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Jennifer Heller

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2017-05-17
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2017-05-17
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  1. “Who really didn't have a voice in rural India. And that was powerful. And I think there, their brand did matter. But I think their issue was that they weren't focused anymore. So they built this movement and they gave women a voice. And they organized women, which was a powerful thing at the time. And then they built a microfinance bank, which was very successful. And then they started building all these ancillary vehicles, which were kind of not so successful. And I think they were building on their brand to do that. But I don't think anyone was kind of taking a step back and saying, what should we focus on? And maybe we can put all of our brand equity and our energy into the one or two things we do really, really well and let other folks try to solve these other problems.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “You know, I think it's an interesting question, and there can be value to brand building at any organization, and maybe at times you do that at the expense of the bottom line, whatever that bottom line looks like. I frankly am not sure that, well, a couple of things. One, I think sometimes the best, and I feel a little silly talking about this given where I work and given that it's not my expertise, but outside looking in, I wonder if sometimes the best nonprofit ideas aren't easily scalable. Paul Farmer talks about this a bit and it's, well, at least in mountains beyond mountains, the book that was written about him, you know, he had this incredible way to bring healthcare to the developing world. But the scalability piece was the reason he didn't get funded for a long time. And yet his outcomes were phenomenal. So I think figuring out how to scale a nonprofit is an incredible challenge. This organization was doing something things incredibly well that worked at scale. They had built a movement of women.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I found some remarkable nonprofits when I was in India, and I thought a couple of times about switching over to a smaller organization that I thought was doing just had better metrics for measuring themselves. You know, what gets measured gets managed. But I was only there for six months and I felt I'd made a commitment to this organization and I needed to give it its fair shake. It just didn't seem right to kind of jump ship after two months, even if they didn't need me. I just felt I'd made a commitment to them. But there were some incredible small organizations, and I don't want to be hard on the world of NGOs and nonprofits. I think there's a lot of amazing organizations out there. I just think my experience with this particular organization, and specifically sort of the unit I was working in within this specific organization was disappointing relative to my very lofty expectations. Yeah.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Rushing towards the nonprofit sector. It just, that's a luxury. It's a luxury to be able to work in a nonprofit to a degree. But, you know, I think when you're in a really fast-growing economy, talent wants to retch towards technology. They want to rush towards finance. So there was a bit of a talent gap in the sector, and smaller organizations were figuring it out and filling it. But bigger organizations, I don't think we're doing such a good job. Secondarily, I realized I didn't want to live in, I think the best work is being done on the ground in a lot of developing countries when it comes to”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think I was frustrated because the institution was more focused on getting grants from the World Bank than they were on making a difference. I think they wanted to make a difference in people's lives, but they didn't always know how. And so so much of the program ended up being oriented around earning the next grant that there wasn't enough focus sometimes on just the blocking and tackling that was involved in trying to make very poor women's lives better. And I think there's some things the organization did very well. But, you know, as an outsider looking in, there are times when you come into a new place and you see things that seem glaringly obvious. They were involved in some public-private partnerships, for example, that were actually losing money for the people that they were trying to support, but they looked really good on paper. It looked really good to say you had a partnership with X large agriculture firm or X retailer. So I think I was a little disillusioned by that. I also think, frankly, in India at the time, talent wasn't”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, I was working for a really interesting NGO there that had a big microfinance arm and a public-private partnership arm. It was very well funded by the World Bank. It seemed like sort of the perfect institution to really explore that passion. I frankly found the work incredibly frustrating. And it was frustrating probably because I came in with a degree of arrogance about what I could bring to an organization that I knew nothing about. There was no reason they needed me there, quite frankly. But the pace at which they moved was not only slow, but”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, it seems so boring to me that I would keep doing the same thing I'd done before school. I just never thought I'd be one of those people the time I spent in India taught me that I did not want to go into the full sort of nonprofit microfinance world.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I stay there, so it was structured as sort of a pre business school experience. I was supposed to stay there two years. I ended up sort of compromising with my boss at the time to stay two and a half years and then spend six months in India before business school so I could make sure that I understood what path I wanted to go down post business school because I sort of view that period in anyone's life as a freebie period where you can take a lot of risk. Postgraduate school you have to kind of start to focus a little more on what you want your career to look like.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Asset classes because these assets were so diverse, but it was also just a really exciting time to be working for the endowment because the team was quite new. There was a lot of energy. There were a lot of folks that had actually come from the banking world there. So I think there was a really high level of sort of discipline and work ethic there, but also a lot of freedom to kind of figure things out. So I just, I fell in love with the work. And I also, this was on the advice of my husband, I tend to romanticize jobs, and he always would say, you know, pay attention to what the senior people are doing every day and is that work that you think you'd love. And the truth was, I loved the work that the senior people were doing. I'd get to sit in on weekly meetings with them, and I loved the breadth of the work. I loved that they were meeting with really, really smart people all the time. And I loved that they were having a tangible impact. So it was fun.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It was incredible. It was just, it was quite frankly a huge relief coming from the banking world. I had the pleasure of being at the Stanford Management Company at a time when there was just a lot going on. Mike was a pretty new CIO. I was working for a portion of the endowment that had been a little bit undermanaged historically. It was 11 different school and department funds, so sort of mini endowments that all of the schools there had. And, you know, they had an incredible amount of assets because we just been through sort of the tech run-up and then the tech collapse. But there was still a lot of value that had been created during that period. But no one had ever really looked closely at those assets. So it was my job as an analyst or associate, I guess. They called me at the time to try to make some sense of that and put information together in a way that would be usable for folks, which ended up being an incredible training across.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Slowing down and learning to take your time and allowing that time, allowing yourself, I guess, the time and the space to open up and really absorb a culture. There's just such tremendous value in that. It's something I want to offer my kids.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Oh my goodness, that's a great question. I think what's interesting, I've now spent time, a little bit of time living in two countries very, very different from the US. So I spent that period of time in South Africa, and I also spent six months living in India prior to business school, working for an NGO trying to scratch my microfinance itch. And I think some learnings have come out of both of those experiences. One, that you have to have a lot of patience for the time and the pace in which things move in other countries. You often have to slow yourself down a lot, largely because, especially the times I was there, these economies were a lot less efficient. And in India, for example, getting a package to my parents mailed meant spending an hour at the post office watching someone tie up the package with strings. And it could be incredibly infuriating, but I think there's a lot of value to”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I spent a, so when a lot of my friends were going to Europe in college, And I knew that there would be something there to learn as a political economy major four years post-apartheid. It just seemed like a really interesting time to be there. And when I was there, I was in a program that was very focused on experiential learning and very focused on sort of letting us find our path in terms of what we were interested in. And I connected with an economics professor that gave me Mohammed Yunus' book, Mohammed Yunus is the guy that founded the Grameen Bank. And I read his book and it just sort of opened my eyes. Of course, here I am now working, you know, running a family office. So clearly my life has taken some twists and turns, but it just really excited me.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Investment banking, and it was largely sort of a post 9 11 crisis moment when I said this is not what I want to be doing with my life. But I enjoyed the analytical side of the job. I really didn't like selling. And I wasn't good at it, frankly. So I was searching around my college website, seeing what jobs were open. I saw a job at the Stanford Endowment. And I said, wow, this is a really cool intersection of finance and kind of the nonprofit world, which I wanted to move back towards. And I begged them for eight months to give me a job until they finally.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, I'm not one of those people that has been interested in investing since middle school or grade school. My dad is a doctor. My mom is an attorney and an art historian. And when I got my first job at Merrill Lynch in investment banking, they both thought I was going to be a stockbroker. And the reason I ended up there, quite honestly, is because I developed a little bit of an interest in microfinance in college. I spent a semester in South Africa. And I was a liberal arts political economy major. And I knew that I knew nothing about what a balance sheet was or an income statement was. And I needed to get some training. So that's how I started in banking. And even then, I wasn't sure where I was going to go, but I learned a little bit about the endowment world when I was there.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Our conversation starts with Jenny's frustrating experiences with nonprofit microfinance in South Africa and India and turns to her career allocating money on behalf of nonprofits and families. We touch on subtleties in picking managers for taxable investors, challenges in executing a long-term strategy, learning from mistakes, and mentorship. Jenny's clear and deep thought process provides pearls of wisdom throughout our conversation. Please enjoy my conversation with Jenny Heller. Jenny, thanks for joining me.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “With a focus on partnering with people who they believe have sustainable competitive advantages, share their long-term vision, and have highly aligned interests. These elite managers often start with great ideas, but have limited capital. Taking the helmet brandy wine five years ago, Jenny worked at the Sloan Foundation, Stanford University Management Company, and Merrill Lynch in its investment banking program. She's a graduate of Williams College, where she serves on its investment advisory committee and Stanford Business School.”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I want to start today's show by thanking you for tuning in. I've had a great deal of fun in the initial half dozen episodes of Capital Allocators, and I've lined up a terrific roster for the next half dozen. I don't know where this will all go, but I want to thank you in advance for listening and spreading the word. As always, I welcome your feedback and encourage you to send me a note. You can do that at capital allocators podcast.com slash contact. My guest on today's show is Jenny Heller, the president and chief investment officer of Brandywine Trust Group. Brandywine formed 25 years ago to manage the capital for a small group of families that all share a long-term multi-generational time horizon. Today it oversees almost $9 billion for those same families, much of it from compounding over a quarter century. The group invests flexibly across asset classes,”

    2017-05-17 · Capital Allocators · Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source