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Shannon O'Leary

lines on the record: 83
first: 2025-03-10
most recent: 2025-03-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This is going to be a fascinating time at the foundation. Our CEO just announced his retirement. So we'll be doing that CEO search at the same time. We have the grant redesign process combined with this more local investment capital program that we're working on. And I think the combination of this work leading into that new strategic plan with a new CEO could be really powerful for the community and the state.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This five year period of time is kid launch on all cylinders. So I have two kids in college right now. I have another one who is a junior in high school. And so it'll be fascinating to support them and encourage them and watch them lean into figuring out how to be adults in the real world.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, having grown up with only sisters, I have three boys and one girl. I find teenage boys. Endlessly fascinating. It's just wild to watch their brains work. It would never occur to me, Ted, that if I were surfing behind a jet ski when I come off the rope to ask someone from the shore to peg me with a full NFL sized football to see if I could catch it. That is, in fact, a real thing that has happened in my many adventures with teenage boys. It's like watching a live fire science experiment go on over a three year period in your own home. Anyway, very fascinating to me. Having never had any experience with it.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The senior class survey, and I just was not at that age focused on family building, just wasn't part of my worldview of what was to come for myself.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many what to choose. My latest pet peeve is the inbound emails that are now calendar appointments of managers attempting to have me trying to click through really fast and then inadvertently responding yes to a meeting that I absolutely did not agree to.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mowing lawns I learned that it is hard for a person who's 5'2 to get an early 1990s all metal lawnmower in and out. Thus, my interest in physics, right? I learned a lot about leverage.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eating. I'm very food motivated, Ted. I loved to try new things. I love to eat. New York is great. Love coming here. It's very hard to go wrong. Have a network of people that feed me new restaurants that I can then try out when I'm here. I love to cook the food. I love to eat the food. And then I get a lot of exercise so that I can continue eating all the food.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI is a little bubblicious. We started to see a little bit of the potential fall that can happen if it turns out the thesis of AI is that you have to spend $180 billion on ships every 18 months. If that's not correct, maybe some of that starts to rotate. That could potentially cause additional volatility on the public market side. And then fun things might happen in several categories of the portfolio, particularly the hedge fund component of the portfolio. You've got some stability that's baked in in a couple of our niche year strategies. And then it'd just be great to have more of an opportunity set available to us.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a number of managers in the portfolio where you've had a doldrums 15 years where money was basically free. Fundraising was super easy. I'm a little curious if those marks are legitimate. And then we've also seen volatility on the public market side. 2022, fixed income and public equity down in the same year. Anybody with a private book looks like a genius, but really just a volatility laundering? Is that what Cliff says? Flip side of that is 23 and 24, where you have really concentrated markets.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did not have any access to constrained managers in 2019. I think the reputation and the team is a real testament towards our ability to get in. Folks are constrained for a reason. Generally, it's performance related. And that is of a benefit to the foundation. And as we continue to serve the community, be here as an institution that's available to provide capital in a variety of different ways. It's not a popular opinion that I would say to say like a board or a committee, but I would love some volatility.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that we're going to continue to get access to capacity constrained managers who are actively seeking us out. And one of the things that we're talking about with our committee is a slight shift in how we do the decision-making process. Because what we're finding is those capacity constrained situations can close very quickly, and we need to be more nimble. And so it's us doing the diligence on the team side of pre-identifying a few of those folks when they're not open, doing the diligence as much as we can beforehand, and then being ready to act. And so one of the things that we're bringing through our committee is a shift from affirmative consent to negative consent.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We also manage assets for more than 200 nonprofits. We're effectively their outsourced CIO. And not all of those folks are necessarily equipped to go back and talk about the nuances of, oh, a massive, there's 50% fewer public companies now than there were 20 years ago. And this thing called Mag7. That is not something that a nonprofit CFO is generally super comfortable talking about with their bored. And so it's us providing different education skills in this timeframe. And man, we got to be in the mean reversion business here soon.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, can we talk about benchmarks, Ted? Benchmark murder for allocators is real, particularly if you have a public market benchmark with the spread for your non-liquid assets, which we do. So here you have your private market assets not moving. And because we've got this enormous concentration in these large technology securities in the public markets that impacts all of the indices it's not just the US indices, it's worked its way all the way through AcquiMI. We spend a lot of time thinking about it. The committee's been great in terms of their ability to understand the repercussions and potentially make some adjustments to those benchmarks. where it's really challenging is conversations with individuals. So we have donors that have donor-advised funds.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the hope of the industry is that interest rates come way down. I don't know that that's going to be the reality that gets experienced at a certain point, you're going to have to create liquidity. And it may mean that you're going to see marks coming down. It may mean that you see folks willing to show their hand on what the actual discount rate is.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can fundraise until the cows come home, and it's not that challenging. And I just think until we resolve what still looks to me like a standoff between buyers and sellers, it's not going to move. And then you have on top of it the structural issue of the allocators in a lot of case. We're in decent shape, but we're having to shave back those commitment sizes.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought that your middle of January 2025 newsletter on this was extremely accurate. Those numbers for us, this was a strange period of time where you had basically two years, almost no shift in Marx. Portfolio is not repricing. There were no distributions. But weirdly, we also experienced a dearth of capital calls. And so stayed on our commitment pacing schedule in particularly the growth part of the portfolio only to have a big cliff of uncalled commitments that now we're sizing down, obviously, our ticket size is going to be smaller in 2025 and probably 2026 as well. I don't know that this is coming back. The good old days of the 10 years where the money was free, the allocators were like, hey, number go up, big denominator, and all of the managers are like, money is free.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're still in build mode. You're going to have an anchor tenant in our hedge fund portfolio. We'll have an anchor tenant in our relatively new private credit portfolio. Same thing is true on the venture side. And then as our connections and network broadens, then we're going to bring in those satellite positions and then potentially consider replacing incumbents over time.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's great, honestly. Especially if you're looking for stuff that's niche and a little bit different off the standard radar in the industry, we spend a lot of time intentionally attending conferences for emerging managers. So folks that are on their whatever the category, venture, private equity, to some extent in the credit side, getting those ideas bouncing around in the community is helpful. And then there are a handful of allocators that I'm really well networked with that pretty much only look at new and unique. And so that's a very helpful network for us to tab. We're going to do some of the standard seasoned managers that are going to be in a lot of cases core positions in most portfolios. We'll have some of that. And I think that's a fine strategy to have, especially in some of the slices of the portfolio where”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the relationship piece. And frankly, having nonprofits and squeaky wheels like myself on your cap table is a little bit of reputation laundering. So our willingness to have those hard conversations and to be intentional in saying to managers, we're going to have a really hard conversation with you. I might talk about it on a podcast. I'm not using your name. You have anonymity in this process, and I want you to know that because then you feel safe having a tough conversation with me. And so we have folks that have come in and said, hey, we're a capacity constrained closed manager. We heard about this conversation Shannon heard with this other person in New York. Can we have that conversation? So I think there's some of this, and it's that reputational benefit. And then, again, the willingness to just say exactly what I think.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you end up on the exiting list, you put yourself at risk of losing a significant amount of AUM. As a part of understanding, oh, here's what the pension community is doing. Here's how these mixes between endowments and foundations, pensions, family office, RIA, that alchemy, they're becoming very intentional about it, which I think is terrific. And partly as some of these other pieces are more volatile, they're looking to add endowment and foundation, which tends to be sticky. And particularly organizations that have an in-house team. Because then you're building the relationship directly with the client as opposed to going through an intermediary. So I think that piece has benefited us as some of these seasoned managers are being very careful about that.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, disadvantage from the beginning was access. We just were not on anybody's list to be approached. And a lot of managers are taking a very intentional look at what their clientele base looks like. If you're a manager and you've got 50% of your AUM coming through the consultant channel and one of those consultants gets to be an outside proportion,”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Category is a priority or not a priority this year. They're not interested in indicating what the pacing schedule looks like and what the ticket sizes are going to be. Hugely helpful for managers to know that information. The one that blows my mind is folks that are unwilling to talk about what's in here with a manager to help the manager help you effectively identify who's complementary, who's a potential replacement.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I learned so much about what you're really asking when you're asking these questions. And we're not talking about like secret sauce type of stuff. It's just that I think a lot of folks don't naturally know how to answer these things. There's a communication void between, I think, the allocator community and the managers. The IR folks generally are pretty well aware of what that gap is. It's that they have a hard time, I think, sometimes solving for X with whoever the investment professionals are. Sometimes it just takes a really long, very uncomfortably hot meeting in order to sort of some of that stuff out. And both sides need to communicate more honestly. So I bump into allocators who do not provide managers with any information of any kind. They don't want to say what they're looking for this year. They don't want to tell a manager that you're”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less effective than I think if I heard from the staff. And being able to have the capital to do that without having folks walk away feeling offended, I think is really what we bring to tables. In that particular meeting where I invited someone to stop talking, we had such a great conversation after that. Everyone in that room participated. And there was one individual who on the way out snagged me. It was like, that was the most fun meeting I've ever had with a limited partner.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fees are a little smaller than other people's fees. I know it is. Our fees are smaller. We're not that big at just about $2 billion. I think some of this is a little bit of a push and a pull. The economics are table stakes. And so when it comes to what do we add to managers, it's the conversations, the hard conversations that we've had with groups around succession planning or a founder who has been experiencing some unpredictable behavior while going through a life event. Those are the kinds of things that we enjoy tussling with. We work through all layers of the staff, not just through the senior team or the senior management. Sometimes you're going to get more out of a table full of 10 analysts and one level up from that in the director type positions. There's been meetings where I've invited the chief investment officer of an organization to stop talking because he's being significantly”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team and committee. So once folks are on a watch list, we're definitely lifting that up to the committee. So they know they have plenty of runway. We tell them where we are in the process and let them know on timing. Have a great team. I have a terrific number two. I have an individual who's followed me around and worked with me for 10 years, who's extremely well trained. We're making this decision. As a group, by the time we get to the point of saying, all right, this is going to end, and the question is just when everyone's there. It's not an argument.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terminations are a long time coming. Generally, folks get on a watch list. We had a situation over 23 and 24 where performance was poor. This is a public manager. And in interviewing the portfolio managers, there were, I think, three individuals who were listed as portfolio managers. We increasingly became convinced that this process was failing. The strategy that we had invested in had clearly shifted with the change in personnel over time as this firm had experienced retirements. And we got to a true loss of faith in the process. And it became more of a question around what's the timing for us to exit this manager.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason you decide to work through that situation is the next tier of leadership is excellent. Their overall investment process is actually even better than the original co-founders. So, I have an even higher degree of affinity for the firm because of that. And yet here, what I'm saying to this individual is you have this reality right here. You're ruining it by tripping over yourself in this capacity.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I believe I also said you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. And let me help you figure out how to do this better and more effectively. And that's the benefit of the relationship is you can have a hard conversation. He actually wrote me a thank you note. And our relationship has been very strong. And it also sparked some internal conversations with the firm that have now yielded some really nice results.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of shut it down having prepped this, I was very irritated. And so I actually set up a phone call directly with the individual, another member of his team. And I said, hey, you know, I just want to be really clear. You embarrassed me in that meeting. You disrespected the committee's time. You disrespected the committee's questions, which is disrespect for their intelligence. And your purpose there was really twofold one, We talk about the new product, which you largely did not do. And two, give the three limited partners in that room some degree of comfort that you actually have a succession plan. Now, they had brought in the chief investment officer with them, this new chief investment officer, and this individual spent the entire time stepping on any comment that person might have made. And I said, when you do that, zero LPs in the room believe that you have a succession plan.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are going to come with questions. Oh, and by the way, there are two other LPs that are on our committee. Are also in this ecosystem. So you're performing for a bigger audience than you think you're performing for and just rambled on and on and on and on for entire 20 minutes. People are like shifting and twitching, not picking up on any of the body language at all. Didn't pause for questions, didn't ask if there were any questions. And we finally ran out of time.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back at this point, we're saying to them, We are with all the other LPs in needing to see real evidence that there is an actual plan. You folks are in your late 60s. We understand that everyone is amazingly healthy and super fit, as one is in this industry these days. But accidents happen. You've made some changes, you've a largely fabulous team. Where's the rest of this picture coming together? And please start demonstrating that it is really coming together. And so as a part of that conversation about our ongoing commitments there, there was a fund that was winding down. We were interested in a new product that this firm spun up. We're pretty excited about it, planning to commit, brought one of the co-founders to the investment committee to present and candidly it was a total fail. Got on. We had preceded this with the team. The committee has an 18-page memo.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so we have spent the last several years spending a lot of time with a firm that we know really, really well, been involved with them in some capacity for probably 20 years. They went away on one direction on the succession planning, didn't work out, went another way, didn't really work out.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an issue. There's a lot of co founders out there in their 60s and 70s. Some have done robust planning. Many have not. A few have attempted some planning and then had to back up the truck and start over again a few times. And so we've seen it all, but I think it's an issue for the industry.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make people very uncomfortable, often by pointing out that I am the only woman in the room that can be effective. I don't know that it's always effective. I think holding people's feet to the fire on tough stuff, like the conversation around the succession planning, those conversations where this is a safe venue for us to talk about hard things and really having managers understand that and then feeling empowered to actually tell me the hard things that they are trying not to tell me is 90% of the work.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not bring her everywhere. That was just a brief two year period of time. The experience gets baked into the process by us ensuring that if I don't get an answer There's two other folks on this relationship that are going to ask the same question, point out that it hasn't been answered. It basically empowered us to be a lot bolder in terms of extracting information that we absolutely need and refusing to move ahead”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you stumble into a situation like bringing your 17 year old to a bunch of manager meetings and finding out, wow, this was effective and learning things you hadn't, how do you then try to take that and put it into your investment process? Because you're not going to be bringing your 17-year-old around all of that.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a question with one group that we never invested with around the risk management aspect of it that was blurry from our previous diligence. And at the end of the day, they just didn't have the right person in that role. This was a solvable problem. If you get that question that many times and it's a clear, you need a risk manager at a hedge fund, someone who oversees all of it and understands positioning and is willing to take traders to task. One, you need to have the right person. Two, you have to empower that person. And that had not happened. And we got that sense of that, but it did really come out. Hey, we have the wrong person in this role and we have not effectively empowered that person.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In many cases, you have an opportunity to ask a question that a manager has repeatedly ducked. And in three instances, I found answers to things that I had been having a hard time getting an answer to, but because there was a teenager in the room, they didn't feel comfortable pushing aside the question. And especially if I re-asked it after the first push, they'd look at my daughter and then they would answer.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a great time, fell in love with New York. And what I found was that actually it was beneficial even for me because the dynamic shifted in the room to have a young person there who folks clean up their language, which you expect a little bit of just as a baseline. But what was so interesting to me was the shift in language, the shift in how they talked about the strategy, the degree of care and interest in explaining it to a 17-year-old revealed Lot about the nature of the people that I was meeting with, some of whom were incumbent, some of whom were potential new portfolio managers. And it just was such a unique experience to get them to present to a 17-year-old. You learn things about the process that maybe aren't as obvious when they're blathering in investment speak at me.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question. I'll tell you about another fun strategy that I accidentally discovered bringing my daughter. So coming out of the pandemic, having been locked in the house for so many years, she demanded to come on a business trip. And I was speaking at a conference and doing a whole bunch of manager meetings here in New York. And I said to her, you can come, but my expectations are you successfully interpret business casually. You attend the conference and participate. You attend all the manager meetings. You need to ask at least one question in every meeting. And I want to read out on what you learned after each meeting. crushed it.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can learn a lot about a firm by how they treat the staff. And I understand there are some personalities in the industry out there that have interesting reputations in a number of different categories. They can have fabulous returns, but then in a case where you have a problematic behaving founder, we're less likely to be attracted to a firm like that than one where there's like a very clear process where you've got a founder, but there's a very explicitly identified next level team and they have a very clear process.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of conversations, a number of site visits, spending time with the back-end folks at the firm is really important to us. Validating their process, getting a very robust understanding What they've described to us is actually what is happening. Thorough vetting of risk and return. And we learn a lot by interviewing not the top rasp.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very long term venture. I ideally were meeting you when you're not fundraising, so there's no pressure from a needing to close standpoint. A diligence process from when we meet you to when we make an investment decision at the fastest is six months.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are similar to complementary or could replace an existing incumbent position. If the manager is not skilled at asking those questions, they need to leave enough room for my staff and myself to be able to identify that about you.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So desired trades from an investment perspective is going to be largely driven by what we need. And so, what I appreciate is when folks come in when they're not fundraising, it sets up a fundamentally non-transactional relationship or can, obviously not always. I really appreciate folks that take the time to have the dialogue about how do we mutually assist each other. I know that you, the manager, need my fee income and you want your carry, but you have to make a pitch to me on where you fit in this portfolio. And there's two ways that can happen. It can happen on the manager side or it can happen on our side. So really skilled folks will come in, meet with us, and dialogue about what are we looking for? What is our budget for this stuff this year? Understand enough about which slice of the portfolio they're in to ask really great questions that highlight”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All risk management exercise. We're not in a position to go all in on venture. We do need that study stream. We don't have the flexibility of, say, a college endowment. So you've got to have enough liquidity built in there. And then obviously we're looking for that return. That bucket is probably 50-50 in terms of liquid versus non-liquid.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A number of other things that are available to us. I'll give you an example of degrees of freedom. So we did an AG credit deal a couple years ago. And what's great about it is from a return profile can totally fit into the growth bucket. From a risk management profile, it can fit in the diversifying category. And ultimately, we landed it in the real assets bucket because the underlying collateral fits into the things you could touch.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spending policy while offsetting inflation over time, that's always going to be the biggest chunk of this portfolio. It is a big risk budget. So 65% where we're seeking higher return, accepting a degree of higher risk, that's a huge component of that portfolio. The diversifying assets, we've got fixed income and hedge funds in there, real assets, obviously stuff you can touch, a little bit of an inflation offset there too. And what we were really intentional about in the policy language was incorporating degrees of freedom in the definition of what can land in the three categories, growth, diversifying, and real assets. And the reason that's important is because it put us on a footing where we're never in position to have to be making a commitment to something that has a worse risk or return profile, particularly in the private markets, then”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I said, we're going to rewrite the investment policy. We're going to also lean into what's the committee's highest and best use if we're shifting to the staff driven model as opposed to a consultant driven model. The committee's best work is what it does at the board level, which is strategy and governance. If we're driving outside the lines, this is when we're coming to you. If we're making a significant allocation shift, we're coming to you on that. We've thought through things like benchmark changes. We ended up shifting from the bucketed model to a roles-based allocation, which is almost like a total portfolio approach. And so we've got our growth allocation. We have our diversifying assets, and then we have a real assets allocation. I'm not going to go through and define all these things because everybody listening to this knows what this is. On the gross side, though, because we're trying to support 5%.”
2025-03-10 · Capital Allocators · Shannon O'Leary – Relationship Capital Investing at St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation (EP.435) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source