YouSaid · the spoken record

Roz Hewsenian

lines on the record: 103
first: 2018-08-06
most recent: 2018-08-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I would say that ninety eight percent of decisions are based on my gut? And I spent a lot of time in analysis, paralysis when I already knew the answer, and I could have saved all that time.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a student of history, but I love to read it through the biographies of the people who are part of the history. So rather than reading a history on the founding of our country, I read the biographies of each of the founding fathers, and that was far more interesting to me because I learned about them as people. That's what biographies give you”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine if we had more respect for each other, for ourselves, for our country, for Everything. How much better it would be? Importance of respect.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't give myself a choice. I just mentally forced myself to do it because I didn't want to embarrass myself. And then I found out wow, that wasn't so bad. But that was terrifying to me. I was freaking out before I did it, but I didn't tell anybody I was freaking out before I did it. I just forced myself to do it.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am acrophobic, horrifically acrophobic, and last year I climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There were two points in that climb where I had a straight view right down to the water and froze, and I knew that if I didn't get over myself, I was going to hold up the other people in my group, and I was going to cause the climb leader to have to deal with me. And I had to force myself through my fear.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we don't learn from our past mistakes. That's probably the biggest one. The other is when people are marketing to me, like know the audience. I've seen a lot of movies in my career. I probably know how they end. So please respect that. That's probably the other one.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am very fortunate to have gone to Sunianta undergrad. It's a New York State school and the year that I applied to Onient it was harded again in there than it was to Harvard. And it was the height of the Vietnam War and everybody was going to college and somehow or another they accepted me. I was eternally grateful to them for accepting me and I had a great four years there and I turned around and with my success helped other students. And I was able to financially support twenty other students. And last year Oneanta awarded me the State University of New York, not Onianta, but the State University of New York awarded me a doctor of humane letters.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least one meeting before the meeting where the manager So there's sufficient time for them to do that. And oftentimes they'll say, because we have a lot of chief investment officers on our investment committee, they'll say, I've had an experience with that manager or that manager is in my portfolio. I like them. So we'll get feedback or we'll get questions or whatever. The other thing that we've done is we have two due diligence memos. We've got an internal memo that is extremely detailed. That's part of our record. We send to the investment committee is something that is no more than five pages and speaks mostly to the fact that we've adhered to our policy so that they know that we had the number of meetings. We looked at this. We checked that. We got comfortable with this. This is how we got because they're really not in a position to duplicate our work. What they're really there to do is to make sure that we adhere to policy.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we changed the process so that we send out a one pager to the investment committee in advance so that they know that this is a manager we're considering. And if you've got issues and concerns, please let us know about this. Or if you know something about this manager or you've got questions, please let us know.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So today I have delegated authority for everything except broad policy and hiring a new manager. We have an investment committee to whom has been delegated virtually all authority, the trustees appoint the members of the investment committee, and that's the governance structure.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when I first got here my authority was a sum total of a hundred dollars. Anything that related to more than a hundred dollars I had to go get permission from somebody. And rather than fight that, I recognize, and this was my Calpurs training, that I needed to earn trust, and that if I work to earn trust, that more will be given to me. And so one of the things I'm fond of saying to the team is we'll go for the little yeses to avoid the big no. And so it was very important that we took our asks and broke them into their component parts and asked them in stages so that we never got too far over our skis.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That becomes a fit. Okay. So before we turn to closing questions, I want to circle back to your thoughts on the governance here. You said you were walking into a governance challenge situation. How has that evolved over the last eight years?”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once those three criteria are met, we look at, well, if we add this to the portfolio, what is the incremental risk? Because it's typically inside the fund as well. And do we have more like it somewhere else? So there is the overall portfolio analysis that's done. And then we do look at income and cash flow statements because it has to be cash flow positive. So we need to make sure of that. But we're not re-undering the investment the way some of our peers have. We don't feel we can bring anything to that party. We underwrote the manager, and that's where our due diligence ends as far as the underwriting is concerned.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a co-investment policy. There are a couple of key criteria. First and foremost, we have to be able to comply with the excess business holdings rule that is visited upon foundations by the IRS, and that says that you cannot own any more than twenty percent of an operating entity, a for profit operating entity. That's number one. Number two, we make sure that the investment is in the manager's wheelhouse, that it's not a fishing expedition on the part of managers. They all have their fishing expeditions. We recognize that. Not every investment fits neatly within exactly what they said they were going to do. They all have their little wild hair. That's what keeps them occupied. So we have to make sure it's in their wheelhouse. Third thing we look for is that they're putting money in alongside us in the co-investment.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, two things. First of all, if we decide we're not going to re up with a manager that drops out of our manager count, the other thing that we're looking to do is actively use the secondary market to modify our portfolio. So we're developing a strategy to do that. And we've already sold an investment in the secondary market that enabled us to hire another manager that we thought would do a better job for us.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what happens over time? So you've been here eight years, and particularly in the private markets, at some point in time, you'll decide you don't want to continue with that manager, but you'll have a long tail of investments, and then you add somebody else in the 50, if you count the legacy ones, becomes.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we don't have to do it right away. For example, we built up our Sequoia allocation solely over time. And now we're at those kinds of numbers. By not having a ton of managers and my ability to meet with the general partners directly, I can communicate to them. You're really important to us. We don't have a million of you, and that helps us get bigger allocations. than what some of our peers get.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Melbourne, Australia, Budapest, Hungary, the East End of London, and we're finding other pockets of venture capital excellence that are just beginning the way Silicon Valley did, where a big investor in Israel Big investor Now nobody has seen a triple digit IR out of VC in a long time I've got one Out of one of our Israel investments. So by looking at areas that are smaller, more up and coming, we've actually been very hopeful that we'll be able to do well.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm excited and scared about China, excited because it's going to be a great opportunity, scared because their attitude toward rule of law is very different than ours. I'm a little afraid of the extent to which China can dominate, and if we're invested there, we're contributing to that. So all of that factors into making it really exciting. The other thing that has us very excited is that we think that Silicon Valley is only going to last for so long and for no other reason California is becoming very business unfriendly. If Gavin Newsom wins the gubernatorial race, and he does to California what he did to San Francisco, and I don't know if you've checked out San Francisco lately, but it's become a disaster. Then Silicon Valley cannot remain there. Somebody will leave, and that will start the Exodus. So we've been going around.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's been extremely helpful to us. So by going down to the company level and using all the tools that we have available to us, we can have a more engaged discussion with the manager and then it's the judgment call about are you being BS or is he seeing it the way you're seeing it”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the drip, drip, drip, drip, drip method. And that's where those are the most insidious because Well, is it style related? Is it this? Is it that? And so one of the things that we do, and this is an analysis that I do with, so let's do a public equity because, or hedge funds, we look at the top holdings. We all have Bloombergs. We look at the companies making their earnings estimates. Are they missing? And if they're missing, we actually look at, well, what is the stock reaction to the earnings miss? And we actually sit down with the manager and show them that. We're basically like, what are you doing here? So that has helped us calibrate when there's a real problem or whether we should ride this horse a little bit longer.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's interesting. Going back to my autonomy example, two members of my investment committee have autonomy as a manager, and they did not fire the firm. They kept them. I was the only one who did. And we won't know for a while who was right and who was wrong, but our assessment of the situation made them both sufficiently nervous. And my point was, okay, maybe we rode through this, but this guy isn't changing. And if it's not this, it's going to be something else. So we identified a character issue with the founder and chief investment officer of the firm”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, and I've heard this from so many other people as well is not firing a manager fast enough. I've gotten better at that later on in my career, but that's probably the biggest mistake.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. And even in private capital, when the manager starts talking a lot about an investment and about making excuses for an investment, that's a clue. And so we are looking at our other investments of the same vintage year, and we're looking at other universe comparisons. And because we don't have very many managers, we can do a lot of work on a company-by-company analysis in our private capital portfolios to really understand, okay, where are the problems? Are they not making their numbers? Is the cash burn too high? And we can get into details with the manager about that. And some of them... Like the fact that we know as much about their portfolio as we do”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The manager starts making excuses for an investment holding instead of just selling it and getting on with it. And you start looking at the investment excuses and you do subportfolio attribution and you figure out the investment excuses are really what's accounting for 110% of the underperformance. So that's a clue That's how.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We looked extensively at a manager who was in trouble and found out that there were issues with the cell discipline, and we pointed that out to the manager and basically said, look, you've got to go figure this out. And if you don't figure it out, then this is what we think is the largest problem that you're having. So that's an example of something that we'd focus on”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not Donald Trump if that's what you're asking We start telling a manager they're in trouble Okay, and we start telling them why. And the reason why is that if they can fix their own problem, they save us a lot of work. So when you only have 50 managers, it makes it easy to be able to work hard, identify the problems, and tell the manager.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh God, everybody has their little pets, but the team is large enough that we can challenge each other one and number two, everybody has their eye on the goal, which is it feels really good when we've met our performance objectives, and we're a highly motivated team to meet our performance objectives, and we take a lot of pride in doing that. We want to do a good job. So we recognize that you can have behavioral biases, but to what end? The thing about the team that is so important is that excellence is ingrained in every single individual, and it doesn't matter their level. And when you have that, then people might start out with their behavioral biases, but they'll back away from them pretty quickly.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“called conviction, baby. So the question becomes if it is a little bit better is it enough for you to fire that manager because you have to make a decision. You can't hire everybody. And the team understands that if we hired the fifty first manager, then you can hire the 52nd, the fifty third, and then where does dilution really take over your investment returns? So the short answer to the question is who goes?”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools, but it's not a workflow system to help you get from point A to point B. We're looking at adding that system, which we expect will be in place later this year.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have backstop as our overall portfolio management system, and we're one of the few foundations or endowments that actually uses that kind of portfolio management system because we went around and we talked to our peers and nobody else was doing it and we're like, well, how do you keep track of all this stuff? So everybody has access to backstop. Everything is in one place. It makes it easy for us to get through our annual audits. The auditor has looked at the system. They're really happy with it. So that's one system. We're working on a second system, a workflow system, to actually interface with our master custodial bank, our finance department, and to really leverage our time in the implementation and execution of what we're doing. So backstop is a static repository. It collects information. There are some analytical”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The big key is not having forty million managers, so a lot of our peers have two to three hundred managers. And stabs about the same size, which means that a substantial portion of their resources are dedicated to monitoring existing managers, which means how much time can you spend looking at new managers? So because we don't have that constraint, I can take people and put them on a problem, a project, or a time constraint situation, and get the work done. So by managing that 50 manager relationship maximum, it really allows us to use resources very effectively. The other tool I have in my toolkit is that our director of risk and operations also has a very strong systems background, and he's been able to leverage our time by making sure that we've had the right systems in place to do things as efficiently as possible.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm generally working with the team. I know what's coming down the pike. We talk about what the issues are, we talk about what the pressure points. The two directors of investments who are responsible for managers, due diligence in hiring, Josh Fenton and Alkim have worked with me before. This is the second time they've worked with me. So we know each other really well and that helps. And they are sufficiently secure in themselves to know when to say, okay, Ros, we need you to deal with this. And I'm sufficiently confident in their abilities to say, you guys can deal with this. You can handle it. I know you've got this. And so that mutual respect and trust enables us to deal with things effectively and efficiently. I don't tinkle in their weedies and they don't tinkle in mine.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially if they're boutique and they're full of themselves and all this other stuff, they're not going to meet more junior people. And it's because top man syndrome still exists in this industry. The other thing too is that I'd been around for a long time, and people do know about me in the industry, and so the team also knows how to use me, you know, sort of like, you really want Raz to come in and meet with you, or do you really want us to handle it? And so there's some of that that goes on.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on the manager, it depends on the circumstances, it depends on whether I've known the manager from before. So there's no set rule about that. And sometimes I do meet them more than once, but I have to meet the firm myself. Before that happens, there's a lot of information that's coming to me. Take the situation with autonomy. We have dealt with other situations where it's a small firm, it's a boutique firm, there's a brilliant founder, so I knew in that particular case I was going to have to go in, meet the head guy, and then go find the ballast. And we talked about this in our due diligence meetings about this manager, so the team knew that that's what I was going to do. And oftentimes the top guy will only meet with the top person.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did know they were in different offices, but what I missed was not questioning well, is that really going to work? Can you be an effective ballast if you are in different offices in different cities and there are about a thousand miles apart? That's what I”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is an interesting thing about truly brilliant people. They typically have a flat side. So when I'm assessing money managers and I've met a lot of them with huge egos and flat sides, I look for a partner. Do they recognize their own shortcoming and do they pair themselves with somebody who's sane? So you capture the brilliance of the founder, but he recognizes that he needs a ballast will keep him from running off the rails or her off the rails. And in the case of autonomy, I found the ballast. It was there. Here's what I missed. They worked out of two different offices.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I could either connect them or not. And there are many other managers in the world, and I didn't need a manager who was going to be tied up with whatever this woman was doing. And the mess that he had created. And when I went in and talked with other people at the firm, it was clear that they all knew about his extracurricular activities. And he was stupid about it. And I sat down with one of his key people and I said, look, I'm not going to pass judgment on what he's doing outside of the office. I said, but here are the top three things he should have done one, not use his real name. two make sure I didn't get into the press, and number three, don't make promises you have no intention of keeping. Those are the top rules if you're going to have an extracurricular activity. He violated all of them. So the question was why was he engaging in such destructive behavior?”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just before that article came out, the manager had an uncharacteristic loss in Puerto Rican bonds, and when I went in to meet with the manager because the team was telling me something's not hanging together about this, why don't you go in and meet with the top guy? So I went in and I met with Rob Gibbons and his reaction about having lost money in Puerto Rican bonds was so extreme I couldn't wrap my head around it. I'm like, look, everybody makes investment mistakes. But Guy, I need you to suit up and go back out on the field. The game's not over. And he was making it sound like he was ready to just pack it in. And then the New York Post article came out and I'm like, oh, I get it. So what did we miss?”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We walked away. We also invested with another firm Autonomy, and one day somebody of my staff comes in and says there's a New York post article on the founder of autonomy, and he apparently was being sued in New York by a spurned girlfriend, and that situation got very, very messy very quickly.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We all looked at each other and we said ten billion dollars in emerging markets private equity venture capital? The numbers don't add up. And so we just thought there's something not right about that, and we walked away. The founder of the firm is under indictment. He's hiding in London because he can't go back to the UAE because there's a warrant for his arrest. The Gates Foundation did invest with them, and they were the ones who figured out that something was wrong, some very proud of the fact that I won upped Bill Gates. And by trusting our instincts and recognizing this didn't add up.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there are too many eyes on the manager. And we staff every manager who's undergoing a deep dive for due diligence with a sponsor, a skeptic, and a director that's above and beyond me. So with three sets of eyes on a manager, chances are you're not going to make a mistake. That said, we have gotten surprised. It still happens. I'll give you an example where we made an investment where we missed something and we did not make an investment. A brage was a rapidly growing venture capital firm focused on the emerging markets. And its founder was a very flamboyant guy. We were very interested in the emerging markets and specifically venture capital. Three of us flew to Dubai. We did a lot of work on the firm. Lot of work on the firm, but there was something that just wasn't hanging together and in talking about it tipping the”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try not to impose too much of my direction because I really want to see their creativity. But my biggest role is to make sure that policy is adhered to, and we have a due diligence policy. I want to make sure that they've addressed the issues thoroughly. I want to make sure that there have been a sufficient number of meetings that those meetings are robust. I will go on site with them at a later stage, and when I go on site, I'm watching them, not the managers. I'm watching what kind of questions are they asking? What kind of prep did they do before we walk into the meeting is not on them, not on the manager, and they recognize that the pressures on them to do the work on the manager. Now if I honestly think they were going to make a big mistake, then I would step in.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then out of that we see what the opportunity set, and then we can do our analysis and drive home to an ultimate conclusion.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All generalists, everybody's a generalist in their different levels, and I run a very flat organization. My associates, my investment officers, and my directors were all responsible for managers, have equal opportunity for sourcing and doing due diligence, and by allowing the younger people to have the same authority to source a manager, I get some very interesting findings because they're not burdened with sort of the biases that people with more experience have. The other thing too is that by not dictating where they're going to look and letting them find what they find, we get much more interesting managers that way. And as a result, I'd rather have ten disparate but interesting managers than three managers that are based on what I directed.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I allow the staff to follow their natural curiosity. So we have a meeting every Monday morning. In that meeting we talk about the things that we're working on, the issues that we have, we're focusing on. So let's go back to my China example. We all agreed with our investment committee China's an interesting place to have more exposure. I never said to them long only hedge funds, whatever, I just said, well, think about this and I allowed them to go out and find the best managers they could. And then after they came back with a team of managers that were all over the place, now they could see we need to organize this a little bit better.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we're actually pretty evenly split between them. That's something that we do look at and we do watch. We're sort of a little heavier on venture capital right now. We want to build up our buyout portfolio a little bit more. So we look at that vis- ⁇-vis how quickly the money is drawn down, how quickly we get the money back. One of the things that's happening to a lot of our peers that we've been able to watch is that they haven't been getting the money back from their venture capital managers as fast as they thought they were. So those tales are much longer. We monitor and we built a model internally to help us forecast out what we think the allocation of private capital will be. We model, draw downs, and return of capital, and we can see how the allocations if we did nothing just freeze the portfolio here the way it would play out in terms of our allocations, and that helps us determine what we need to focus on more.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not radically different from our peers because all other foundations have the same objective we have, which is earn back five percent plus inflation to last into perpetuity, where we differ from our peers is that we're a lot chunkier because we're more concentrated as a portfolio, but our returns and our risk profile are not radically different as a result. And we're a little barbelled. So we're higher in the safe assets category compared to our peers. Robert with Johnson, Hewlett Packard, if you look at what their allocations are for the equivalent of our safe assets category, it's more in the 10 to 12 percent range. We're higher, but we've been far more selective in the private capital range and more concentrated, and that's actually worked for us.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So our directive to the team was, let's think about this, let's think about what we have already. We can model that. And then look at adding each individual opportunity that you found and figure out where the best risk return trade off is coming from. And let's just say for argument it's a broadly diversified long only manager. Well, if that's the best risk return trade-off, now find five others like that and look at the comparison and see where the best trade-off is. So that's how we go about it.”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's endemic to their philosophy. And I'm looking for conviction. So to answer your question, that makes it very important for us to look at the incremental risk and return of the portfolio every time we add or take out a manager. One of the things that we're looking at right now Our investment committee were looking at the rise of China and how important China has become, and the question is will we have a more systematic approach to dealing with China, or should we just be dealing with it opportunistically? We've decided that we want to be a little more systematic about it. We have exposure in our illiquid category. We want exposure in our semi-liquid category, and we're going about looking at how to do that. And the team surfaced all in about ten managers to look at, and they were all over the place”
2018-08-06 · Capital Allocators · Roz Hewsenian –Helmsley Trust's Chief of People and Process (Capital Allocators, EP.63) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source