YouSaid · the spoken record

Ash Williams

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107
first
2025-08-11
most recent
2025-08-11
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “And you were apolitical, merit driven, and you have a business background. It's very unusual. Most of these people are political science types of one kind or another, hangers-on of one flavor or another. So I said, well, thank you very much. This gentleman's name was Hyatt Brown. He's still around as a wonderful guy and a mentor. And I said, thank you, but I'm planning to go to New York and pursue my career in the investment world. And he said, listen, you're a native Floridian. You're coming back here at some point. All right. You're going to, sure I am. And he said, so here's my proposition. Stay here. Go to graduate school at Florida State. The marginal difference in an MBA from NYU and one at Florida State will be more than offset by the walking around sense you will pick up working two years at the very top of state government at this stage in your life and if you're ever going to come back to Florida the relationships you will build at this point will be with people that most would never have”

    2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That in turn led to being invited by the chairman of that committee who was one of the rare individuals who was actually a very successful private business person, was not a career elected official, and he had made a decision he was going to give back a certain number of years in public service and that he intended to complete his service by being Speaker of the House of Representatives, which is a bold thing to say a priori I'm going to be in the House for six years and know that I'm going to be speaker for the last two because there's this planned succession in these political institutions that extends out years in advance. And that was in place at the time. Well, this fellow didn't let that stop him for a second. He made plans to disrupt the succession mechanism and succeeded. And then approached me and said, what are you going to do? I need staff and the speaker's office while I'm speaker. I need some people who are completely independent.”

    2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And when I was a senior in undergrad, that plan was somewhat, at least temporarily derailed by a professor approaching me and saying that he had been approached by one of the committees of the Florida legislature to do a consulting project that was in his area of expertise. And he told them, look, I'm too busy. My star pupil could do this under my supervision. Long story short, I ended up doing a consulting engagement for a committee of the Florida House of Representatives back in the mid-70s as a senior in undergraduate school.”

    2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “When I was in high school, I graduated from high school in 1972. So if you think about all of the giant conglomerates that were formed in those days, I was absolutely fascinated by the notion that people would do these add-on entities like AT&T or any number of the other big ones of the day that had all kinds of businesses that were seemingly unrelated but were represented to be highly synergistic and collectively additive each to the other. Well, we know history proved that wasn't quite the case, but nonetheless it interested me and caused me to want to at some point have a career on Wall Street. And the original direction I was thinking in terms of going was studying business at the undergraduate level and then coming to graduate school in New York and probably going into investment banking as a normal entry level path. And I was in fact planning to go to grad school at New York University.”

    2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It was like so many things in life. It was indirect, but it wasn't without intention, and it wasn't without thought. So ever since I was a little kid, I was always interested in businesses and why people did things. And so you walk into something like a grocery store where there are hundreds of thousands of consumer choices, people follow consistent patterns with what they put in that basket. There's brand loyalty, there's product loyalty, there's all kinds of stratification about how people make consumption decisions. And that's true at every level of economic activity. That's always fascinated me.”

    2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. I was born in the mid-50s. My family had been in Florida for quite a while. We actually came to Jacksonville from a place called Fernandina, Florida in 1916. My family had been in Fernandina since before Florida was a state actually, and a relative of mine by the name of Marcellus Williams was a surveyor who worked for George Washington's surveying firm and did the original survey of the territory of Florida when it was being considered for statehood. Florida became a state in 1845. So Marcellus, small group of other people and a handful of mules somehow surveyed the entire peninsula of Florida without being eaten by anything else, either two-legged or four, and filed a survey that was acceptable to Uncle Sam in Florida became a state, and that was that.”

    2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “This week's summer series is with Ash Williams, the former CIO of the Florida State Board of Administration, where he oversaw one of the largest state pension funds in the U.S. Ash was an innovator in the space, modernizing the compensation scheme, asset allocation, and governance in a public pension fund, a notoriously tricky political”

    2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source