YouSaid · the spoken record

Finny Kuruvilla

lines on the record: 64
first: 2023-10-12
most recent: 2023-10-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“More people want to be more holistic and integrated and just have a sense of peace there with their values. But then on the positive side to say, okay, business should be the And that's an exciting vision for business that I think we've lost. One of the tragedies in the modern world is that business is often portrayed as adversary, as something hostile. So we think about the Occupy Wall Street movement. We think about all that happened with the financial crisis of 2008, 2009. Usually in the movies, the business guys, the bad guy, that's really unfortunate. We have chosen to try to reclaim a vision of what business could be. We really believe and are excited in business and its potential there. And in terms of the specific values, we have embraced a value set that we summarize with the love your neighbor principle. So that is found in almost every major religion. And the question then becomes if we're trying to love our neighbors, well, one, who are our neighbors? It's not so obvious if you're a business in Boston. Is it just local Bostonians?”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. First is the question of do people want values in their investing? And it's not obvious that everybody even does. It's growing in popularity. But first, you have to have the conversation why values. And you can think about this from a couple of different dimensions. First would be on the negative side, so certain areas you want to avoid. That's really important. And it's something that I don't think we think enough about. We sometimes use this analogy of a mafia wife. She's got the fur coat and the diamond rings and living this very lavish life. And she knows that something shady is going on on the other side of the door but doesn't want to ask the hard questions because she's got the great lifestyle. And I think a lot of us can fall into something like that where we're participating in lots of investments and we don't want to ask too many hard questions because maybe there's things we don't really want to know are actually happening. But that's not a comfortable place to be. And I hope.”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this integration of personal values and investing, something you hear a lot more about today, but something you started a long time ago, how did you frame out the values that you would then impose on your investing?”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even tied today is a Boston-based investment company that offers mutual funds primarily across a variety of asset classes to investors who want to be in alignment in terms of their values and their investment portfolios. We have a little over $6.5 billion under management across eight funds, and I happen to be a portfolio manager on two of those funds. Our first fund called the Gilead Fund, which is a go anywhere fund that's a best ideas type fund that integrates our values with our investment process and then a dedicated healthcare and life sciences fund, which primarily invests in small and mid-cap healthcare companies.”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took about eight years for us, so we were an unprofitable company for our first several years, and so it was not financially feasible for me to come aboard full-time. So in 2016, I made the jump and went full time into Eventide.”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up in July of 2008. And so had these two parallel tracks going, so on the one hand was working at Claris Ventures in the Venture Capital side, but then working with very, very small dollars at the time our mutual fund as part of that $800,000. We put $100,000 of it into the actual fund itself. So it was managing a pool of capital of about $100,000 and learned how to run a mutual fund company while I was working at Claris Ventures.”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much there, and I'm very grateful to the folks there for taking me under their wing. But then in parallel, what I did was said, okay, well, I want to try to raise some capital here for potentially starting my own business. And so went to just friends and family and said, here's an idea. What if we were to put together a company that would take the concepts that I have been honing over the years in terms of applying some basic screens to what we invest in? and then creating a product that would especially serve values-based or faith-based investors who want to try to get a good return from their investing in ways that are compatible with their values. And so went around to, as I said, friends and family and raised about $800,000 of just business capital to get the company going. And we launched Eventide in the summer of 2008, our mutual fund opened.”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had never done any formal study of accounting or business or anything like that. I was basically just a self-taught investor by reading books. And so it wasn't an easy move there. And I applied to a variety of jobs and frankly got turned down by most of them, but there was a firm in Cambridge called Claris Ventures. It was later acquired and became Blackstone. They found me through a common friend and they offered me the role after some interviews. I wish I could say it was my cleverness that got me the role, but it really wasn't. One of the nice things that venture capitalists are pretty good at is they're good at realizing that sometimes we have nonlinear paths into careers like investing and they're willing to take a bet on someone who they believe has an aptitude or a talent there even though they may be more raw or untrained. And it was a fantastic firm I learned so much.”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grim odds. Today, if you have a child with leukemia, he or she will have closer to a 90% chance of making to adult. So a complete reversal, and out comes there. And that is on the back of the work of thousands and thousands of people, but a lot of it comes from these biotech companies that are financing these trials. And one great innovation, you can help more people than you could help in a lifetime of seeing patients as one-offs. If you want to really be able to maximize your ability to affect patients, then moving over to something on the, say, the biotech or pharmaceutical side, you're actually more likely to have a shot to actually impact an order of magnitude or two more than you would seeing patients individually.”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning and growing and stretching, and I always say I use more of my med school now than I did when I was actually seeing patients as a resident and a fellow because you'll go from thinking about lupus to diabetes to oncology all in a day. That's one major reason. The second was a lot of the patients that I happen to take care of had some form of blood disorder. So that included leukemia, lymphoma, conditions like that. You quickly realize when you are taking care of those patients that a lot of the good stuff is happening not within the halls of the hospital, but at the biotech companies across the river and Cambridge. One of my stats that I like to share on this is that if you had a child in 1970 with leukemia, he or she would have about a 10% chance of making to adulthood.”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ironies of life is that we fall in love with the idea of something, not necessarily the thing itself. And the idea of something can be very different than the thing itself. And so it's always good to keep sober and to be flexible because you can't really know too well what things are actually like until you're actually doing it. And I certainly enjoyed my years in medicine, and I'm very grateful for that. But one of the realities of medicine and my physician friends, I think, would agree to this is that once you hit the pinnacle of your training, it actually becomes quite repetitive. It becomes something where you know one little slice of medicine very, very well, and you end up just doing a lot of pattern recognition again and again to deliver that care to patients. And that's not a bad thing. And I think it's something that I'm very grateful that a lot of people are content in those roles. But there's a certain type of person that craves, and I'm in this category,”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of You spent all of that time getting educated to become a doctor, at what point in time do you say, oh, I'm not going to practice, I'm just going to become an investor. One of the things that's very interesting about the trajectory”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the real lesson that I learned from all that was from my mom, my mom started off working at Bank of America as a teller.”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stay tuned for next time when I'll share what I actually like to say in that out of office response. Thanks so much for spreading the word. Enjoy my conversation with Finney Curravilla. Great to see you. Great to see you. Ted, why don't you take me back to your upbringing as a path to how you got into investing?”
2023-10-12 · Capital Allocators · Finny Kuruvilla – The Fourth Source of Alpha at Eventide (EP.343) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source