YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Weatherley-White

lines on the record: 115
first: 2016-09-09
most recent: 2016-09-09
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

“Tell me more. And I've been getting a fair amount of press recently for the work that we're doing, and people read that. And it gets passed around. And suddenly they want to know about it. And I think that had I known there was going to be this level of interest 10 years ago, we would have been more demonstrative at the time instead of sort of hiding it. Yeah, that's what I would say to myself.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just think about how cautiously we talked about impact investing and how hesitant we were to even let many of our clients know we were doing it. Because we were afraid that our embedded client base would find that we were wandering off into the weeds, building out our capacity impact investing, whereas what we've discovered is that every one of our clients, that's probably a dramatic statement, what has surprised us is how many of our clients that we perceive to be conventional investors have expressed an enormous amount of interest in impact investing, not necessarily, hey, I'm all in, flip my portfolio, but Like this, I like the concept. Tell me more.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me coming from you. It's not about the risk aversion with the capital allocation. I mean, I think whatever investment discipline you have in place to invest responsibly and well, not from an SRI perspective, but just to invest capital responsibly. Right.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say develop an awareness of impact investing and expertise you can be fluent in the language. Go to Wall Street and get your investment chops down cold and then find a relatively small shop that is focusing on impact investing because in my mind, that's the future. Because right now there's a talent whole in impact investing.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that asymmetry made no sense to us. And now you're seeing that cost of capital for the project finance being driven down by the amount of capital flowing into the space. And we're even now starting to see these pretty high CapEx projects without power purchase agreements backing them up, which three years ago would have been unheard of. And that just shows you how far Capital markets have evolved”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking about affordable housing with a Section 8 component, that actually can be a performance enhancer rather than a drag on performance or environmental piece of it. You might be looking at alternative or renewable project finance, right? So project finance, there's no technology risk. Your counterparties are typically investment grade utilities, sometimes with very long power purchase agreements, and you're underwriting that based on the variability of the power rather than on the creditworthiness of the counterparty. And yet, despite the fact that the sun shines pretty consistently and you can look at long-term Patterns, you are seeing even three or four years ago double digit returns being backed by a public intrade utility with a three handle under debt.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital, they say they're going to return, right? And then maybe a little bit in parallel, but we also focus on the intentionality around the impact strategy, either an environmental piece or more of a social piece. And the social piece can be something like affordable housing, which is not particularly revolutionary now, but there's some really interesting cognitive biases around Section 8 housing, for an example, which are just simply wrong and are demonstrably wrong. And so if you're...”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we're what we call finance first impact investors, and by that we simply mean that any investment needs to be viable. Like it needs to be a good investment first. We're not going to make an investment just because it has a sexy environmental story. So we start with our totally conventional diligence and we determine whether or not this is likely to return to.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really, really days. And I think that when you have a firm like Generation Asset Management who is demonstrating repeatedly durable persistent alpha. A market that, in theory, shouldn't really offer that. You know, is 10 years a sufficiently long sample? Maybe not. Maybe they're going to blow up.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that because there is this cognitive bias against that, valuations are more attractive. You're not getting a ton of money chasing these deals. I talk to impact investors.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All down there, and they're talking with asset managers, trying to figure out how to talk about it. Subtle and pervasive conversations that nobody's really admitting to yet. Because it doesn't fit with the self schema that we as investors hold for ourselves. You're a philosopher. You know what that means. And as a result, and this is kind of a this is such a tangent, but I think it's an important one.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Serious commitment, or you know, even what's his name? Vincent Mai, the former chairman and CEO of AEA, he launches a fundamental capital based here in New York to focus on private equity, late sage private equity investing in firms that have sustainability components to their business model. I mean, it's like, it's just happening at a pretty quiet level. I was on the call, I was on a phone yesterday with a woman from the World Economic Forum, and she was really interesting adjective to describe the conversations that she's having clandestine. She said that she is having this conversation with sovereign wealth funds, large pension plans, institutional pools of capital all over the world who are fascinated by and compelled by this notion of impact investing, but they don't want to go public with it.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So I think that when you have firms like Goldman acquiring imprint capital, BlackRock hiring to everyone Shell and really elevating the role of their impact team in the company, bank capital rolling out a fund and having 150 internal people apply to work on it. I think that's the”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Warby Parker is another example of that buy one, give one model. So, I think the professionalization of impact as we move out of the anecdotal evidence phase and move into the thesis validation phase before we move into the ubiquitous presence phase, right? And I think that is starting to happen because you've got firms like Bain Capital raising an impact fund. You've got Blackstone hiring Deborah and BlackRock, excuse me, hiring Deborah Wynshell. And in the org chart, Deborah is former executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation. Okay. Super smart Very data driven, understands sort of this world really well. In the org chart, what's interesting is she reports directly to the CEO. She doesn't report to the head of structured products.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, Tom's the toothpaste as well. Tom's the shoe company were the one that invented the buy one give one model. So for every pair of Tom's shoes that a customer buys, Tom's gives a pair of shoes to a kid in a frontier emerging market that needs a pair of shoes. And that buy one, give one model has become much more common over the last few years due to the success of Tom's”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest shift is the professionalization of impact investing. We have moved out of what I like to call the anecdotal evidence collection phase where there's a bunch of interesting people doing pretty cool things. We've got exits like. And Warby Parker and Group Denon's acquisition of Happy Family Food. There's a bunch of those sort of anecdotal evidence phase that you can run a business and exit it at an attractive valuation that has a clear environmental or social mission embedded in the operations of the company.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably third of the way or a quarter of the way into the hard thing about hard things, Horowitz's book. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and those are just the ones that I'm just reading recently. Yeah.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Savings is really interesting halfway through. I'm really enjoying the badass librarians of Timbuktu, which you got to check out.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the light you cannot see is fiction. And then in the nonfiction world, I mean, I'm always reading. I'm halfway through sapiens right now.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and there's not that many books that I've read that even as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, oh, damn, I wish I'd written that. And Anthony Dorr's, all the light you cannot see, comes to mind on that one. And Anthony Dorer is a, you know, Tony Dore's a Boise guy, so I've got a little bit of a bias there. But that book is just lyrical and beautiful and heartbreaking.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a master's class in investing, is the way I think about that, you know, the collection of his letters. When you ask a bibliophile what his favorite books are, you run the risk of paralysis, right? Because there's so many.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a different approach because, you know, Sun Tzu wrote really about strategy as applied to military maneuvers. Maneuvers. And Miyamadu Musashi really writes about strategy as applied to one's life. And everything is a metaphor. So it's very Zen book. I love it.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did not. He was his assistant. But it was his office. It was like the direct line. And I say, yeah, I met this guy at dinner. His name's Charlie Munger. And he told me to call this number and ask for the bound copies. And it was like.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I was visiting them, went out to dinner with them, and I was young. And it happened to be with this older guy who was involved in investing. And I asked him, I said, so if you were a young man thinking about getting and investing, what would you do? And he says, I would call this number. And he wrote down this number. He said, call this number and ask the guy who answers to send you the bound copies of the chairman's reports for his company. And I didn't know anything about Berkshire Hathaway. I'd never heard of Warren Buffett. No idea. So I called the number.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was, yeah, John Train, and he basically interviewed guys who had built long-term, really attractive rates of return in the public equity markets and then basically published those interviews. And then I got with a nod to Warren Buffett. So my grandmother's... Best friend. She's English. Her best friend was really good friends with Charlie Munger.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I could probably get to Warren Buffett, but I got a really cool story about Warren Buffett, which I'll get to in a second. I think that anybody who is thinking about entering the capital markets for a career needs to read reminiscences of a stock operator.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we had a little bit of that, but it was all product pitches. We'd have the. Head of mutual funds. It wasn't in theory.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, and I was super pissed for a few months. And then I was really grateful because I realized he was right. And he set me up with a couple of interviews at Merrily Lynch and Smith Barney and Prudential in Boise. And that's sort of how I started there.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much so. And he was a bike racer, and we sort of ended up going along bike rides together. And his family had a multi hundred million dollar private foundation that he was running. And so I had these two different, completely different views of the capital markets. And I'd go out and climb mountains with Martin Adams, and I'd go out and ride bikes with Tom Campion. And between the two of them, I just got completely fascinated by it. And so when Tom turned to me after working with him for about two years, he said, you need to leave Ketchim because you don't leave now. You're never going to leave. He basically kicked me out to catch him.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not PG rated at all. And he was just this oddly inspiring guy. Like, I just really liked hanging out with him and his worldview was really compelling. And then this other guy by the name of Tom Campion, quite older than me, but he'd gone to Andover in Dartmouth, super educated.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I was living in Ketchum, there were two guys that were really my mentors. One, Ketcham, catch them, Idaho, which is where Sun Valley is located. One was a retired, pretty young guy who was a bond trader at Solomon. And he'd made enough money to punch out relatively young, lived a very modest life in Ketchum, but had a lot of adventures. And he and I spent a lot of time in the mountains, and he just got me super inspired. He was a crusty.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So on our team jerseys, we had the Foster's logo, and it was that you couldn't make it up. So after every race, the Foster's truck would show up with Kegs. And on Boathouse Row and Melbourne right along, right below Princess Bridge on the Yara, all the boat crews would come to mercantile after the race because that's where all the beer was.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the best part is I joined mercantile rowing club in Melbourne, which was sponsored by Carlton United Brewery. Makers of Fosters. I was going to fosters.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was adventuring. I was writing, I was skiing, I was bike racing, I was a private chef, I worked at the Sun Valley Athletic Club. I mean, it was just cobbling together a life that let me have as much adventure as I possibly could.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lot of rap. I mean, you can look at all the climate modeling and yeah, you know, maybe there's some guiding factors in those, but I think of the more like guardrails rather than train tracks, right? The climate models are subject to revision. They're subject to an enormous amount of variability, particularly on a year-to-year basis. And so directionally, I think they're pretty clear. And so directionally, if you're aggregating capital to acquire a potential future arable land, I'd be pretty diversified in my geographic footprint. Sure.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be material. And now it gets right to what I was saying earlier about capitalism being a fantastic optimization mechanism. The fact that people are thinking about that is going to drive capital in that direction. And they may be right. They may be wrong, but it's a capital allocation decision. Based on however you're discounting the risks around climate change or the opportunities around climate change.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you look north of the Crimea, for example. And if you can extend the growing season by just a couple of weeks on either end, Spring and fall, suddenly an enormous amount of that land becomes arable. That is a huge win for holders of arable farmland in northern climbs.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be Yeah, I mean, as my mom, who's a wonderful golfer, likes to say every putt makes somebody happy. You just got to look around and see who's smiling. And I...”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe you get a little bit of a lift in the land value if you're in the middle of a construction boom. But, you know, basically, over the long haul, you're going to get rate of timber growth”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and, you know, the thing about timber, which is interesting, is that the yields from timber are basically dependent upon the rate of growth of the trees.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our public fixed income allocations right now are primarily for liquidity. And so we're sitting at about 15% across that torrent's largest clients. Our public equity exposure has been steadily coming down over the last year and a half, and we're down in the mid-teens right now for that as well. So we've got about 30% of our Assets in the public markets, which leads about 70% in the private alternatives and real assets market, which is really understandable.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And what we look for is either, as I said earlier, demonstrated capacity around beta with a tax managed overlay or Proven low correlation to the rod equity markets with a defensible investment thesis that we think can play out over time. That's a relatively small part of our overall public equity exposure. But right now, I mean, so I don't know if this is a disclosure or not, but I'm going to run the risk here. So I said we don't use model portfolios. So the way that we sort of get around that in terms of talking about it is that we aggregate our 20 largest clients and we consolidate all their portfolios in a sort of a hypothetical exercise around what our exposure across the firm is. And right now, we are skeptical about the public fixed income markets. We think it's basically in an environment of return free risk. And so”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in the public equity markets and public fixed income markets, we use separately managed accounts with specialty managers that focus. Unhedged long only equity in our fixed income allocation is mostly relatively short duration, very high credit quality. We don't like taking interest rate risk. We don't want to take a ton of credit risk with our fixed income portfolios because we think They serve the roles boused in the portfolio. It's a pool of liquidity. Little bit of income. It's not where we want to take a lot of that risk.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that commonality becomes self-reinforcing in your hiring practice. And so you do have to bring a level of intentionality to sort of dismantle that. And it's not easy to do. And so I think your point earlier about companies that are more enlightened, it's a bit of a loaded phrase, but more enlightened companies, they're going to do that naturally because they recognize that strength comes from a diverse view, disagreement in the C-suite leads to better decision making. But you have to do that intentionally because it's hard.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's your network tend to look like yourself. And so to make that decision to hire somebody who is really different from you, it's harder to do. There has to be a level of intentionality in there that is not commonly reflected in corporate America. And I think that's the obstacle that we face, this cognitive bias towards hiring in our likeness. And it's as simple as you do an interview with somebody and he played lacrosse at. Duke, whatever, and you had a brother that played lacrosse at UNC, and so you think of him as a really good guy.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's hard. I mean, our company was founded by six middle-aged white guys, right? And I think our natural instinct is to hire in our image. It's a comfortable hiring decision.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a really important point to make for these companies. It's not about, oh, we have to have women, but instead let's make sure that we get the best people. And frequently, they're not looking for gender. They're looking for the best people.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I would take it even one step further and say for those companies, it's explicitly not a box checking exercise.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, maybe that's part of it. But I think when you look at some of the research that's being done around behavioral science and group science and group IQ, it becomes suddenly more clear that gender diversification is actually about making better decisions.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had to be extraordinary. And so perhaps the influence that you would have over the strategic direction of the company would be outsized effectively because if you made it there, you were exceptional.”
2016-09-09 · Masters in Business · Interview With Matthew Weatherley-White: MIB (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source