YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Briner

lines on the record: 79
first: 2024-10-21
most recent: 2024-10-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Cherry picking is one. You got to be very careful about that. You sit around and look at enough deals over the years, not with perfect accuracy, but pretty good accuracy. You can tell the no-brainers and then the maybes from the not so goods. And the cherry-picking aspect of that is something to be very careful with. What we found, we had a lot of analytical horsepower around our team at Willet, was that the investment team wasn't perfect at predicting which ones were the best ones relative to their allocations to those. So that's an interesting fact. But trying to make sure that you have people be consistent in what they're investing in in the team that they lead is really, really important. One, two, I think you got to manage the managers. At some level, you're asking a favor from them. You have to, for compliance reasons, separate the investment decision making by the philanthropic entity from any personal entities there. And that requires a very light touch. These are...”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot of places that, in theory, would love to have that economic alignment. And yet, as you said, many don't. What are some of the challenges in making that work, some of the pitfalls that you have to avoid?”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Empowerment is always the first and most important part of that. Each of the people running their particular portfolio felt like they owned it and was the face of Willet to their particular industry. So empowering your team in that way was a huge ingredient of all of this. Then yes, the economic alignment. I always find it interesting that people view it as a conflict of interest for the investment team to invest alongside whoever's capital you're investing. structured correctly, I think that should be essential. You want people to have more than just their psychological incomes at stake. We want them to have their actual incomes at stake. And there are some pitfalls that you've got to be careful of and capacity issues and all of those things. So there are some issues to manage around that. But I think it does so much more good than bad over time when done correctly. It's why if I look at Willet, the turnover level is extraordinarily low.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentioned two things that tie into that point of motivation. One is people are highly motivated. And then you also mentioned that Steve and Alice had personal investments alongside, which isn't something you always see in the spool of capital. What created that high level of motivation for the people on the team and that alignment of interest?”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the end it comes down to interest. Both of them are investors to their core. Both of them sat in an open floor plan with everybody else. Both of them were making investments personally on many things. And that alignment of interest is really hard to replace. I think there are many people in the investment business broadly who are there to make some money and it's a fine way to do so. But then you run into those people who really just love this stuff. And when you work with them, you understand why they're successful. It's not because they're trying to make money. It's because they actually love it. And everybody knows it and it resonates. So availability is just a byproduct of all of that. If you're talking to them about a way that they're going to do right by their client in a material way that will influence the portfolio, they got time for you. It may not be right now, but it'll be soon. And if it's not in person today, we'll do it by Zoom tomorrow.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was it that made them available? You imagine this very large pool of capital, you got a team doing a whole bunch of different stuff. Their calendars probably get full. So what was the structure of the setups so that that worked?”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Steve and Alice and in the rest of the Willet team, you have smart, motivated, candid people. There was not a lot of wasted time. You knew very quickly where things stood in working with that team. And that is just the best way to be efficient, to empower people ultimately. It doesn't mean that we always agreed, far from it. But you knew exactly what you needed to do to convince them. And over and over again, they were available and candid. And those are the two most essential characteristics, in my view, for people who approve investments is availability and candor. And I think the two of them have that in spades. So it made it very easy to get things done if you could get them convinced.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within that relatively simple structure of Steve Allison, and then you and your team and real assets and across the board. What was it about the decision making process that seemed to work effectively?”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was the biggest deal, I think, still to this day that Willet ever did as a direct investment, where it was a secondary. So we bought an enormous set of secondary interests out of a retail vehicle that my former firm had put together. So we had a competitive advantage there. We partnered with some other people to do that because the scale of it was enormous. But it's always a good setup when you know more than the seller about the assets and when the seller has to do so for the wrong reasons. So we did that in scale early days. And then we just kept on networking in those investment businesses, all the real asset categories, trying to essentially sell our capital. I think that's one of the things that a lot of people miss. Some firms are able to sell their capital with their brand name, but most it's interpersonal relationships. And going out there and meeting people at conferences and networking and showing up to board meetings and things like that is the best way to sell that capital. And we really did a good job of that, will it?”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always think the secondary market is fascinating. You have the best setup in that you usually have sellers on the other side who are doing it for the wrong reason. And we did that early days at Willet. And in fact, it was my old firm selling.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you got it done. And the scale was pretty large and got larger, which had a wonderful virtuous circle effect for us where people would bring us new deals because they realized that we were easy to work with, we were scale providers of capital, and we had a great team across all verticals.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was as good as it gets, so internally focused. Again, Mike had a blind trust initially. Mike also is a wonderful manager in that he very much believes the credo of hire great people give them the tools that they need to succeed and get out of their way. So we would absolutely be accountable and report to him. But by and large, as long as it was going well and we could answer his very direct and pointed questions sometimes, he let us have a long leash. So the investment process was very straightforward for each asset class. It was one asset class head, an associate director, and then we had a CIO Alice Ruth, who's now Dartmouth, and then the chairman Steve Ratner, and a few got Alice and Steve to say, yes, you're done. You had some compliance and ODD issues that you had to work through every time just to make sure that Mike, given his profile, was associating with people who he wanted to be associated with, usually not a problem, but good to double.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investments and unsponsored direct investments. We built a really interesting portfolio and that was pretty exciting for me to do in that era.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People in the world building a new family office essentially. And oh, by the way, in a blind trust at the time, so really couldn't ask you too many questions. Which you do want your clients to be able to ask questions, but it's great if they're pretty high level. The only wrinkle was it was in New York City. So I've been in Chapel Hill since 1995 other than two years in Boston. And I traveled a lot. So I thought, gee, it's a really interesting commercial opportunity. But personally, I could probably commute. And I approached them with that idea, and that worked. I went from running all of private assets and being one of the managing partners of that piece of the business at Morgan Creek to just running real assets for Will Advisors and going way back to a kid from Texas when the tide was out for these categories. I've always thought they were interesting and I've learned a lot about them over the years. I've made plenty of mistakes that I hope I've learned from. And being able to build that portfolio from scratch really with an open remit, not just funds at all, doing a lot of secondaries, doing a lot of direct investment, both”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, some of that was the GFC. So Morgan Creek peaked $13 billion in the summer of 2008. The complexion of the business changed. It was heavily hedge funds going into the GFC. It was heavily private investments coming out. But it was clear by 2011 that you had to consolidate, you had to get to scale. The fee pressure justifiably, given that no one really distinguished themselves during the GFC, was intense. So the only way to deal with intense fee structure is to get to scale. So we either needed to acquire someone or be acquired. And that was just never going to happen for a lot of different reasons. So that became evident to me by the middle of 2011. I wasn't really planning on doing anything about it necessarily other than keep trying to push to consolidate or buy somebody. And we looked at some of those opportunities, but then I got a phone call, which is one of those phone calls that you have to take. One of the top 10 riches.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I enjoyed it. It was a big change in the day-to-day, but I do think one of the best ways to know that you have mastered the subject is to be able to explain it to other people. And in the process of acquiring clients, in the process of servicing clients, you find out just how well you know it. Within the endowment architecture, and we did have a good investment committee at UNC, so they did push back from time to time. I think over time, they become so comfortable and you become so comfortable as the investment team that you just lose a little bit of the sharpness in what you're doing. So it's always good to have someone pushing back on what you're doing every day because it keeps you sharp. So we value that very much. There's sometimes too much of that when you're getting investment recommendations that now need to go to, we had 12 OCIO clients at one point and you needed to convince each and every one of them to do so. Again, the ratio of how much time you're spending thinking about investments to how much time you're spending trying to”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We probably overthought what we should be doing. When people come to you as an OCIO and say, you know, I don't want the full menu. I'd like to go a la carte. It's very tempting. And some firms have pulled that off well. I would say it is a material change in your mission to become a purveyor of asset class fund of funds versus an OCIO. And it's hard to do without a lot of people doing a lot of different things. We did not have that. So we were trying to catch a lot of different balls all the same time and the acceleration of the stock market in 06 and 07 really helped, but it left us unprepared for 2008-2009. Culturally, it's the change to being a la carte plus free speak, so to speak, that was a huge difference that we didn't manage all that well in hindsight.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having just two clients and having the network that we built at UNC, it was pretty great. What changes is when you add many more clients? And then all of a sudden your day goes from 80% investing, 20% clients to 20% investing, 80% clients. And now you're in the asset management business.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly, the clients. So that was number one. We started with two clients in Morgan Creek. They are great families. And they were interested in replicating what the endowment successes had been in the tech recycled heavily in hedge funds that shorted the tech rec in 2001. And that was very successful for many of them. And so a lot of families took notice and they said, gee, the endowments are doing something right. They got 99 right through their VC portfolios. They got 02 right through their hedge fund portfolios. Maybe there's an all-weather way to do this for the family market.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was a moment where I started to think, well, maybe I don't want to do that for a living. And it so happened that a couple months into business school that Mark Yusko and the team left UNC to form Morgan Creek Capitol and asked me to come run private investments for them. And that was interesting to me and that took off like a rocket ship. That was from an early OCIO. What was the difference in doing that from what you saw at the endowment?”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's called Brayton Point. It's an old coal-fired power plant down in Rhode Island. And it was coming out of one of the bankruptcies of the era. I hope it's natural gas these days. But I remember talking to the managing director on that tour, and I said to him, man, how'd you get so interested in power plants? Like, why did you make this your life's work? Us love these things he looks at me straight in the eye and says I hate these things they just pay me really well”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Am from Texas and so it will not surprise you to learn that they had a real estate and a natural resources portfolio that were orphans and they were like oh you can just handle that you're from Texas you must know all about oil wells and I'm from Dallas I've never seen an oil well in my life at that point but I learned and the pendulum swings as it always does and then all of a sudden towards the end of my career at UNC those asset categories were really really interesting So how do you think about what you wanted to do after you had that initial experience? I had a great experience at UNC. I ended up going to business school in 2004. Along the way, I thought, well, gee, I'd like to get closer to the assets and try to work at a private equity firm. And so the folks at ArcLight Capital were willing to put up with me for a summer. And that was Boston where I was going to business school. So I spent the summer buying power plants. And I thought, wow, this is really interesting. I had a moment that summer, though, which was a little disconcerting. We were taking a two-”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I thought that was pretty compelling. In addition to my ulterior motive, and so I took the job working for Mark Yusko at UNC Investment Management at that time, became UNC management company. So what were those early years like for you working in Endowment right out of school? You were in the endowment world in this era. Yale was a lot different than UNC was. Many endowments at that time were essentially where alumni went to retire after a successful career. And they put them some stocks and some bonds and they didn't really do a whole lot. And so that profession was evolving massively at the time, in part the tech boom of the late 90s and venture capital, the wave that really crested in 99. So it was a very interesting experience and evolved very rapidly. When I got there in 99, there was a little bit of EC in the portfolio. There were a lot of growth stocks. 2001 happened thereafter. When I got there, I was the only junior person.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, Bill, where are you going with this? And he said, Well, it turns out the number one reason that people should study Latin was to be better at English. You know what's even better to learn English? Studying English. So, if you want to be an investor in the long run, why don't you go be an investor?”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had worked at Goldman Sachs one summer in college and had planned to go back there, just do the Wall Street Investment Banking thing. But over the course of the years in college, I developed an ulterior motive. Her name is Cheryl. She's my wife now. Was going back to get another degree at UNC. So I thought it'd be interesting to go to Manhattan, work at Goldman, but I saw this advertisement for the endowment management function at UNC, which was just beginning to be professionalized at the time. This was 1999. I went and interviewed for that. I remember talking to one of my mentors and talked to him about, you know, going to Goldman versus working at UNC. He said, you know, the National Latin Commission commissioned a big study a bunch of years ago about all the reasons people should study Latin.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That goes way back when I was five years old. My dad lost his job. Don't really realize Going on at that age, but when your parents start fighting. It's not very fun to be around them. You start to take notice of what's going on and how it's impacting your life. So that was the first moment that I began to understand how important finances were in a family's life. Forward a couple years, my dad ended up working as an investor. Then we never really got to watch much TV in our lives. But every Friday night, he'd turn on over dinner. Wall Street Week with Lewis Rukaiser. And so all four of us, in fact, watched that with the family and all four of us are investing. So thanks to Lewis, RIP, for getting me interested in investing back in the mid-80s. And where did that take you through when you came out of college?”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Counts in a low turnout race like this. If you don't live there but have friends who do, please encourage them to vote for Brad. Lastly, if Brad is successful in his bid for treasure, his first priority will be building an investment team of talented professionals who share his passion for making a difference. Maybe you can help there too. Before we get going, I've appeared as a guest on a few podcasts to discuss my latest book, Private Equity Deals. If you're interested, I'd recommend listening to InvestLike the Best, the Investors Podcast, Animal Spirits, Wall Street Skinny, and Private Capital, each of which offers a different take. A few more will come out over the next few weeks as well.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our conversation covers Brad's story, investment, and leadership insights from his experience, the problems with North Carolina's investing and governance, and Brad's plan to turn around the state's pension fund performance. I don't often get to talk about really poor investment performance on the podcast, but this time we do. North Carolina's state pension fund has finished dead last among its peers over the last three and five years. That's 50th out of 50 U.S. states. It's 20-year returns aren't much better. The significant underperformance is what happens when an unsophisticated public employee leads the management of serious investment assets. I've known Brad for 10 years and want to do everything I can to help him both win the Treasurer seat and succeed once he's there. If you happen to live in North Carolina, please get out and vote. Every vote truly”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guessed on today's show is Brad Brainer, meeting candidate for Treasurer of North Carolina in the upcoming election. The state treasurer's responsibilities include managing the state's 120 billion dollar pension fund. Brad put himself in the ring after 25 years of investment experience, serving most recently as co-chief investment officer of Willet Advisors, Michael Bloomberg's family office. For more information on Willet, my conversation from 2019 with the chairman Steve Ratner is replayed in the feed.”
2024-10-21 · Capital Allocators · Brad Briner - Family Office to Public Service (EP.413) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source