YouSaid · the spoken record

Ashby Monk

lines on the record: 84
first: 2017-10-23
most recent: 2017-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Libyan Investment Authority. There was also one MDB in Malaysia. There was countless examples of almost borderline tragedy where the financial services industry clearly took advantage of these funds. Ireland being swindled on foreign ex fees by State Street, Goldman Sachs swindling Libya on a billion dollar derivative trade. I mean, we could go on and on, right?”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what an amazing opportunity to go in with a white sheet of paper and start building brand new investment organizations for the next millennia. And so I started working in the Middle East. I started working in Canada with AIMCO. I was becoming like close buddies with the New Zealand Super Fund, all these places that I just found incredibly motivated and doing the right thing. The challenge is, just as I saw sovereign wealth funds as the blank sheet of paper upon which we could sketch out the idealized institutional investment organization, the for-profit financial services industry saw them as lambs for slaughter. And so just as we now have the New Zealand Super Fund, which just clocked 20% return this year, and I would argue is the single best investment organization on the asset owner side and the planet today, there were also the”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Garden Clark was on the rise of sovereign wealth funds, and we did that project because what seemed like out of nowhere, this class of investor emerged and became almost the most dominant, you know, at least most talked about investor class in the newspapers. I remember the first time I put the search term sovereign wealth fund into Google Scholar in 2007, zero. It might have been 2006, but literally zero papers have been written. And that, to be fair, owed to the fact that like a lot of these entities existed, but we didn't know what to call them. We called them permanent funds. We called them reserve funds. We called them stabilization funds. But then Andrew Rosenoff came along and was like, these are sovereign wealth funds and then didn't really define it, kind of catalyzed us to begin thinking about these. My initial hypothesis was governments around the world are going to start setting these up. They're going to be big.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are so sick of me talking about fees, but this is my chance, right, to tell people why the hell I'm on the soapbox. So I spent 10 years trying to figure out how do we change the behavior of the big asset owners. And why did I want to do that? Well, first and foremost, I think the financial services industry is capturing too much value. It's distorting incentives. We have this increasingly short horizon of investment, despite the fact that we have $100 trillion in long-term capital. We have an asset management industry and financial services industry that's capturing about 40% of all after-tax corporate profit in America. It's egregious. Even the research shows us”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever So, when you're working with, you know, it doesn't matter, California, Australia, how do you think about fees these days? You talked about alignment and everyone's talking about it, but what can people actually do?”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sequoia, whatever is doing the deal, and then literally we could create a top decile venture portfolio at next to no cost. And to me, that was this deliciously appealing fun structure. But weirdly, the governance kind of prevented us from going down that path exactly. But I think we got close.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when a predetermined venture fund of repute does a deal in those, we would swoop in and say, hi everybody, we're the University of California. Don't bother us, but we're just going to take our 10% pro radish share in this deal.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what I wanted to do and what happened is a little different. So what happened was it's a combination of what you just described. That's what is happening where there's a great entrepreneur who built a company called Tibco, sold it for many billions of dollars. He's recruited this guy who was an early hire at Facebook and Google, and he's building what looks like a very experienced entrepreneurial team to help scale businesses. And then they have privileged access to all these deals in the ecosystem. If I was going to do it my way, I might have designed it like this, where we were creating all these little seed funds on each campus. Those seed funds would then collect rights to deals. at the University of California. Those are separate entities in each campus. But what I would then do is assign those rights to a broader fund.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And it was the concept broad based, or meaning there's a lot of deal flow. Are you trying to be the best venture capitalist? Or is it, hey, let's just do a pseudo index of the opportunities that we have and we think that's going to work out really well because of the access.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By those sand hill investors. So we could anchor a new fund and take the rights that we have to participates in those deals and endow this new venture fund with those rights and immediately put that venture fund on the map as a key player in the valley. And so that was what we did.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we're constantly tapping the energy labs for insight, massive energy laboratories within the UC ecosystem to be able to assess and understand opportunities in deal flow. We are tapping the medical science communities for understanding the future of gene editing and things like that. But even beyond those, let's call that research and due diligence and understanding the market, we partnered with Beau Capital, which is in effect the entity that is UC Ventures. And that's a guy named Vivek Ranadive that's running that. We partnered with them and we brought the deal flow that is privileged to the University of California to the partnership. And so the idea was specifically to say, listen, everybody's chasing the top venture funds. They're hat in hand walking Sandhill Road. Like, we have all these companies that are coming out of our ecosystem that are being funded.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On terms that I would describe as aligned, and I never would have imagined we could actually do it. I mean, in theory, I loved the idea, but in practice”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the answer to that is where do you have an edge? And I think that is increasingly the question most pension funds are asking themselves is it's not like how do we get access to the best managers, it's what is it that's unique about us that could facilitate privileged access either to assets or managers So if I take the example of the University of California where again full disclosure I'm a senior advisor we have this 10 campuses we have five of the biggest hospitals in the world we have three national labs there's 10 billion in R&D it turns out that external managers are fascinated by this ecosystem and so we can go out to external managers and say listen we'll partner with you and we're going to add value in a way that you can't even understand today and over the last three years of watching Jagdeep Bashir and his team implement on that I can tell you that works like they're getting into managers”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there is active management. Like if we take the case of Australian super and full disclosure, I am a consultant to Australian super. But the organization manages an internal public equities team. They manage an internal infrastructure team, an internal real estate team. I think there's fixed income securities that are now coming online. They've set up an office in London. There's another global office that's going somewhere that I don't think is public yet. They are building a professional team. And what you're going to is, where do you choose active and where do you choose passive if you're building this internal fund?”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how they organize their teams and manage the money? Because the active passive debate is so pervasive in the US. And those are huge pools of money. So how do they go about organizing? Presumably it's actively managed. They're internally managed, right?”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Australia, they did this incredible mandate that all individuals have to contribute. It's going towards 12%. It may even go higher than that now that I think of it, of their income into a super fund. The super funds, so already you're getting enough money in the door. That's important. Beyond that, they also are professionally managed and increasingly professionally managed, as you're seeing consolidation among the super funds. And so you get this really nice mix of the individuals are putting enough money in and the assets are being managed in a way that it has to be called professional. Like when you look at Australian super or first state super or C Bus, these are top-notch organizations that are really setting the standard, I'd almost say globally, for what the next generation of retirement organizations will look like. Like I think here in the US, we have a ton to learn.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up there. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So the Crown Corpse, it's like a legal structure that has allowed the Canadian model to exist because it's quasi private. So the boards of directors of these public entities can set comp in such a way that”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their arm's length entity is set up by the crown, but they run their own budgets. They have independent boards, kind of the boards can be sacked, but in some cases they're double arm's length board where you nominate a nominating committee, and that nominating committee picks from a set of standard boards of directors, and then those boards of directors have the right to set the resourcing for the entire organization internal and external, including comp.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think Canada is a little different because they trust their government. And so that creates a different relationship between the Crown Corporations, the people, and the government. The”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go diagnose yourself. And here's the medicine cabinet that you can pull out of and treat yourself. And oh, by the way, WebMD is filled with a bunch of baloney. It's not just good medical advice. It's also snake oil. It's also, you know, tons of things in there that don't make any sense that people are doing day in and day out.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God. We are in trouble in terms of our retirement security and with the population aging and the medical science only getting better. And so we're all going to live to 150 years old in 100 years. So we are in big trouble. And it's really, and some people debate with me on this, but it's really a funding problem. We've got to get more money going into these programs. And what I learned at Boston College is that here in the US, we don't have a political will to create a mandate like we have in Australia and we don't have a political will to create a kind of crown corporation model of pension investment management like we have in Canada. And so we create these various iterations of defined contribution pension plans that are the equivalent of if we took the parallel into the medical industry, it would be like saying here's WebMD.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the equation, how should we invest this money, but also the liability side of the equation, which is how do we prepare people for retirement? And each of these kind of stints in my life have been very formative. The Boston College stint was formative in the sense that it taught me how intractable the problem is in the U.S.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Built these models and these theoretical constructs that on the surface seem much more elegant and robust than anything we would be doing if we were doing case studies. The problem is the assumptions that went into those models were just as suspect as the selection bias that might be in a case study. So rational actors and efficient markets, I mean, I think sitting here today, 2017, I think we'd all obviously agree that that's crazy because we are all crazy, so we're not rational. And at the time, like I didn't want to spend five years doing a doctorate basically embedded in that world. I went from there to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, where I was a fellow, actually a joint fellow program between Oxford and Boston College. And my project there was on national retirement systems, trying to understand both the asset side.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a multi method approach to understanding economic activity that builds theory from the bottom up instead of the top down. And rather than viewing the world through a lens of kind of a top-down theoretical model or methodology, we kind of build our understanding of the economic environment and economic systems through big data, but also through interviews, through case studies. I mean, I guess what I had kind of lost the love of was we”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, this is almost up to four minutes though. So Paris, Masters in International Economics, I kind of got the bug for academia again. Then we went to Oxford. So my wife got in to do a doctorate, an MPI, and then a doctorate in economics. I went to go do a doctorate in economic geography with a guy named Gordon Clark.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, my girlfriend at the time we had met at Princeton. She taught English at Universites de Parisanque, I think, which is Assass, and just kind of lived a dream there for a little while. And then we both got into the Sorbonne to do master's international economics. We were the only two Americans in a program of 800 because you had to speak French. And that was around the time that we were invading Iraq. So it was quite an interesting time to be an American in a French university with no other Americans. I'm just rambling here, man. If you want to just jump in, yeah. Keep going.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One was 9 11 happened. My wife was in the towers. She's fine, but she was down there and she was one of those dust-covered people that you saw on TV. That was her. She had to hide in a parking garage. So there was a stint on that day where I wasn't quite sure if she was alive. I don't want to oversell it, but it was a big enough moment in our lives that when we kind of reunited that day, we were like, what are we doing? We're working 100 hours a week in our early 20s. You know, we don't love what we're doing. And so we both kind of looked at each other and we're like, let's quit and let's go to Europe. And so we did. And so I was racing bicycles at the time. I had been a rower in college, so I understood how to suffer. But cycling was a whole different level of suffering. And so I went and joined an amateur team in Paris and traveled around Europe and raced while my wife was”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, just the process of, first of all, being an investment banker and learning what it meant to do transactions was not what I thought it meant. I truly did believe that we were the center of this important institution that was allocating capital between asset owners and projects. It was much more self-serving than that. And then when I moved over to venture capital, which was my hope that this would be much more aligned with long-term value creation, even there because I was doing financial services venture capital, the focus was as much on fee streams and transactions and extracting rents wherever possible. And so none of that kind of felt like it matched with the idealistic visions I had for the financial services industry graduating from college. And then so after, I don't know, three and a half, four years, I quit. And there was a couple reasons I quit.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As far as I knew, consulting and banking. And I chose banking and I went off to Wall Street to do two years of investment banking and then another stint as a financial services venture capitalist focusing on what we called back then internet finance, what we might call today FinTech. And we were also playing around with offshore financial centers and the ability to set up reinsurance companies in places like Bermuda and understanding how you can generate higher return and not have it taxed in these offshore environments and it can kind of change the dynamics. Inspire me to understand more and in greater detail the financial services industry, I can't say that I was like inspired by what I found within the bowels of the financial services industry. I had to go about that.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An eyebrow raise. No, but so 1980 my dad was working at Hewlett-Packard and was invited down to Silicon Valley for a two-year tour of duty. He had sold, I believe, the first supercomputer in Canada to the University of Alberta from HP, and they said, young man, it's time to come down to the HQ and see what we're really working on. And he never left. So they still live in the Bay Area 30 plus years later. And so I grew up being a foreigner, a Canadian in America, and then I became an American, I think at age eighteen. And then I went off to Princeton, and it was at Princeton that I often describe it that I majored in rowing and minored in economics. And so after Princeton, like all good economics undergrads, I was presented with the two paths that are available.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difference between being in your thirties and twenties when your wife buys you sneakers in your thirties and twenties she buys you running shoes. And at age forty one I received a pair of walking shoes. Literally, it literally says walking on the tongue of my new shoes for my 41st birthday. So that was a bit of a”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ashby, thanks for joining me. Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Why don't you take us through your background? My background is a non traditional path to end up being whatever it is I am today. I guess the way I might start it, do you want the two minute version or the five minute version? Let's go for the four and three-quarter minute version. Okay. So it starts. in the country called Canada and the town of Edmonton. That's where I was born. My dad was in university at University of Alberta, as was my mom. I was born in Edmonton. That was 1976 in September. And in 1980. My birthday? Yep. Just crossed my 41st year, which is interesting.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And hedge funds using examples from the Canadian and Australian pensions, New Zealand Superfund, and University of California Endowment. Lastly, we discuss Long Game, an innovative company seeking to improve personal savings in the United States. Ash is a passion-driven creative thinker who rightfully has the ear of some of the most important pools of capital in the world. His ideas will change the way you think about allocating capital. Please enjoy my conversation with Ashby Monk.”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guest on today's show is Dr. Ashby Monk, the executive and research director of the Stanford University Global Project Center. Ashby is also the senior research associate at the University of Oxford, a senior advisor to the Chief Investment Officer of the University of California, and the co-founder of Long Game. Ash advises sovereign wealth funds and large pension funds and is involved with a bunch of fintech companies, all of which attempt to create innovative solutions to fixing the financial picture for individuals, pensions, and countries in the years ahead. Our conversation starts with Ash's early work experience and path through academia and flows into an exploration of next generation, lower cost approaches to active management for large asset owners. We touch on investing in public equity, private equity, venture capital,”
2017-10-23 · Capital Allocators · Ashby Monk – Asset Giant Futurist (Capital Allocators, EP.29) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source