YouSaid · the spoken record

Kim Lew

lines on the record: 104
first: 2020-08-17
most recent: 2020-08-17
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

“All kinds junk, good, bad, way too much to me. And everybody has given you these answers like, you know, my biggest fault is that I'm a perfectionist. No. My biggest waste of time is a true waste of time. There's a whole bunch of TV that is of no value except for maybe it's a stress decompressor and it just keeps you from too crazy.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell you the question you didn't ask me that I was like, I hope he asked me this question. Everybody he's asked this question for has given him fake answers and I'm going to.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enjoy your children more. I spend a lot of my time with my kids. The best thing I will do in this world is the legacy of my kids. And so my guess is that I'm going to, no matter how much time I spend with them, and I like, I feel like I spend a lot of time, no matter how much time I spend with them, I'm going to think to myself, I wish I had spent more time with them because they, I hope will be amazing people. And I think they're super interesting now. So when they're adults, they're going to be really interesting. And I'm going to wish I had spent more time with them and my grandkids and everybody else. Think I'm going to be really proud of them. I think I'm going to be really proud of my grandkids.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think sometimes am the person who Worries too much. And for sure, like I said, when I was in HBS, one of my issues was I couldn't speak up in class worries too much. I worried too much about what people would think. I wish I had learned earlier than nobody knows everything. And you just sort of have to put yourself out there and just hope for the best. And sometimes you're going to look dumb. And guess what? You'll get up. You'll still be breathing. And, you know, now I'm willing to look stupid and I wasn't willing to look stupid when I was younger.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was an organizational behavior major. I love books about sort of human behavior and the way people think and the thinking fast and slow books, the blink books, the give and take, all those kind of like what are humans like and how they develop. I think people either read fiction or they read nonfiction and if they're business people they read business books. I read all of them, right? I just, if somebody recommends a book to me, I'll read it. I think having sort of a broader sense of the way different people think and the way different people experience the world has made a difference.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father was a Had to do military corner bed making. It's just a very, very disciplined. I learned the Marine Corps hymn before I learned my ABCs probably. Just a very sort of, he really believed strongly that if you just have to plan things out and if you don't plan things out, then you will not be prepared. And if you are not prepared, you will not perform well. And I think that's probably the thing that stayed most with me. I'm maybe an over planner sometimes.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When she was not even ranked. So she had not been playing, and then she just came back, and it was pretty amazing, right? Like the whole idea that you can just decide to get yourself together and make a comeback was pretty amazing”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I will start off by saying I am the least athletic person you will ever know. From when I was two years old wore glasses and I think kids who wear glasses naturally don't become sports kids, right? So it's not something, but probably my favorite sports moment was when Serena Williams won the Australian Open in 2007. It just was in the first?”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Choose to do again, but I would like I did some crazy massage things at some spiritual, I don't even know what they're called. And I was it horrible? No, but am I likely to sign up for it again? No, you know, probably the most unusual is that somebody here at Carnegie knew the echomologist at the Museum of Natural History and they took me on the tour behind the scenes and let me touch this. That is closer to a human than to a salmon. It has elbows. And they think this is what became humans. That was kind of cool. Yeah, it was an amazing year. And I tell people, everybody I see, I'm Ted, when you turn 50”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did shadow boxing. I did, you name it. If somebody said, come do this thing with me, okay, I'll do that. And it was awesome. And some things I will never do again.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we had the best time, right? Like it was a different experience. I'm so glad I did it. And I'm here. If I could get a reservation, I went. And some of them were the dumpling restaurant in Hong Kong. And some of them was per se here in New York. So I did that because I'm a foodie. I love food. That was fun. I went to the Taj Mahal by myself. I decided I was going to walk 100 miles a month, which meant I couldn't take the subways anymore. I had to walk everywhere and I recorded it with my iWatch. So I did that. I walked. I decided I was going to try five new exercises that I'd never tried before so I did.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I talked my husband into going to this thing with me. We go. We are literally the only black people in the whole room, right? So here we are. Not that I haven't spent my life being the only black person in the room, but for sure. Here we are. And because I don't go to these things, I'm so dumb. We drive to the gala, right? Which is only a problem because we drive to the gala, which means we have to park the car. Now we're walking through the streets of New York City with a gown and a tuxon. homeless people are like looking good where are you guys going right where every single other person has been driven up by their driver to the car we are cracking up laughing at the fact that like so this was a fail we were supposed to take a car here”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I didn't open door helicopter ride around New York City. They tether you in so you can't fall out. Crazy. I would have never done that. Some of them are a little bit more uncomfortable for me as a person, but everybody else will think this is why, I don't know why you're uncomfortable with this. So I never go to the gallas, the New York City Gallas, all the proof of gallas, not my scene, not the people I'm most comfortable with, not gonna go it. Somebody asked me, I'm going because I've never done them. I'm going to go to one.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny, you should save So, when I turned 50, I decided that I was going to do 50 things I had never done before. And the criteria for those 50 things was it just had to be something that I'd never done before and that I thought would make the next 50 years better than the last 50 years, which meant they could be big or small. Some of them were free, some of them were not free, some of them made me incredibly uncomfortable, and some of them were like, they're just sort of interesting. I'm glad I did. Start with you.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This team can be great. They can be. There's lots of competition in their life that gets in the way of greatness, right? We have kids. We have families. The volatility that comes with having a bonus one year and not having a bonus next year is real. They have to decide. And I have to decide. I mean, like, I'm not putting it just on them, but we all have to decide what greatness looks like for us and whether or not we're willing to do what it takes to be great. Not everybody's going to make the same decision. And I'm hoping that I can be brave, right? Like every day, I hope that I can be brave.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know I'm gonna do everything I can to feel good about it, or I'm just gonna play it safe and have a good life and not grind your teeth at night and not feel stressed out and whatever. And that's how I feel about the portfolio. There was a lot about the portfolio that was sleep at night type of investments. And now we have to decide whether we want to be great.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can feel more comfortable doing things that are a little bit more strange than we might otherwise. And so we might spend twice as much time thinking about what could go wrong as we did about why this is a special opportunity. So it's painful sometimes. Like I said to my daughter the other day, so I have a 17-year-old, she's about to go to college. And I said, you know, look, there are people out there who are going to live perfectly wonderful lives. They will never take any risks. They will be happy. They will have families. When they look back on their lives, they will feel good about it. And then there are people who decide they want to be great. And the people who decide they want to be great are uncomfortable all the time. You have to decide what you want to be. It's okay. Either choice is good. It's a great choice to decide. I just want to do something that impacts the rest of this world and I'm going to be uncomfortable with it.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that will hurt us if they get that term. So either you have to decide you don't want to be in there or you need to find a term that protects you if they do that stuff. Or someone will say, I know these three people who have invested with them before you do that, you should talk to these three people because one of the things I've heard about them is that they're quick to get scared when the markets get choppy. And so that's a portfolio construction, a portfolio management risk. And maybe you should think about that. And it's all sorts of things. I mean, you name it someone has seen it before if you're experienced enough. I've seen it before, something. Other people that will talk about, we try a lot more to leverage our relationships with peers outside of the organization. And just lets everybody spend a lot of time just figuring out what the risks are because then we can just at least put some arms around it.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, someone brings a manager in, somebody else on the team says, you know, Had a structure like that before. It wasn't in this space, it was in this other space. And here's what happened and I got burnt. And here's the thing that the manager did that maybe wasn't exactly what I wanted. Or I co-invested, not co-invested, but I was a co-LP with this fund. Here's what motivates them. That's very different than what motivates us and they're asking for this term because this is how they run their portfolio.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing that we do is we do incredibly good research because we are in the business of taking risk, we know that we will not always be right, but we created a structure where everybody on the team is responsible for identifying an unearthing risk, right? So you may bring something that's a little esoteric and it's a little weird and it's a little risky. So everybody sits around and talk about, tell me all the ways this could go wrong.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you are gripping the two. In an institutional setting, right? So on the one hand, Kinds of investments you're talking about in a spin out and a new fund and a new organization have that flavor. On the other hand, you say, boy, seven years ago you started with this form team and seven years later we're not sure we're comfortable enough to step up. How do you put those two things together?”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got started in your career and Betty says to you, take risks. And you've used language in communicating with your team about being uncomfortable and be wildly creative and bold, really entrepreneurial type of language. And I grip you.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the first time we invest in the venture manager, we make a $5 million investment, we make a $10 million investment. It takes a while to feel comfortable giving somebody a $15 or $20 million investment, but they invest over time. And so it can take a long time to build them up to even close the size of the manager that you started with seven or eight years ago. And so I don't think there is an asset class where we are not experiencing that dynamic and trying to figure out how to do that. But it's a nice challenge, right? And I think the challenge, that's why I love this job. I love my job because there's a new thing to think about every day. It's stressful, but it's a new thing to think about every day.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's prevalent in all the asset classes, even in venture portfolio, they are for sure. I think the great venture managers have thought about succession, they've done succession, they shared networks, they've shared institutional knowledge. The entrepreneur community cares about them and they want to be a part of them and so they have a natural sourcing advantage and they're great and they're going to be great. But in order to feed the beasts, they've got to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger to the point where what you invested in originally is very different than what they are now, which doesn't mean they won't be highly successful, but the role and portfolio is different. And so you got to take a chance. So it's, again, it's a vintage year thing. It's an agent stage in the”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or enough money. So maybe we've given them more money, but these big guys that we've been with a while have four percent positions. Are we ready to give these guys four percent positions? No. So either we have to decide that we're going to have twice as big a portfolio resource problem, or we're going to decide that we're going to take a leap and give these guys that we feel good about but not great about more money. We're going to just dig in and feel great about them. So we're trying to figure out who we need to feel great about and give them meaningful position sizes to and figure out who we think is next to give us money back.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into your decision. That is a struggle that we're having right now. If I had to say the thing that about our portfolio that worries me the most, it is when Meredith and I started as co-CIOs, we said we have a succession problem in this portfolio. All of our certain types of managers are of the same vintage year, same agent stage. When they all decide they want to go, they're going to go roughly around the same time and we're going to be screwed. So we're going to start building a farm team of people who do slightly different things but can play a similar role in portfolio. And we're going to start building. And now what's happening is this vision that we had, you know, seven years ago, six years ago that maybe things were going to be different is coming true, but we haven't gained enough conviction to give more money to the farm team.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they're open to seeing the world in a different way, and so that there's benefit in that. And so we spent a lot of time. Sometimes we think what we have found is the struggle is that that person is often a horrible people manager. So maybe they struggle with building a team. Maybe the way they think about it is just the way they think about it and they have a hard time imparting those thought processes on anybody else. And so then it's a one-man ban. And do you want to bet on a one-man ban? We are still fiduciaries. What I would do with my own money is not what I would do with Carnegie's money. And so I have to think about whether this makes sense for an institution like ours, which is why sometimes you give a tiny amount of money just to see how this person grows. And sometimes you just watch them because they're just not ready for us yet.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've looked at both our spinouts and other spinouts and really try to dissect who was innovative in the way they thought about their jobs. We are always shocked at how different the spinouts are from each other. Sometimes they're the same. Sometimes the culture was so strong in the organization that they were in that you are buying the same thing again with a new, maybe slightly less experienced manager, but you feel like they're good enough and they're ready and there's no problem. And if you want that exposure, you can find it. And sometimes you find out there were three people underneath that head person. And each of them thinks about the world slightly different. And one of them is thinking more aligned with the way we see the world going, right? One of them is not as interested in benchmarks. One of them maybe is by dent of their background or their experience, which is not exactly as Wharton HBS as the other might see the world in a slightly different way and they're looking at things in a slightly different way. So they're still grounded in what exists right now.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so let's just pick on that example. Usually when that happens, you've been involved with an organization, a hedge fund manager for a while. The founder retires. Usually there's a team of people. Maybe there's a spin out of that. So now you have this funny decision where you can continue on with a roughly similar strategy, hopefully very talented that's been successful, but that's flying in the face of this notion of, well, we need to shift the portfolio and do something different. So in an individual decision like that, what do you do?”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every day, especially in the hedge fund space. You know what? I'm closing up shop. I can, I've made money. I don't need to do this anymore. It's not fun anymore. Here's all your money back. Now I got to figure out what to do with all that money you just gave me back. And so yeah, I got to worry that I need to take away from those managers and those managers may just give it back to me at the worst possible time.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And every day I have to wonder that one of them decides that it's no longer the game they want to play. We've seen that, right? That's happening.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you come in, right, it's the beginning of the year, you're doing the end of the year, you're doing review of your portfolio, you know where you want to head. You know it's a really long-term pool of capital, and you also know that 90% of it is in a model that you may likely have high conviction in the individual managers, but you wonder if that's the structure that's going to meet the objectives that you have.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think building teams that make sure that you always have an inflow of young talent is probably more important. Yeah.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just intellectually curious, they're sort of people who Been presented with the idea that they have to start thinking about these things and they've been shied away from it. They were like, okay, so let's think about what that means. And so we'll see how it evolves over time. But I think the old model of how you chose your team probably has to change. And I think a little bit of that has to do with, quite honestly, that you need to make sure you have young people in the team in ways that we always thought experience made this career, this job is one where pattern recognition makes a huge difference in your ability to be successful. Sort of throwing out the pattern, so it's going to be just as important”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the skill set you looked for in your team has to change? And arguably yes, right? Like we looked at great manager selectors. This person has expertise in real estate and they know every single person and they'll be able to pick the best real estate manager from the worst real estate manager. City designs and the future of transportation and the future of how all that works and you have to be able to incorporate that into how you slowly think about how the type of things you invest in and maybe the ancillary things that you invest in they're still real estate, but they're not exactly real estate and you got to think about how long it'll take before this actually materializes. And so you have to have a much more macro view and long-term view about how you think about things. And fortunately, I think the team.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as much as I would like, but they take a lot of work. So it takes a lot of work managing them, and it takes a lot of finding them. But I would say right now, it's probably not more than five or ten percent of the portfolio, but do I think it's going to have to be more? Yes. I think it's going to have to be more if we're going to continue to outperform. Because I think returns are coming down. And if returns are going to come down and our 5% payout is not coming down, we're just going to have to find different ways to create alpha. And so that's going to have to become a bigger part of the portfolio. And portfolio construction is going to have to become a bigger part of how we gain alpha. And so we're going to just have to tweak all the different tools a little bit. So I'm not abandoning the endowment model. I still think it's a great model. It's just the tweaks as we think about how we're going to do that. And so, you know, a lot of times I think about does that mean?”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roughly the way we look at it, eight asset classes, it's roughly 10 or so in each asset, well, it was more than 10 to 15, and then there's offshoots from certain. So let's say we had 10 buyout managers, but then maybe we also have 10 US venture, and then we have 10 emerging markets venture. And long short, there'll be 10 and 10 real estate. Then we broke out resources, 10 resources and things like that. You put it all together and wrap it up probably about a half. And then when”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And make us think about what might be coming. So we always dedicate some time to that, which is hard when you have to manage a portfolio right now. But I want the team to come to me with weird stuff.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did one on demographics, we did one on the retail sector where we had people talk about how retail was going to evolve over time. We had someone come in and talk about contagions and how diseases spread and what that meant. We had someone come in and talk about active versus passive, which is here right now, more of a here right now phenomena. But sometimes they're really we're doing one on cryptocurrency. We did one on the future of work and what robots could replace and what they couldn't replace. And we did one on real estate and how self-driving cars and the way millennials think about housing would change how cities were built. So sort of an urban design kind of thought. And so all those don't affect right now investments, but they will have us look for sort of weird off the run type of investment.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can stay invested in Argentina over long cycles? No, we're going to have to eventually take our money out of that. But do we think that it's long enough for the work that it takes us to do to get in? Yes. So we do a lot of looking thematically that feels like at the time it's not necessarily going to lead to investment, but it will over time. We went to Latin America in 2012 to do the work on Latin America. We didn't actually make the Peru and Argentina investments until 2015 and 2014 and maybe I think 2016. So really late. And we just sort of invested some time in doing the work so that we know what it looked like when it came kind of thing. And so we do a lot of that. And one of the things that I love doing is that for every investment committee, in order to remind the committee that we're long-term, we do a panel on something that is unrelated to the portfolio.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guys, to think they want to play there just yet, but we're looking for efficiencies and we're looking for ways that we leverage the fact that we don't have a real need to be close to a benchmark and that we do have patient capital and we're willing to let you have highly concentrated portfolios that will do strange things and we will either figure out how to make that work in our total portfolio or we'll figure out how to educate the committee and the rest of the organization so that people don't get nervous about it. And so while we spent a lot of time just going into inefficient asset classes now, I think we spend much more time looking at just things are just different, just odd. You know, we went into Argentina before the Argentinian elections, which everybody thought was crazy, but we did the work that showed us that no matter who won, here's how the market was undervalued and we could do that. And do we think that”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means our check size are tiny. So we, as much as I would love to be able to put managers in business by giving them enough money, we're never going to give them enough money to do that. But what we can do is look for idiosyncratic small things that the big guys just can't do. So for instance, we did a manager in Peru and there were tons of people that were trying to figure out how to invest in Peru, but there was so much money that they were disrupting the market, right? But we did a manager that had a $20 million fund and we did 10 of it. We can do that. Yale can't do that. It doesn't make sense. I mean, they could do it. They have the skills to do it, but it's not good use of their time, right? So we spent a lot more time looking for that type of idiosyncratic risk. We do go earlier and we will invest in managers when they're not quite proven and where the manager is too small for some of the big.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm as much of a Swinson acolyte as anybody else, right? I think the whole concept of the endowment model is right for the type of investing that we do and for the type of skills that we have and for the fact that we are able to educate our committee in such a way that they don't need us to hug a benchmark, right? So all that makes the endowment model a good one for us. I think that one of the things that Swinston has been brilliant about is evolving what that means to him over time. And I think one of the things I try to pay special attention to is the basic framework of an endowment model makes sense, but we can't execute an endowment model the way Swenson does because we are not Yale. And there are things that are just by its very nature inherently benefits to them that we don't have. We don't have any inflows of capital. First off, we have zero inflows of capital. We are $3.5 billion.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that one of the things that I have found over time that if you have a really good team and you have a really good strategy. And people know the strategy and they own the strategy and you sit down as a group and you stay consistent in that strategy. You don't have to spend as much time telling people that this is a bad investment because they know it doesn't fit what we've talked about.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've hired people a little bit more support to help. I also don't spend as much time going to manager meetings as I did before. I spent a little bit more time thinking about asset allocation and strategy than we arguably did before. And so even though these administrative aspects of the job take up so much more time than they did before. Stolen from time that the directors are happy I don't do anymore. Like I try to go to a few meetings with each of them a year and I go to if you're doing a new manager I go to that. So I've taken away some investment work that I've done before.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we would have been able to do it if we had been sole CIOs. It would have been too overwhelming. Just all of the other work takes so many hours.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I keep saying to myself, I couldn't understand as a foundation investor why they're buying all this fixed income. Why are you buying all these long bonds? It doesn't make sense. But then you understand liability matching and you see, and then I say to myself, oh no, those rates are going to be low for a long time because that demand for that long bond is so high. And so when I'm thinking about rates rising, and people kept saying it was going to happen, it was going to happen. And I was like, it's going to happen a lot slower than you think it's going to happen. And so that is a positive effect on how we thought about managing assets here. And so it was things like that that I think both of us had. You know, she did different things than I did, but for sure, we come back and we'd share what we learned at our committee meetings and both with the team or just with each other. And it helped expand relationships. They had different managers than we had. It was a different sourcing than we might otherwise have had. It was really valuable to us. And like I said,”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was really important to me, and I got involved in a lot of, I'm on the investment committee of the ACLU. And so in addition to their endowed assets, there's a pension fund. And I think one of the big issues between foundations and pension funds is to just don't understand each other. So serving on, I was both on the ACLU's investment committee and the Girl Scouts, both of which it was pension assets, gave me a whole different perspective on the decision making of pension funds and things that we oftentimes think doesn't make sense. I don't know why they do that. It doesn't make sense. But then when you're managing or you're on investment committee of one of those institutions, you know exactly why they're doing it totally new.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I chair the board of my kids' school and the business of running a school is incredibly tricky. And so all of the people management issues and the resource scarcity issues and the conflicts between the product you're selling versus how you manage the parents, which is arguably different in relation to students, sort of helps you to think about the relationship you have LPs and GPs and how people are coming from different perspectives and you really have to try to put yourself in other people's seats and think about how resource constraints impact people's behavior and the way they do things. And it actually was really good for me. And because of the work that we do, we don't really manage businesses. We manage organizations but not businesses. So seeing the actual management of a business.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The industry, and me particularly, and people who are color in the industry, and all of that became really important to us. And I'm not sure we would have been able to do it if we had been sole CIOs because it would not have become a part of our everyday. And then I don't know that you think about it later on if it hasn't been an everyday thing for you. So from the beginning, we took on these added things. So then once we became sole CIOs at different places, we kept them going because they had already fit into who we were. And so that was a gift because at least I know for me and I know based on the things that Meredith has done that those outside responsibilities have been hugely impactful to us. And we're better managers.”
2020-08-17 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source