YouSaid · the spoken record

Jase Auby

lines on the record: 79
first: 2024-09-09
most recent: 2024-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“As I've become more senior, it's paying a lot more attention to the feelings of the person around me. What are their hopes and dreams, the people that you work with? What do they prioritize? What are they worried about? When you're putting together a team of people, how is that team going to interact? What type of people they are? And when I was younger, that kind of stuff was not on my mind at all. I mean, I was an independent actor and we're all just getting together and hashing things out. And that perspective of thinking more than just yourself, that's a hallmark of being a good leader. And I do wish that I had learned that a lot earlier.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People just go away. They're like, oh, this guy just doesn't get it. That's important. No one cares about your career more than you do. That's something he told me, which is very important, especially for permission person like myself where I'm sitting there waiting for somebody to come tap me. And then the best one ever, the one that nobody can ever follow. But I've spent a lifetime trying to is compare and despair. So don't compare yourself to others. There's always somebody who's smarter or made more money than you or whatever it is you value they have more of.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So definitely my wife, Susanna, for sure. We talk about her job. We talk about my job. I learn a lot giving her advice on what she does and I learn even more getting advice from her on what she says. That's just been super important over the years. And then I had an early mentor at Goldman Sachs who taught me the way. You come out of college, bright eyed and bushy-tailed. And they just set you straight. They tell you a lot of things. And one, he told me we were in the fixed income. So you only have a triple A rating once. Once you lose your AAA rating in life.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got this about 10 years ago, and it's when I realized that there are two kinds of people in the world. There's people who ask for permission and ask for forgiveness. And I thought long and hard about what kind I was. And I realized I'm a permission person. If I was left to myself working somewhere, I would be a cog in the machine and I would just sit there and wait for somebody to come give me work and then I would do the best I could to finish that work. It's realizing that in yourself and then challenging myself to go out and be more entrepreneurial and go out and think of things to do. And so the advice is if you're a permission person, break that mold, but also if you're a forgiveness person, break that mold too. If you're a forgiveness person, maybe ask for permission a little bit more too.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you look at lists of advice that people give, you're like, what are your top 10 pieces of advice? Think about it for yourself. What's the number one piece of advice that's common to all those lists? And that piece of advice is do what you say when you say you're going to do it. It's a cliche. So my biggest pet peeve is when people don't do what they say and they don't do it when they said they were going to do it. Even worse, they come to you a day before something's due and they say, well, I did the easiest 80% part, but that hard 20% was just really hard. I don't even know what to do there. And you're like, okay, come on, man. So that's definitely my biggest pipe pee.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I play soccer on the weekends. I was a horrible team sports athlete as a kid, but I absolutely loved team sports. I had to play tennis as what I specialized in. But here I am, 54 years old playing old man 11 on 11 referee soccer. And we run real slow. And we limp a lot. But one last bite at that team sports apple for me is something I really enjoy.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We all have a lot of our favorite munger buffet quotes. This is a munger quote. In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time. None zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads and about how much I read. And that's my hobby. I read a lot and I enjoy it when I'm at home. I sit in the center of my house because I like to sit and read. And then when my children come home and they want to engage, I'm there and ready for them. It's a lot easier to engage with your kid. When they want to engage with you than when you go knock on their bedroom door and they yell at you to go away. But for me, my favorite hobby is reading and then being there for my kids.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Class US large cap equity dominate for quite a long time. I like to think in decades which major country is going to win in the decade. The US won in the 1950s coming out of World War II. We were the factory to the world. Europe was rebuilding in the 60s, the emerging markets in the 70s with the commodities, the Japanese clearly in the 80s, US again in the 90s, emerging markets again in the 2000s. Who is it? Well, it's India. India is the top performing major market in the world, and I call it a major market because they have such a huge percentage of the world's population. And I don't think the US is going to be the dominant market in this decade. At this point, it's probably going to be India.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to sound a little bit defeatist, but Alpha is going to get harder and harder and harder. It already has gotten harder. AI is going to actually speed up that as well. And so as investors, thinking about beta is going to become more and more important over time. And having the best beta you possibly can. We're 8% investors in risk parity. Risk parity is all about having the best beta. Literally, when you put together a risk parity portfolio, you ignore alpha altogether and you take out a blank piece of paper and you say, if I was to build the most diverse portfolio I possibly could, how would I do it? Different providers have different answers to that question, but you're trying to maximize diversification, the idea of putting leverage on our fund while maximizing diversification, that's a prediction I would make. I would say that that's going to become more important, especially as we've seen one asset.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very interested in it. We know a lot about that at Texas teachers with our focus on every kind of power you can imagine. And we're big power investors. So I do think AI has legs and that it's going to be transformative for our society.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI is obviously really interesting. I'll attempt to be original there. We identified data centers three years ago as our number one idea and it crossed several different portfolios. And we had identified that as our number one idea before AI showed up. And then AI showed up. And so now it's just totally turbocharged it. So looking forward, I see data center demand for a long time. People have started to contemplate what it might mean to have a bubble in a data center. But investing in a data center, from my perspective, is similar to investing in land. Usually when you're investing in farmland, you're not actually buying the land. What you're buying is access to water. It's more about water than it is soil. And so data centers is the same thing. It's about access to power, looking forward. It's this very boring sector, the power sector is suddenly. A lot of people are very.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentioned at the onset when you first got started in Wall Street that you had these computer skills and sometimes you could just see the trends by where people are hiring. Using that lens, I'd love to have you look out and say, what are you seeing today?”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if it's a valid idea, we're sure that the board as fiduciaries will go ahead and adopt it. And if it's not a valid idea, it's not consistent with the corporate board's fiduciary responsibility, then we won't. Obviously on other things where you have a conflict with the board, like pay or board terms or something like that, we're going to vote differently. But on these activist type issues, we now vote alongside the board. And I'm really glad we did it that way where we went to the provider rather than try to build a custom policy ourselves. First of all, it takes a lot of people to build a custom policy yourself with. There's thousands and thousands of votes a year, which is we only have 240 people at Texas teachers. But also, we've been able to convince other states to adopt this. And so there's other folks who are thinking along these strict fiduciary lines and less about more activist type issues.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building in Miami, we actually know to think about that. Another way it comes out is proxy voting. We use a proxy service and proxy services, they really do try to reflect the consensus amongst all of the folks who subscribe to their service. And we have noticed over time we're much less activists at Texas Teachers. Like I said, we're a strict fiduciary maximized value. And we noticed that there was more activism seeping into those proxy guidelines. And so several years ago, we went to our proxy provider and we said we're going to need you to come up with a new benchmark policy for us that takes out these more activist types issues. And we suggested they call it the strict fiduciary policy. And they actually ended up calling it the global borderlined policy. And so the idea”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are very much in that strict fiduciary mindset where we're not thinking about the climate lens in particular on the portfolio as a lens separate and distinct from just thinking about risk and return on a portfolio. One of the examples that folks always use when they think of climate risk is they'll always mention we were building a building on the beach in Miami and we realized we had to think about climate risk. And for me that's not really a new risk. The catastrophic risk industry's been around for one of the original investment industries there are. I'm not an expert on it, but let's call it 500 years people have been thinking about cat risk and that industry is very, very good at and they build very good models to model that sort of thing. So that idea that you're putting this top down lens where you suddenly have a brilliant idea, hey, everyone needs to think about climate change. It's like, no, no, we got this one. We're investing on a...”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That innovation drive and it's having the will to do it. It's building an articulate case to your board, your state government, to your members. But for us, it really is the board, having a board that you've built a lot of trust with over time, that understands exactly why you're doing the things you're doing and is ready to support you in that decision.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To China, you're flying to Japan. So the reasoning behind that office was less clear. But the London office has been a really big success for us, just being local.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, we're in Austin and we thought about opening foreign offices. We realized we did in fact need a foreign office in London. So we are the only public U.S. fund that has a foreign office and we have our office in London. The Canadians and others have offices all over the world. We did actually investigate opening another office perhaps somewhere in Asia. But what we realized was what we're using the London office for is primarily private markets having boots on the ground in the same time zone. And there's a lot of managers in London. You can unlock a lot of Europe just from London. But in Asia, we don't do as much private investing in Asia. So you didn't really need that private office as well as it's not as concentrated. So it's really hard to just pick one city in Asia. And Asia is a big place too. You can't cover all of Asia from one city. You're flying to Australia. You're flying.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first one has definitely been successful. Every hedge fund that we're investing in knows that 1 or 30 is something that they should be offering their customers. They're certainly offering it to us. And then the cash hurdle, I mean, people have been pressing cash hurdle for a long time. I'm sure we'll see more adoption over time.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beta long short portfolio, you want to make sure it's over a 0.3 beta benchmark in our directional hedge fund portfolio. We have near 100% achievement of that 1 or 30 over an appropriate risk benchmark fee structure. And then what happened more recently is we started to think about our stable value hedge fund portfolio. And back in 2016, an appropriate risk benchmark for a zero beta portfolio was near zero. So we were a lot less focused on putting cash benchmarks into hedge funds. But now with cash at five and a quarter, we knew that this was important, but it's come to be more important. So we've launched a second initiative this time. And we have 60 signatories to the letter we put together. And it's the idea of in a zero beta portfolio using cash, paying fees worth a cash hurdle.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. We were able to press fees in every external relationship that we have in every asset class. And that's one of the advantages of being large. So back in 2016, we launched an initiative in the hedge fund industry to convert folks from a 2 in 20 mindset, which is a 2% management fee. And in addition, you paid 20 incentive fee, convert that to a 1% or 30. So if you think about it, you're not necessarily changing the quantum of fees. Hedge funds are still getting paid a lot of money. You're just tilting it away from that certain management fee and giving them more of that incentive fee 30 instead of 20. That was a very successful initiative. And when we launched that at the time, 1 or 30 is a little bit of a brand name. You can say that. It's easy to remember. But what it really was was one or thirty over an appropriate benchmark. So if you have a point three.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, part of one of the advantages of having this kind of scale is you imagine having some pricing power in terms of terms and fees. We'd love to hear the experience from the original innovation of 130 to how that's played out in the portfolio today.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of those 180 managers that we funded, we've had 12 graduate to full fledged allocations in the portfolio. That means that you were successful through three funds on average and that you've added value over a long period of time. Another point of that too is it takes time to go through three funds on the private side. So there's definitely a pretty big time lag on that. But we've had 12 full-fledged allocations to the funds over the years, which we're very proud of.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to make sure that early on we are building a relationship between emerging funds that are succeeding in our core portfolios. As a general rule, we'll do three funds with an emerging manager, and then we have to make a decision. Do they graduate or are we done with this relationship? Because at that point, we no longer consider them to be emerging. And so building that relationship with the larger portfolios, and then just putting up a lot of pretty strict numerical criteria around outperformance on the private side, MOIC and DPI and things like that. DPI can be particularly difficult in emerging manager portfolios. So that's something we've absolutely focused on.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really is just using the same benchmarks as what our larger portfolio uses. So private equity, it's got to be the SSBEI for us, Street Private Equity Index and real estate's got to beat the Odyssey and public equity, public benchmarks. So we can just measure the alpha, the regular O ways. Something else is we have identified what we think does not work. So for example, we don't allocate to venture capital in our emerging manager program. And there are a lot of emerging managers in venture capital, but we've not had success there. And if we want this program to be sustainable, we have to acknowledge where we can have edge and where we don't. And so we've just been very clear about that. And we've got larger in the asset classes where we've had more success. We've had more success in P.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There. And then number three is graduation. So to affirm our size, if we're making emerging manager program 25 million dollar, $50 million commitments, that is not going to move the needle. And we probably should be putting too much resources into that. But if we give a path to graduation to come up to a full size allocation in our portfolio, then that will end up really helping the portfolio. But especially that focus on performance and return has given us probably the most, I'll take it that far, the most successful emerging manager program in the country, certainly the longest lived without any interruption.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, huge success with our emerging manager program. Started it in 2005. So it's 20-year program at this point in time. We've funded 190 emerging managers at this point in time. And the reason why it's been successful and sustainable is we have clearly articulated goals. The first one is performance first. So if something's not performing, it's not going to be sustainable. No matter what your objective is, your objective could be a climate goal or something like that. It's not going to be sustainable over time if it's not outperforming. And so that's number one for us. Number two is diversity in that portfolio. And that really springs into the idea that diversification is the only free lunch in finance. And it stands to reason that diversity of thought and diversity of people is valuable as well. So that's our number two.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alongside a lot of core relationships of size, you've long had this emerging manager program. I'm curious how you've thought about it, what's happened with it, and how you continue to think about it going forward.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Externally in something that we actually end up doing internally as well. And there's a symbiosis there. Innovation is absolutely the key to alpha. That's what makes alpha sustainable. You will not have alpha if you don't innovate. Even at our level, even at the $200 billion level, you've got to be innovating.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Says to you, think about commercial real estate. What do you think of first? Everyone still thinks of office buildings, but office buildings is, last I saw just 21% of the commercial real estate market. So 79% of the commercial real estate market has nothing to do with office buildings, which is quite interesting if you think about it. So it's all about finding those niches. Success in that asset class is 100% about innovation. The other thing to say about innovation is it's rare you truly come up with an original idea. Given our information flow, it's almost always true that we've seen that idea before. So someone will oftentimes come to me, particularly in internally managed portfolio, and they know now, especially, but my first question is going to be, well, who else does this? And sure enough, almost always, even if you came up with the idea independently, there's somebody else out there doing it, and they'll talk to us because oftentimes that actually could end up with us investing.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Innovation is deeply important. We've had a lot of success in the real estate area, for example, and real estate has been all about finding the next niche. And if you're not finding that next niche, then you can still have a good return, but you're just going to have a core level beta real estate portfolio. And the history of real estate in the past several decades has been about asset classes that were not originally thought of as core assets that became core assets. So did you get into multifamily early? That's a pretty old one. Now today, did you get into single family that's been a big success and important? Did you get into industrial? That's now solidly a core asset class. In fact, and the most commonly used core index, the Odyssey industrial, which Amazon warehouses, that sort of thing, is 34% of the index is the largest part of the index. Nowadays, when someone...”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the size of a committee is very important. You want it large enough that you get a very diverse set of viewpoints, but you don't want it too large because then there can be a real free rider problem, actually, when you have a committee that's too large. And you can know when people feel less vested in the result. I like a committee size of five to six. I think that's important as well to have a chair who's spending a lot of extra time thinking about the process and thinking about the quality of the decisions and also thinking about the merits of the decisions, but just thinking about the quality of the process itself is important. So an empowered chair, articulated guidelines, getting together periodically to consider the decisions you made and how to improve.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pushing it down to those asset level investment committees was crucial. They're processing so many more investments and they're able to react much speedier to our external managers. And we become easier to deal with, which can be really important. External managers are human. You do build relationships there. And when you're able to talk to someone with a professionalized, very well thought out process that can give you a quick yes or no, the motto no slow maybes. That can be a real advantage. So yeah, just setting ourselves up to be quick, but prudently well thought out in what we're doing.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Improvement and something that has been termed, I think, AQR came up this term craftsmanship alpha, where you're just getting better and better and better at the processes that you have in place. You're minimizing trading costs. You have the best process. You're using your people wisely as well.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, that inversion of pushing authority autonomy downward, that's been the core of it all, focusing on people. Was a really big deal, especially in that 21 and 22 period. Also, this is a little more obscure, but thinking really hard about what it means to make a wise decision. So just going back to that first principle that we're in the wise decisions business, the mechanics of decision making, decision making is all about information. It's about having the right information. Make sure you don't just have the easy information. You actually go in and out and got the hard information as well because you could end up with a very different decision. Thinking about structure of committees that make decisions, they tend to be conservative committees. So you want to think about making sure that you're not just turning down too many investments because there's a vocal person on a committee. Just thinking about the mechanics of decision making has been really important. And that really goes into the idea of continuous.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That one doesn't come up as much to that private equity versus stable value because they're just so different. But one example might just be data centers, which is something that we're investing in in private equity. We're investing in it in real estate. We're investing in infrastructure, and we're investing in it in debt. And then there's hybrid securities between all of that, something that's got both debt and equity attached to it. And so we make a working group, actually, on something like that where all of the verticals are interacting with one another and thinking about those risk issues in a unified way. And then you figure out where it best goes into the portfolio. If it's a good investment, we'll always find some place for it to go.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think about the cross comparison of asset classes across these different groups where if you have that vertical specialty in private equity, it might be harder for them to think of how attractive the incremental investment is compared to something in the stable value portfolio?”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really is setting up those boxes of authority when you ask for transparency, oftentimes what you're getting is a lot of quantitative. We have the fund fully modeled out quantitatively, and we know the risks that are being taken. And the qualitative manager by manager decision, it really is embedded down with the teams. And for folks like me, it's more of an explanation of the strategy they've taken and how they consider those qualitative factors. And a lot of questions back from me, but they're making those decisions.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people in your seed, particularly when you're talking about letting things come from the bottom up, you get a very qualitative view of managers, and yet you came at it from a quantitative horizontal view of risk. How have you put together that quantitative view with the qualitative judgments that are coming from the bottom up?”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The final call was made in the CIO's office. Not that we were that way, but just to the extent we were, I made us less that way. So for me, it's all about pushing authority and autonomy as far down in the organization as possible, as is appropriate. The exchange there is true transparency into what's actually happening and just making sure we're building really strong trust so that when we delegate that authority, we know it's being used well. One thing we did was to make sure that we had one internal investment committee that approved all investments for the entire fund. And now we've put investment committees into each vertical. So now there's a private equity investment committee, a real estate investment committee. Larger stuff certainly goes all the way up to the top one, but we've pushed that authority down to the teams. People responded well to that, and I think we get better decision making that way. One leader at the top thinking in black and white terms is not as good as lots of folks considering shades of gray down below.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had that full horizontal view, and the board ended up hiring me to be CIO. So I went from spending a lot of time building that horizontal view to actually getting more vertical. I was really leaning into the relationships. So spending a lot of time in New York just going out and meeting our external relationships where they were. I didn't spend a lot of time doing that before when I was in the risk group and really prioritizing when people come to Austin being there as well. Sometimes I actually don't like to travel because there's so many people coming down to visit us in Austin that you end up missing meetings down there, but facing externally has really been my focus. And that's not something I've done for a long time, maybe since my career back at Lehman Brothers, like learned a little bit of those skills. Another big priority I really made when I became CIO was making sure we were not a top-down organization, not a command and control organization, not an organization where decision making was monopolized by, say, a CIO.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something to always keep in mind when you get promoted is you can really fall back and spend 80% of your time doing what you were doing before. For example, if you were the head of the private equity group and you become a CIO, you got to watch out and make sure you're not spending like 80% of your time talking to your old private equity contacts because you got a whole other portfolio to manage. So I had to do something similar to that. One of the reasons why I became CIO is because I had a horizontal view on the whole organization being in risk. I did not come from a vertical. And so to me, the analogy is when you have a CEO of a company and that person maybe even built the company or founded the company, were there for a long time and that CEO leaves when the board says, well, who should we make the CEO? Well, there's the CFO sitting right there. And it's because the CFO is one of the few people that has that full horizontal view. So that was a real analogy to what happened to me. I was the chief risk officer, CRO, and when we started talking about succession.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and they seek out ways to be there. Working from home has hurt us a little bit, actually, because people can now, for example, work from home for an employer in New York City and then move to Austin. And so they don't need to necessarily change employers. And folks can leave us and join a firm in New York City and still live in Austin. But we'll see what happens with work from home over time. We may go back to something what we had in that issue won't be there for us anymore.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them solely for the benefit of those teachers and solely to maximize Our members are our customers, but on a daily basis, we don't have customers. We're not trying to design products to suit customers. We can just invest in things that are actually going to meet that core goal. So that's the first thing that attracts people, text teachers. Number two is the other like-minded folks who are stepping up to that challenge. Number three is that intellectual challenge. That's what I love about my job more than else is the breadth, just being a mile wide, knowing something about every asset class we have in our portfolio, being able to think intelligently about venture capital and private equity and hedge funds and everything else. I enjoy that challenge. You don't want to be a mile wide and an inch deep, so I like going as deep as I can in that area. So that intellectual challenge is there. And then the fourth value proposition is Austin, Texas. And so that's been really helpful for us because Austin's been a destination for quite some time, but it's really picked up the pace post-COVID. People want to be in Austin.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“War for talent is tough in 21 and 22 combined those two years we lost 25% of our staff which was one in four folks walk down the door the great resignation but our longer term run rate and our current run rate is five or six percent a year which is at a healthy rate so we've been able to attract and retain staff with the exception of that two-year period our board understands that challenge and they've really helped us with compensation and benefits and those sorts of things and we have a very clearly articulated value proposition as well for people that come to work at Texas teachers so it's a rank ordered value proposition number one is the mission serving the teachers of Texas and I like to articulate that and say how do we serve the teachers of Texas and it's we're in the wise decisions business so we have dollars of capital and we are investing”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So 100%, we always prefer to manage internally for obvious reasons, fees obviously much lower when you hire your own people and empower them. But the key thing is to really be clear-eyed about whether you have skill in that particular area. And if you don't have skill, we will not hesitate to go external. And so we have external relationships in every single class of class that we invest in.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those deals and figure out a way to make it fit in the portfolio. One of the ways we're able to do that is we have a group called our Special Opportunities Group that that is a big part of their mandate is if someone goes to our private equity group and it doesn't fit in the portfolio for risk reasons or return reasons or any reason they can pass it over to that group and that group can consider it.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the standard verticals are obviously very important. So there's a private equity team and a real estate team and an infrastructure team on the private side. And then we have internal fundamentally managed public equity, internal quant equity. And then we have an external public equity group. They also do hedge funds as well. Then we have a risk team that manages half of our risk portfolio externally and half internally. So just standard verticals. But one thing that we do really pride ourselves on is being able to consider an investment that doesn't fit exactly into a vertical. And that's really based on the idea that sometimes the most attractive, interesting investments are the ones that most of your peers said no to because they all said, well, is this a private equity deal or is this a credit deal or is this a real estate deal or is this an infrastructure deal? We don't know where it fits, so we're not going to do it. We work really hard to do that.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that our investment relationships have is they have lots and lots of smart people who are just oftentimes waiting to be asked. And you can commission bespoke research projects. You can be thinking about entering a market. You can call up five partners and ask them about that market and really understand it. Folks have resources they want to give you. And it's up to us to actually accept those and put them into our system, which can be tough because we have 240 people and $200 billion. And so we got a lot more information coming in than we can process at the end of the day. And then also just having liquid capital that we have ready and able to invest in vehicles we've set up previously with our manager relationships so that when they really need us, we can be there with principal investments or co-investments and all those sorts of things.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Venture capital, for example, can be difficult for us to ask because the gating item for venture capital is oftentimes not capital. We have lots and lots of capital, but if someone has a $500 million fund and we say we want $200 million of it, they're going to say you can't have that much. And so that's a little bit of a limiter there.”
2024-09-09 · Capital Allocators · Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source