorrow. And that’s just how I do it.

Jeanie: I love it. Well, before we launch into coaching and how it’s evolved as a practice, I just want to spend a minute on your entrepreneur’s journey because you mentioned leaving corporate life to set up on your own and what a big risk that was. Can you talk a little bit about setting up your own firm, how you spread the word? And just your experience with that?

Aoifinn Devitt: So when I— as I mentioned, when I started my coaching business, it really was unheard of. So what I had decided to do is I interviewed a lot of coaches who were ahead of me, who had started some sort of business. So I learned a lot from them. How do I set up a business? Some of the basics. What are the networking organizations that I need? It’s institutionalized by corporate America where you go to certain industry functions. Doesn’t work like that in a coaching capacity. I also had to get really clear on like, what kind of coach do I want to be? Do I want to work with individuals? Do I want to work with companies? And again, it was still so uncharted that a lot of it I was making up as I went. And I relied on various mentors from my corporate life to guide me, remind me of my skills and attributes. And then I had a lot of friends in finance, and there’s no better friends than to have friends in finance where they teach you the basics on how you use QuickBooks, how you do you billing, know, what are some good networking practices when they’re doing business development. And I listened and learned. And I’ll tell you, the, the most crucial thing that I had to learn really quickly is the power of building network and network capacity. When you’re working in an organization, it’s fairly set up for you. You know who you’re going to interact with and a lot of industry people. But when you’re out on your own, you don’t know what companies you’re going to resonate with. You don’t who subscribes even to a coaching mentality. So I learned very, very quickly the importance of reciprocity, getting into dialogue. I ask a lot of questions. I’m very, very curious about people’s stories, their backgrounds. I spend the time always. It’s not something that I do occasionally. It is built into my practice. I’m talking to people weekly that I don’t know. I offer a lot. I’m a very, very generous person. I talk to people constantly in all different stages of life, some that are in transition. I have received tremendous generosity in my almost 20 years of being in business. And so I believe that to be really, really important in the network building. And so I don’t even really call it networking. I just have circles. I’ve created different circles of people and they’re who I go to as confidants and that I ask for help. But then they’ve also become my referral source. And so now, after being in practice for a long, long time, I don’t really have to do any marketing. It’s all reputation and I stay in contact. I’m also very good at keeping tabs on how they’re doing. Where have they grown to? What companies are they leading and a part of? And again, I just don’t lose the thread and I believe in the power of that reciprocity and service mentality. And I try to teach it and talk about it as often as possible because it’s not taught anywhere. And it is your lifeline as an entrepreneur. It is something you cannot stop. It’s not a one-off, it’s a constant practice.

Jeanie: I love that. Very powerful words and already some reflections built in there. We use the term coaching mentality and subscribing to a coaching mentality, and I suppose I’d be sort of surprised if there are places that do not, but I’m sure there are many places that do not because it is becoming more, so much more common to hear about. Every level of executives using the services of a coach. You work with a wide range of executives. What are some of the themes that are emerging today? What are some of the challenges that you hear a lot about, the coaching gaps that they’re asking you to fill? Love to hear what’s on their mind.

Aoifinn Devitt: It’s complicated because the world is so different in the last 4 years. And what I can say to you is the themes that I see— and there’s always going to be a political element. How do I navigate politics? How do I navigate power dynamics? Which is one of my favorite conversations because I’m really good at figuring out what’s the system you’re operating in, where are the influencers, where are the detractors, how do you navigate that? So that’s always going to be there. But what I’ve noticed is that’s much more amplified in organizations and the level of ego that now that is attached to that. But by the same token, because of that, what I’m noticing is this real interest and desire for more human-oriented conversations, real self-discovery, real self-exploration, a lot of considerations and things like— I talk very openly about the power of meditation and breathwork and spiritual, soulful in the same way I talk about intellect and all the various leadership competencies that you see. And I think that’s been the upside of this very difficult time period that we’ve just moved through. It’s given us permission to explore things in ourselves in different ways. And I also think it’s more important, going back to the circles piece, the level of expertise that I need to have around me now is very different than it was 4 or 5 years ago. I’m not as sophisticated with DEI as I could be, but I have lots of people who are always educating me and challenging my thinking, challenging my assumptions, the generation that I grew up with, what are the things I need to say, be sensitive to, where do I need to lean in and be more curious. And that’s one of the things that I’ve really had to notice about myself is, I have to hold back before I make an assumption or a judgment or make a recommendation. I need more perspective than I’ve ever needed before. And it’s really important. And I think that’s one of the other things that I’m really seeing that’s very healthy in organizations is they’re embracing more of that and being more conscious of what are the questions I need to be asking. Do I fully have the full understanding of the situation? The people involved, the interests of the people involved. So it’s a really interesting situation. And the types of calls that I get— I mean, I work with men and women, a variety of industries. And the things that I’m always trying to understand is like, are you ready to work with somebody that’s coming in from the outside who is not emotionally tied to what you’re doing but stands for your excellence? That’s what I see as my job is to help you to see maybe what you can’t see what you can’t sense, but I’m always standing for your best and highest. How do we get you to a place of excellence regardless of the circumstances that you find yourself in and maybe get you to ask bigger questions? So it’s a really interesting time.

Jeanie: It’s fascinating because another thing that I think comes up and is one of the later questions was around how our hybrid working situation has changed what people look for in a coach. And one of the things that I read an article I discussed in my Spanish lesson actually about ghosting. In the workplace, and this is ghosting around the job application process. Apparently this is due to Mexico. There’s been a huge rise in both candidates ghosting prospective employers and employers ghosting candidates, and people just not showing up for their first day or, or not responding, you know, to, you know, giving any feedback after an interview. And to me, that speaks of a much more serious issue, which is a breakdown of trust, trust and respect, because the more this goes on, and I think with hybrid working, less in-person contact, trust is a casualty. And when we’re seeking to build trust, so how do you encourage your executives, especially those who might be new to a company, to build trust in them?

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, there’s a lot of different ways to do that. And I think the, the number one way is when there is any in-person opportunity. And a lot of times what they’re doing is there’s like clustered meetings where they’ll get together for a couple of days. The quicker you can get to more revealing, vulnerable, open-hearted conversation, the quicker you’re going to be able to establish trust. This is Jeannie’s philosophy. It doesn’t mean that you can’t talk about business strategy and operations and all the things that are driving an organization, but your lead-in needs to be connection and people-oriented first. Production and operation— I think about all the buzzwords. We’ll play buzzword bingo like, here, you know, the strategic imperatives and all of are driving organizations, we’re leading with that more than we’re leading with people. And I think we need to reverse that. So even if it mentally we choose, let’s lean into more of the people orientation, what are some of the choices I would make that are different? What are some of the decisions that I would make that are different? And then follow up with the production, the execution, and all the results that are necessary. And I think a lot of people have that backwards. They say, you know, for the sake of all things, it’s all about revenue growth, or, or again, pick your, your buzzword. That you think is important based on industry. And I think those leaders that are really getting the people affiliation and importance right are having a lot more ease and flow. And they’re having powerful hybrid interactions. They have happy employees that are coming into the office for the 2 or 3 days a week, or they’re having, again, these clustered events. So when you’re getting on the virtual sessions, you’ve already established that rapport as a human being. And it’s amazing how much more production value you can get out of it just by recognizing we are human beings behind all of this and we all have lives and we all have feelings and emotions. And I think we need to be seen for that the same way we’re seen for our competencies and our ability to drive organizations.

Jeanie: But is there anything else you find you’re speaking to executives about more and more today?

Aoifinn Devitt: One of the things that I really do encourage, and this comes up quite a bit, is the importance of self-regulation and not enmeshing yourself in all the circumstances you find yourself in. It is not up to you to own or manage all of those situations. How do you come back to yourself and figure out what’s my role, what’s my part, what’s my domain? And just because I’m present or in a situation or interaction where there’s a lot of emotion. It’s usually bad behavior, and there’s, again, paradynamics. It doesn’t mean you have to play into that emotion. How do you come back to yourself and regulate your own response and reaction to what’s going on? So it’s something that I, I’m noticing I’m having to talk a lot about. It’s like, let’s go back here. Where are you right now? Where— okay, where are you? Come back to yourself. What are the questions you need to ask?

Jeanie: Really, really interesting. And I mentioned in the intro that you speak at a number of conferences and host a podcast. Just taking each of those in turn, what topics do you bring up at conferences that resonate particularly with your audience?

Aoifinn Devitt: The most common call that I get— it’s one of my favorite subjects, probably because I was monumentally terrible at it— is I love to talk about what I characterize as communicating with impact. I have an amazing mentor based in San Francisco who I partnered with probably 12 or 13 years years ago and did a lot of work with her inside of organizations around— at the time we characterized it as executive presence. And so I learned the basics of the model and the behaviors, and it’s a term that’s thrown around a lot in business. And so I’ve revised it, if you will, to have more of my particular take, which speaks to my job is to help understand when you’re at your best, when you’re most effective, when you’re most powerful, you know, when you come out of those meetings and you’re like, they need to pay me more money, I’m that good. My job is to help you find what that looks like using the Presence Model. But really what I’m doing is I’m attuning myself to you in a way so that I can help you understand when you do this, you’re getting greater results with less effort. When you do this, it’s noise. So how do we get rid of the noise and bring you up into a higher way of being? And so this subject is probably the most common call that I get to do anything in sort of conferences. Sometimes I’ll do workshops, sometimes I’ll do it more one-on-one with executives. It’s my favorite topic because it’s all about being human. And if you read any of the research around presence— Amy Cuddy’s probably got it, one of the best books I’ve ever read around it is around presence— is that she really promotes this notion of speaking in connection language. But she also always talks about the more we try to manufacture behaviors that are not real, which, again, we’ve all been guilty of this in a business way, the harder it is to maintain because it’s not real. So you really want to lean into your most natural state of being, not the one that is manufactured what you think appropriate. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to be aware of the cultural norms and the ways that operations or organizations operate. You do, but you don’t become something that you’re not. And so I’m very, very good at just focusing on how do I teach this in a larger group and have everybody walk away with a couple of things that they could apply right away. But I credit my mentor, Amy, for teaching me all of that. She was an amazing person. So that’s probably the most common one that I get.

Jeanie: I’ll go look up some of those sources. They sound fascinating. And then your podcast, Warriors at Work, because I mentioned that I was privileged to be a guest. What do you aim for there?

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, to answer that question, I got to take you back to 2020. Because I had another one of those crazy Jeannie, what are you doing again? So in February of 2020, I decided to rebrand. I decided to take the JeannieCoomber.com. I had a podcast kind of off to the side that it was a little hobby, and I said, no, I’m going to integrate the two. I really want to create a talk show for men and women in the workplace. That was my original intention. And to talk more about, like, spirituality the same way we talk about strategy. Let’s talk about intuition the same way we talk about intellect.. And so that was my big brainchild. And I was like, I’m going to combine the I’m coaching. Going to do this podcast thing. Hired a great branding company, and off I went. Launched it February of 2020. Okay. Not the best timing. And then nobody’s hiring an executive coach. All my travel got canceled. All my engagements got canceled. And I had a big heart-to-heart with my husband. My daughter at the time was a sophomore in high school. I was like, oh my gosh, we have to get ready for college. Our younger one’s still in grammar school. What are we going to do? And I said, I think I have an idea. I’m going to get into service to the business community. So I’m going to take this Warriors at Work idea and I’m going to go out on Facebook Live, which, by the way, I had no idea how to use or had any idea what I was doing. So it was me and a notebook, 5:00 every morning. I would just talk from the heart. What can I talk about? And the whole notion was, how do I serve up things that I’ve learned? And at the time, it was a 15-year-old practice. Of all the people that I’ve ever coached? How do I help people navigate the most insane environment we’ve ever seen? And I got back such return of love and followership, and it blew up, and it became like this thing where I realized I couldn’t do it every day. I had to create some sequencing. I also then figured out how do I stream in guests? And then while I was at it, I was like, well, if I’ve got you here live, let’s pre-record something too. So I have two bits of content. And I did it all the way up until, oh gosh, probably the late 2021 when people started going back to the office. And then I said, well, I have this great podcast, I’m just going to keep that going. So it’s a thing now, and that’ll be 5 years old February of next year. And so it’s, it’s something that I love, but it’s still the same concept is how do I bring ideas, thoughts, perspective out into the business community to help everybody live their best and fullest life, whether it’s inside or outside the office. And it’s no-holds-barred. I’ve talked to CEOs, I’ve talked to shamans. It’s all fair game. It’s all about what is going to help you navigate, grow from, or move through the next thing.

Jeanie: I love that. And it all comes from a start of giving, from a center of.

Aoifinn Devitt: Yes.

Jeanie: And, giving. Uh, and not knowing necessarily what the reciprocity or return will be, but having faith that there will be one. So I love that. And moving to the reflection section now, so I think you’ve told us a little bit about some setbacks and challenges. I think a lot of them have been built in there, some of them around timing. But can we look at some highs and lows maybe of your coaching journey so far?

Aoifinn Devitt: Mm-hmm. Highs. I did not get any— well, I got asked to do a private session. It was a Communicating with Impact session in New York. Just before COVID for the top 1% of the executives that were a part of this network. And I kicked and screamed. I didn’t want to do it. I thought, what? C-suite female leaders, they’re not going to need somebody like me. They all have media coaches. They don’t need Jeanie to come in. And the founder of this executive group is like, no, you need to do it. It’s going to be great. So I didn’t sleep the whole night before because I was in my head. Like, you know, I’m a human being. I’ve got insecurities like anybody else. And I was in my head going, this is a huge mistake. I’m going to flop. I called a colleague on the way. She got me out of my head and she was like, stop it. Just go in there, be you. So I threw my whole script out and it ended up being one of the most rewarding professional days I’ve ever had in my life because I was me. And I just started coaching women live. There were some women that were interviewing for really high-level positions in that week. And I had heads of people, I did CEOs. I mean, see, just fill in the blank. This entire room was so magnetic. And after the session, I had probably 25 people waiting to talk to me afterwards. It turned into tons and tons of opportunity, but it reminded me that I’m here to be me, not to be somebody else. And I have a lot of gifts and talents to offer the world. And it was so fulfilling. And then the feedback that I got from the founders of this organization really— I just never forgot it. Brought me to tears. It was so so fulfilling. I think a low point for me that was probably the most difficult to navigate was less on anything from a coaching or client situation, because sometimes those can be very, very challenging. But my husband had a wild medical issue back in March of 2022, completely out of left field, and it really leveled him for quite a few months. And so I became the primary income earner in our household. It was scary, but again, always went back to, I know my capabilities. I know my talents. I care deeply about what I’m doing. But what ended up coming from it is I developed a panic disorder. I had a lot of panic attacks and episodes. And so they lasted— they were daily, usually twice a day for about 6 months. So it was very difficult to hold this space for other people talking about these highly emotional things while me, myself, was having a very, very difficult time. And I pulled in all of my shamans, Reiki therapists, doctors. I work with a functional doctor. I pulled her— anything and everything to help me look at it and understand what it is, learn from it. And then I was able to frankly openly talk about it. And the more I talked about it, the more I realized so many people suffer from that. And it’s not 100% gone. I’ve just learned even more techniques of self-management. And I know when my energy’s off or when I’m depleted and things that I have to do to care for myself. And thank God my husband’s fine now, but it was a really, really difficult time period to be in this service, helping, transformational space when I was so— I was very half full for a good portion of that time period. But like every pain and loss in life, it was an extraordinary time of learning and growing.

Jeanie: Back to that theme again, and thank you for sharing that story so authentically, because I think that will be extremely helpful to others who either suffer in silence or don’t have the self-awareness to know something is very wrong and to recruit these massive circles of influence and support, which are there, but it’s about recruiting them and knowing you can get through. So my next question is normally around key people that have been mentors to you or have been supportive, and I think you’ve already mentioned some in the form of your mentor based on the West Coast. But is anyone in particular who was particularly formative in your life and career journey? And it’s not an exhaustive list. I always— No, no.

Aoifinn Devitt: Besides the people that I’ve said that were there to lift me up and remind me of my talents, I like to reflect on the most difficult colleagues and people that worked for me that were like the nightmare employees. Boy, did I learn a lot. And I think of them. There’s always a few that always pop up when I’m having a tough day. I’m like, I navigated that one, that one, that was— I didn’t show up great there. Because of course, you make mistakes in that situation too. But I have a lot of gratitude for the really difficult people that I’ve had to work with over the years and how they made me stronger, made me better, made me dig in, learn from my mistakes and how I would fumble things. So slightly different answer than probably what you expected, but I do think of them a lot.

Jeanie: Every cloud has a silver lining, I suppose. So that’s, that’s a very positive way to think about that. And besides the clearly very strong mission that is really embedded in all of your coaching work, are there any other causes that are important to you that you bring this energy, which is abundant, to in your life besides the work side?

Aoifinn Devitt: I became aware of two nonprofits in this last year that I have a lot of love for. One is called One Life to Love, and she’s addressing homeless issues for children in India, which is an epidemic, educating them, clothing them, feeding them, and setting them up for success in life. And then the other one is similar called Mercy Beyond Borders, and they help educate girls in South Sudan, Haiti. She’s had extraordinary results. She’s been doing it for about 12 years. I’ve had both of those founders on my platform because they are extraordinary people who chosen to do this work in life. So I remind myself of people like that when I think I’m having a difficult day or I’m not really sure the outcomes of things, and I find them to be very grounding and just reminds me again of my humanity and how much we have. So those are the two that I think about and give a lot of support to.

Jeanie: Any last word of wisdom or a creed or motto to leave us with? You have littered quite a few generously throughout this conversation. But anything either you wish you’d known as a younger person or that you sum up now?

Aoifinn Devitt: Don’t resign yourself to what you think you know. I feel like a lot of people make an assumption or an assessment of a situation and then they move on. Don’t resign so quickly. Sit with it and sit with the discomfort. Sit with the tension. What’s that expression? Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. I’m really encouraging people to be courageous and have tough conversations. And I’m, you know, I’m trying to do my best to have those as well. I feel like that’s where the light is.

Jeanie: I love that, sitting with the discomfort. I think we talked about comfort zones in our conversation, our own podcast, and I’ll try to take some of that on board as well. Well, Jeannie, this has been just as much a tour de force as I knew it would be. You are one of the true original warriors You may recruit others, but you eat your own cooking in that respect. Thank you for the work you’re doing in the coaching arena, for reminding us as to what we are capable of and what we need, and also what is around us and the resources around us that we can draw upon. I very much look forward to keeping in touch, and thank you for sharing your insights here.

Aoifinn Devitt: And thank you for putting out such an amazing podcast that provides space to have these types of conversations. It’s really important.

Jeanie: Well, the goal is to have some mini coaching sessions, and I feel we’ve delivered exactly as— so thank you. I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear from more inspiring professionals on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. And all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This series is kindly supported by GCM Grosvenor. GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset management firm with a longstanding commitment to supporting small, emerging, and diverse investment managers. For over 30 years, the firm has developed expertise in funding and guiding these managers as part of its broader activity across alternative investments. With over $20 billion in AUM dedicated to small and emerging managers and $16 billion in AUM dedicated to diverse managers, GCM Grosvenor leverages its experienced team, broad network, and proprietary sourcing capabilities to support their success. Through the Small, Emerging, and Diverse Manager Program, the firm creates opportunities for investors to access a wide range of talent while seeking to drive strong returns and impact. For more information, visit www.gcmgrosvenor.com.

Shan Chen: I would take more risk on a lot of things. And also be more open-minded to my colleagues’ ideas.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces podcast. A podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Shan Chen, who until recently was a portfolio manager focused on mostly private investments at the Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System, where he spent over 17 years. He previously worked primarily within information technology and did research work in biochemistry. He’s recently retired from the PSPRS and is focusing full-time on developing AI solutions for investment management. Welcome, Shan. Thanks for joining me today.

Shan Chen: Thank you.

Aoifinn Devitt: Let’s start with a little bit about your background. So clearly you didn’t start out in the investing or finance world. Can you talk to us about how you ended up in science initially and how your career took shape from there?

Shan Chen: Yeah, absolutely. So before I come to this country, I got my education in Beijing University, Beijing, China. I come here, as I mentioned, to study chemistry. Did research in biochemistry, actually also get a degree in computer science and be a developer for many years. And around 2004, seeking to broaden my horizon, I went to business school and get an MBA. So after graduate, I joined the PSPRS. That’s Arizona State Pension for Police, Firefighter, and Public Safety Personnel. So my career at PSPRX has spanned over 17 years, quite a long time. So during that time, I actually covered a variety of asset classes, including fixed income, credit, hedge fund, private equity, venture capital, and real assets. So this extensive exposure really gave me diverse and rewarding experience, allowed me to gain deep insight into different asset investment strategies and approach.

Aoifinn Devitt: Yes. And Mark Steed, of course, CIO at PSPRS, was also a guest on this podcast. And I think that kind of rotation has been one of his hallmarks, right, to ensure that the team does get broad exposure. Was that something that you enjoyed, the broad exposure of the rotation?

Shan Chen: Yes, for me, that’s, that’s a blast. So we’re doing that, I think, around year 2010, 2011, the beginning of 2011. So Mark was covering private equity, I was covering fixed income credit opportunity, then we switched. And we have a few other people, we just rotate every 5, 6 years.

Aoifinn Devitt: There’s a lot of a learning curve, but then of course, uh, the ability for cross-fertilization of ideas. And did you always work and live in Chicago, or did you ever work in Arizona? On-site?

Shan Chen: Well, I commute to Arizona for over probably 12 years before COVID And so basically my routine is go there Monday, come back Friday. I still couldn’t believe I did that for such a long time. So it’s very demanding, but this speaks how I love my job and also I love my family. So I have to, I have to do something to make that work.

Aoifinn Devitt: So I’m sure the tickets were a different price in the summer versus the winter, obviously, the Chicago, Chicago-Phoenix commute. And then in In terms of your career pivot, so having started your career in science and investment information technology, how do you think that informs your approach to investing?

Shan Chen: Yeah, so the transition from the IT to investing was a significant and a surprising turn in my career. So it’s really required me to leverage my technical background and will adapt to the nuance of the financial industry. While this unique combination of skills has proved invaluable, you know, especially as the technology and the data analytical became increasingly critical to investment management. So I would say my experience or my background as a science and doing the software development actually helps in a lot of different ways.

Aoifinn Devitt: I know that Mark has always had quite a scientific approach to investing, but he was probably an early adopter down there and you as a team around AI. But when did you first start getting interested in AI AI and using it to inform your investment process?

Shan Chen: Yeah, so markets always be innovative and forward-thinking, and one of the things our group adapted is there’s a program called Superforecasting. So it is the academia program in Northwestern University, and they try to forecast whatever the event, whether it’s the financial or political, And it’s more like calibrate the people who gave the forecast, how confident they are, what kind of information, what the process. So we adopt that approach to our investment decision. So Mark has asked the team to run a similar process, similar exercise for probably 3 years. And we use what they call Breyer score, to keep tracking people’s accuracy, how good they’re making the prediction of certain things, for example, stock price, certain economic like CPI, those kind of measures. So for me, more particularly, this is, this is really nice because I’ve been trained to be quantitative. But later on, we start looking at the AI that was like a few years ago, we have the AI available. And that’s quite interesting. I became interested in using AI partially because English is not my native language. I really use that to improve my writing, my email. So my email can be correct the grammar mistake, make the phrase better. So it’s proved to be an excellent tool for me to communicate with other people. So that’s sparked my curiosity. So now, because my developer background, I use Python, the language, a lot of doing my work because we’re dealing with a lot of Excel. So to use Python to work on Excel just makes the job much easier. Meanwhile, the Python have communicated directly to the OpenAI, what they call API. So instead of just using the web interface, I can write a simple program to interact directly to the ChatGPT engine. So I spent quite a lot of time on YouTube also learning things. So there’s so many free information. People gave their recipe how to do these things. They give you the code so you can basically copy their codes, tweak it a little bit, see how it works. So that’s how I got started.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, it’s really— we definitely will dig in a little bit as to, okay, beyond it helping with the writing and clearly that that’s a massive enabling effect, how you would use it in asset allocation. But before that, just wanna go back to the prediction exercise that Mark was discussing. What did you learn from that? Did you learn that first of all in terms of how accurate predictions are, but did you find that people when they got the feedback were able to become, to narrow down and become more accurate with their predictions? Did any patterns emerge from those exercises?

Shan Chen: So the whole purpose is not make the prediction more accurate. It’s more like how you calibrate a prediction. For example, you think about employment numbers coming out. So before that, you can make a prediction. You think it’s going to be like, say, below the average, and you’re supposed to attach your confidence level. That’s the trick. You can give a prediction, then then you have to say I’m like 60% confident or 80% confident. If it’s 50% confident, that’s basically a coin toss. That doesn’t give you any information, right? But if you say I’m 60% confident, that means you think that’s going to happen, but it’s not that— you’re not that convinced. But if you’re 80%, 90%, that’s huge. That means you probably know something other people don’t know, or you’ve been doing that a long time, you’re, you’re expert in this area. Let’s tell us something. So by combining the outcome and your confidence level, that was the Breyer score tells you, and we track that. So what do we learn of this process? In the very beginning, our confidence level is really high. It’s like whatever the stock price, economic number, we have 80, 90. When you are right, you got really good score, but when you’re wrong, you got punished because your score is— and that’s not asymmetrical. So you get punished more in your score. And we, as a team, we keep this score for everyone. It’s like competition. Let’s think about Olympic. So in the end, people say, okay, so the best way to improve my score is actually you have to really think about the confidence level. So one of the things I say, investment professional, one of the shortcomings is overconfidence. How to fix that overconfidence problem when you make the investment decision, that exercise really helps. And then the detail is to actually increase your confidence level, you just have to do a lot of hard work and do the study, have the baseline, those kind of lot of techniques how you can make your confidence level and prediction better.

Aoifinn Devitt: And obviously that’s all what we’re seeking to do is, you know, become better at predicting, so therefore we can develop an edge in the investment world. And now that you’re focused on this full-time, it seems, the research developing AI solutions, where do you think AI is going to really impact, say, the allocators’ role? And will it be around prediction? Around things like which asset class to invest in or well, what the— how it’s likely to behave. How do you see it really? I’m just thinking from an allocator standpoint first.

Shan Chen: Yeah, so from allocator point of view, so we have to think about our process. So we get a lot of information as an allocator. I mentioned earlier, when we start today, you know, while I was working, you got hundreds of emails in the morning. Those are the information. And with that, they give you the PDF, the pitchbook. Some, some of them give you the Excel because while you’re in the due diligence phase, they dump you a lot of information. Just think about a data room. So you open any data room, just think about how many files. And the average data room, you’ve got anywhere from 20 megabytes to 100 megabytes of information. And that’s just one fund you need to make an investment. It’s not realistic for a human to review all the documents. Let’s say there’s 50 files and these things are really across a lot of areas like investment strategy, operation, track record, legal. How do you process that information? So one of the things in the early topic we talked about prediction is what would make this focus or decision, we don’t have all the information, right? You only have partial information. You make a sort of informed decision, but you never have 100% of the information. You’ve got probably like 50% and processed or digested. AI can really help. So one of the technology used for that particular purpose is the RAG, Retrievable Augmented Generation. And one of the things what AI good at is you heard about the concept of the context window, like a million token or 100,000 token. That means how much information you can give to the language model and they can process it. So one token is about one word. So you think about one fund, how much worth is there, how much you can give them. There’s a limitation, first of all. So you cannot dump the whole data room to a large language model. Second of all, you probably don’t want to do that because of security reasons. I mean, those are confidential information. That’s to actually doing that, you have to— there’s some risk. So you cannot just uploaded to the internet. You can run your large language model locally, but that’s some technical things you have to figure out. So the RAG, Retrievable Argument Generation, what they do is they take all this information, they chop that to small pieces. Then you ask a certain question. The process will take your question, goes to digest the information. Let’s think about the database. Only retrieval the information related to your question. Then they send that small chunk to the large language model, and they can really write the answer to give you a good, very well-written answer to your particular questions. And you do that many, many times. Think about your DDQs, due diligence questionnaires. You probably have hundreds of that. Different questions. You can do that 100 times. You run that in your background, and that can be very efficient. So with a few hours, you can basically generate the basic understanding of the strategy of the fund. So that’s, I think that’s what they can really help for the investment decision. So here, there you got your information, right? That’s one step.

Aoifinn Devitt: Two main areas that I’m seeing is, uh, certainly RFPs, manager selection comparison, also then the due diligence component. So once you’ve made your selection, getting in there, really shortening. And in a way, it’s probably consultants who need to watch out most because this is often a consultant function as much as an allocator function. There’s clearly that there. And then, is that your focus today, is on the allocator side of things, or are you also looking at how managers themselves say an active equity manager, fixed income manager is using AI in their processes?

Shan Chen: They are, they are. I actually look at a lot of these latest things, especially have been more established. If you— this is resources are constrained, so the larger managers are put a lot of effort behind that. So I just recently noticed the paper put by Man Group. Man is a hedge fund. So they’re trading public equity. So what they found out is they try to harvesting the private information from the private companies to guide their public company trading. And they use AI to doing that because you have to process a large amount of information. So, but again, you talk about group is historically be fund-oriented, have a lot of resources. And talk about private equity, I think Blackstone is making some model internally, and probably all these large ones, they’re all doing that. Smaller ones, I think, is probably disadvantaged. If you have like $500 million, maybe a billion fund, How you justify to have a team to doing these things, but, but their approach is also different. There’ll be more focus on certain industry. For example, if I’m a PE focused on the consumer discretionary, that’s a totally different approach. You have to build a different sort of workflow to harvest that information. So that’s just from the information gathering analysis. Then you have to You know, the decision-making, that’s a different area.

Aoifinn Devitt: Interesting. So then just taking, say, an allocator like a smaller family office, maybe a smaller pension fund, if they’re— I would imagine the OCIO maybe can take advantage of this with scale. But if you’re dealing with a non-OCIO model, are you developing a solution for allocators? What do you— now that you’re at the research stage of your own, where do you think, without letting the genie out of the bottle too much, you would see a niche?

Shan Chen: Yeah, so I’m still debating, should I develop something as a product or just like doing consulting as service, just show people the capability. So these things are technically, if you put some time and I keep mentioning the YouTube video, you could do that yourself. You, you spend a few, maybe like 40 hours to learn a programming language. Presumably Python, and you spend $20 on OpenAI, you just buy the account, and you can play around with that and see how is the technology, see if you’re comfortable with that. One of the issues is, are the people really comfortable to get this information out there? And if you’re not, you have to find a way to run the model in your own computer. That can be done. So for people to use that, I think there’s still many, many years away to make that like real, be integrated to your sort of the day-to-day workflow or process. That’s going to take time. So I don’t know exactly where, where’s the, how to do it. It’s not like I have a product and say, okay, this is a product. You can use that. Maybe somebody have that, but That’s, that’s what I’m kind of worried about.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, it’s interesting because I know as a public, previous public fund employee, you would’ve been aware of the emerging manager you problem, know, the manager, emerging manager focus. And from what I’m hearing here, scale matters, size matters when it comes to embracing and putting the time and resources into AI. So do you think when you think about the investment management industry and its evolution, you know, we have the, the Mag 7 on the stock market, we have clearly a, a consolidation into the very large names. We have on the barriers to entry in the investment management industry leading to more consolidation in the large names. Will this be a barrier to alpha as well as a barrier to entry that the small funds won’t have a chance to get on this train that is going to be the key to excess return?

Shan Chen: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I never thought about that. I would think that’s going to be an opportunity. Because the bigger funds, you think about the KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, World, they’re huge. They can put a lot of resources behind that. Now, what is against them? What’s their disadvantage? Because they’re already very successful, so the new things are going to be disruptive to their own model. So their business is successful for a reason. They follow a certain model. You put these new things in, you run the risk. So smaller funds do not have that issue. Whatever the tool they can get to make them more competitive, they just should do it. The only problem is they need funded people. They need have the conviction to do that. I think the resources is actually not that— it shouldn’t be an issue because technology-wise it is very cheap to do that. Think about all these like virtual private net, not virtual private server, all this cloud, those are infra— technical infrastructure is available. You you can, can access that, take advantage of that with not a lot of capital. You’re not thinking about like buying the box. You you can, can go to the cloud, subscribe that some of the things is even for free if you just want to try it. The problem is, I think you need to find the people have kind of the full stack technical capability a little bit and also understand the industry. Then you try different things, see what work. And that’s, that’s going to be interesting. So that’s kind of reminded me like the year 2000. At that time I was in the IT industry. There’s a lot of different opportunity. You just never know. You have to, you just have to get into that, work some projects, see how it works.

Aoifinn Devitt: And talk to us about machine learning because we’ve spoken a little bit about AI. What impact do you think machine learning can have on the investment process?

Shan Chen: So one of the things what Mark had been pushed, and just recently I completely get that, is the machine learning. So the machine learning and the AI things is not exactly the same. AI is like a black box. You ask some question or you give some information, ask them to comment on that. They give you a great answer. However, you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s just It’s amazing, but it’s a black box or magic, whatever you call it. Machine learning is not. Machine learning, you can explain what’s going on very clearly. It’s not easy. It’s mathematics, but you can explain what’s going on. So machine learning actually can really help the investment decision. A simple thing will be like decision tree. One of the examples or one of the projects we did before I left is we make manager selections. How you make these manager selections more active? Take buyout, for example. We basically, every vintage year, we say this manager ABC’s first quartile XYZ is third quartile, we gave these. This is known, there’s a database. And these managers, you have certain information. For example, the fund size, the team size, and the previous— if it’s the same fund series, same firm, you have the previous history. You can have this information run the decision tree, and our preliminary result is actually increase the prediction accuracy probably by 20 to 30%. ‘Cause think about before, your prediction is you have 4 quartiles, right? First quartile, second quartile, third quartile. That’s how industry score, gave the score to the funds. So you got 25% of chance if you just do that randomly. If you make a very simple decision tree, take some input, for example, the previous fund’s performance, you can increase the prediction to like 33%. I mean, this hasn’t been really tested for the upcoming farm, but at least from the historical data, it seems to help a little bit. So you can use some of these technologies to help your decision-making. That’s, that’s another piece. So there’s actually quite a lot.

Aoifinn Devitt: Machine learning. And then of course the AI itself.

Shan Chen: Yeah. Yeah. The AI getting information, machine learning, help make a better decision. 2 snaps.

Aoifinn Devitt: Just before we finish on the investment management industry, so you’ve been in the industry now over 20 years, with one entity 17. What would you say in terms of— we do focus a little bit on diversity and inclusion in this podcast, in terms of, you know, I spoke about emerging managers, any comments on the industry and its diversity, any thoughts as you were navigating your way through it?

Shan Chen: Yes, yes, I love that topic. And if you ask Mark and my team, I actually have a presentation on that internally. Just talk about that things. I mean, it’s a trend and it’s a reality right now. You see more and more diverse people entered into the investment decision or in investment industry. Like, I’m an example. Given my background, I’m not have the typical track record or the career progress as in the investment industry, right? So that shift makes a lot of sense because people from different backgrounds, so they bring different perspectives and also opportunities. For example, because of my background, I’m really interested in how the AI, the machine learning, going to impact this industry. So I will use a simple analog. That would be a group of people decided where to go for lunch. I think it’s about lunchtime. Well, for you, it’s late days. This is probably different. So go to lunch.. And there is more diversified group, it’s likely consider wide range and ultimately discovered really a great restaurant. So that’s how I look at diversity. You just use those analogs. Of course, there’s other things you have to think about the cost of diversity, because you have people potentially have different, a lot of different background, how they communicate each other, right? That can be things to those details. You need to work out those details to really take advantage of the diversified team.

Aoifinn Devitt: I love that analogy, and at any time of day we can discuss restaurant choices. Always, always fine by me. So looking back at your time at Arizona PSPRS, what were some of the highs and lows there? And also, how did the investment approach evolve? Because you did cycle through the different asset classes. Any takeaways regarding the relative attractiveness?

Shan Chen: Definitely the highs and lows during my time, but reflect on them, I see them all as a valuable experience, even the lows. So the investment approach has evolved tremendously since 2007. So we started like 60/40 public-private, and over the time we add hedge fund, private equity, real estate, and real asset. So today it’s just like $20 billion. There’s also doing the co-investment, separate management account. So, and my focus has always been private equity, seeing even I take over responsibility on different asset class during this time, occasionally when we need more coverage. So really, I think the challenges would be you always have to learn new things. I wouldn’t call that low. It just sometimes you’ll feel It’s overwhelming, but in the end, you’ll find it’s really rewarding.

Aoifinn Devitt: I love that, and it really echoes what we’re hearing about sport now and young people and how specializing too early is a real downside, that actually some of the best sports people are the ones who played every sport as a child and did not specialize too early because there’s always, whether it be strength benefits or coordination, that can come from one angle to another. And I I really, also think sometimes in an organization, there can be challenges with ambitious people who want to grow and learn. And if you keep them in one specialist role, there may be a ceiling there. But if there is that rotation aspect, there can be sort of no ceiling and unbounded opportunity. So really interesting. Looking back at your career, were there any setbacks? You mentioned some of the lows of having to learn. Any investment mistakes that you learned lessons from?

Shan Chen: You’re bound to make mistakes. Think about investment is we’re taking risk and it’s quite common your investment not perform as you expected. And I wouldn’t consider that a mistake. But so what I think about a mistake is there’s something you think you could do differently. Like for me, it’s like the risk-taking. I would take more risk on a lot of things and also be more open-minded to my colleagues’ ideas. So those are the two things. For— I’ll give you a clear example. One, you mentioned Mark wants to do the quantitative things. I’m totally for it. And early days, he’s talking about like decision tree, this type of stuff. I kind of didn’t really take that seriously until I decided I want to retire. So if I taking that seriously and really communicate with you colleagues, sometimes you just, there’s so much good ideas if you just open to communicate with, really be humble, and you can make things make things better or just more productive. Yeah.

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, no, I love that. Take more risk. That is definitely good advice. And just as we’re in the advice section, and before we get to the last question though, I’d like to ask about key people. Was there anyone in your career or personal life that had a real impression on you and was formative?

Shan Chen: Yeah, there’s a lot of people, all the people I’ve been working with, I’m really impressed. I want to spend more time with them. And let’s start with the early one, our CIO, because you’re working on the investment team, the CIO is most probably the most important one. And for me, I got like 3 incredible CIOs. The last one is Mark. That’s the longest time I’ve been working with. A lot of ideas and also the style. The style is really amazing. I would argue working on investment and making investment decision is a high-pressure job. And you’re dealing with a lot of the stakeholders. You’ve got to be very, very cool. Not that emotional. And so I learned so much from Mark. You’ve handled all the situations. Don’t get too, like, knee-jerk reaction is definitely a no-no. So that’s why to have a good sale is so hard. That’s kind of really unique combination of talent. Then the first sale we have, one of the things I learned, and he’s keeping telling us, just humility. You just be humble. It took me a while to really to understand that. You know, be nice to people, be open to ideas. That’s the industry really needed. You need teamwork. And we’re dealing with a lot of really smart, successful, good people in the industry because our job is talking to managers. And basically those people are all incredible people. You learn so much and you do that day in, day out. I see the difference after I working there probably 5 years. I feel the difference after 10 years. I realized We’re in a really good position. I’m talking about a public pension, right? Then just take advantage of that.

Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely. And any last question, any words of wisdom? You’ve already littered this conversation with quite a few around teamwork, around risk-taking. Any creed or motto that you live by or advice maybe for your younger self?

Shan Chen: Again, to my younger self, be open-minded. Seeking feedback, asking people what they think I should do better. And just, you have to build the trust. People are so polite, they won’t tell you anything if they think that’s going to offend you. So be nice to people. And I will also be better organized because before I left, I look at all these emails I which have, is just not very good organized. Again, that’s tied to the information. We’re in the information business. And part of how to make a good decision is how you organize the information. So yeah, those are my advice.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much, Shen. This has been a great conversation. You’ve always been, as we were colleagues in the public fund arena, you were always one of the most helpful and approachable fellow allocators, just like Mark as well, in terms of being generous about sharing ideas, lifting the hood a little bit on the massive innovation going on down there and really being a shining light in the world of public funds. So thank you so much for coming here, for letting us in a little bit on your next chapter, and for advising us of the possibilities that lie ahead. Very much good luck with that, and thank you for sharing your insights with us.

Shan Chen: Yeah, it’s really nice talking to you. Thank you.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn and David. Thank you for listening to the 50 Phases Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors on their personal journeys, Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This series is kindly supported by GCM Grosvenor. GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset management firm with a longstanding commitment to supporting small, emerging, and diverse investment managers. For over 30 years, the firm has developed expertise in funding and guiding these managers as part of its broader activity across alternative investments. With over $20 billion in AUM dedicated to small and emerging managers and $16 billion in AUM dedicated to diverse managers, GCM Grosvenor leverages its experienced team, broad network, and proprietary sourcing capabilities to support their success. Through the Small, Emerging, and Diverse Manager Program, the firm creates opportunities for investors to access a wide range of talent while seeking to drive strong returns and impact. For more information, visit www.gcmgrosvenor.com.

Wendy: Give first. It’s a big part of how I have built meaningful non-transactional relationships. What that means is be helpful within reason without the expectation of something in return, and that will serve you well throughout your career.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I know today about Wendy Lee, who is co-founder and chief investment officer of Ivy Invest, which is focused on creating more wealth for the average American. She started her career as an investment analyst at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and worked in a series of endowment and foundation roles before joining Ivy Invest. Welcome, Wendy. Thanks for joining me today.

Wendy: Thank you, Aoifinn, for having me today. It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you, and I love the work you’re doing here at 50 Faces.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much. I’m looking forward to hearing about your career journey. So let’s start with talking about how your career started, and did it— your journey take any surprising turns along the way?

Wendy: Yeah, so I grew up in a small city in Pennsylvania. It’s where my family wound up after immigrating to the US. My dad came to the US to pursue his doctorate, and growing up, I had a very typical, you know, immigrant experience. My mom, who had been in accounting and was in management after she immigrated, her degree and her experience didn’t translate. She came to the US and had to learn the language and to start all over. My dad was a full-time grad student with a comically minimal stipend, and my mom waitressed and took on other hourly work. And that’s, that’s really what our family lived off of. So growing up, I went to our neighborhood public school and I had in my mind the same ambitions that I think a lot of immigrant children would relate to. The professional career paths that I knew about were lawyer or doctor or like my dad, engineer. And after finishing his PhD, my dad did go into industry and our family circumstances certainly changed eventually. But by this time, I was toward the end of middle school, entering high school. And my public high school was wonderful in many ways. My closest friends are still my childhood friends. But it was— how should I put this— not a Westchester or Connecticut-type public high school where families move into the zone to send their kids. So lucky for me, I was a strong student, a naturally good test taker, and I went to Columbia. And Columbia was a shock to the system for me. I was surrounded by students that were as ambitious as I was, but far more sophisticated than I was at that time. My college friends are the ones who introduced me to this industry called finance, which, by the way, pays really well. So it was, it was easy to get drawn in at Columbia, and all the usual suspects recruited there. This was pre-GFC, so really the heyday. Anyway, I’ve probably made two surprising choices along the way in my career. The first was actually right out of college. Instead of the usual finance or consulting job, which is where I was heading, I chose to join something called an endowment investment office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I got a lot of confused looks from friends at the time, and this was 2005, 2006, when professional internally run endowment and foundation investment offices were less common. And I candidly didn’t really even know what I was getting myself into, but I chose the role at the Met Museum because it sounded different and interesting. And that proved to be the case. It led me down this wonderful career path of being an institutional allocator. And so the second surprising turn happened really last year when I left that compelling allocator role at the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. I took a sharp left turn and I started Ivy Invest, which is a fintech asset management firm. So that story is still being written.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, we’re definitely going to dive into that, and I’d love to just get back. That is fascinating. First of all, thinking about your experience in Colombia, I swear there was a lot of adaptation you had to do, and there’s the typical, I suppose, this inclusion factor, which is important when you do come from a different background. And then moving to be an allocator, Metropolitan Museum of Art sounds like it could have some other attractive aspects. Did you get to brush shoulders with the art world, or were there any other aspects besides their allocation? And maybe can you just give a few facts around the size of that endowment and its kind of positioning?

Wendy: So the endowment when I joined was about $3 billion. They were already very broadly allocated across alternatives. The Met Museum, when I joined, already had an established, long-running, high-performing investment program, one that was just consistently top quartile, if not top decile performance over multiple time periods. And then in terms of the other benefits that you might have alluded to, certainly I was not a particularly— I didn’t have strong expertise in art. For me, it was more of a nice to be in that environment. I will say this: when I was at the Met Museum, the museum was closed to visitors on Mondays, so we did have the museum all to ourselves, and that was really just an extraordinary experience to be able to walk through the halls when it was closed to everybody else and really just enjoy the artwork quietly. That obviously a little bit of a deviation from the other aspects of the role, which were unusual really starting out at institutional allocator role. And there’s definitely aspects of that piece of it outside of the art that was interesting.

Aoifinn Devitt: And just before moving on to discuss Ivy Investee, starting your career as an allocator, as you said, it was an unusual route. It wasn’t something that, you know, was traditional, but how would you recommend that as a learning ground for other graduates who have this potential, because there often are quite interesting entry-level roles there.

Wendy: Yes, it is. It’s definitely unusual. And actually, I’m not sure that too many investment offices really hire right out of school. And I think part of it speaks to sort of the experience that I had, which is I was the first analyst at the Met Museum when I joined. There wasn’t a formalized training program or group of peers, and I think there’s a lot of value to both of those things. I needed to figure a lot of things out on my own. I had to sit in front of spreadsheets and models and just figure it out. And I did. The trade-off was that I was exposed to some incredible investment managers across hedge funds, private equity, natural resources, and so on, right out of the gates. A really steep learning curve. But I did become grounded in this particular way of thinking about portfolio construction, manager evaluation, decision-making processes, risk management. And so it is, as you know, this is an apprenticeship business, so it matters who you train with. Lauren Mazur, she is the museum’s current CIO. She actually hired me back then, and she’s an excellent, very astute investor. Lauren trained at the Yale Investment Office, and I trained with Lauren, and I learned so much from the way that she and Suzanne Brunner, the CIO during my time there, I learned so much from how they navigated the museum’s portfolio through the global financial crisis. The decisions they made, the ones they didn’t make. Those are lessons that really have stuck with me. But back to your question, while there are all these aspects of starting out at an institutional allocator office that are really extraordinarily interesting, I don’t know that starting as an allocator is really for everyone. It is, just speaking from my own experience, it can be a really highly unstructured environment. But that said, if you can do well with that and you have the good fortune to train at a great investment office. To your point, there’s really nothing like it.

Aoifinn Devitt: So can you talk a little bit about your experience of founding your own firm? How has that gone so far?

Wendy: It has been the most challenging and the most rewarding experience. I think the cliché that you often hear is spot on. The highs are high and the lows can be low. One of the hardest things about building a thing that doesn’t currently exist is that there isn’t a blueprint. You make a lot of decisions with partial information. And I think anyone that has been an entrepreneur can relate to the challenges of making decisions in what can feel like a vacuum, for lack of a better term. That is until you actually put your product in front of people, and that’s when the real feedback loop begins. So my co-founders and I, we felt this immense urgency to start the feedback loop, to get that going, to get out of the vacuum. And fortunately, that’s, that’s where we are now. We are putting our product and our company in front of people, which feels very vulnerable, but it also feels very real. Our work is tangible, and that’s very exciting. The other thing I’ll say is that I can’t imagine building IB Invest with better co-founders. I feel super fortunate. There’s a bit of conventional wisdom around what qualities make for successful founders. And I now viscerally understand why, and I have to agree. My co-founders, Matt Palkar and Arash Khodose, they embody a lot of those qualities. Matt and Arash, they are focused, they’re optimistic, they are relentless problem solvers, and together we just keep moving the ball forward. We laugh a lot. We really do enjoy working with each other. So a lot of ups and downs, but Fortunately, mostly a lot to be grateful for. And one more thing I’ll say, one of the unexpected upsides has been I’ve had friends in our business who are or have been entrepreneurs or who have entrepreneurs in their family. And I wouldn’t have known about that otherwise, but now they share those experiences with me and it’s been this whole new way to relate to people, which is fantastic.

Aoifinn Devitt: I love that. I didn’t think of that actually as opening up a new channel of communication when you add that to your bank of experiences. But of course, it takes one to know one. And I think you have to have lived it to understand the kind of stomach-churning nature of the beginning, and probably more than the beginning of being an entrepreneur. Well, let’s dig into the focus because, you know, fintech is your focus. You have an app. Tell us what exactly Ivy Invest, what problem it’s designed to solve.

Wendy: Yeah, our focus at Ivy Invest is to give every individual investor the type of portfolio that billion-dollar institutions and family offices use for their wealth. At our core, our message is ultra-wealthy institutions manage their long-term investments differently, way differently from the average investor. Let’s take that knowledge, that investment approach, that access, and distill it down to one decision point. Do you want that for your long-term wealth? And if you do, here it is. Ivy Invest provides it in the form of a single product that is easy to use, easy to access with no accreditation requirement and $1,000 investment minimum, right? We provide one product and we provide it through a modern fintech web and app-based experience. Now, in terms of the problem that we’re solving, it’s a pretty well-known problem. We’re looking to level the playing field between your average consumer investor and large-scale wealthy institutions and family offices. There are certainly other platforms that have preceded Ivy Invest, and these platforms almost exclusively focus on access, which is great. I’m a fan of creating access points, but we think that leveling the playing field requires more than simply providing access. For your typical individual investor, what do you do with that access? How do you make sense of being offered a private loan or a real estate investment? And forget for a moment, just forget for a moment about the negative selection bias piece of it, which is definitely an issue. And just think about the burden that’s putting on someone to make decisions that we as professional institutional investors don’t make. I’m not out here trying to cherry-pick individual loans or commercial buildings to underwrite. It’s wild when you think about it. So we provide access, but we also take on accountability. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that for our average customers, I’m in a much better position to build a sophisticated portfolio than they are. That added layer improves the experience for our end customer. And so as I said before, our customer just experiences a single finished product. Now, someone might say for themselves they’re not interested, and that’s okay. We’re providing one option, one solution to the problem. Where I do take umbrage though, is that There is a subset of professional investors that feels really strongly that individuals don’t need or shouldn’t even have access to alternative investments or more sophisticated portfolios. And my reaction is sort of, are we really in this day and age still having this debate? The argument is that retail investors are fine with the existing options. They say, yes, the retail options are lesser, but they’re fine. And that strikes me as fundamentally insincere. If the existing public market options are good enough for individuals, then they should be good enough for institutions. But we know that wealthy institutions and family offices have long since moved on from stock bond portfolios, and they’ve reaped the benefits of their more sophisticated portfolios, and they’re not going back.

Aoifinn Devitt: Really interesting. And I’d just like to take that, so, because I agree with you completely around the need to add value, providing access. The sophisticated experience you’re bringing in terms of asset allocation, and about why should this be an exclusive club? It provides essential diversification, essential access to talent and skill that is not available elsewhere. And I think it is an essential way to mute volatility. Well, in terms of though, some might say that there is the evolution of the investment management industry to be not just a product industry, but a service industry, and that many of these relationships are really sealed with the service provided by, say, an asset manager. And the fintech piece is fascinating because I think we all thought we’d be disintermediated in private wealth by robo-advisors that fintech would govern. How do you find your clients embrace the app, say the fintech component, but also need the service from you?

Wendy: I do think there’s different types of investors, and I do think there is a subset of investors that is well served by high-touch, high-service wealth advisors. I do think that there are folks who either from a level of wealth standpoint or for younger generations, just a personal preference standpoint, don’t necessarily want a high-touch experience or they don’t have the wealth to be eligible for a higher-touch service experience. And so I think there is a certainly large enough subset of folks who deserve to have that sophistication in terms of investment management, who deserve to have the type of access to a portfolio that we know is capable of generating better risk-adjusted returns and better returns overall. And there is an element of, again, sort of leveling the playing field, providing access to those investors. Who, for whatever reason, personal preference, level of wealth, don’t have access to higher-touch service providers, who can still access a really high-quality experience from a fintech standpoint, from a platform standpoint. And I do think that robo-advisors certainly have generated a lot of interest, and they’ve brought in new investors who previously weren’t investing and have provided them an option and a pathway to taking advantage of the returns in the public markets. And I think these are all trends in the right direction.

Aoifinn Devitt: And speaking of trends, tell us how much you think fintech will start to be present in the investment management industry. Do you see that we will do more, and even broadening beyond fintech, the use of AI, etc.? How do you see the investment management industry as evolving?

Wendy: I think it’s interesting to think about it from a tech and AI standpoint, and I think I see a lot of companies being built right now in what’s considered the wealth tech space, folks who are providing technology to help service wealth advisors and independent advisors. There’s a lot of both companies being built in this space and experimentation and the types of services that can be provided from a purely technology standpoint. I do think that it’s going to be a long time before, to your point, any of this technology or AI really supplants human judgment, whether that’s human judgment in terms of what I’m providing from an investment judgment standpoint or human judgment that’s being provided by a financial advisor in the way that they engage with their clients. So I think what we’re seeing, or at least what I’m seeing, is that there are a lot of companies being built to further supplement and provide additional resources and efficiencies to the existing folks who are in this space. But I think it’s going to be some time. And honestly, one of the things— this is purely anecdotal— I think this is going to be an area where, because of the consequence of getting things wrong with your personal wealth, I think this is an area where a lot of individual investors will still want to know there’s a person at the end of the day behind a lot of the decisions that are being made here.

Aoifinn Devitt: And let’s get into then some of the other aspects of the investment industry, given that the person is at the center, whether that’s on the advisor side or on the client side. How well do you think the industry has adapted to reflect its client base in terms of the diversity of the industry? Does fintech make that irrelevant because it’s an app and it doesn’t matter if it’s who, who the client is on the other side? How do you think, I mean, having been a woman in the industry yourself, the industry embraces inclusion?

Wendy: I do think there’s certainly a lot of, there’s a lot of room for improvement on this front. And what I mean by that is I think investing is fundamentally a more nuanced exercise and there’s complexity both in the strategies that are being executed and complexity in the underlying investments themselves. And so I think breaking down that complexity for investors is important. And what I mean by that is there’s a piece of the challenge that is like a pure communication standpoint. A lot of the investment world is publishing information that’s intended to speak to other parts of the investment management world. And so a lot of how we communicate is really industry shorthand, mutually understood frames of reference. And so that’s one piece of the puzzle is just really figuring out how to speak to everyday investors. But back to the diversity point that you made, I think another part of it is that the individual investor base is broad, it is diverse. And part of communicating effectively has to include meeting investors where they are, metaphorically speaking. I think having shared frames of reference and shared backgrounds, that’s really where I think when you have greater diversity in the investment management space, you will be able to communicate more effectively with investors. And I do think, you know, there’s an element to your point to what you alluded to, that as a woman in this industry, it’s wonderful that I do think there are a lot of young women who are entering finance or entering investments who are rising through the ranks, but it is still more limited at the senior levels. And I do think it’s important to have different voices that can speak to different experiences, especially when you’re talking about communicating with a broader investor base like the individual investor base.

Aoifinn Devitt: Just moving on to some reflections. So having— now that you’ve embarked upon this entrepreneur’s journey, One of my favorite podcasts is How I Built This by Guy Raz that takes many entrepreneurs now successful through their ups and downs and, and just reflections. Have there been any key setbacks or challenges that you can talk about now where you maybe learned lessons?

Wendy: I do think that part of being an entrepreneur is experiencing a lot of challenges that are very unexpected challenges. And what I mean by that is you anticipate that certain things will be difficult. And so we anticipated that starting and launching an SEC-registered fund would take time and would be difficult because now we’re operating in a regulated environment. What we didn’t anticipate is that our onboarding process, for instance, for our customers, when we were building out our initial onboarding process for our customers, we had a series of questions where we were asking customers to put in their own information. And then part of that is, as a financial product, all of our customers, if they’re opening a financial account, they need to go through what’s known as know your customer, anti-money laundering processes. And so with that, when we were collecting information that was being entered directly and manually from our users, what we found is that the rate of user data entry error was really high, which created a lot of, let’s just call it, unscalable issues on our end. And so we had to refresh that account opening process and that data collection process. And it’s, you know, it was one of those learnings where, as we’re talking about it, it seems so obvious, like, of course, folks make mistakes when they enter their data. And it’s important that the data is accurate. That can have consequences. And so it’s one of those areas that I laugh when I talk about it because it’s both so obvious in hindsight, but it was also one of those things that it was very unexpected as we were dealing with it at the time. And there’s just so many, there’s so many of those examples as you build the company.

Aoifinn Devitt: I can certainly relate to that. And I think, you know, you can handle the challenges that you foresee. It’s these unforeseen things that trip you up that I think are what cause that kind of entrepreneur’s dilemma as they embark. And thinking about people, so you mentioned having two co-founders as well as other mentors throughout your career. Were there any key people who had a particular influence on you throughout your career and in what way?

Wendy: I mentioned Lauren and Suzanne at the Met Museum earlier. They were and are excellent investors with incredibly high standards across every aspect of running an investment program. And I was at the Met Museum for 4.5 years, so it was a formative experience. I then worked with Colin Ambrose across two institutions over the course of 13-plus years, including most recently when we started the investment office at the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. So I would consider Colin my most significant mentor and easily the person that has had the most influence on my career. Colin is an exceptional leader and chief investment officer. He has strong investment judgment, clear foundational principles, all the usual things you would expect from a great CIO. But I think the thing that sets Colin apart is his ability to bring out the best in every member of the team. He knows how to develop talent. He encourages professional growth, and it’s easy to tout the benefits of open discussions and intellectually honest team debates, but it’s actually really hard to foster the kind of environment that allows for those things. It requires a leader that is open-minded and transparent and humble and really trusted by the team. And so, when I think about key people who have influenced me throughout my career, I think of Colin as a great example because that’s really now how I aspire to lead. And he’s had such an influence on me as both an investor and just a professional and now a leader.

Aoifinn Devitt: Before we get to closing question, I always like to ask if people have any other interests that we don’t capture here in the career journey. Anything for you outside the office, say, that is an important cause that you hold dear?

Wendy: Yes, I love this question. I would highlight two smaller nonprofits that both in different ways look to level the playing field in their respective areas. And there’s clearly a theme here in terms of the types of missions that speak to me. The first nonprofit is called EWAB, which is spelled E-W-A-A-B and stands for Encouraging Women Across All Borders. It’s a college mentorship program primarily supporting women in STEM majors. EWAB provides academic mentorship and professional development opportunities for young women who would otherwise not have access to that kind of guidance. And I’ve seen it be a very impactful program for these young women many of whom come from less advantaged backgrounds as they prepare to navigate male-dominated industries in STEM. The second organization is a little bit different. It’s called Flightpath Dance Project, and Flightpath is incredible. It is a fully tuition-free dance company and preparatory program for high school dancers in New York. Flightpath provides training and workshops and experiences, and they prepare these high schoolers for college and a career in the performing arts. These are, to be clear, young men and women who otherwise wouldn’t have the option to train and reach for these opportunities. It’s hard to describe the level of talent that is clearly nurtured and captured by Flightpath through this program, and several alumni of this program are now professional dancers, which is really remarkable. So I’ll point to both EWAB and Flightpath as great organizations that mean a lot to me. They both address this common challenge of talent might be equally distributed, but opportunity isn’t, and widening access to opportunities is so important.

Aoifinn Devitt: I love that. And one of our previous guests, Sonali Patel-Wilson, also mentioned EWOP. I’m not sure if you know her, but she’s now at Wellington and a very, very important— it’s lovely to have the same connection. And on the dance front, we’ve had a number of guests who actually were former dancers who now have ended up in the investment world and that the poise and the choreography and the learning to work within a team and learning to perform, all of these are such critical skills. So I think it’s really important to just sort of circle back to the arts as training grounds for what we may do later because it’s rare to be able to be a dancer your entire career. But I love that, that this flight path has given rise to opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist. And my final question is around advice, whether there’s any key word of wisdom or creed or motto that you live by or advice for your younger self that you can share?

Wendy: I have one really simple piece of advice that I was lucky to receive early in my career, and I continue to find it invaluable. And it’s the one piece of advice I give to younger folks coming up in this business. Give first. Give first. It’s a big part of how I have built meaningful non-transactional relationships. And I tell younger investors as they look to grow their networks, When you meet folks, give first. What that means is be helpful within reason without the expectation of something in return. And that will serve you well throughout your career. And then the second, if I can offer to, there is something I do remind my kids of a lot. And this is more of a personal motto, which is that you don’t always get what you want, but you appreciate what you have. And so I always think about how I’m very grateful for all that I have from my family to my friends. To my co-founders.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I’m nodding here because that advice around networking is something that I have also started to internalize and pass on because everybody has something to give. And I think it’s and very— just in summing up here, your story is one in which humility runs through it. But I do think that certainly you noted at the beginning that you didn’t come from the same privileged, perhaps high school background that some of your Columbia peers did, but you knew even then that you had something to give. And it was actually through some giving of advice on LinkedIn that I was drawn to you. So I’m, I’m so happy to see that you’re continuing to give back to our industry. And thank you on this podcast, you’ve shared a lot about the fintech and the new frontier that that brings. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing your insights with us.

Wendy: Thank you, Aoifinn, for having me. This was a pleasure.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This series is kindly supported by GCM Grosvenor. GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset. Jennifer Ryan: Management firm with a longstanding commitment to supporting small, emerging, and diverse investment managers. Aoifinn Devitt: For over 30 years, the firm has developed expertise in funding and guiding these managers as part of its broader activity across alternative investments. With over $20 billion in AUM dedicated. Jennifer Ryan: To small and emerging managers and $16 billion in AUM dedicated to diverse managers, GCM Grosvenor leverages its experienced team, broad network, and proprietary sourcing capabilities to support their success. Aoifinn Devitt: Through the Small, Emerging, and Diverse Manager Program, the firm creates opportunities for investors to access a wide range of talent. Jennifer Ryan: While seeking to drive strong returns and impact. Aoifinn Devitt: For more information, visit www.gcmgrovenor.com. Jennifer Ryan: Our next guest has built her career in the business development segment. And now has a role as Head of Distribution at a major global asset manager. Aoifinn Devitt: Hear from her about the importance of. Jennifer Ryan: Relationships, how clients’ needs are becoming more nuanced and evolving in different ways. Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment and beyond by focusing on its people and their stories. Jennifer Ryan: I’m joined today by Jennifer Ryan, Head of North American Distribution at Lazard Asset Management. She previously was Head of UK Institutional Sales at BlackRock and Head of the US Institutional Pensions at BlackRock and started her career at Goldman Sachs. Welcome, Jennifer. Thanks for joining me today. Speaker C: Thank you. Aoifinn Devitt: I thought that you could start by. Jennifer Ryan: Tracing your background and how you came to enter the world of finance and investments. Speaker C: Sure. I started my career— actually, funnily enough, I was a liberal arts major, went to Boston College undergrad, and went into consulting thinking I’d work for a couple of years and then go back to law school. And I found myself working with a client called Goldman Sachs. And working at Goldman Sachs enabled me to see the organization from the inside out, at which point I interviewed with the asset management business, which was pretty much in a reboot mode in, in the late ’90s, and took a role there in a very marketing-oriented role and then started working my way up from there. So I had various roles in sales in first the third-party space, working with banks in the, in Northeast, and then moved over to the institutional business in about 2008 after I finished my MBA. And from there, I then went to BlackRock for 6 years. I spent 3 years in New York, actually headed the middle market pensions group there and got their— worked to get their OCIO effort off the ground. Then I moved to London around the time of the pandemic and spent 3 years there, and then made my way back to the US and joined Lazard at the end of January 2023. So my background has been really just through experience and opportunity and actually having great mentors who introduced me to new channels of opportunity along the way. So I have to say, I credit a lot of people in my career to giving me those opportunities. Jennifer Ryan: And of course, I invited you here because I’m always intrigued by the business development mindset and how that’s developed, that thick skin that you need, and the somewhat nuanced approach to developing clients. And looking back, maybe going back a little further, did you always have those instincts to network and develop relationships? Looking at your college and high school years? Speaker C: Oh, sure. Well, I do think that I’ve often been a connector of people and I’ve often enjoyed that, but I ended up studying English literature and Spanish literature in my undergrad years, and I really enjoyed communication and writing, distilling messages. And I do feel that, you know, the combination of working to simplify a message and make it easily understood is sort of at the core of what you do in a sales and distribution role. And I also think that just having an ability and an interest in human nature and working to adapt with people as their needs change is sort of the essence of what we try to do as good people in distribution. Understanding your client and adapting with their needs is critical to what we do. So I’ve always enjoyed that. And I do think that in the role of being on the front lines, your job is to really distill down messaging, make it easily understood, tailor it to your audience, understand what they care about. And then let them guide you in terms of where they want to take the relationship. So that’s always been interesting to me, and my experience and my network has also been informed by those experiences. So I consider a real blessing that I’ve had the opportunity to work both in the US and in London. Jennifer Ryan: Well, as someone who’s just come back from an extended trip to South America, studying Spanish literature sounds extremely appealing to me right now. Have you ever used your languages? And I think just getting back to our previous point, of course, learning languages does help with identifying differences, but also commonalities between different people. Did you ever use your language in your role? Speaker C: I do. I mean, as a teenager, I did a year abroad in Spain. I lived in Spain and studied there and learned the language, lived with a family. And that was a really formative experience for me. I, of course, have the opportunity to use Spanish in New York and in the US because it’s, it’s everywhere. And I think it just, you know, the experience of living in another country really helps you understand nuances and makes you a little bit more observant of human nature because there’s not just one right way to approach things. So that’s been really one of the, you know, many formative events in my life. But speaking another language certainly gives you that extra perspective and it has helped me. Jennifer Ryan: And moving on to business development as a craft, what would you say were some of your core beliefs when it comes to working with clients and developing new clients? Speaker C: I mean, key to this, I think, and one of the things that I did when I first came to Lazard is really making sure that you understand the ecosystem of your client. So we organized ourselves according to client types so that you understand the unique problems that an endowment faces versus a corporate pension versus a public pension. And you can really speak to their needs and their risk tolerance as well as getting to know the people in that world and how they think and operate. So first of all, I think the core beliefs that I have in terms of covering clients is do your homework. Know not only the client and what they care about, but know the ecosystem in which they operate and the world in which they, you know, what they care about in terms of investment opportunities, but also governance, the limitations that they face. I think increasingly we see clients that are forced to have fewer relationships because they’re being asked to do more with less. They need more partnership type of experience. And the way you become that partner is truly by understanding what their unique needs are and truly educating yourself so you can speak at their level. So it’s truly understanding the client that makes a person more useful to an allocator because they don’t have to explain everything to you. Jennifer Ryan: And that was my next question about how client needs are evolving, because when we think about this resource constraint that you mentioned, this might be a common theme. We often see then clients looking to outsource their investment functions, And that then can become another relationship that you have to start from scratch with that outsourcer or OCIO. How would you say clients’ needs are differing today? Speaker C: I mean, I think there’s a big consolidation happening. So you see a lot of firms that have just fewer resources going the outsourcing route. But those who continue to have a staff, have a CIO, they’re really rethinking their decision-making. They’re reconsidering capital allocation because of some of the things we’re seeing in the world. The market is evolving. We’re in a new rate regime. You’re seeing geopolitics changing the way people allocate. And you’re also seeing a huge shift in terms of the regime of private markets. We’re seeing fewer distributions. It causes people to reconsider what they’re doing throughout their portfolio. So I do see clients’ needs evolving in a very big way. And on top of that, actually, we’re seeing a bit of a generational shift in CIOs, particularly in North America. You’re definitely seeing more more new CIOs starting. And with that, you see someone taking a fresh look at a portfolio. So it’s a great opportunity to kind of reconsider the asset allocation of any portfolio. So with that in mind, you have to be conversant. It’s really important to be conversant in terms of the things that really matter to clients. And they’re very, very different according to different channels. Jennifer Ryan: And do you see clients having more appetite now for more esoteric types of investments? Aoifinn Devitt: Thinking about where we are in the. Jennifer Ryan: Interest rate regime, is there more clustering around traditional investments or more appetite for different ones? Speaker C: I tend to look at portfolios as what is the problem you’re looking to solve. So if you see inflation really creeping up, that’s a main consideration. Real assets have taken hold. Infrastructure is incredibly important in portfolios in a way that it hasn’t been 10 years ago. You think about public markets where we tend to operate at Lazard and where you you see, know, obviously the pressure from the standpoint of an active manager, you’re seeing passive exposure as an option, you’re seeing private markets. And that means that, you know, if you’re really gonna be effective in the active management world of equities in particular, you have to operate in areas that are less efficient so that you can make a case for active management. And there certainly is a case to be made, but we see opportunities in the world we sit in as, where we see less efficient markets and an ability to add alpha from an active perspective. Whether or not that’s a niche strategy or something that may have seen maybe part of a core portfolio, but sees maybe less of an allocation because of inefficiencies or the strength of the US equity market, things like EM and international, we’re starting to see an uptick in appetite for that. And certainly thematic. Aoifinn Devitt: And on the one hand, cycles are faster, certainly certain market cycles, information digestion cycles. And then on the other hand, cycles are longer and slower. We talked private equity and slower pace of distributions. So where would you say this decision-making relationship building cycle is? And just say for somebody entering a business development role today, fresh out of university, no network, because of the hybrid working, because of this resource constraint that you mentioned, do you think we need to reset expectations about how long that relationship building process takes? Or do you think it’s just always been hard? And it always will be hard, you just have to knuckle down. Speaker C: I think it is hard. I really do believe that you have to pay attention to all the nodes of the decision-making from the CIO to the staff to the trustees. The next-gen opportunities for people in sort of an entry-level position to interact with people at their level at the client is also incredibly important. So yes, it is hard, but if you take a team-based approach to covering clients, meaning there’s a lead person who works with the CIO and the senior investment staff, working with a junior person to get to know that next generation, and the consultant relations people are communicating as well to the field consultants who cover those clients, you can have a really robust process of building a relationship. And the more coordinated you are, the more effective you’re going to be. But I think the challenge sometimes is that people, for whatever reason, maybe it’s human nature, feel like it’s easier or better to go alone. And I really believe strongly that the more coordinated organizations tend to do better and develop deeper relationships. Aoifinn Devitt: It’s really interesting as a segue to kind of the mindset of somebody in your role. And obviously not all mindsets are alike, but I would imagine there are some mindsets that are the opposite to that. They’re not team-based, they’re sole player, sole champion, protective of information. That’s almost a stereotype. What would you say? I mean, just looking at You obviously believe in the team-based approach. In terms of— I always think of the mindset of somebody who succeeds in your role. Do you think that’s something you learn or you’re born with? Are you born or made? And how do you develop that thick skin? Because there will be inevitably rejection and setbacks along that journey. Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s probably taking the first question, is it— are you born or made that way? I think it’s personality. And I do think it’s sort of how, in many ways, I mean, if you want to think about it, it’s like, how are you raised? Were you raised to be somebody who is sort of like eat what you kill and out for yourself, or were you always kind of encouraged to work as a team? I mean, honestly, I think team sports are great, and that’s one of the things that you learn and one of the things I encourage my kids to do. But I think that those things are— you can evolve, you can learn how to do those things. I think when you see proof points and you see it work successfully, you can really be sold on that concept. But until you— if you’re somebody who tends to want to do things on their own, it’s going to be hard. But when you see it in action, you kind of really know how powerful that can be and how it can shorten things. Because of course, information and feedback really shape success in terms of a salesperson’s career. The more information you have, the more adept you can be at changing and targeting exactly the needs that your clients have put before you. But one person can only do that so well. So I think that it’s incentive structures that also make for a better or worse team environment. But I think you have to select people who kind of have that tendency and you can kind of see it demonstrated in the way they interact socially too. Aoifinn Devitt: And then bringing that to then the diversity question that I often ask on this podcast around our industry, its diversity, and the importance of that, because it seems like if you’re trying to build relationships at different levels, you know, you’re going to be facing clients with very diverse characters and perhaps backgrounds, et cetera. So you should probably as much as possible try to slot into that. How do you think our industry is doing? Are we attracting the right diversity of candidates? Speaker C: I think we can always do better. I would say we’re squarely in the B category in terms of how diverse the business is. It’s still not as diverse as I’d like it to be. I think we’ve made some strides, and clearly you see with women in senior positions and diverse people in senior positions, that always helps because they bring people along with them. But I do think that organizations have to strive to be disciplined in their hiring. They have to strive to be disciplined not only after they bring in diverse candidates to make sure that they’re successful once they are in an organization. We tend to lose a lot of people at the VP level, and that may not even be a function of diversity. It may be a function of lack of career guidance or career planning, but it’s more likely to happen if you’ve got someone who is diverse and doesn’t see anyone that looks like them in front of them. Aoifinn Devitt: I’d love to pick up as we move to the reflection section, that point about career guidance, because the last time I met someone who had that in their job title, I was in high school. So I really don’t think that the career guidance function— it may be called an executive coach later, but it’s a little bit thin, I would say, in terms of its availability to us. And there’s an onus on the candidate, maybe, or the employee to seek it out. How well do you think we do? And did you have anyone that guided you? Speaker C: I did. I mean, I, I also had the ambition. First starts with the individual. You’ve got to drive your own career 100%, and you’ll find that people are more willing to help you if you demonstrate a hunger to advance and to be thoughtful about where you take your career. No one’s going to take you by the hand and tell you where to go. You’ve got to have that ambition yourself. But I did have people who recognized in me that I was interested in advancing my career, learning more. And they were people that— they did not sit in a title of career guidance counselor. They were people that I respected who had senior roles in distribution, and I worked alongside them. I went to meetings with them. I got their feedback. I got criticism from them. I got encouragement from them. And then various bosses along the way. My boss at Goldman sponsored me for an executive MBA at Columbia. People like that who actually get behind you because they know that you’re going to put in the time to be successful, I think, is really the winning recipe. And I’ve had a lot of people in my career like that who’ve been supportive of me and have encouraged me to take chances. I mean, I think the other thing is that sometimes you got to take some risks. And when you have a support network around you that you believe in and that you, you respect because of their own success, those people become your board of directors when you make big decisions. So I have repeatedly called on people, former bosses and peers of mine, many women that I know, that I consult with when I make big decisions. Aoifinn Devitt: And it’s interesting because that kind of develops, I suppose, organically. I find I get asked the question a lot from, say, junior employees, like, how do you develop and how do you gain mentors, or how do you gain sponsors? And unfortunately, it’s not really a question of asking. It’s almost a more nuanced process of evolution. Is that how it worked for you? Speaker C: I think so, yeah. I mean, I think it’s like-minded people who have a natural connection socially or for whatever reason. It’s got to be very organic. I never really— I mean, I like mentor programs because they facilitate engagement, but I think the best mentors and sponsors— we could talk about the difference between a mentor and sponsor— are the ones that actually recognize that they see a little bit of themselves in the mentee. And they really want to foster that. And the person who is looking up to the mentor says, yeah, I want to be like that person. I recognize that they’re good at what they do. I respect them. They’ve got integrity, all those things. But those are very personal connections. And the ones that endure are friendships, I would say. So there’s got to be something more than like, are you good at your job? Aoifinn Devitt: It’s interesting because as you get older, of course, though, there are fewer people ahead of you. That when you get into your 40s and 50s, there may not be that many people who can see themselves in you because they’ve already retired. So I suppose there’s— whereas it’s an interesting— that it becomes, I suppose, fewer and fewer potential. But hopefully you’ve developed a network by then. Speaker C: Yeah, that’s right. A peer group is very important, people that you know and trust. And I mean, I think that’s critical. And I would say to anyone starting their career, invest in your network and your friendships and make sure that you give back to other people in ways that help them as well. Aoifinn Devitt: So looking back at your career then, would you say there were any setbacks or challenges? Because that’s often one of the key areas where mentors and sponsors can help, is in encouraging that resilience or maybe showing a path that they perhaps navigated through a similar setback. Was there anything in your career that led to some lessons learned? Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, so when I joined Goldman, I was not part of the analyst program. I was a more of a lateral hire, so there was no fixed path for me. So I was sort of going it alone as opposed to having a 2-year program and then being accelerated to the next level. So that was just understanding that I had to chart my own course. That was one thing. Making the decision early on to go more of a client route when I could have chosen portfolio management or client-facing job was really a question of what am I good at? What am I really enjoying? There’s sometimes what you think you’re— that you want to do because it seems good on paper versus what you’re very good at. They’re two different things. So, the more you start to realize that you should lean into the skills that naturally come to you, then I think that’s important. Being a woman in the finance industry, I just felt very important— it was very important to me personally to have a graduate degree. I wanted to get an MBA, and I didn’t want to leave the workforce. So, I wanted those credentials primarily because I had been a liberal arts major and I wanted to have the formal training in terms of finance and accounting and all those things. So setbacks, I don’t know, maybe I perceived it as a setback, but it was very important to me to go back to grad school. Aoifinn Devitt: It’s a really interesting observation there. And I think we’ve spoken about some of the key people who influenced you along the way. And just bringing it back to our original discussion around partnership and the collaboration that’s now part of how we work with clients, would you say that the starting out working with clients at a low point for them in terms of their portfolios, their strategies, was a time to build trust and maybe elongate your time horizon because you knew nothing was gonna happen in the near term? Speaker C: Yes, definitely. And there are ways to build that trust by giving people greater transparency on geopolitics or what you think about the elections or intellectual content and not even talking about product, but really just trying to help people be informed. And it’s every salesperson’s goal to be that first call when people have a thorny issue that they’re trying to figure out. That’s, our goal always, but when the markets aren’t moving and people are sort of scratching their heads or just frustrated because they’re under pressure, they want to see what you’re seeing. So, if you’re proactive in reaching out to people and telling them, could this be helpful to you? Do you want to hear what we’re talking about? I think that’s how you build trust. And also just being honest about where you are as an organization and not trying to sugarcoat things because oftentimes, The worst criticism that you can get as a salesperson is like when you’re disingenuous. And so you’ve gotta know your facts, you’ve gotta be honest with people, and you’ve gotta be really listening to what they’re telling you and not trying to just kind of sugarcoat everything. Aoifinn Devitt: It’s interesting because exactly that, I mean, clearly at a downtime, a client is going to be enshrouded in a certain amount of worry. And if they say credit investors come to mind, you expect them to constantly worry. So if a client is asking their asset manager, what are you worried about? And the answer is nothing. I think there’s a cognitive dissonance that develops from that because this is just, well, then you’re not seeing the same reality I am. So it gets back to the honesty. And I always sort of say, look, as an allocator, I say, look, you’re in the room because we know you have all these credentials. I don’t need to hear you selling yourself to me again. I do want to hear what I don’t know. I do want to hear what’s out there that I should be worried about and maybe that you’re seeing. So it’s about that kind of honesty because intellectual honesty, I think especially in the down times. Speaker C: Exactly. Like, talking your own book is incredibly, I think, offensive to people. They can see right through it. Aoifinn Devitt: So they can, and we can. My last question then is just about any words of wisdom. So a long career working with some great mentors, by the sounds of things, as well as having a fairly hungry attitude from the beginning. Any words of wisdom, creed, or motto, or advice for your younger self that you can leave us with? Speaker C: Sure. I guess I would say, first of all, be excellent at your job, but keep your eyes and ears open and be willing to take risks because the marginal day in the same job when you’ve mastered everything is great. But if somebody gives you an opportunity to take on some new challenge, you should try to be open to it. And I would say, again, I come back to the network. I’ve learned so much through talking to my friends in the industry and how they think through their next steps and challenges. That’s been really important to me, and it’s something I value personally because I get strength from talking to people that I respect. So I would just say invest in that. Don’t sit in your office and keep your head down and hope that things are going to work out because it doesn’t happen that way. That happens in school. In your career, it’s a little bit of— it’s skill, it’s luck, it’s relationships. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much, Jen. Since we got to know each other, I’ve seen you as a serious and very committed servant of the institutions that you work with. And I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you more here in this discussion. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing your insights with us. Speaker C: Thank you so much. It’s been my pleasure. Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Tony Miller: It has been a highly charged summer between the big year of elections, a series of political and geopolitical surprises, and a few market shocks. It has been anything but the silly season. We’ve launched a few episodes of 50 Faces TV focused on investor identity and responsible investing, and we have continued covering the issue of maternal mortality women in sports, and other matters close to our hearts. Now we are back to our main series for Series 5, and we are delighted to bring you another 10 inspiring guests who share their insights on careers, markets, overlooked opportunities, and advice for fulfillment in life and career. First, on investment topics, tune in as we cycle through investment opportunities in fintech and consider the implications of AI as an advisor.

Speaker B: I do think that It’s going to be a long time before, to your point, any of this technology really supplants human judgment.

Tony Miller: And think about how it can help allocators.

Speaker C: We get a lot of information as allocators. You got hundreds of emails in the morning, the PDF, the pitch book. In the due diligence phase, you open any data room, just think about How many files? It’s not realistic for a human to review all the documents. AI can really help.

Tony Miller: We go back to school with Tony Miller of Excolare, exploring the opportunities in investing in education.

Speaker D: I think one of the challenges in education in particular, human capital broadly, is having an innovative solution, having a better product, right, is necessary but not sufficient. It needs to be a product that can improve learning, but it’s got to be a product that improves learning and can scale across 10,000 school districts if you’re talking K-12, across 3,000 higher education institutions.

Tony Miller: And talk about how we can learn from incentives and what really matters.

Speaker E: First two letters of merger is me. So you absolutely need to recognize that everyone is evaluating the change and what it means for them individually first and foremost. And if you don’t respect that, then you’re not really fully grasping what that change means to every single person in the organization.

Tony Miller: We hear about the challenges of being on the front lines and dealing with clients.

Speaker F: I do think that in the role of being on the front lines, your job is to really distill down messaging, make it easily understood, tailor it to your audience, understand what they care about, and then let them guide you in terms of where they want to take the relationship.

Tony Miller: We discover opportunities in investing in agriculture.

Speaker F: The whole idea of natural capital, farmland and timberland, you know, sequestering carbon. We’re, we’re able to feed the world. We want to do it sustainably. We’ve got to do more with less. And farmland has also proven to be an inflation hedge. So there are a number of reasons to include it in a portfolio. However, because it’s illiquid, it’s been difficult to develop products that really fit a retail market.

Tony Miller: Some of our guests speak about how they have navigated through some uncomfortable cultures.

Speaker G: I joined the city in 1980, and basically it was the era of the dinosaurs. It was only 5 years past the 1975 watershed when women were able to open bank accounts in their own name. Can you imagine that? Younger women today can’t even think of that, and, and I’m glad they can’t.

Tony Miller: Rob Gardner speaks about the woeful situation around savings and pension pots in the UK as he advocates for better financial literacy through a formula of earn it, keep it, grow it.

Speaker H: Maybe just to give the listeners the scale of the problem in the UK, 1 in 7 adults have no savings at all. 1 in 3 have less than 1 month’s in savings, 1 month’s living expenses in savings. So they can’t go more than 1.

Speaker C: Month.

Speaker H: You know, once if they lose their job. The average pension pot of a 40-year-old in the UK is £15,000. That’s not a year, that’s full stop £15,000. That is just way too low. That is definitely sort of inadequate.

Tony Miller: And finally, you won’t want to miss the wisdom that is liberally scattered throughout this podcast series, including wisdom from parents.

Speaker I: My dad was a big influence on me in terms of the way I think. He used to always say, you know, what do you know for sure? Or take things back to formula. So if you had a question about how something worked, dissect it back to what do I really know for sure here? You know, usually the problem is fairly simple.

Tony Miller: And from an executive coach, don’t resign.

Speaker B: Yourself to what you think you know. I feel like a lot of people make an assumption or an assessment of a situation and then they move on. Don’t resign so quickly. Sit with it and sit with the discomfort. Sit with the tension. What’s that expression? Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. I’m really encouraging people to be courageous and have tough conversations.

Tony Miller: We look forward to sharing Series 5 with you. You can find all of our podcasts on the 50 Faces Hub, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Aoifinn Devitt: So that sort of drive to do your best is an amazing thing, but it also, it can have a negative side to it as well.

Tammy: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast. A podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment and beyond by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Tammy Parlor, who’s the co-founder of Women’s Sports Trust. She works with leaders from across sports, media, and business to understand how to practically raise visibility, increase impact, and create a stronger women’s sport ecosystem, and was awarded an MBE in 2019 for services to gender equality in sport. She’s a master in the Korean martial art of Hapkido, having practiced for over 40 years, and currently runs a club in central London. She loves learning and is a club rep on the FA Women’s National League board since the end of 2023. Welcome, Tammy. Thanks for joining me today.

Aoifinn Devitt: Oh, it’s lovely to be here. Thank you.

Tammy: Well, let’s start with a little bit about your background. Can you tell us about your journey into sports and now the work you do as an advocate for women in sport? How did it start and did it take any unusual turns along the way?

Aoifinn Devitt: Gosh, I think life is unusual sometimes. I think beginnings of something can sometimes be quite subtle. So it wasn’t about ever really about creating an organization or creating transformational change of a system. It was just life. I grew up in America. We moved there because of my dad’s work. There’s a phrase that I’ve heard called third culture kids, and I really think that applies to me. These are people people who are raised in a culture other than their parents or their country of nationality during a significant part of their child development years. And for me, that was age 11 to 22. And one of the challenges of being a third culture individual is sometimes a feeling of being other or not belonging. But it also means that you’re aware of other perspectives and may look at things slightly differently. And these factors can play a big part into identity and self-esteem when growing up. So I don’t know where it came from, but age sort of 12, 13, I suddenly decided that I wanted to do a martial art. And it so happened that there was a Korean grandmaster who was about a 20-minute drive from the, the suburb of Chicago where I was growing up. And I started there and I never stopped. I found my identity there. I found I grew in self-esteem doing this martial art, and it became a massive part of my life. I left America unexpectedly. I had immigration problems in ’93, and by that time, Hapkido was just— as I say, it was part of my identity. It was a big part of my life, and the only way really to continue it and to continue being a student of this, um, amazing grandmaster was if I started to teach. And by that time I had been teaching classes at his studio. I was black belt multiple times by that time as well. So I started a club and I just continued. And come— I think it was around about 2004, I— for a long time I had felt that I want to be a master of the art. I wanted to do this full-time. I just— it was me.. And I, I thought, if I don’t do this full-time, I’m gonna get to an older age and I’m gonna regret it. So I took the plunge and started full-time running my martial arts academy. And I you was, know, incredibly successful. I still run that academy, not on a, a full-time basis anymore. Being a sportswoman, a coach, was my identity. But when London 2012 hit, the Olympics, I came to London, sport took on a totally different, an additional purpose to me. And that’s where the sort of foundations of the charity that I run, the Women’s Sport Trust, started to develop.

Tammy: That’s fascinating. Well, I want to dive in quite a bit to martial arts and what it does to a personality and how it infiltrates the rest of one’s life. But you mentioned you made the decision to go full-time But did you have other interests and other professional pursuits before you made that decision?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, so my background is learning development, which I suppose that the constant thread in my life, you can look at my career and is, it it’s kind of a bit, some maybe a bit higgledy-piggledy, for instance, but I think the constant thread is that learning and that desire to unlock potential. So first in my learning development role, I spent, gosh, almost a decade with The Prince’s Trust, which was all about young people and unlocking potential. Then as martial arts master, now as Chief Exec of the Women’s Sport Trust. So this has been— that whole learning has been a constant sort of side to me. I mean, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a computer programmer, an accountant, or a teacher. And I think actually all of those bits are actually in what I do. I’m, I’d say, a little bit of a jack of all trades. I’m a bit of a geek, but this theme that runs through is just all about unlocking potential in the individual, and, and now in my role with Women’s Sport Trust, in a system.

Tammy: Well, let’s go back to that now, the unlocking of potential. So I also know intimately the suburbs of Chicago and finding that studio to find hapkido. What I suppose drew you to martial arts and how did it form you?

Aoifinn Devitt: Gosh, I don’t know what drew me. I mean, I often get asked this question. I have no idea. All I remember is I woke up and I was saying to my parents, I want to start karate. I hadn’t heard of hapkido before, so I, I honestly don’t know where this came from. But what I found within the studio was not just the physical pursuit, but also its martial arts, particularly the way where I was learning with a Korean grandmaster, was very much about mind and body. So he is the son of a Buddhist monk, and very much, as well as the physical side, very much lectured on Taoist philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, etc. So I was quite an unusual kid. So from, well, once I began to be able to drive by myself, which is in the US at 16, I would be at his daybreak meditation classes that started at 5 o’clock in the morning. I mean, that’s unusual for a 16-year-old, but there was something that— it really spoke to me on every level. And what I love about it now, it continues to challenge me. It’s a martial art that has many different aspects to it, and so there’s always something that you’re bad at, there’s always something that you improve. And intellectually, it keeps me interested. It’s, it’s all about how a body moves, how a system moves, and how by just the principles of things like non-resistance, circular motion, etc. It’s about life, it’s about understanding life, and, and the club and the school is almost a petri dish for life. So it’s really touched me on so many levels. And also, if we go back to my original story about sort of moving to another country, it was— it touched me on identity. It was where I, I felt comfortable as an immigrant. It was somewhere where I was accepted. I’m an introvert, so it was a place where I could quite happily just sit there and not talk, but people would still like me. So yeah, funny old thing.

Tammy: And I suppose when you think of martial arts, there’s some initial things we think about in terms of, say, discipline, respect for oneself, for the self as well as for the master. I suppose goals, resilience, Any of these things that you think are particularly important today for young women and for the work world we’re in today?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, I think martial arts are really interesting. As I say, the petri dish, the idea of discipline through the Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, etc., the importance of self-awareness and introspection, the, the importance of mastering oneself, letting go of attachment to external conditions, whatever, whatever you want to call it, and, and the Beauty with martial arts as well is this grading system, whether these goals— you go for another belt, etc. So there’s that motivation is almost sort of built into it. And the other thing, particularly in the traditional martial arts, is there’s an expectation as you move towards black belt, and definitely as black belt, that you start to become a leader as well. The simple things, but they’re massive. Like, for instance, whenever anybody comes to the club to watch a class, to, to see what it’s about, Everybody will go up and introduce themselves and please welcome, et cetera. So there’s a real culture about helping others and being interested in other people’s improvements, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing to develop.

Tammy: It’s so interesting. It’s that whole lift as we climb philosophy that a lot of women on this podcast have demonstrated in their work life and basically kind of climbing the ladder with one hand stretched behind you. Is the image I have in mind. And then in your own competitive sport journey, tell us a little bit about that, maybe some of the high points and low points that you experienced competing at the level you did.

Aoifinn Devitt: Yes, well, my martial arts— I was going to say unique, not necessarily unique, there are others as well— but it doesn’t actually have competition in it. The competition is— it’s, it’s a martial art of self-defense, so it’s about constantly improving, but the competition is seen as yourself and not somebody else. But that definitely been highs and lows, and there were many days that I didn’t want to go, many, but I never gave myself a choice. It’s a funny old thing. I just, this is what I did. So even on those days where you don’t feel like it, etc., that is, you just continue to do. And also through that whole belt system, as a black belt or as, as a master, for me it’s sort of, and I noticed this when people get different color belts as well, they start to inhabit that level. So as you get your black belt, a black belt does certain things, and it was the same with me, you know. I might lack confidence in leading a class, but a black belt does lead class, so I’m just going to have to do it. So those kind of things. When you talk about sort of low points and things, a big struggle was when I had to leave America and had to leave my grandmaster, and it was a case of For me, I thought that was the end. Well, kind of. I also knew that it couldn’t be. Again, this idea of I didn’t ever give myself choice. I was always going to do something. I just had to figure out how. So that, I suppose, the positive side, because it’s driving you forward. But also there’s a negative side to some of that, if I’m totally honest. I was a driven perfectionist, very self-critical of myself. I suffered from anorexia and bulimia between the ages of 19 to, I think, around about 24. So that sort of drive to do your best is an amazing thing, but it also, it can have a negative side to it as well. It’s the joy of learning and striving and teaching, and also the loneliness of, I suppose, when you’re in that leadership position as well, there’s a loneliness that sometimes can come in. So a real mishmash, but I think that’s life as well. I think that’s sort of how life kind of unfolds.

Tammy: And the rough with the smooth, the lows and the highs. And it’s so interesting. So you kind of touched on it a little, but I would imagine there are some mental tricks that you need to stay the course there because, I mean, it’s particularly martial arts is a resilience almost embodied in the practice. So how did you have mental tricks that you use to— it doesn’t seem like you had much motivation issue in terms of going to practice, but in terms of moving on, progressing, sticking at it, which I think for especially for teens, for women in particular. I see this through my own children. There’s a big fall away of women from sports into their high school years and beyond.

Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely. There’s a big drop-off then. And I’ve been doing my martial arts now consistently for 40 years, which I recognize is unusual. There’s so many points where you can decide not to, and I didn’t. I just kept doing it. It goes back to the one thing what I said before, that idea of for a long time I, I didn’t realize I had choice. I thought that if I made a decision, well, then that was my decision. So I had had to, I to stick at it. So I didn’t realize that. I mean, I know it must sound absolutely bonkers, but that was kind of the approach that I took. I’ve decided, so I would. Later in life, I know I have choice now. I do know I, I could, I could stop it, but I recognize how good it is for me. It’s, it’s not just about the physical practice. It enables me to create good both mental and physical practice. And if we want to be healthy in life, we do need to keep practicing these things. So understanding the benefits, I suppose.

Tammy: I’d love to talk then about the work you’re doing to build a women’s sports ecosystem, and you’ve been recognized for your contribution and services to gender equality. Tell us about the challenges there. And I suppose, what does that look like? And I just harken back to your US background as well, because there is, of course, Title IX there and I funding, suppose, mandates around women’s sport. We also hear a little bit about the increased attention to, say, women’s basketball, women’s tennis, although we’re not there yet with all the sports. Where are we on the spectrum, maybe, of where we could be? And what is Women’s Sports Trust aiming to do about that?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yes, when we started, when we founded the Women’s Sports Trust in 2012, we had this phrase. It was my co-founder Jo that actually coined the phrase, that we wanted to move women’s sport from worthy to irresistible. And really, over the past decade, that has been our journey and our goal. And you look at women’s sport now, and it is in, oh, such an incredible space if you compare how we were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc. So we— the charity focuses on the visibility, commercial viability of women’s sport, and also role models. So role models, the media landscape, and the funding landscape as well. What we’ve done over the past decade has really changed as the industry has grown as well. At the start, it was around bringing the ecosystem together. We recognized that the system was in silos. People were pointing fingers, blaming each other. You know, the media isn’t doing this, or brands aren’t doing whatever, but no one’s actually talking together. The other thing was that a lot of the focus on women’s sport was all around grassroots and participation. Now, that’s incredibly important, But what about the elite side? What about leadership? What about commerciality? These parts of the, I suppose, flywheel of the women’s sport industry were in atrophy, or weren’t really being— it wasn’t a space where women’s sport occupied. So the charity, that was our goal, to focus on those areas through elite athlete role models, media, looking at media coverage and, and then the commercial landscape as well. We started by bringing the ecosystem together through awards campaigns, et cetera. Once they started to coalesce, then we were recognizing that the platform for elite athletes was growing, but they didn’t necessarily know how to take full advantage of that. So we developed a program called Unlocked, which was all about giving them a place to understand their voice. Get them heard by senior decision makers, etc. Most recently, we are focusing on data and insight. We did some research, I think it was 2021, that really pointed to the lack of data within the industry. So we took it on board to start bringing this data together, broadcast data, visibility data, and using that as a way to bring together the broadcasters at BBC Channel 4, ITV, DAZN, Sky Sports, whoever, and then the rights holders, social platforms, etc. Everybody, all the decision makers involved in visibility and have those behind closed doors conversations around what’s, what are the blockers, what are the opportunities, and start to sort of shift mindsets. We also started pushing this data out into the ether, and what that’s done is started to change the narrative in that area as well. It’s given the system confidence. And encourage them to take advantage of the opportunity that was being missed. Now we’re also working in the commercial space because, um, there’s still a lot of work to be done. We’ve come an extraordinary journey, women’s sport, but still— there’s we still need more investment, we still need visibility in more prominent spots, etc. As an organization, success for me, for us, is about seeing women’s sport valued, seeing that the industry being inclusive of society, and also seeing women’s sport as leading society positively.

Tammy: And how about the visibility point? Because obviously we are on a journey here to build awareness, get more visibility. How important is it when you have maybe a— the likes of Caitlin Clark in the or, US, you know, Serena Williams, when you have these outstanding performers to move the needle that way, it’s so important.

Aoifinn Devitt: Visibility creates engagement. If you haven’t got a platform, if people can’t see you, they don’t engage. So having that platform in prominent spots, and also these amazing role models— women’s athletes are fascinating, often because they’ve had to get to that point through so many hardships, etc., because of the differences in support for women’s women’s sport sport versus men’s sport, et cetera. So having these role models such as Caitlin Clark sort of come to the fore is really making a difference.

Tammy: And I’d love to move now to speak on another aspect of sport, applied sports psychology, which you’re studying. And psychology, of course, is not only infiltrating the world of sports, but also the world of investing and pretty much every world. But what is it about that What is applied sports psychology anyway? What is the definition and how is it gaining more traction across all sports?

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I’ve long been interested in psychology, how understanding how, how the mind works and how to again unlock potential in that way. So of course the applied sports psychology course was something. So a decade or so ago, I did decided to do a master’s degree in strength and conditioning. Which really pushed me to the edge. It was a fantastic program, all to become a better coach, a better martial arts master, that I would understand more. After completing that, I still had the bug and I loved learning. I wanted to do more, and I decided to start another master’s degree, the Applied Sports Psychology. I didn’t finish that one. I completed the first year. The second year was all about doing another dissertation and things, and I thought, I’ve just done a dissertation, I I can’t, can’t put myself through another one. So decided to stop that. That said, as a layman, I am incredibly interested in the area, and it’s all about motivation and confidence and dealing with stress and anxiety and those psychological techniques. And it’s essential in sport. It’s all about wellbeing in sport and improving performance. And with the Olympics coming up, I’m sure it’s a, a key part of every athlete’s program to be the best.

Tammy: And I know we’ve seen a lot more attention on mental health as well as also performance in sports through menstruation, which is a problem unique, I suppose, to female athletes. So I think getting more attention of the nuances of women’s sport is also a sign of progress.

Aoifinn Devitt: Hmm, definitely.

Tammy: Moving to some reflections of your own now. So were there any setbacks or challenges across the course of either your practice of sports, your work within sport, or just in life in general that you think you learned lessons from that you can share?

Aoifinn Devitt: Oh my I, gosh, I, I don’t know whether I’ve got a, a set of top 10 lessons or anything, but I can tell you there’s been loads of setbacks. So decided to— after being inspired by London 2012 and the— hadn’t really seen female athletes and, and women’s sport before, knew had to do something, so decided to set up a charity having never done that before, but thought, you know, I’m not stupid, other people have done it, I’m sure I can figure it out, I’m sure that— I’m sure there’s a YouTube video on that somewhere. So it’s been a massive learning curve, from getting charity status to building boards to networking within and understanding an industry that I wasn’t directly involved with, to leading an organization. And I’d say I don’t think the podcast is long enough to list all the challenges and mistakes I’ve made along the way, but thankfully motivated by constant learning.

Tammy: Yeah, so you mentioned working with a grandmaster in hapkido, and I found when I interview anyone who’s played sports at a high level that there is often a massive influence of a coach in terms of the life lessons, just the learnings that come from them, whether it be a grandmaster or other teachers or anyone else. Was there any particular mentor along your journey?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yes, definitely. I started with him when I was 12, 13, so he you became, know, almost like a, a second father. He was very influential. And when I started my club here in the UK, well, I remember writing to him and said, I want to stay your student, I don’t know what to do. And he called me and the conversation went, you set up club, I visit. That was it, that was the conversation. So, okay, okay, I’m setting up a club now. And since that time, 2 to 3 times a year he would come over and grade my students, etc., for many, many years. And that is— that’s huge, especially when you’ve had immigration problems and you’ve been brought back to the UK by yourself. That was a massive, massive influence on my life. We’re setting up the WST. I mean, there’s an industry full of trailblazers, too many to name. That have taught me so much about the industry and so much about how we— and what we need to make change in. But perhaps unusual, but probably a massive influence as well, is my ex-wife, who I set up the Women’s Sport Trust with. She’s a leadership— she runs a leadership consultancy in diversity and inclusion, and, and still an important person in my life. And she has a way of seeing into people and pulling out their best qualities, which has been massive to be able to be seen and the good qualities be seen. So that, that’s sort of huge as well. But I’m motivated less by people and more by vision. If I see purpose in something, then I can see how it can unlock potential.

Tammy: I love that this focus, this core focus on unlocking potential. And I suppose just as a, as a final question, it’s maybe it’s relating to that purpose, But any key creed or motto or purpose statement, word of advice?

Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, I want to do Nike’s “Just do it,” probably, as most.

Tammy: Well, I think we will leave it in the quiet wisdom of your master, Iviszett. I think that that is, is enough in terms of the vote of confidence and the absolute trust in you and your enterprise. So thank you so much, Tammy, for the service you are continuing to provide to women’s sports to raise visibility and for continuing to rise to the tremendous challenge we have. But I think it’s, it’s so wonderful to have a role model of your stature flying the flag for women in sports and moving it to the next level. So thank you for coming here and sharing your insights with us.

Aoifinn Devitt: Oh, thank you for having me.

Tammy: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. You can find all of our content on the 50 Faces Hub, where you will find a library of role models, resources, and other solutions to enhance your career. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This episode is supported by PIMCO, a global leader in active fixed income with deep expertise across public and private markets. PIMCO invests their clients’ capital in income and credit opportunities that span the liquidity spectrum, leveraging their decades of experience navigating complex debt markets. Their flexible capital base and deep relationships with issuers have helped them become one of the world’s largest providers of traditional and alternative investment solutions a valued financing partner. Visit pimco.com to learn more. Welcome to the second collaboration between Monumental Me and 50 Faces Productions. Monumental Me and the Mindshare Podcast help women access the tools needed to thrive in life and in work. 50 Faces Productions and the 50 Faces Podcast are dedicated to showcasing inspiring people and their career journeys. This series captures key insights and current trends from women dedicated to innovation and discovery in women’s health in particular, as well as in healthcare more broadly. Focusing on women in healthcare, wellness, and health tech, we hear about the funding gaps, technological advances, and awareness campaigns that are bringing this issue out of the shadows and into improving lives. I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast. A podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of people in investment, medicine, and science by focusing on people and their stories. I’m joined today by Jessica Carr, who’s the founder and managing director of Coyote Ventures, an investment firm that focuses on backing founders who are solving problems that disproportionately affect overlooked populations with a foundation in women’s health. She’s also a limited partner of Portfolia FemTech II fund, designed for women who want to back entrepreneurial companies for returns and impact. Among other advisory roles. Welcome, Jessica. Thanks for joining me today. Jessica: Thank you for having me. Well, let’s start with your career journey. Aoifinn Devitt: Can you talk a bit about your background, where you grew up, what you studied, and how you first became interested in healthcare and investing? Jessica: Great. Yes, it’s a bit of a journey, so I’ll start from the beginning. I was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas, so it’s in the far west, northwest of Texas Panhandle, and it’s a small city, about 200,000 people. And my dad is a dentist and my mom is a recently retired OB-GYN nurse. She just retired last year. So I grew up around science and medicine. And when I was 14 years old, I actually started working in my dad’s dentist office. I was very nerdy and wanted to work instead of play sports. So I started off just filing charts. By the time I was 18, I was a fully licensed dental assistant and I really loved helping patients. But I also really loved the front office, taking payments, making appointments, and my favorite part was actually taking the cash to the bank. So I, I think there was an intersection of many things that was maybe predictive of my future right then and there, but definitely a lot of zigzags along the journey. So when I went to college, I went to Texas State, which is outside of Austin, San Marcos. It’s a very beautiful town with a river. And I was pre-med, thought that I would explore either doctor or dentist path. So I started studying biology and chemistry, all the pre-med classes. And I really think my first year, freshman year chemistry professors, I actually really nerded out on chemistry, which was ironic because in high school I hated it. And the only class I got a C in was biology actually, cuz I didn’t like memorizing things. And I felt like with chemistry you could actually understand things. So I started joining different research labs and changed my major to biochem. I was also a philosophy major just because I thought it was a really fun balance. So I, a few years in, decided to focus on research instead of going into med school. And so I had a few opportunities. I did a summer at Berkeley under the Amgen Scholars Program. And joined a lab there, was really successful in helping a research project get published, and after that decided to go to graduate school for biochem. So I started as a PhD student at UC San Diego and joined a research lab there focused on microbiome health. And after 2 years, I finished my master’s and realized that I wanted to work on something really practical, tangible, instead of just writing papers, just as a personal decision for my interest. So I decided to leave with the master’s and fortunately got connected with Impossible Foods in the early days. So it was less than a year old. My professor at Berkeley was friends with the founder of Impossible Foods, so I was really excited. It was exactly what I wanted, something that was impactful, tangible, but also using my science background. I was doing some R&D that was biochem related. So it was definitely a perfect job. It was very, very fun launching new products that are changing the way we think about meat and food in general. So I was at Impossible for 6 years. I co-authored some of the patents. I helped with the initial formulation and launch of the burger. And after that, realized I really liked the early days of the companies. I was meeting a lot of idea stage companies, and I just felt a lot more excitement around starting something new. So I decided to leave Impossible once it was launched and scaling and worked with about a dozen companies over 2 years, very much in the idea stages of both food tech as well as health and wellness. And I felt really excited about getting closer to the health and wellness side since that was sort of in my origin. And so I got a lot of experience working with a variety of different founders and realized that not just the ability to consult founders but also write checks would be more impactful. So I definitely was always interested in investing, but I don’t think I got a lot of exposure to it having gone so deep on the science side. So I realized that I really wanted to make an impact that way. So I briefly joined another fund. They were a little more generalist impact, and it was there that I started to see women’s health as a huge opportunity. And there was a few companies paving the way, being good examples of companies able to, you know, hit significant milestones and raise at significant valuations. So, you know, Maven being a unicorn in the space, for example, has definitely helped catapult other companies. So I developed the thesis for Coyote and decided that it made more sense for me to raise a fund of my own rather than invest out of a more generalist fund. And so Coyote was born, launched in 2021, and it’s been growing ever since then. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, it’s certainly a really interesting background to this point. One question before we discuss Coyote and the opportunity set there. Working in Impossible Foods in a fund or entity like this that is at really at a point of massive growth, I don’t know whether you would consider it a startup or where it was on that trajectory, but what did that teach you about work practices, innovation, and in a way, what did you learn from there that you now bring into your current venture role? Jessica: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think that there’s so many transferable learnings from being in a startup in a totally new field. Food tech was really emerging at that time, and I think some of the attitudes of Impossible is really translated into what’s hopefully a successful end story. But, you know, it’s already grown and scaled, and it’s already successful by some accounts. It’s still private, so some people confuse it with Beyond Meat, which is public. But I think a few things— one of it, the founder was a really genius biochemist, and you he’s, know, one of the smartest people I worked with. And it took a little training for me to get used to his work style, but a lot of it was like, we’re better off building our own things in our own ways rather than using something that’s already out there, which was definitely a non-conventional way of thinking but really panned out for success for them. So even a small example was I was trying to compile a list of meat flavor compounds, and I was just like, let’s just go and look at which ones are in the publications and make a list and do metadata analysis. And he was like, no, we will use our instrumentation and make our own list. And we ended up doing both. But I thought that that was, you know, a new way of thinking of like, oh, we’re doing it all ourselves. And even some of the ways we built databases were all internal. And so I do think that there’s room for collaboration at the same time. But I do think that in some ways it’s like sometimes the best way is to do it yourself. And so seeing founders who have sort of that ability is really important. And I think just understanding the level of innovation, it’s definitely just a training that I’ve received being from Impossible and being around really innovative companies. I think that there’s a lot of companies that are slightly improving something, or maybe they’re just plugging in like one simple technology and it’s not a pure innovation. So I think the definition of Coyote is understanding what we define as an exciting innovation that can change the future versus something that is kind of just a Band-Aid. Aoifinn Devitt: Really interesting. I gotta latch onto that. Like, what is here to last, essentially? What’s gonna be the, that, that changes? One quick thing though, just again on mindset, did you learn anything from working inside a, a successful startup to full-scale company in that way about the mindset that’s needed and about the founder always necessarily being the one who can take it along a growth journey and about the mindset of the employees that is optimal? Inside a group like that? Jessica: Yeah, there was a lot of amazing teamwork, especially in the beginning. We didn’t have really as much defined roles. And so even my very first day at the company, they were like, yeah, wear some clothes you don’t care about. We’re going to be out in the fields harvesting plants. And yeah, I was like, yeah, I don’t need to be in a lab because my title is research associate. And I think that’s a lot of what you learn as well and how you can qualify some people that we think could be talented but have had their whole careers in more corporate roles might not always understand. I think the phrase is overused, but, you know, wearing multiple hats, I think that that’s definitely something that’s really needed and not have the attitude of like this, you know, assembling IKEA furniture for the office, for example, like that’s not below us, it’s like teamwork. Aoifinn Devitt: I love it. And now let’s move to Coyote. So let’s talk so about, what’s your mission there and your overarching goal? Jessica: Yeah, so our mission is improving lives of people who have been overlooked and really focused on women for our first fund. But I think you can see how that can really grow. A lot of places where women have been overlooked is intersectional with women of color as well. So a lot of the health disparities for women are worsened for BIPOC. And so we’re really looking to have a lot of ways in which we’re improving women’s lives and lives of all people overlooked. But starting there, and what would be. Aoifinn Devitt: Some of the technologies that excite you today, or innovations that you’re either looking at that are in your portfolio or maybe might make their way in? Jessica: Definitely. We’re heavily focused on digital health right now and have a big thesis around what makes a successful digital health company. And so when COVID hit, it really accelerated adoption of telehealth. But at this point, a lot of the companies that may have been overvalued in telehealth, telehealth for XYZ, haven’t fully moved the needle. And so what we’re seeing right now is telehealth may be a component, but there should be like an entire digital platform that’s defined the health outcomes that they’re improving. So one example is a company we invested in called Malama Health, and they’re working on Solutions for high-risk pregnancies, and their first use case is gestational diabetes. So when someone’s diagnosed with gestational diabetes, they have to measure their blood glucose many times a day, write down every, you know, everything they eat, any exercise. So obviously opportunity to make an app for that. So this isn’t just a D2C app though. They’re an entire platform that has a consumer angle, but also that data integrates with their healthcare provider. EHR, and they’re working with, you know, payers. So this is paid for. And the bottom line of why I went into all that example is that they’re measuring health outcomes. And so they’ve actually been able to show over a 30% reduction in preterm births, which is also associated with a lot of other sort of less risk for long-term diabetes risk, less risk for cardiovascular risk. And the payers are not paying for C-sections instead of natural delivery. So what we really like about this company as an example is they can use telehealth as part of the platform, but really it’s more about holistic health and how they’re interacting with patients every day because patients are not seeing their doctors every day. There’s other things that happen in between doctor’s visits. So how do you intersect on a lot of these daily activities to optimize health and also prove that you’re optimizing health at the same time. Aoifinn Devitt: And what would you say is the current state of investment in women’s health? Clearly you have highlighted it as an area of opportunity. Do you think it gets the same attention on the venture capital field? Jessica: Well, it depends on what you’re comparing it to, but no, not really. I mean, even Rock Health has put out within digital health how many solutions are focused on women. And so it is pretty low. I’ll find the exact number, but it is underrepresented in venture funding. And even within the venture funding that women’s health is receiving, it’s mostly still focused on maternal health and fertility. And I know I just gave a maternal health example, and it is very important to optimize for maternal health, but there’s so many other areas of women’s lives that are not getting funded. Another company we invested in is Betterleaf. They’re focused on bereavement care. I just was thinking about how little resources go into, you know, end-of-life care, for example. And so they do sort of disproportionately impact women. So there’s definitely need for more investment, although I would say it is a very strong and growing subcategory of health, but it should represent more since there’s just so many areas of health that affect women. And it’s not just maternal health. It’s also like autoimmune disease impacts 80% of women and receives very little funding. So, you know, it can be a problem in the investment community, but also in the R&D community. So the White House now has launched $12 billion of funding in the US. They’ll be able to fund projects internationally as well. So the first initiative is the Sprint for Women’s Health by ARPA-H, which should be committing about $100 million. And this is focused on R&D, which they’re definitely focusing on what R&D projects could translate into fundable enterprises as well. Aoifinn Devitt: And of course, there are other ways of raising visibility, and sometimes it comes down to an individual level. And recently on LinkedIn, a real estate agent has announced proceeds of real estate sales that she will allocate to creative ventures, which was great not only to underscore the underinvestment in the space but also to highlight the work that you’re doing. Can you talk a little bit about that and other ways that you’re raising visibility? Jessica: Yeah, yeah, that was Melinda Moore. She’s selling some real estate in LA and growing her reach in which area she’ll be representing. So definitely was a really innovative way to raise awareness around She’s working also with some celebrities like the former model mentioned in the article that might not have on their radar investing in venture. And a lot of folks do tend to think of, you know, helping people as philanthropy only. So it is important to raise awareness that we do make positive impact and we do report on both impact metrics and diversity of our portfolio., but it’s, you know, you can make returns on it at the same time. And so that’s a really important message to reach, especially as women who wanna make impact are coming into more and more wealth and will be majority holders of new generation of wealth. And so it is important to get the message out in many different ways. And Melinda found a very creative way to do it. So excited. Aoifinn Devitt: It was, it was great. And just to get technical for a little bit in terms of the opportunity around a venture opportunity, I suppose what would be the entry points for, is it angel investors, institutional investors, as well as what kind of returns and time horizon do you think in this area, not your fund in particular, but just in this area that investors need to bear in mind? And given the sort of size and what stage are you investing in, what kind of exits, I suppose, do you think are on the horizon? A lot of questions in there. Jessica: Definitely in the weeds a little bit, but we’re operating as a traditional venture fund, so we have the traditional 2 and 20 and 10-year fund life, which these days does typically get extended about 2 years. And one reason we are focusing on digital health is that a lot of these technologies can be scalable more quickly. I do think if you ask people who are investing in more biopharma, I tend to think that costs a lot more and takes longer. But we have seen examples of digital health companies that can exit and that 8 to 10-year horizon at over a billion-dollar exit. So we are targeting those types of returns that could return the whole fund. So it is hard when you look at it, like how many companies can achieve that and what the amount takes to return the fund when you assume somewhere between 50 to 75% do not. It comes down to the power law of depending on a few companies less than 20%, but realistically more like 1 to 2 out of the 25 to 30 we’ll invest in will hit that target return. And so that’s why we do have to be pretty strict looking at financial projections of companies, even though yes, they are made up, they are made up with logic and thoughtfulness, hopefully. And if they’re not, then I’m sort of like, how can you return that if you don’t even have a goal? So Hopefully that answers your question. Aoifinn Devitt: Yeah, absolutely. And then just here to take the question a little further about visibility and attention, we’ve spoken about the fem health area. How about as a venture capitalist in an emerging fund? We met actually at a Women in VC conference, I believe, and those events are great in terms of raising awareness of women in VC. How would you maybe characterize what it’s like for a woman in VC right now in terms of the fundraising experience, the level, percentage going into female founders, female venture capitalists? Do you have any sense of that? Jessica: Yeah, of course. And I’m trying to move away from some of the language because I think it’s unfortunate, but it might be overstated about the 2% funding going to female founders. Like, our track record is to make an impact in there where all of the CEOs we’ve invested in have been women, and we don’t actually have a mandate. So we’re working really hard to fix that and co-investing with preferred female emerging managers for the most part. So I’m trying to move away from language of how hard it is. I even talked to men and it’s hard for them. So this downturn has really had a negative impact for now. And there was one man who raising a fund of funds who told me only 4% of fund managers raising are hitting their fund targets. So I don’t want to harp on it being the fault of a woman. But I will say in my experience, women are raising less, you know, target fund size than men, and it’s taking longer. So those are my observations. I don’t want to be negative about it. I definitely wish I had a larger fund size and more AUM and quicker to raise, but I’m not alone in that wish. So hopefully by raising awareness and great podcasts like yours and other ways to reach people that this will continue to improve. Aoifinn Devitt: And I know your involvement is passive in Portfolia, but is there anything that your work there has taught you about this landscape or the experience of other founders or women seeking to back founders? Jessica: I think it’s really important to bring this up because I’m a passive LP in one of their funds and definitely wanna support their work as much as I can. What I do like about what they’re doing is they created these sub-$10 million funds. And the reason in the US to do sub-$10 million is you can have a maximum of 250 investors. If you’re above $10 million, it’s 99. I have no idea why that’s the law, but what that did was create a lot of opportunity for minimum check size being $10,000. And so a lot of first-time LPs are coming in through portfolio and learning the ropes. And what they really focus on is education about women investing specifically. So they’ll have calls where they have the founders pitching, they have anyone can volunteer as contributing to diligence. So we’re not setting up our fund in that way because we’re less focused on education, but we do have a lot of LPs you who, know, learned the ropes at Portfolya and became comfortable investing larger check sizes than that. So I definitely appreciate the community that they have cultivated. And I think they’re doing really great work. Aoifinn Devitt: And I think I’ve spoken to other people who work with similar organizations and so much of it’s about empowerment, education, and just basically the network effect of becoming either an angel investor or a backer of entrepreneurs. You actually build a network, you build credibility, and there’s a, a great snowballing that can happen there. So networking is definitely key. That was actually, it was another podcast guest we discussed that. So I’d love to move now to some reflections. So looking back at your career so far, at your experience as a venture capitalist and working with founders, any lessons learned, setbacks maybe that you’ve learned lessons from? Jessica: Yeah, I mean, one is this is all about working with people. And in my career, I do think there are times I reflect on people I’ve worked with that I, I wish that we would have maintained better relationships even back 10, 15 years ago. And there are some that I, I maintain good relationships with and some that I feel like were a little bit of missed opportunity of maintaining a good relationship there. And so I think that that’s one lesson learned is even all the way back to graduate school in your first career or your first job is always doing your best and forming good relationships with the people you’re working with. And I think lots of setbacks in terms of feeling setback, but not actually being setback, being confused. Like every time I left an opportunity, like leaving the PhD program or quitting at impossible. A lot of it is, am I doing the right thing? Just questioning what’s next. Is this risk worth it? And yeah, I think that I would’ve been feeling a lot better if I could have like relaxed a little bit more and, and trusted the process a little bit more. Aoifinn Devitt: And in terms of any mentors, we’ve spoken a lot about the importance of mentors. Did you have any sponsor, mentor? I know you mentioned some people in your college days who maybe affected your path, but anyone or even a role model that has affected your career path in any way? Jessica: I think a lot of small ones. I wish I could point to just one person that was a major one, but I think I have a lot of small ones and a lot of ones who might not even fully realize their importance. Like I mentioned, early freshman year professors, even all throughout college being also a philosophy major, some of those professors. And then, you know, in graduate school, I do keep in good touch with my PI who was leading the lab. He was a great influence. I think founder of Impossible and some of the colleagues there are great influences. I don’t always do a good job communicating back and saying their importance, but yeah. And then a lot of people that I don’t actually know that I’ve followed and read about can be influential. And I would say in my personal life, some friends that I admire and even some yoga teachers. I actually have two yoga teacher trainings under my belt and went to India for a while. So a lot of people from that community and, and teachers from that community as well. Aoifinn Devitt: Definitely the yoga teachers have a font of wisdom that runs very deep. Our last question is around any words of wisdom, creed, or motto that you live by. Anything you can leave us with there? Jessica: Yes, the yoga reference just led into that. I read this book a while ago and this phrase really stuck out to me. It’s very silly, but it’s, why settle for a banana when you can have nirvana? And it’s just kind of silly. It was like my mantra the first time I ran a marathon. It’s just like, I don’t know, it’s like a phrase that chose me, but I, I think it is kind of a theme of Having not settled and having trusted, you know, wherever I sort of have jumped off cliffs without knowing where to land, I guess. But yeah, that, I think that mantra was supporting me there, even though it sounds pretty silly when I say it out loud. Aoifinn Devitt: I love it. Well, let’s all keep striving for nirvana. Jessica, it’s been such a pleasure to hear from you the mission behind Coyote and what drives you, the quest to raise visibility, bring funding, and really bring into the foreground these issues that are important important to all of us, and that I think we have to amplify over and over again. So thank you so much for the work you’re doing, for the network you’re building, and for sharing your insights here with us. Jessica: Thank you. It’s been really great talking with you as well. Aoifinn Devitt: Thank you for listening to this podcast made in collaboration with Monumental Me and 50 Faces Productions. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring professionals and their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This episode is supported by PIMCO, a global leader in active fixed income with deep expertise across public and private markets. PIMCO invests their clients’ capital in income and credit opportunities that span the liquidity spectrum, leveraging their decades of experience navigating complex debt markets. Their flexible capital base and deep relationships with issuers have helped them become one of the world’s largest providers of traditional and alternative investment solutions at a valued financing partner. Visit pimco.com to learn more. What does the study of chemistry and chemical bonds have to do with the world of investing and connecting with the ultimate beneficiaries of all of this work? Hear from our next guest how she implements this in a thought-leading strategy around sustainable investing, impact investing, local impact, and so much more. Jennifer Devine: I’m Aoifinn. Aoifinn Devitt: Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Jennifer Devine, who is head of Wilshire Pension Fund and a thought leader in the field of sustainable investing. Welcome, Jennifer. Thanks for joining me today. Jennifer Devine: Thank you very much for having me. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, let’s start with your background. We’ve known each other for many years, going back to your time at Hampshire Pension Fund. Can you tell us where you studied and how you ended up pursuing a role in pensions? Jennifer Devine: Well, I did actually a largely irrelevant degree in chemistry, and at the end of that, I didn’t want to carry on blowing up things in the lab, so I went to the careers service and they recommended accountancy. And after training in that, I was not satisfied at all working in an accountancy practice. Just working excessive hours, just really so the partner could earn a massive bonus. That didn’t motivate me at all. So decided to move over. There was a role on offer at Hampshire working in the pension fund team that just seemed like a really good fit to me. I didn’t know anything about investments at the time, but I could see it was a really sort of intriguing area. And I felt that I could then sort of use my financial skills and actually also make a difference at the same time by helping to secure the financial futures of loads of hardworking public servants. That was very appealing. To me. Aoifinn Devitt: And already we’re getting to the mission, which has come through very clearly in your work in the LGPS. So, so we’ll definitely come to that. But first, I just want to go back to your origins in chemistry, because I think that often we think these paths are relevant, but often there’s either a scientific knowledge that comes from that, there’s a method to hypothesis testing, etc. And now that you’re so focused on sustainable investing and the net zero commitment that you have and some of the technologies behind that. Have you found that you’ve drawn upon any of your chemistry knowledge at all in some of this evolution of investing? Jennifer Devine: I’m sorry to disappoint you, but in the length of time since I studied it, I’ve forgotten all of it. But you are right, there is a link. I think a lot of people who do science degrees do then sometimes end up in sort of financial services and things like that. I think sometimes it sounds like a bit of a weird comparison, but I think that the world of investments can be a little bit like inorganic chemistry. When you’re looking at the periodic table and all the different trends and things, there’s lots of competing factors working out why an element might behave in the way that it does. And I think that asset classes can be a bit like that too. There’s all sorts of different moving parts. And so I think not having that sort of clear-cut view of things, but trying to take different viewpoints on how, why things might turn out the way they do, definitely appeals to that scientific part of my brain. Aoifinn Devitt: And then of course, translating all of that complexity to something that can be easily understood, I think is one of your absolute strengths, or you or whoever is covering the communications division at Wiltshire Pension Fund, because that’s, I think, one of the best ways of communicating an investment belief and approach. And let’s just get to that now. So how would you say your investment beliefs have evolved, and when did they start to embrace so wholeheartedly sustainable investing? Jennifer Devine: So I think that that would probably be since I’ve been working for Wiltshire Pension Fund. I think before, when I was part of a team, I wasn’t leading on the strategies, although I was deeply interested in the role that the different portfolios played. I didn’t have that same sort of oversight role, but coming to Wiltshire, I was taking over the investments, being responsible for the whole strategy, just really starting to think about what the fund’s trying to deliver. The LGPS, it’s an open defined benefit scheme, taking on new members now. You know, they might be 18 years old joining the scheme now, it’s still open, they’re going to be around. So our investment horizon is really, you know, looking out 100 years plus. We’re still going to have to be here delivering returns. As well, with all of the public sector organisations that are employers of the scheme, they’ve come under such an immense amount of pressure financially, and with the cost of living crisis, the members too. I think really trying to invest in a way that delivers a sustainable financial future for the fund is so important. We really want the contributions the employers pay to be stable and affordable. There are times when you think they might want a cut in it. I think what they really want is stability, knowing how they can plan their finances, and that’s really important to them. With the long-term investment horizon, you can then really tap into sustainable themes, take advantage of those opportunities, invest in things, not just like making quick trades, but really for the long-term. And that’s when as well, more global things like the issues like climate change and biodiversity really start to become more important as well. Really need to protect the investments from those risks of being overexposed to companies maybe that aren’t prepared to transition and behave in a better way. So it’s about managing those risks, but also there are so many opportunities that come out of that, and that’s where it’s really, really exciting. We see lots of really exciting opportunities to invest in things that will not only help drive the transition, but also benefit from it as well. Aoifinn Devitt: And of course deliver that return that as an open scheme you need. And we’ll get to maybe some of the opportunities in a minute, but could you just set the scene for us a bit about Wilshire Pension Fund in terms of its size, funding level? The maturity of the scheme, maybe cash flow profile? Jennifer Devine: Yes, I can. So we are about £3.3 billion of assets at the moment. We’ve got roughly 85,000 members, and they work for 180 different employer organisations. So it’s quite a complex scheme. We’re very well funded at the moment. Basically, our discount rate that calculates our funding level is based on gilt yields. So where they’ve gone up more recently, the present value of our liabilities has come down, and I think that makes us look artificially better funded perhaps than we really are. So it is healthy, but perhaps it looks extra healthy at the moment. And we’ve still got cash coming in. We have a slight cash surplus from our dealings with members, but I think looking into the future, that is something that is going to change. And it’s something that we’re trying to be quite wary of, maybe in the sort of 3 to 5 year kind of time horizon that things might change for that. And we’ll need to be focusing more on income generating assets, but for now it’s looking quite healthy. Aoifinn Devitt: And I certainly think that’s very prudent to look at that funding level today as being perhaps a slightly artificial phenomenon, easy come, easy go, especially as interest rates look to be heading downwards next. And then how does that translate if we were to look at that sort of pie chart in our heads of asset allocation and going round the wheel in terms of equities, fixed income, alternatives, etc.? What’s your asset allocation on a broad level? Jennifer Devine: Well, it’s obviously evolved an awful lot over the last 5 years. So it was you something, know, just to go back a few years, it was sort of more simplistic. Simplistic in the past, and I think we really have— well, we still really do embrace simplicity. We want the pension fund committee to be able to understand everything that we do, so we don’t want to introduce lots of complex sort of equity protection type things that they would struggle to monitor. So it needs to be very understandable to them, but we’ve made it not more complex, but maybe just more interesting, for lack of a better word. So rather than relying purely on the traditional things and having sort of assets in there like diversified growth funds and stuff, we’re doing more diversification through the types of things that we invest in. So looking at more impactful assets and things like that, at more private markets. So it’s built up a lot more in that area over the last few years. We do still hold a lot of equities, but lots more now in real assets and also portfolios that have more of an outcome-driven objective rather than it just being purely financial returns. It’s a dual mandate. Aoifinn Devitt: So let’s dig into that dual mandate a little bit and talk about some of the local and impact investments that you have carried out, as well as some of those contributing, as you said, to this energy transition. To your net zero targets and to ultimately to sustainable investing future. Can you walk us through some of those opportunities? And I will note also that anyone can follow these, and that’s how I picked up on them, through your fantastic LinkedIn posts, which are often accompanied by pictures, onsite visits, and simple case study translations of what you do. So I think getting back to that, maybe avoidance of complexity, but focusing on communication, very much, I think, a leadership role in that respect. Any opportunities that come to mind, maybe recent ones that have excited you? Jennifer Devine: Oh yeah, there’s so much, it’s hard to pare it down. And thank you for your comments about our communications as well. We’re really keen to build on that and give our members like a sort of a real understanding and pride in what their pension fund money is being invested in. And I think that ties in nicely with some of the more impact-generating assets as well. Those are the ones that are more sort of real to people. So we’ve been spending some time over the last couple of years building up our affordable housing portfolio. It’s not focused super locally, just into the Wiltshire backyard, although some of the assets are in there, because we wanted to make sure that the capital could get you deployed, know, faster. We didn’t have to want to wait or end up with too concentrated a portfolio. So we’ve taken sort of a balanced approach to it, and it’s UK-focused rather than just being in Wiltshire. But that’s been fantastic, and even seeing the manager’s views on that portfolio evolve over the time we’ve been building it up has been great, really seeing the link between how more energy-efficient homes are better homes for people to live in, but ones that will sell faster and get us a better return as well. So it’s just all sort of quite a nice virtuous circle of making things better for everybody. And that has really helped inform our philosophy to impact investing as well. We don’t identify the impact sort of necessarily first. We want to get a certain type of return, and then by investing in these types of properties, That is completely integral to the investment case, the impact that they’re generating. So by investing in homes that are meeting a demand— there’s a shortage of these sorts of homes, it’s meeting a demand, people really want to get into them, there’s long queues, they’re good quality homes— and that means they get sold faster and we get better returns. So it really works for everybody. So that’s been fantastic. But also more recently as well, we’ve been building out our climate opportunities portfolio, which is something I’m really proud of. So that’s a multi-asset portfolio. We’re investing in all sorts of different things, covers everything from listed equities. So in companies that are sort of best placed to benefit from the transitions with a manager that’s got a real sort of academic backing to their investment approach. That’s really exciting. We’re investing in emerging market transition debt. We’re investing in climate tech venture capital. We recently made an enormous commitment to a fund that we built with some other LGPS funds in the Southwest to invest in renewables in the Southwest region, and we’re going to be heading out next next week to visit one of those solar farms, which we’re really pumped about, and you’ll be able to read about that soon on LinkedIn. And then finally, we’re going to be doing some nature, nature-positive investments in there as well. So I’m really, really excited about those. Aoifinn Devitt: And what kind of response have you had when you talk about these climate-positive investments, and then you also communicate them with case studies in a way that investors can understand? How does that land with your beneficiaries and with the other stakeholders? Jennifer Devine: I think it’s landing really well. We had a really positive committee meeting recently where the members were looking at some of the recent case studies that will be going in our upcoming climate report, and you could really feel the pride that they had that their investment decisions had led to these really positive investments. I think that’s pretty fantastic to have that level of buy-in, and the members do find it interesting too. I think sometimes LGPS funds or other funds in general can come up with criticism from their members, what are you doing on climate? And I really think getting out there, getting ahead of that and telling people what you’re you’re doing can really help show that you’ve got nothing to hide and you really are sort of trying to do positive work to drive through improvements. Aoifinn Devitt: Could not agree more about being on the offense essentially rather than the defense, which is always better to positively show what you are doing because it’s often those things get overlooked. And one of the last pieces of the ESG kind of, as it was pyramid, might be diversity and inclusion. And our industry, this is something this podcast focuses on, I know there’s now an Asset Owners Charter whereby we perhaps are playing a little bit of catch-up to some of your peers in the US, etc., some of whom have led with a diversity mandate and they have grids and disclosures required, etc. How do you feel about the level of diversity in the investment industry anyway, and I suppose at the managers that you work with? Jennifer Devine: I think that it’s still an ongoing issue that we need to do a lot about. I think you only have to go for a walk through the City of London at lunchtime and you see Well, I’m not going to go into detail, but you see the core demographic that you would expect to see working in the investment industry. But you know, that, there are a lot of fantastic people coming up from all sorts of different backgrounds. And I think what’s the most important thing is just the representation. So, we want to get our stories out there, women in the industry and other minorities, they need to just sort of be making themselves visible, making themselves heard, and showing people that different viewpoints are really, really important and can lead to better outcomes. And there is a place for people in the industry. We did some nice work on this recently as well. There was International Women’s Day and we really wanted to highlight the pensions gender gap, but we also shared some stories as well. We put out some stories from different managers in our teams, different female leaders, to show people that, you know, no matter what your background, you can sort of find your niche in the world of pensions and investments. Aoifinn Devitt: That was a beautiful piece, again on LinkedIn. And as I said too, I think at the time it almost brought tears to my eyes. It was just so beautiful in celebrating, I think, every piece of this intricate workings that goes to delivering a pension, and then celebrating people who maybe don’t often come to the fore. And I suppose the other thing to note in the LGPS is the high percentage of beneficiaries who are women. And I think that’s important because one of the things that can get lost sight of as we move to ever-increasing consolidation of the industry, and maybe moving away from the ultimate beneficiary as we move things away from local councils, is that accountability piece, and I suppose that constant remembering who this is done for. So I think that linking both your staff to the beneficiaries is very powerful. Jennifer Devine: Yeah, it’s really important. Yeah, you’re right, there’s an enormous number of women in our scheme. I think it’s something like 80%, and a lot of them are part-time workers as well. And through taking their time out with their families and things like that, they’ve really fallen behind in terms of how much pension benefits they have earned. And I think it’s just important that they’re aware of that. And we do encourage them to sort of really get connected to their financial future. That’s the phrase that we’re using at the moment to try and encourage them to log on, see what they’ve got. Is it enough for you? Are you aware of what you’re saving? And are you aware of what an amazingly important benefit the pension actually is? Aoifinn Devitt: Uh, the other thing that you do that I think is quite innovative is in your staffing side. One of the key constraints in local government are resources. And what I notice you’ve done, and some of the, the power behind this phenomenon of your communications piece, are how you perhaps, I think it’s a part-time programme or a programme whereby someone who’s also a student can work with you and build their career that way. Jennifer Devine: Yeah, we really do try and accommodate all sorts of different things. And that’s one of the things that I found amazing when I moved to work at Wiltshire was the amazing flexibility in hybrid working. Like, I still had relatively small children at the time. The youngest one had just started school. I wouldn’t have been able to do this job without the ability to work from home and be flexible. And I really want to promote that for everybody within the team. As well. We have lots and lots of flexible working arrangements, and it enables us to have people in the workplace who wouldn’t otherwise be there, and then we really get to benefit from their skills too. Aoifinn Devitt: And in this podcast series and previous ones, we speak a lot about public service and some of those, suppose, the frustrations that come from the pace at times, or the governance burden, setbacks, challenges. Throughout your career, have there been any such setbacks or challenges that you’ve learned lessons from that you can share here? Jennifer Devine: There’s been lots of things. Yeah, I think the biggest challenge that I have experienced, as cheesy as it’s going to sound, is being a woman in this workplace has probably been the biggest challenge. There’s been lots of times where I feel like I haven’t really been heard within the room and stuff like that. So I feel that now I’m in a position where I can be heard more, would just really encourage other people to make your voices heard and put yourself forward. I mean, there’s been lots of other challenges too. I think that’s probably been the longest enduring one. Aoifinn Devitt: Hopefully one where there will be light at the end of the tunnel, but, you know, certain factors won’t change in that respect. And any high points that you can talk to over the course of this career so far? Jennifer Devine: Yeah, I think the biggest high point has been the ability to just really crack on with what we’re doing at Wiltshire and really just take it to the next level. I’ve had so much support and encouragement to do that in this organization, and when I think about where we’ve come just over the last few years— we didn’t even have, you know, a net zero target at the beginning. We were being good stewards of of our capital, but we weren’t really thinking so much about all of the different work that we could do and really taking the approach forward. And over this time, we have been really lucky to win a couple of awards for our approach to responsible investment. Those were fantastic evenings. It was brilliant to bring the team up. Everyone was just so overjoyed and proud of themselves. And the feeling that it was such a team effort as well was just so rewarding. Aoifinn Devitt: Again, some other great coverage of that on LinkedIn. So that’s been wonderful to see. Was there any mentor or sponsor for you over the course of your career? Some people have them, some people don’t. Jennifer Devine: Yes, absolutely. And you may have met him yourself. There’s a chap called Nick who used to be my boss when I was previously at Hampshire, has just been the best advocate for me. Like, I feel he really, really pushed me. He obviously saw something in me that I didn’t at the time, and he’s just really pushed me to grow. And he’s still here for me now. We still meet up for lunch every month or so, and he’s always got good tips for me and things like that. I feel He’s real like work dad for me, you know, it’s just really nice to have someone on your corner and like sort of push you to do better in the workplace. I think that’s really important. And we’ve got really nice schemes for that sort of stuff at Wiltshire as well. One of the benefits of being part of the wider council is that we have access to all these sort of, you know, mentor and coaching schemes and things. And I really think that people should open their minds and like engage with that sort of stuff, get fresh perspectives. Aoifinn Devitt: And I want to also call out another great, maybe I wouldn’t say necessarily work dad, but certainly a major source of support for me was John Pittum at Hampshire County Council. I’m not sure if you ever overlapped, but he was definitely the spark capital behind kind of a nascent consulting firm that I had back around 2006, 2007, a huge supporter. And I’ll never forget that. And I think that you are carrying that baton by being an important source of spark capital for many of these emerging sustainable investing solutions. So I think that goes on. I’m sorry, many people will consider you the same way I consider John. So, so thank you for that. My last question is around any advice, creed, motto, word of wisdom, advice for your younger self, anything from that collection of ideas that you can leave us with in terms of your career and maybe advice for others. Jennifer Devine: Yeah, I think that when I was first starting out in the workplace 20 years ago, I remember my mum saying to me at the time, like, never turn down any opportunities for learning. And that has just rung in my ears for the last 20 years, and I would never turn down any opportunities for learning. I think it’s so important. When you’re learning things, you’re changing, you’re doing new things, you’ve got fresh ideas, like it brings that motivation and that drive to continuously improve. So I would say that to everybody, yeah, my younger self again, and everybody out there, like, don’t turn down any learning. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, watching your transformation in the industry has been a great privilege, and I’m going to bring it back to chemistry because not only do we have catalysts here, you are a great catalyst for change in the industry and great examples of that given, as I said, on the LinkedIn page, which I keep referring to, which I will link to in the show notes. And the last thing also that I’m gonna get back to chemistry is we talk a lot about bonds in chemistry, and I think you are creating these bonds between the ultimate beneficiary, other stakeholders, their money, and the impact it is having. And creating that connection, as you call it, which leads to better engagement, is one I think of the most formidable and strong bonds that you can create. So thank you so much for being an advocate as you are and for sharing your insights here with us. Jennifer Devine: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn and David, thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This episode is supported by PIMCO, a global leader in active fixed income with deep expertise across public and private markets. PIMCO invests their clients’ capital in income and credit opportunities that span the liquidity spectrum, leveraging their decades of experience navigating complex debt markets. Their flexible capital base and deep relationships with issuers have helped them become one of the world’s largest providers of traditional and alternative investment solutions a valued financing partner. Visit pimco.com to learn more. Rita: It’s my ability to relate and connect. I bring people into rooms. I connect people, and I feel like that’s what our profession needs. And I do this every day, even when I go to an event. Hi, I’m Aoifinn. Aoifinn Devitt: Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Marguerite Cheng, who is CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth based in the Washington, DC area, as well as being a founding member of Kiplinger Advisor Collective and the Authentic Asian. A keen runner, she was co-founder of 261 Fearless, a global nonprofit organization that uses running as a vehicle to empower and unite women, as well as Girls on the Run, where she’s a soulmate. She’s also a podcast host of Margaritas with Margarita podcast, where she shares financial literacy and financial planning advice. Welcome, Rita. Thanks for joining me today. Rita: Thank you so much for having me. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, you have an extensive resume with many chapters within the field of wealth management. Can you briefly walk us through your path to here? Rita: Absolutely. So I graduated with double undergraduate degrees in East Asian language and literature and finance, and it is actually the East Asian language and literature degree that helped me secure my first job in finance. I had the opportunity to work at a Japanese securities firm, and in this role, my job was to read financial statements, work with the analyst team, and write summaries in English. So in this job, I learned how to write in a clear, concise, compliant manner. I did that in my 20s, and it was time to come home to the United States and complete my second degree. And during my time at the brokerage firm, I learned a lot, but I realized something was missing. It seemed very transactional. And while it was fast-paced and I liked learning, I realized that the discipline of personal financial planning more appealed to me. However, I recognized in my 20s, who was going to take me seriously? What does this person know about retirement? So during that time, I put my head down. I read every book I could on personal finance. I helped my husband prepare for the CPA exam because in school I studied accounting and finance, but eventually I just earned my degree in finance. Then we got married, bought a house, had 2 kids. It was at that point in time where I felt, you know what, I feel like I have some street credibility. I am going to join the financial advice profession. So there I was with a 3-year-old— not even 3 years old, almost 3 years old— and a 6-month-old where I said, I’m going to join the profession. So For those people who don’t know me, who think that I may be meek and weak, they don’t understand that I passed 4 tests in 6 weeks with a child who wasn’t even 3 and a child who wasn’t even 6 months old. That takes a lot of determination. So I tell people, just me being in the profession, I already feel like I had to overcome so much. And I tell people, please don’t underestimate people who seem a little bit quiet. Because I’m the type of person where I’m just kind of taking everything in and observing the world. So that’s my story about— I liked what I did, but I felt like something was missing. And I’m so glad that I just took the time to pause, look around the world around me, and be like, you know what, let me learn more about the financial planning profession. And that’s what I did. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, that’s funny. I don’t think anybody would call you weak or meek today, but I can understand that maybe you felt you were perceived that way. And it’s interesting because I do think there’s a lot more learning around this, you know, the concept Susan Cain, Quiet, around introverts and the role they play. And it’s not even if someone is introverted in every setting, but maybe the desire to take things in. And how did you feel back then that suited you to developing business? Because obviously within financial advice, there is the advice component and there is the growing the business component. How did you develop those chops, I suppose, or that skill? Rita: Oh, sure. So this is what’s interesting. I know that sometimes these practices still persist where someone will ask you, who do you know? And you make a list of friends and family. And I remember someone asked me, who do you know? And I think I had 2 or 3 names. They’re like, you don’t know any other people? I’m like, look at me. I have 2 kids, like, under 3. My daughter isn’t even 3. They’re like, what about your parents? I’m like, my dad doesn’t even live in this country. My dad lives in Taiwan. He’s on a long-term consulting project. And the sales manager looked at me like, how are you going to grow your business? I was like, well, I guess I’m just going to have to pick up the phone and make phone calls. Believe it or not, my first year I acquired 33 clients. 31 were from strangers, 32 was from one of the names on my list, and 33 was from my dad. So how did I acquire clients? You know what? I am multiracial, I’m multicultural. I would say My cooking is not my best suit. However, my ability to listen, relate, and connect with people is off the charts because growing up, my grandmother would speak to me in Mandarin. I’d answer in English. I’d go to Mandarin language school. And then there was a period in time where I went to classrooms, not in this country, where I didn’t understand anything in the classroom, but I could observe. I could read what was on the chalkboard and I could listen. And so those are all really good skills for a newbie advisor, the ability to listen and connect. And I know that it was hard. However, I’m the type of person where I’m incredibly disciplined and focused. Even if I hate doing something, I tell myself, okay, even though you don’t like doing this, you have to be the best at this. You have to do your best. And so before phone session, I would walk— this is too funny to be able to do this— I used to walk and get an iced mocha with whipped cream. Now I know that’s a lot of sugar and caffeine, and then you also have the whipped cream. But the thing is, I drink this before a phone session. I had high energy, and it sounded like I really wanted to make these phone calls. That’s half the battle. When you have a smile on your voice and you sound energetic and upbeat, And you have a name like Margarita. I mean, you keep people to like laugh and be like, oh, Margarita, well, I’ll have one of those. And then they warm up to you and you just ask questions and you don’t pester or pry and you build the connection with people. So I would say that I’m not the best salesperson by any means. I am very good at listening. Asking questions and following up. And that’s what really helped me build my confidence. Aoifinn Devitt: Fascinating. I will bear in mind the secret to making the phone call and firing oneself up. But so that’s you entering the wealth management profession. Couldn’t you now comment on the profession itself? How do you think that has evolved since you joined? Do you think it has become more centered around this human connection that you mentioned Has it become more transactional? Is your way a little bit more rare? What would your observations on that be? Rita: So I am really excited about what I see in wealth management, financial advice profession. If we talk about the CFP population, so the number of certified financial planner professionals, we just crossed 100,000. I’m seeing more people under 30 earn marks, meaning the growth rate is faster than we’ve seen in a long time. I’m seeing more women, I’m seeing more people of racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds pursue CFP® certification and join the profession. So for that, I am very optimistic. I do think it’s very important though not to just bring people into the profession, but also help them feel welcome, supported, and included. I’m liking what I’m seeing. Of course I am. It has evolved. And that makes me very proud. This is what I told people. I’m the type of person— I’m working in the profession, but I wanted to leave this profession better for others. It sounds like I’m dying, but I’m not. I was not willing to wait to do that. I’m like, you know what? I’m going to work in this profession, and I’m also going to support, mentor, advocate for people along the way. Sometimes I can feel a little bit overwhelmed, but I also know what really drives me when I feel tired is the emails I get, the message I get. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to help me. Just being that connector, listening to people and supporting them. So for that, I’m very optimistic, and I just think that this is a really amazing opportunity for people to make a difference. Aoifinn Devitt: And when you think about the RIA of the future, what does that look like to you? It’s a quite a fragmented industry right now. And even though we mentioned the shift towards becoming more diverse and human-centric, there’s still advantages to scale and having centralized, say, investment services or trading or other HR functions, et cetera. So advisors like you can keep with that connecting piece. How do you think the industry will evolve? We’re thinking also about the private equity backing that’s out there. Do you see the future REA landscape will look a lot different? Rita: It’s interesting about private equity. We do need investments to grow and scale. I do think that it is going to be important to have different business models and different compensation models. And I’m not just referring to fee versus commission, I’m talking about fee for advice. It could be subscription, it could be engagement, it could be module-based. People might call it like life coaching. Yes, of course, there’s that element to that, but there’s also different types of help that people need. So as an example, like financial caregiving, maybe your parents have a money manager that they like, but they need help with managing their affairs. They don’t want to necessarily outsource that to someone who pays their bills, but How do you put systems and support structure in place to support the parents? Which, by the way, makes good business sense because the parents aren’t going to be on planet Earth forever, and you’re building a connection with the next generation. I’m also seeing the need for an IRA Future Can think about programs for the next generation to learn about money and wealth. The best thing that you can do for a parent is help their child. And sometimes kids don’t want to listen to their parents, right? However, hearing from somebody else about enrolling in employee benefits or setting up a Roth IRA or student loans— so I think the IA Future can be creative in the services they’re offering. It could be on equity compensation, employee benefits, not everyone wants to turn over the management of their portfolio. So if that’s the only way you’re allowing people to access your services and pay for your services, you may not have the opportunity to serve clients, help them grow the wealth, manage the wealth, and then retain the wealth. So I think there’s a lot of opportunities for the RIA of the future. Aoifinn Devitt: That’s fascinating. Just to think even about that module delivery. I suppose the concern is around the amount of free advice that’s out there. But then I suppose we have to question the origins, the veracity of some of that advice, the motivation of that advice. Is it just sponsorship? And then of course, the fact that most free advice on the internet, you have to comb through a million ads to actually get to the meat of the issue. So perhaps there is still a market to pay for that advice out there. In your case in particular, Blue Ocean Wealth Management, what is on your clients’ minds? What topics do you find yourself coming back to over and over? Rita: So I would say if we’re talking about people who are already retired, they are worried about— this is what my client said to me. He’s like, I know I don’t want to outlive my savings, but who would ever thought that living too long is a risk? But I understand. So for clients who are already retired, they’re worried about longevity risk because many of my clients, people who ask me to describe their clients, they are very healthy, active, and fit. We have people who go skiing and play golf like within the same day. We have people who have city bikes and mountain bikes. We have people in their 70s who are working with strength and conditioning coaches. So these clients are healthy. They’re most worried about longevity risk, long-term care, about outliving their savings, right? They have planned and they have protection in place, but still it does like, even if they’re okay, they’re worried about their extended family. Then you have people like me who are Gen X. They’ve saved, but they want to make sure that their kids can launch. I mean, me, I’m worried, are my children going to be able to buy a home if that’s what they want to do? If they choose not to, that’s on them. What about that? And then people who are older Gen Z or millennials, just balancing competing needs and priorities. I mean, I think that comes across for everybody, but people who are, I’d say, anywhere from 5 to 15 years out, they’re worried about balancing the various priorities and navigating. Do I work for a startup where there’s more risk but no benefits, or do I stay in this secure job I mean, these are things that do keep people up at night, and these are things that financial planning— financial planning cannot help. I can’t tell people what to do based on their values or passions and priorities, but what financial planning can do for them is clarify how much they need for them to be able to pursue their passions and priorities. And I’d say at the end of the day, people just want to know, what should I be doing can I do what today to make sure that I’m on track for my goals? So I’d say universally that’s what people are most concerned about, but obviously based on your stage and age of life, that’s of most concern. Aoifinn Devitt: And you have a fun podcast. No pressure. Here I am interviewing a fellow podcast host called Margaritas with Margarita, a fun name. What kind of topics do you cover on that and what kind of response have you had? Rita: So I actually like with hosting too. So the first one was Margaritas with Margarita. It’s a play on my name and it’s personal finance happy hour. There’s a lot of advisors that tune into that. And then there’s Money Minute with Margarita, which is more global. And that is for more business. So there’s topics related to money that we don’t necessarily think about. So here’s what I mean. Couples and money. How do you address aging and talking to your parents? So these are really good question, and listeners like tuning in to hear how other people are handling it. So I didn’t think anybody listened, but I guess they do. They’re like, well, I really like what you said, how you can nudge your parents to plan, because sometimes people don’t plan because it’s not pleasant. But then when you approach these conversations from a place of care, people will turn around. And even someone from college said to me, He’s not a client, so it’s okay that he texted me. He texted me. He’s like, Ritu, when you were a freshman in college, I always thought you were really smart. And I was like, well, that’s good. But now I really think you’re smart. I did exactly what you said when I was talking to my mom, and it totally works. And I was like, so you just tell your parents that Mommy and Daddy, we want to do what it is that you want. I know this is difficult, but it’d be inappropriate for us to decide what you want to do. You don’t need to make these decisions tomorrow, but help us help you. And remember, we love you and we know this is hard. And he’s like, you know what? I did it with my mom and it was so well received. So these are the types of things that people are really enjoying listening to. Also, how do you talk to your spouse or partner about money, kids and money? So all these topics that can be awkward and uncomfortable, but how we make the uncomfortable comfortable. I think that’s been really well received. Aoifinn Devitt: So interesting. And so really resonates, I think, in terms of overcoming taboos and giving the comfort, the space to do that is so key. I’d love to talk also about some of the work you do around diversity. And we could talk about women in this as well as the Asian population, given the work you do with Authentic Asian. Again, you said you’re encouraged by the changes you see in the profession and in the community. And of course, that’s not just on the client side, but the advisor side as well. The whole place is becoming more inclusive. I suppose, what do you do in particular that you find is helpful there? Do you have group discussions, affinity groups? Do you recruit, help with recruiting, help with mentorship? Rita: So what I do is I try to make myself available to individuals who are interested in the profession. Sometimes I might do it in a group setting, and other times I just say, hey, if you have any questions, you want to reach out, It’s been very well received because sometimes people want to ask a question, but they prefer to ask it in a more private setting. I think mentorship is important. We also talk about sponsorship, right? The other thing that I think is key, there’s a connection between mentorship and sponsorship, and sponsorship, you usually see that within an organization. I think one of the things that I’ve encouraged other people to do is be that connector. There’s a bridge between mentorship and sponsorship, but if you know of somebody, making that introduction, because people who aren’t already in the profession may not know the things that we take for granted. So whether that is an email introduction to someone or sharing a link to a podcast or inviting them to an event with you, Now that we’re no longer on lockdown and people are gathering at events, what I do is I might invite someone to an event with me, and if I can’t be at that event, I will coordinate and I’ll make sure that they have like a buddy to greet them. This is something that I’ve actually taught my kids. They are not in the profession. Never want anybody to sit at a conference or an event alone. I want them to remember that Margarita introduced them and they left this event with 3 new names and 3 new friends. So when they come back, they don’t feel alone. And this has been very well received. The other thing that I also do to support the profession is for people who are younger and newer to the profession. I said younger and newer because there could be people that are newer to the profession that may not be younger. So that’s why I say younger and newer to the profession. We talked about being that connector, but also asking them how you can best support them, whether that’s like writing a letter of recommendation for an industry award, nominating them, even if they don’t win, the fact that you have been intentional and proactive in supporting them. And when they do win, it makes you feel good because you’ve contributed to their success. So that’s what I would say. It’s very important. There’s one thing I can say to people, We all can do a little bit to make a difference, and I want you all to have the abundance mentality. Me taking the time to write a letter of recommendation for someone else so they have this opportunity is not taking anything away from me. If anything, it’s actually elevating the profession because it’s creating a culture of giving and support. Aoifinn Devitt: It’s so interesting because all of that, that wraparound, that little extra piece you speak about, it reflects to me the importance you put on following up before. Because following up is that extra piece at the end of an interaction that often gets forgotten. And you actually need no training in that. It’s the most obvious natural closing of a relationship that should happen. And I’ve never heard anyone say before that they pay attention to ensure that nobody is sitting alone at an event and that they feel included at the event. But so many people would simply stop at inviting someone to the event. But it’s the lack of follow-up then can make the vast difference between the event being a warm success or something that makes them feel excluded or less a part. So really interesting how that little gesture can make such a difference. I’d love to ask also, speaking of gestures that make a difference, so you have many board roles and very involved in many industry organizations. Given that many of us would like to sit on more boards and see that as a way of giving back, what do you think makes a good board director or chair in your view? Rita: Sure, thank you for the question. The first thing I would say is thinking strategically and taking the time to understand the organization. That’s the first thing. The second thing is once you think strategically and you understand the organization, think about the unique skills or talents you have, right? And then also think about your areas of interest. I think that’s all really foundational. And then once you’re on the board, recognize that you speak as one voice. So once a decision is made, it’s important to have unity in that decision. It takes time to get there. I talk about myself, right? I remember I interviewed for a board position, and they’re like, why you? What makes you so great? And I was like, well, first of all, I don’t think I’m so great, but the reason why I’m here— I was like, because if I came here and thought that I told you I think I’m so great, you’d think I’m arrogant, and you’re like, oh, she’s arrogant. I said, but let me tell you what I really believe that I can bring to the table here. It’s my ability to relate and connect. I bring people into rooms. I connect people, and I feel like that’s what our profession needs. And I do this every day, even when I go to events. The other thing that I think sold them— I was like, I’m actually an introvert. I’ve taken personality tests, and I actually lean slightly more towards introversion, but that doesn’t mean I don’t talk to people. I’ll come to an event, and it’s not cheesy. I’ll introduce myself, and once people do that, they’ll see that 4 other people introduced myself. I was like, so that’s exactly why you need me in this room. And I did get the board position, not because I was arrogant. I was like, here’s what I can do, and here’s what I have done, and here is what I will do for you. And so I think that that comes across as sincere and genuine. But don’t think that you want to just be on the board to put it on your resume, but think about the mission of the organization, the strategy, and how you can best support that. Aoifinn Devitt: Wonderful. Well, I’d like to come to some personal reflections now. So we know we’ve had some, quite a lot of reflection already around the personality that works well in certain circumstances and how you can make a difference. We talked, it’s been a very positive trajectory as we’ve discussed, but not without its hardships at the beginning. Were there any particular setbacks or challenges that you experienced in your trajectory so far that you learned lessons from? Rita: Sure. So the first thing that I learned is to advocate for myself. It wasn’t easy. I had to advocate for myself, and I was very careful how I went about it. So here’s what I mean. I told you when I first joined the profession, my eldest daughter was not even 3, and my son wasn’t even 6 months old, and I hadn’t even had my third kid. I knew that there was really nobody who looked like me. I’m not just talking about age, race, ethnicity, gender, right? I didn’t see any working moms. I didn’t see any working moms of racial or cultural ethnic diversity. But there were times when I encountered difficulty. So here’s what I mean. The sales manager said to me, he’s like, you’re a lousy financial advisor. You might want to rethink this. You spend too much time asking questions, listening. Now I didn’t cry. I didn’t mouth back. I just kind of was quiet. And this is the power of being quiet and not reacting. I just took it all in. And I thought about it. And I didn’t think about it where I was angry, where I let it eat at me. I really reflected. That’s who I am. I reflected. And I said, you know what? He is right. I am lousy for what he wants me to be. I will never be loud, pushy, aggressive. So he’s right. His perception of what a successful financial advisor looks like and sounds like and acts like, I will never live up to that. He’s right. I’m lousy. However, for what I want to be, I am who I am. And that’s when I realized that we both can be right about the same thing. But it was very, very difficult for me. I’m not going to deny it. There were times when, like, I felt all alone. I didn’t want my family to know what I was experiencing. And I kind of just, you know, I was like, I can’t let people down. I need to be successful, not for me, but for my clients and for the people who come after me. So I have to be strong and I have to get through this. I’m not just being successful for me, but I want people to know that people who look like me whose experiences are like me can still be successful in this profession too. So yes, it was very difficult, but I knew that once I changed the mindset, I wasn’t combative and I leaned into my inner strength. I’m like, my strength is the ability to relate and connect with people. I’m not pushy. He’s right. Like, I’m lousy. But guess what? I’m right too. And I would say that that was hard. Aoifinn Devitt: Amazing self-reflection to do that and not to be combative, as you said, to push back. Besides somebody like that who clearly did have an influence on you because he caused you to reflect, were there any mentors that had maybe a positive influence that were the role model that you’re seeking now to be to others? Rita: Absolutely. So people always ask about mentorship, and mentorship can be formal or it can be informal. It can just be organic. So one of my mentors graduated from a university, University of Maryland College Park, and was in a co-ed service fraternity as I was, just different generation. And he took the time to give me career advice. And here’s what he told me. There’s 3 things. He said, first, Rita, I know you’re very busy, but I need you to join the professional associations. “now when I say you join, you’re not just going to pay your dues. You need to get involved.” I was like, “Okay.” Then he’s like, “I know you love to read. I want you to keep on reading. The other thing I want you to do is I want you, even if your opinion is different, to reach out to reporters and journalists and be positive. Tell them how much you like what they wrote, right? And if there’s something you feel like they missed, do it in a way that’s nice.” I followed his advice. And then he said, “Remember that I told you I read? I know you love to read. You read like a machine, Rita.” I need you to read what your clients are reading, whether you agree with it or not. So he told me all those things, and I did all of them. Then there was another mentor. When I had joined the professional association, he saw that I was really good with people. He invited me to serve on the board of directors, and I said to him, I said, you know, I just passed the CFP exam. This was almost 20 years ago. Do you think I’m qualified? And he said this, and this is what I tell people. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. I was thinking that I wasn’t qualified because I had literally just taken the CFP exam and you have to go through this background check to be able to use the marks. He’s like, you’ll be fine. You’re the type of leader that our organization needs at this time. So those two mentors definitely helped me and I tried to be that person to people who reach out. The other thing I tell about mentorship is they were older white men, and their story and their journey was a little bit different, but both of them were really mindful of knowing that what they did might not work for me, but hey, here’s 3 things that you can do that will be helpful for you. So you can join an association. I know you like to read, Rita, continue reading. I know that you like writing, reach out to those people. Another one is like, you’re really good in bringing people together, so I’m going to invite you to serve on this board. Your job is to be membership director. All you need to do is talk to people and bring people into the chapter. And both of them like really helped my confidence because I’m like, even though like I’m newer to the profession, I have something of value to give. And so I always try to see that in others. And create opportunities for others. Aoifinn Devitt: You certainly do pass it on. Well, closing thoughts. My last question is around any key piece of advice. You seem to have got lots, and we’ve already shared a lot in here. Any one thing maybe that you could tell your younger self? Any word of wisdom to leave us with? Rita: Oh, sure. Absolutely. So I sometimes I was afraid to ask for help. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, right? Sometimes, especially I can say this My dad was born in China, left China for Taiwan, worked so hard to get to America. Yes, many people helped him along the way, but sometimes we feel that if we ask for help, it’s a sign of weakness. My dad didn’t tell me not to ask for help. That’s not where I’m going with this, but sometimes there are cultural perceptions of how we grew up. But just remember, when you accept help, you don’t have to do everything that person is telling you, but when you don’t accept help, you are depriving someone of the opportunity to help you. And as much as you can benefit from the help, that person benefits as well. So that’s something that I learned early on, and I wish I could have told myself early because I was scared, rightfully so. I didn’t see anybody like me. I didn’t want people to think I was incompetent, incapable. But once I realized, I was like, hey, you know, there’s lots of people who want to help you. And it’s okay to be open to their help. You don’t have to implement their help, but at least be open, have open heart and mind to their help. So that’s what I would tell myself. Aoifinn Devitt: I love it. Well, I think you used the word meek earlier and it brought to mind the expression, the meek shall inherit the earth, because I do think that this quiet power that you have expressed through your career and how it has worked so well for you and also by association for so many others that you’ve had contact with, and now hopefully all the listeners of this podcast too. It has been so powerful to hear how you have forged and made a, a career for yourself within financial planning, and thank you so much for sharing your insights with us. Rita: Thank you so much for having me. Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This episode is supported by PIMCO, a global leader in active fixed income with deep expertise across public and private markets. PIMCO invests their clients’ capital in income and credit opportunities that span the liquidity spectrum, leveraging their decades of experience navigating complex debt markets. Their flexible capital base and deep relationships with issuers have helped them become one of the world’s largest providers of traditional and alternative investment solutions a valued financing partner. Visit pimco.com to learn more.

Penny Green: One is never ask anybody to do something that you yourself wouldn’t do. One is to know yourself and know your strengths. Someone pointed out to me a long time ago, they said that this is a really big ask. And I said, but I’m not asking anybody to do something that I wouldn’t myself be able to do. Said, yeah, but you can do things so much more quickly than other people. And I hadn’t recognized that. So I think recognize your differences in working style, treat people as you would like to be treated yourself, respect people, and in the pensions arena, put members at the heart of what you’re trying to do, and that will bring it all together. I’m Aoifinn.

Aoifinn Devitt: Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Penny Green, who’s retiring from the investment industry at the end of this month following an over 30-year career. She started her career in pensions in 1987, spent a long stint at TPAS where she was Deputy Chief Executive when she left, then became Chief Executive of SOL where over the past 4 years I’ve had the privilege of working with her on the Investment Committee. Upon retiring from the Chief Executive role in 2014, she became an independent trustee with Best Trustees and her portfolio included a trustee role at SOL and chair of an organisation focused on raising standards of pension administration. She was President of the Pensions Management Institute for over 2 years. Welcome, Penny, thanks for joining me today.

Penny Green: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, let’s start with a bit about your background and how you ended up pursuing a role in the investment world and pensions in particular. Can you just take us through the start of your career and were there any surprising turns in there?

Penny Green: Well, I suppose in some ways my career in pensions started, I’m not unusual in this, it started almost by accident. I actually didn’t know anything about pensions or investment, but I saw a job advertised in HR and applied for that, and the company contacted me and said, well, we’ve got another job for you in pensions which is paying £500 a year more. Would you be interested in that? And bearing in mind that I was not being paid at that time, in ’87, I think my salary had just scraped over £10,000 a year, an extra £500 a year made a big difference. So I said, yes, thank you very much, I will I will take that. I went through the interview process, got the job, and discovered that I was going to be working in pensions, which I did know about. But we were going— the pensions world was going through a massive upheaval at that time because we were transitioning from an era where membership of pension scheme was compulsory, and that was being abolished from the 1st of April 1988. So I joined this firm in 1987, at the back end of the year, and within 4 months was presenting the pension scheme, the new pension scheme, to the employees who previously had been in a non-contributory scheme, and the scheme had been completely rechanged before my time, and presenting them this new contributory scheme. And that’s how I ended up in pensions, and I absolutely loved it. It’s highly technical, which it obviously is. It’s much, much more complicated now than it was then, but it is highly technical. But you’ve got that huge people element, which is so engaging. It doesn’t really matter what you do if you’ve got a retirement. Each retirement is different because everybody’s experience of their work and what have you is different. And I just love that combination of the highly technical stuff and the human element and found my niche and took it from there.

Aoifinn Devitt: And it’s great because listening to you at retirement speaking about this members-first mission, and drive that’s always guided you through this career. How would you say that developed then, and how has that kind of evolved and as a center of why you do this?

Penny Green: I think, you know, I’ve always wanted for people to understand, so that was sort of quite important. You know, why are you writing a letter if the person at the end is not going to understand a word you’ve written? You’ve wasted your time. But the members-first thing really came to its fore when I worked at TPAS, when We were looking at complaints, some justified, some not, some less so, but the underlying theme of everything that came through is people just did not understand. And I’m thinking, well, you’re paying for this, you’re paying with your contributions, and even if you’re in a non-contributory pension scheme, your salary has probably been adjusted a bit to reflect that. So you’re paying for this, and yet you don’t understand, and you feel that something’s gone wrong. And then when you did find— and it wasn’t very often, but you did find occasionally real malpractice— that’s absolutely wrong. That’s really not the right way to go. And so having sort of had a member focus to start with, I think my time in TPAS really, really strengthened that and said the pension scheme is here for the members. An employer doesn’t set it up for no reason whatsoever, as employers don’t establish pension schemes because it’s out of the— necessarily out of the goodness of their hearts. There’s a commercial reason for that, as there is for any business making an expenditure decision. There has to be a commercial reason for it. But at the end of the day, the employer is spending a lot of money on this. The members should be put at the heart of it so that they understand the value of that. So I think that’s where it started.

Aoifinn Devitt: And have you found— this is the challenge I’ve heard some other pension industry advocates mention— the challenge of getting member engagement? As you said, they do pay for it, it is directly impactful to them what the outcome is. But do you find that member engagement is difficult to establish?

Penny Green: Oh, it is the perennial challenge. You do get engagement, but invariably it’s probably when it’s too late to make significant changes to what your pension outcomes are going to be, unless you get really lucky with the investment trust. But I think as an industry, we spend an awful lot of money, and I do question how we can change that, the engagement of younger people. But I do also wonder whether we’re not just trying to do the impossible. You know, if you’re 30, you can’t retire now till you’re 68. So that’s a whole lifetime, more than your lifetime ahead of you. And in the meantime, you’ll be grappling with student loan, possibly a mortgage. You’ve got young kids coming up, which are expensive. And something that is not going to happen in your life for over a lifetime away for you. I think it’s very difficult for us to try and say, we know it’s more than your lifetime before this event happens, but actually you should start thinking about it now. I think we beat ourselves up that we don’t get the engagement we should have, but I, I think that we’re being unfair to ourselves because if you look at people’s lifetimes and, and people’s lives, what they’re experiencing, something that’s going to happen a long time off is really not high priority. You know, it’s like if I’m going on holiday in 3 years, you know, I might be planning a holiday for 3 years off. I’m not actually going to put an awful lot of thought into that, as opposed to the one that I’m taking in 3 months.

Aoifinn Devitt: It makes perfect sense, and you’re right, there is a bit of beating oneself up about it. I suppose that places then the onus onto the trustees to do their part.

Penny Green: Yeah, I think it is. You know, I’m not saying let’s just sit on our hands and do nothing. I think that’s absolutely wrong. But I think we just need to reflect the audience that we’re looking for. And technology is fabulous now. I mean, when I started, we would write to people, we’d write a letter, and then they would have to write back. And occasionally, if it was urgent, you’d phone. An awful lot of stuff that was produced was written as if it’d been written in the 1970s. I mean, it just wasn’t engaging. We weren’t telling people much about their pension schemes. The first change in that was really when we had what we called the disclosure regulations, which I’ve never really liked the expression disclosure, but someone pointed out to me that when we disclose something, it’s almost like we’ve got some information and we’re just going to give you a little bit of it, we’re disclosing a bit to you, rather than actually telling people what they need to know. So I think we do need to, as trustees, think about what information we’re giving. People and addressing the audience. And now the technology allows you to sectionalize and compartmentalize your membership so that you can change the messaging of what you’re doing and try and find those hooks that will get people interested.

Aoifinn Devitt: And that’s a great segue to just a discussion of a little bit of pensions industry, where we are today in terms of state of play. You’ve spoken about evolution and would like to think it’s in a state of constant improvement, continuous improvement, evolution, especially with technology. But regulatory oversight and reach has increased as well, the burden on the trustee has increased as well. Where would you say now, as you leave the industry, we are in terms of the right balance and thinking about the regulatory burden as well?

Penny Green: So looking at it from the member engagement perspective, I think the regulatory burden is just too much. It bemuses me. We all know, doesn’t matter whether you’re a civil servant or working at the regulator or a trustee or just a normal person going about their daily lives. We all know that if you give people more information, the more confused they get, and the less likely it is that someone will read something. I mean, if you go to a supermarket and you’ve got a choice of 4 washing liquids, then that’s easy to make the choice. If you’ve got a choice of 30, it’s impossible. That’s just normal human experience. And yet the regulatory environment is such, particularly when it’s about talking to members more is better than less. And I think the TCFD report is a prime example. The authors want it to be accessible to members, and when you look at the sheer length of it and the complexity of it, no member is going to be reading that, let alone understanding what they’re reading. And I think the regulatory environment has lost its way when the regulator asks for more information to be provided for members and That’s not working, that’s not helping us at all. There was a reason why in the ’80s we started doing member annual reports, because members were not reading the formal report and financial statements from the trustees, so we did a summary of it. And then the regulators got involved with that by saying, if it’s a summary, then you need to check that it’s accurate and it’s not misleading members. And it stems from a good motivation—you don’t want members to be misled—but it ends up when actually I think they probably are because they’re just not reading anything. But when it comes to actually how we run our business, how we as trustees, I think we’re probably about where we ought to be. But I do think that we are going to see an awful lot more regulation coming down the line, and I do question whether that is going to add value, particularly when you’re in DB world. Then fundamentally, the employer will be picking up those costs. But actually now, the more cost you heap onto DC through regulation, through demands on trustees, that directly impacts the member bottom line. And I am not convinced that what I think is going to happen is going to be value-additive to members. And in DC, that really matters, right?

Aoifinn Devitt: Every basis point counts, of course. And just speaking of being a trustee, so you mentioned this additional regulatory burden and How do you think that’s going to affect the attractiveness of this role and the burden, I suppose, of continuous education and training?

Penny Green: I think it will make being a trustee much less attractive. One of the really great things that I’ve found is, is getting the lay trustee, particularly from the membership, involved. And you look at what’s required to be a trustee now and the professionalisation of trusteeship And I think that we are in danger of losing that member engagement because it is complicated, it’s difficult. You look at the investment universe, particularly when you’re looking from the DC perspective, and for members, you know, lay trustees, to get to grips with that on top of their day job, I think is becoming an increasingly challenging objective. But equally, there aren’t enough professional trustees around to fully professionalise the trustee board, so I think there’s a big challenge that we face with the regulatory burden, the requirement on training, on education, on keeping up to date. I think that we have got to keep that member involvement, which I found personally throughout my pensions career, so positive. It’s really value-additive to members because it comes back down to members at the heart. It just reminds you who you’re being a trustee for.

Aoifinn Devitt: And of course, it then pushes some burden back to advisors to translate this into plain English and conduct the training. But the more advisors we add to the mix, again, the more the cost burden. Let’s ask a few questions now just about your leadership style and your ascent to that leadership, because that was remarkable over the course of time. It gets to get into the deputy CEO role. Was that an intentional progression on your part, or how did that work until you got to the CEO position ultimately?

Penny Green: I would not describe myself as an ambitious person, although I think there are a lot of people that would disagree and say that I don’t know myself very well from that perspective. All I ever tried to do was to find a job that interested me and stimulated me. So I’d got to the point prior to joining TPAS, I’ve got to the point where I felt that there was nothing more for me to learn in the previous role, and I saw the TPAS job and applied for it and got it, which was fabulous. And it was such a— it was a massive step change in many ways. Partly there was the responsibility of running the business, which coming from a larger organisation to a much smaller one was a big change, and I’d loved that bit. I found that I enjoyed doing that. But TPAS looks at every sort of pension fund. So I’d gone in being, you know, knowing contracted-out final salary pension schemes inside out and upside down, to discovering that actually there’s only one part of the pensions obviously we know that now, but I went into that quite naively, I think. And I found that, you know, learning was very stretching, it was very challenging, but I thoroughly enjoyed that. But after 5 years, frankly, I’d got fed up with members as complainants, because every member that contacted us was complaining about something. And I wanted to go back to a role where I could talk to members as members. And so I looked around and found the job at SOUL, applied for it, and was appointed and never looked back. It’s been a fantastic time. But to say that I didn’t sort of get out of bed 30 years ago and map out a career, it’s evolutionary again. Lovely.

Aoifinn Devitt: And then your leadership style at SOHL. We spoke about the members first, but how would you describe your leadership style with your team?

Penny Green: I’m quite directive. And in fairness, when I arrived at SOHL, there was a hunger amongst the staff and the trustees for things to change, but there wasn’t a clear vision of what that change should look and so when you’re implementing that sort of change, a directive style was appropriate. The challenge that I found was that, and this is probably a function of time, but over time that was what became to be expected of me. And so when Seoul STC needed something that was much more collaborative, I was not the right person to deliver that because everybody was so used to me being directive, or bossy if you like, which is one of the things that pointed it out to me that it was time. Well, I thought myself, nobody actually said anything. In fact, quite a lot of people, when I said I was stepping down as CEO, said, why, why? And the answer was actually because the organization needs that, that we need a fresh perspective, we need somebody coming in from outside with new ideas. And so it was absolutely the right time for me to go, and I think we can see how SDC has developed subsequent to that and the leadership of Sue, which has been brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I’m in awe of what she’s achieved.

Aoifinn Devitt: And that’s interesting because not many people would describe themselves as directive, but I think many people are. And I suppose it’s particularly a challenge for women who describe themselves as directive because, as you said, that can be translated into bossy. And one of my questions usually on the podcast is around diversity in the industry. And you did ascend in an industry probably at a time, and continues to be a time, that is not very well represented by women. Was that ever an issue for you, being a woman in a relatively male-dominated industry? Did it ever factor in any of your career choices?

Penny Green: No, I was brought up from day one to think that, you know, I’m as good as anyone else. So I’m sure that there was probably some things, some words said about me behind my back that was, you know, I’m a pushy, bossy woman and, and I should get back in my box. But I can’t think of any instance where I’ve felt that I’ve been impeded, or my gender has been an issue, which is, as you say, in an investment industry which is driven by men largely, although it is changing, but certainly when I started it was a male-dominated industry and remains that way to a large extent. I can’t think of any instance where I felt that that was an issue for me, and maybe I’m just very thick-skinned and didn’t notice it. Which is entirely possible. But now I think you just go and you do the job to the best of your ability, irrespective of your gender. And I expect to be respected for that, and I will respect others as long as they’re doing the job to the best of their ability.

Aoifinn Devitt: And one other question about career progression, just before we go on to some reflections: any mentor or sponsor in that mix? You mentioned being driven by where the job is interesting and what stimulates you. And did you have any leadership representatives that you looked to for guidance, or that had a role?

Penny Green: No, no, I didn’t. I mean, the closest I got to a role model was Dennis Buckley, the chair of SOAR, but I didn’t have any particular mentoring. You know, maybe I should have done a bit more of that, and I could have evolved my leadership style at STC, but I didn’t. So I think it would have been really helpful actually to have had somebody to bounce ideas off, but I did have a very good network of people that I could talk to. So there’s not one individual apart from Dennis that I would pick out, but you’d sit down and talk with the people I work with at the Raising Admin Standards, now PASA. When I was president of the PMI, there was a group of people there, people that I’ve remained in contact with subsequently, but not one specific individual.

Aoifinn Devitt: And it’s interesting because Dennis was of course chair of the Board of Trustees at this time. So I think if I’m correct in that, so this would have been a nice example of, I suppose, how a CEO and a chair can interact in a very positive way.

Penny Green: Yeah, it was.

Aoifinn Devitt: And then moving on to some reflections. So I’m sure you’ve been having many opportunities to speak to a group as you now finally retire and think about your career. What would you say were some of the high points and low points looking back, whether it’s Sól or otherwise?

Penny Green: I think the high points— been all high points, to be honest. Can’t possibly all have been high points. The high points have been watching teams grow and develop. You know, when I first started, there was a desire for change, but people couldn’t see how that change could be implemented. And actually helping people see what could be done and see people grow into roles— I remember one member of staff saying, ‘No, I’m very happy doing the job that I’m doing.’ And this has happened on lots of occasions, actually. And then you just test them, offer them something a bit extra, and they go, ‘That sounds interesting, I’ll do that.’ And it sounds weird, but to watch people blossom as they develop and understand what they can achieve, I think, is always the highlight of anybody in, in a management role. From a technical perspective, seeing SDC get Master Trust authorisation, which was just such a grind, it was such hard work for the executive team, but for them to achieve that on our behalf as a trustee was also a massive, massive positive. We all celebrated that. It’s the second time I’ve done it. I was on a Master Trust for a commercial master trust, and when we got authorisation, when the regime was brought in, the funder was so thrilled. Us trustees all got vast bottles of expensive whisky, which was a great treat. But again, it was the executive team that had done all the hard work. But to achieve that when it is such a complex thing to achieve is great.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I suppose that maybe on the low point side, another way to ask the question is around any setbacks or challenges that you overcame. Because I think for someone with a career as long as yours, I’m sure the learnings from overcoming a setback would have a lot of wisdom in there for those of us still with many, many years to go. Anything that comes to mind that’s any kind of hurdle you overcame?

Penny Green: The worst thing in my career, which has guided me, was actually when I joined TPAS as Deputy CEO. And when I arrived, I didn’t even have a desk. Let alone an office. I had to move around, so I would sit in the CEO’s office until he had a meeting, when I had to pick my papers up and move somewhere else. And I felt really quite unwanted. And then to discover, because he— we went out to lunch the end of the first week, and he said, well, I didn’t really want a deputy anyway, and the person I chose wasn’t you, but I got overruled by the other appointment committee. And that didn’t fill me with a great deal of joy, I have to say. But you’d never go back because you can’t ever go back, so you have to go forward. And I just— okay, well, we are where we are. You’ve got me. I’ll just work as hard as I can and learn as much as I can, because by then I’d already worked out that there was a huge amount for me to learn and prove my worth. And as it happened, he then unfortunately went off ill for a while, so I actually had to step into his shoes. And so when he came back, he could see that there had been some value. In having a deputy, you know, so it was positive. But in so many ways, that made me create a sense of creed: treat others as you wish to be treated yourself. Everybody’s employed for a reason. No companies— I said earlier, you know, companies make decisions on a commercial basis, so if they are going to employ someone in a role, that’s because that role is needed. And it doesn’t matter if that means that you’re the most recent recruit or the CEO, you’re all needed for that organization to function and function effectively. And the other aspect is, as I say, definitely treat people as you would wish to be treated yourself and respect people for what they bring. It’s just served me quite well, and.

Aoifinn Devitt: It’S a very empowering message as well for everybody at every part of that organization, knowing the power that being hired gives you. Because the very fact that you were hired, as you said, just gives you some aspect of being needed. Now you are, I think we’ve all heard from the LinkedIn message and speeches that this is it in terms of the final retirement. What does the next chapter hold for you? What are some of the things you’re looking forward to doing?

Penny Green: So I’m looking forward to not having anything in my diary other than things I want in it. I’m looking forward to doing quite a lot of traveling. We’ve got trips to Madeira and to Singapore and Australia already lined up. We’re thinking possibly Spain and Japan next year. And there’s an awful lot of Europe that we’ve not been to. I mean, we’ll be living in France. There’s a lot of France we’ve never visited. There’s huge swathes, you know, I’ve been to Germany on business, but I’ve never visited Germany. It’s a country that I know nothing of and would love to visit. So there’s a lot of Europe that we want to visit and travel. So it’ll be a mixture of travel and seeing friends and family and sitting on our terrace reading interesting novels.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, happy and excited as we are for this chapter for you, as we are facing this, those are your colleagues, I say we, with some sense of loss, we are losing an absolute beacon of learning, of commitment, and of pensions knowledge. So as we lose you from the industry, are there any kind of parting words you can leave us in terms of maybe words of wisdom, a creed or motto that has stood you in good stead that you have lived by that you may be, or advice for your younger self? A few different options there, because I’m sure that there is a lot of a well of wisdom to draw upon.

Penny Green: I think there are 3 things that I would say. One is never ask anybody to do something that you yourself wouldn’t do. One is to know yourself and know your strengths. Someone pointed out to me a long time ago, they said that this is a really big ask, and I said, but not asking anybody to do something that I wouldn’t myself be able to do. Said, yeah, but you can do things so much more quickly than other people, and I hadn’t recognized that. So I think recognize your differences in working style, treat people as you would like to be treated yourself, respect people, and in the pensions arena, put members at the heart of what you’re trying to do, and that will bring it all together.

Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I think it’s so appropriate that we’ve ended where we started because that is Focusing on what really matters and never losing sight of that, I think, has been really a hallmark of your career and an amazing stimulation for the rest of us to do the same. So thank you so much, Penny, for coming here. I know we’re in the last week, so I feel very privileged to have snatched an hour of your time. Thank you for coming here and sharing your insights with us.

Penny Green: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear from more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.

Aoifinn Devitt: This episode is supported by PIMCO, a global leader in active fixed income with deep expertise across public and private markets. PIMCO invests their clients’ capital in income and credit opportunities that span the liquidity spectrum, leveraging their decades of experience navigating complex debt markets. Their flexible capital base and deep relationships with issuers have helped them become one of the world’s largest providers of traditional and alternative investment solutions a valued financing partner. Visit pimco.com to learn more. Tony: The only constant in our business is change. You sort of anticipate change. In some cases you prompt change, but you know that things are going to continually evolve. And so I describe the evolution from an asset allocation point of view, from a style point of view, from a globalization point of view. But over the last 10 to 12 years, there’s been a movement into private equity. Private credit back into real estate, different types of real estate. So I think this evolution is sort of taking place now on the private side. Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Tony Doherty, who just recently retired from a role of Managing Director at Lazard Asset Management, where he spent over 40 years. He started his career in insurance and then investment consulting, where he spent 13 years. Welcome, Tony. Thanks for joining me today. Tony: Thank you, Aoifinn. And how are you? Aoifinn Devitt: Great, and great to see you. It’s been such a wait to have you here, and I’ve been fascinated by your career to date, in awe at your ability to build relationships and trust. I knew I had to have you as a guest, so thank you. Tony: Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, let’s start with your background. So you have had a long and fascinating career. Can we just go a little bit back to before it started, to where you grew up, what you studied, and how you came to join the world of finance? Tony: Sure. So I’ve lived in New Jersey and worked in New York for a little over 40 years now. Most of that has been at Lazard Asset Management. Prior to that, I was working for A.G. Becker, which is a pension consulting firm that was located in Chicago, but also had an office in New York City. But I’m originally from Chicago. I’m born and raised in Chicago, and I’m third-generation Italian American. My great-grandfather came to this country in 1901 with his 7 children, and that was the beginning of the Doty family in Chicago. And with that, we sort of lived in a lot of different places in Chicago as Chicago changed after World War II. And we started in the Taylor Street area. We moved to the West Side, we moved to the Austin area, and then after being there for several years, moved to the Southwest Side and When I met my wife and got married, we moved to Oak Lawn. So I’ve been sort of a Southwest sider for most of my life. And before we moved to New York, I was going to buy a house in Palis, so I was going to establish even firmer roots on the Southwest side of Chicago. But growing up in Chicago, having a Midwest background, basically having Midwest values, I thought, you know, served me pretty well throughout most of my career. And I learned a lot not only from my family, but people I was associated with in school and business. And, you know, hard work, honesty, character, integrity, these are all the words that I would say frame most of my life. But it was important to me to work in the finance area, and I’ll get back to that. And then, you know, coming from a large Italian family was also an important thing in terms of growing up and the richness of having a big family. My grandfather had a farm in northeastern Illinois, just south of the Wisconsin border. We spent our summers together up there. And so, you know, we were all very tight with our family. We still are tight. And so moving from Chicago to New Jersey was a big move for my family, for myself. But, you know, it was an enriching step, not only personally, but also in terms of my career. Aoifinn Devitt: So what drives you throughout your career? Tony: So growing up, I was pretty much driven by two things. One is I wanted to be the first college graduate in my family. Which I was. Secondly, I sort of vacillated between, from a career point of view, being a stockbroker or a professional baseball player. So those are kind of opposite choices. But I was always fascinated by the markets, by the history of the markets, by economics, by finance, much to my grandfather’s chagrin. He always suggested that I stay away from the stock market because in the ’29 crash he lost a fair amount of money. And so he kind of steered me or tried to steer me away from that. But Growing up in the Southwest Side of Chicago, which was more of a blue-collar area, I really didn’t have many mentors from a professional sense or people that could help me or mentor me in terms of fulfilling my career goals. And my friends, you know, sort of ridiculed me along the way and said, you know, you’ll never get to Wall Street. And that just gave me more determination to get there and to basically work in finance, which, you know, was always something that was very interesting to me. So after I graduated from college, it was in the peak of the Vietnam War and it was very difficult to get a job because men of my age were eligible for the draft. And luckily they came out with the lottery system. I got a high number and so I was not drafted. But, you know, jobs were few and far between in that period of time. And so I took a job at CNA Insurance in Chicago, not because I liked the insurance business, but I needed a job and it was a good way for me to learn about business. And so this was my first formal step into a big business. I learned a lot about the functions of how business works and operates both internally and externally. I did well over the period of time I was going to be there. They were going to send me to Kansas City as a regional administrator. And before I moved to Kansas City, I got a call from a headhunter in Chicago who said that A.G. Becker, which was a regional brokerage firm, was looking for somebody in a management training program. Aoifinn Devitt: And was this your path into consultancy? Tony: So I said, well, you know, look, I’m going to be a stockbroker. Do they have any openings? They said, look, you know, they do have stockbrokers there. They’re the biggest commercial paper dealer in the United States. They trade other types of securities. Go over there, go on the interview, which I did. And I met with a fellow, his name was Stu Porter. And Stu was a very nice man and he was very honest. He said to me, look, he said, you know, you have a nice background, good background. We’re looking for people in our funds evaluation department. And I said, well, what’s that? And he said, well, that’s our new pension consulting business. And at the time, A.G. Becker, Frank Russell, and Merrill Lynch were the three providers of consulting services in the US. So I said, well, what about being a stockbroker? He said, well, take the job, “Get a foothold and then let’s see how you do. And if something opens up, you can always transfer.” You know, you always get that, that bait and switch routine. So I did take the job and probably one of the first things that happened after I joined A.G. Becker was the market crash of ’73 and ’74. And after that downdraft in market, I decided that it was probably not in my best interest given the volatility of the markets to be a stockbroker. So I said, “Look, I’ll stick with my career at A.G. Becker.” And I think, you know, what I want to do is become a field consultant. Consultant. So I spent the next 6 or 7 years pretty much on the inside doing all kinds of management jobs, worked in the systems department, the product development department. I started up the customer client servicing department for A.G. Becker and working with a lot of the field consultants. And then in the late ’70s, I got a break. There was a fair amount of turnover in the New York office, and they asked me if I would basically commute and spend the weeks southeast and handle a territory. And they said, you know, it could be up to a year, a year and a half. It turned out it was closer to a year and a half. And so, you know, I did shuttle diplomacy. You know, I would leave on a Sunday night or a Monday morning, come back on a Friday night and spent most of my time working from New York City to Washington, DC. And most of my clients were from, I would say from Baltimore to Washington. But it was probably the best thing that happened in my career because it immersed me in the business of being a field consultant in finance and They dropped me into the deep end of the pool and I wasn’t sure I could swim, but I figured it out pretty quickly. And I had never been on the East Coast. It was a real experience living and working in New York City and traveling up and down the East Coast. And in 18 months, I probably got 5 years’ worth of experience and I made some great contacts. It was a wonderful experience, although being away from the family, I had 2 young children at the time, not being able to spend a lot of time with my kids and my wife was not the easiest thing, but from a career point of view, it was a really good step. So at the end of that period of time, they asked me if I wanted to come back to the Midwest and have a territory in the Midwest or just stay on the East Coast and work the territory I had. And I decided to stay on the East Coast. I figured that I had planted the seeds on the East Coast and our business, the asset management business was pretty much dominated on the East Coast from New York City to Boston. And so I figured I was going to learn a lot more being on the East Coast than I would in the Midwest. And that worked out precisely as I had figured. I then got a call in mid-1982 from the people that had recently joined Lazard Asset Management. They had come over from Oppenheimer Capital and they were basically asked to restructure and redefine and refocus the asset management business. And the 3 people that took over the asset management department contacted me and they wanted me to come over and join them as one of the marketing people. They had hired a person from A.G. Becker who had worked on the Taft-Hartley side, who was a good friend of mine, and he suggested that I follow up and have an interview, which I had a series of interviews and that was very successful. I was hired in December of ’83 to join Lazard Asset Management. And so when I joined, I was glad that I had the consulting experience because that foundation really served me well in terms of knowing the asset management business, our competitors, what you needed to do to be successful, how to basically do marketing, how to set up a client servicing function, how to work with consultants. And so as we got into 1984, we started on that endeavor. When I started with the company, we had about $3 billion under management. About 30 clients. There were 50 employees at the firm. So it was a startup. And when I called people in New York, they had heard of Lazard Frères. They did not hear of Lazard Asset Management. When I talked to people outside of the tri-state area, they didn’t know who I was working for or who Lazard was. But it was a great opportunity from the standpoint that I was working with 3 really senior knowledgeable investment people who had come over from Oppenheimer Capital. They had a defined style of management and we built on that. And when I started, we had 3 strategies, US equity. It was a relative value strategy, fixed income, and something that a lot of people don’t know about, which is balanced funds. But the CIO and I became really good friends and we started working on product development and we decided that if we could replicate what we were doing in the US in the non-US markets, that would be very successful. Because a lot of pension funds were starting to globalize. We also saw and recognized that on the small-cap side, US small-cap side, most of the players were growth players. And so there was no value competition there. So we started a value small-cap strategy. We also started a global strategy, and shortly thereafter we started an emerging market strategy. As we got into the late ’80s, we were hired by General Motors, which is our first big win, which was just amazing. I mean, we, we were all shocked that after a few— in a firm that had a great pedigree and a great reputation that we would be hired by the biggest corporate pension fund in the United States. And then that was shortly followed up by wins at CalPERS, CalSTRS, a number of other public funds. And in the ’90s, we were just off and running. And the foundation I built was really by working with a lot of the consultants. There were 13 or 14 consultants I worked with. We had approvals at most of them. Again, coming from the consulting side was a big benefit to me and to the firm because I knew how the game worked. I knew the language. We had respect for one another. And so it was a great start. Aoifinn Devitt: It’s exactly what I was hoping for in terms of a history lesson of the evolution of asset allocation, which is really intriguing to me. And I will say that I was born in 1974, so I’m well aware that’s a 50-year arc now that we’re covering. And I suppose just, you know, before we move into sales as a mindset and how you approach that, which I think is fascinating, just love to hear. So back in, in the ’70s and you’re starting to work with around asset allocation, and clearly you’re filling out the complexity of some of these offerings at Lazard there by filling gaps. What were you starting with? Were we starting with very basic kind of balanced funds and then gradually starting to spread those out? Tony: Yeah. So, you know, in the ’70s, a lot of funds were, you know, I would say the allocation was mostly towards fixed income. The equity was US equity, large cap, mostly growth. As time went on, there was more of an equity allocation, and then I would say a diversification into the non-US markets, into mid-cap, small-cap US. When we started to talk to people about global, know, you they— people thought we were from you Mars, know, talking about global equity. But what happened in the late ’80s, early ’90s is that industries globally started to merged together and the analytical framework that we used at Lazard started off looking at US companies and non-US companies. And then we decided, you know, if you were looking at pharmaceutical companies, auto companies, other global types of businesses, you had to evaluate these companies from a global point of view because they all competed. And so we put together our research team at Lazard to have a global platform. Obviously there were industries like utilities that are more local. So we have people that sort of follow those companies on a local basis and then getting into emerging markets in the mid-’90s. So there was more movement into equities, globalization, and along the way, I mean, you know, one of the things that I think most of us know is that a big part of sales is education. So, you know, you have to educate the buyer before they buy. So we spent a lot of time educating prospects and clients about the benefits of foreign diversification or non-US diversification, moving into different company sizes, investing up and down the cap range. So there was a lot of work that we did in terms of educating not only the buyer, but also the consultants in terms of the benefits of this type of diversification. Aoifinn Devitt: And let’s move in now to the mindset. So it seems that your Italian-American upbringing and this large family and the bonds, and so you got to know diverse personalities, I think pretty well, I’m sure through that and to work with them. In terms of the role you’re in, do you think these people are— who are successful at what they do in roles like yours— are born or are they made? Tony: Well, I would say that it’s probably a little bit of both. I you think, know, from a personality point of view, you have to be, I think, an extrovert. You have to be able to deal with rejection. You have to be hard-driving. You basically have to sort of have focus in terms of what you do and how you do it. But the rest of it is all acquired skill. And one of the things that I was blessed by was the fact that I went to work for A.G. Becker and they were committed to doing a lot of training with the people in the field. And they basically had the thought that they would hire really high-character people that were able to get along with other people that had good interpersonal skills, and they would train us. And so both from an academic point of view, And you know, we had an affiliation with the University of Chicago and we had a lot of training with the staff, the professors from the University of Chicago. I worked with David Booth for a long time. David’s a good friend. He was my mentor both in New York and Chicago in terms of the educational work that he put into me and what he did to help me. And then, you know, I worked with some people that were IBM-trained salespeople, Xerox-trained salespeople, people that were from industry. They were very giving people and I was like a sponge. I mean, I was very inquisitive. I always asked a lot of questions. I always wanted to get better at what I did. And then these people always spent the time with me and they were willing to spend the time and gladly spent the time. And so the A.G. Becker Foundation was really important to me when I got to Lazard. That really helped me get started. And when you think about, you know, a lot of the successful salespeople in the ’80s and ’90s, most of which were former consultants. A lot of them came out of AG Becker and other organizations. So that sort of foundation, that skill set, really helped a lot of us propel the business going forward. Aoifinn Devitt: And how do you mentor, say, younger people entering this arena to deal with rejection? Because I’m not sure if you have a kind of a rule of thumb or just a mindset that you use, but I’m sure few people are born with that thick a skin. Tony: Yeah, well, you know, that’s true. I think nobody likes rejection and, you know, I think the first thing you have to learn is that it’s not personal. You’re selling a service. People need a variety of services. They may need yours, they may not need your service, but you know, it’s not personal. And the more you do it, I wouldn’t say you get used to it, but it becomes a little easier to tolerate. But the thing that I did as an approach, and I think a lot of other people that were former consultants did, is that we didn’t function as a vendor. We functioned as a partner. We functioned as a co-CIO, a consultant. We did consultative sales. So a lot of it was really sort of trying to solve problems to help improve the investment program, the system that we were talking to. And by doing that, it’s less direct. It’s more of building relationships and then trying to understand what’s in place How to move it forward, how to improve it. And so that sort of lessens the direct blow of being rejected. So by doing that, you know, I built really great relationships with a lot of people. And when I started at Lazard, most of my time was spent on corporate DBs, endowments, foundations, hospital plans. I had a couple of public funds. I was probably 5 or 6 years into my experience at Lazard. I started to move more towards public funds and I really liked the public fund community. It’s fast growing. There’s some really interesting people that work there. There’s big pools of money. There’s areas where you can be very helpful. And I always thought that if I could bring the resources of Lazard to the public fund prospects and our clients, that I can enhance their experience with us and make them better in terms of what they were doing. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I would say that feeling is absolutely mutual in terms of them appreciating you. So no, no question about that. Just in terms of that community though, and I know we’ve spoken in the past about your many trips to Alaska and you’ve gone to far-flung locales certainly to serve that community. How would you say the needs are evolving? You’d mentioned consultative problem solving. Some of the problems are the same, some of the problems are new, I’m sure. So how would you say over the course of the 40 years, and I know this is hard to capture in a small short response, you’ve had to adapt? How have those clients’ needs changed? Tony: Well, you know, I think any of us that work in the business know the only constant in our business is change. You sort of anticipate change. In some cases you prompt change, but you know that things are going to continually evolve. And so I describe the evolution from an asset allocation point of view, from a style point of view, from a globalization point of view. But over the last 10 to 12 years, there’s been a movement into private equity, private credit, back into real estate, different types of real estate. So I think this evolution is sort of taking place now on the private side. On the long-only side, there’s still challenges. I would say the last 6, 7 years, markets in our business have really been driven by macro events. Up until that point in time, it was really more bottom-up. It was more stock-specific. It was more about earnings and improving earnings and revenues and companies. But the geopolitical macro issues have really dominated markets. And so the evolution there is to try to help clients deal with those types of situations and to try to understand them. And clearly, you know, Wall Street has a variety of opinions that it provides to clients, but being a trusted advisor and having close relationships always helps. Aoifinn Devitt: And looking back now at such an illustrious career and a long one, were there any particular highs or lows that stand out for you? Tony: Well, you’ll always remember the big wins, and I mentioned a couple of them earlier on. And as we built our emerging market equity business, you know, we were hired by the state of Mississippi in 1998. We were very small then, but they took a chance. They took a flyer on us. We had managed an international equity portfolio. Then a few years later, we were starting our emerging market debt business. We were hired by Ohio PERS, those were big wins. And so, you know, you always remember those big wins as a salesperson. But, you know, I think the other thing that was important and I always remember is training younger people, moving younger people along in their career. I was really blessed by the people I worked with at A.G. Becker. They were really good to me. They were really good people. And I learned you need to give back, you need to train the next generation. I’ve always been committed to doing that. And at Lazard, the public fund team was a team and we functioned as a team. And so it was important to have people at various levels contribute to the success of that team. Aoifinn Devitt: And just a last word on public funds. I mean, I suppose it’s interesting that you mentioned collaborating and letting the resources of the firm you work with be their resource to really supplement some of the lack of resourcing there. Do you have any thoughts on whether they have the resources they need, whether it’s getting more challenging as assets get more sophisticated? Tony: I think that there’s been a lot of improvements on the public fund side. I think the people that have come into public funds are very well educated, very smart, very dedicated. I would say that the people that work in public funds and the investment teams are a good group of people, and they know how to work with the investment manager community. They look at us as a resource. Not everybody, but you know, the ones that are more astute certainly do that. They’re looking for good partners. And so I would say that it’s much improved over the last 20 years, 30 years for sure. But there’s still challenges as you well know. I mean, you know, you’re in a political fishbowl and the politics in public funds are always the challenge. Funding is always a challenge. You know, there’s some funds that get the money that they’re promised. Most of them don’t, but most public funds have done a terrific job of managing their assets. Generating really good returns, improving the funded ratios, and basically serving the beneficiaries, which is the important aspect of you it, know? And so in today’s environment, we’re dealing with a much more sophisticated group of people that are managing these assets. Aoifinn Devitt: Okay, so now is the section where we dive into the deep well of Tony Doney wisdom, reflection section. First of all, this reflection first is two parts. One is around any key people or mentors that you had. You’ve mentioned the mentoring. And then we’ll get to the second part in a minute, but I’d love to know if there were other people that have influenced how you think and see the world. Tony: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of people and I always worked on the, with the motto that, you know, you want to associate yourself with the smartest, the brightest, and the most talented and get to know them and basically learn from them. That’s always served me well. It served other people very well. And, you know, I think there’s a give and take there, but, you know, I mentioned David Booth. David Booth was very influential to me. He was a good friend. We had a lot of fun in New York. But I learned a lot about, about the academics, how assets were managed, how different firms managed money, how alpha was generated, what to look for, what was important, what was not important. So he was very helpful to me there. There were other people at A.G. Becker on the sales side that were really skilled salespeople and really had good client servicing skills and beliefs. And so again, I’ve, I’ve learned a lot from those people. On the plan sponsor side, there’s CIOs that are very influential. Bob Maynard, who just recently retired from Idaho, and Bob’s a good friend and I always told him he was my go-to CIO. You know, he’s one of the brightest people in the business. And if I had a problem or an issue and I needed honest feedback, I could call Bob. There was Bob Store in Alaska that served a similar role. Ed Kellen became a very good friend. When I was at Lazard, we spent a lot of time together. Michael Leary, who recently passed away in his day, was probably one of the finest pension consultants in America and a good friend, and I learned a lot from him. I worked with Richard Ennis, Jim Knopf, John O’Brien at A.G. Becker. So, you know, those are big names in the business. So there’s a lot of people, people that are recognizable names, but you know, everyday people, The people I worked with at Lazard, both in the investment departments and on the marketing side, very talented, very collegial. Those were great experiences for me. Aoifinn Devitt: I should have added the caveat that this is not supposed to be an exhaustive list, as I’m sure after possibly you’d always leave somebody out. And the second question that I didn’t script, but I just speaking with you, I thought was an important one, is, is there any, just for people coming up through the ranks and aspiring to be the kind of relationship builder you are, anything, any book or or any movie or any public figure that you think is someone that gets it right? Tony: I’m not sure I could put my finger on anybody off the top of my head, but I was lucky. I mean, when I joined the, the business, the business was in its infancy and it was evolving. And so there was more access to people because, you know, people needed to talk, they needed contact. Today the business is different. I mean, it’s much more competitive. The people on the plant sponsor side are very busy. It’s hard to get in, it’s hard to get to the space. You need an edge, you know, you need contacts, you gotta be more resourceful, you gotta be more creative to figure out ways of getting in, how to meet people. So it’s much more challenging. I think the important thing is, you know, I was doing this at Lazard and I’ll do this on an ongoing basis just to use my contacts to get in. And so, you know, and then I think a lot of senior people in the business do the same with the junior people in their organization. Liz Smith, who’s a good friend of mine at AB, basically does the same thing with her junior staff in terms of using her contacts to make introductions for people. So leverage is really important in terms of relationship building. Aoifinn Devitt: Thank you for that. And then maybe just building on that in terms of words of wisdom or creed or motto, and then you can go right back to the Italian-American family gatherings if you like, in terms of anything you can leave us with. Any Tony Doty-isms that we can immortalize here? Tony: Well, people that have worked with me and know me, they know I’m very focused. I’m very goal-oriented, but I’m also very team-oriented. And so when I joined Lazard, the fellow who was the CEO of Lazard Asset Management, his motto was, and I think, you know, this has served me well over the last 40-plus years, you know, he always told us we don’t have to be the biggest asset management firm, We have to be the best. And being the best is something that you’ve gotta work on every day. And a lot of the younger people I worked with, I would always try to tell them, look, you know, every day you have to get better at some aspect of what you do within your career. And you gotta be introspective. You gotta look at what you did. You gotta figure out, did I do it right? Could I do it better? And then you gotta ask questions about, you know, how do I do this a little bit better, a little differently. And I think that commitment is one of the things I always tried to communicate to people I worked with. And the other part is to have fun. I mean, look, this is serious business, but you know, you don’t want to work yourself to death. You don’t want to be boring, just focused on your work. You gotta have fun, you gotta enjoy it. And you know, people ask me, 40 years is a long time to work at one firm and in one industry. And I always responded by saying, I really never looked at it as a job. It was fun. I enjoyed it. I mean, every day I would get up and I would love going to work and seeing people I know and basically working with them. And it wasn’t a task, it was fun, it was enjoyable. And I think that’s really important in terms of if you want to be successful, you have to enjoy it. And there’s a lot of people that start in our business, they work at it for a few years and then they give up because it’s not easy. It’s hard. But again, you got to be creative and use the resources around you, leverage people that have the know-how, that have relationships, and it’ll help you move your career forward. Aoifinn Devitt: Well, certainly, Tony, I can say that it shows on your side that you have enjoyed it, and it has been such a pleasure to work with you. And I’d say in terms of that generosity, it has been felt on my side. I will not forget how I asked you one time about trends among public fund CIOs, and you made time. Be sure to make time to sit down with me to talk about that. I’m still waiting for the Alaska travel tips, but I think I have been quite busy. It’s been, been challenging to get that one. We’ll schedule a different offline for that. Well, thank you so much. You are truly a legend in the industry. Delighted to celebrate this milestone, but also look forward to seeing what the next chapter holds. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing your insights with us. Tony: Aoifinn, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Good to see you again, and We’ll be in touch. Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. 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