Pat Dorsey is the Founder of Dorsey Asset Management, a $1.7 billion global public equity manager focused on companies with competitive advantages and long investment runways. Pat created Morningstar's moat research framework and led its equity research efforts for a dozen years before launching his firm in 2014.

Our conversation covers the nuances of investing in businesses with wide moats across quantitative analysis, switching costs, network effects, brands, management, alignment, capital allocation, and reinvestment runways. We then turn to Pat's application of moat analysis to his investing, including concentration, global scope, position sizing, decision making, and lessons learned.

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

Our first guest on the Senior Decision Makers mini-series is Nick Csicsko. Nick is a Managing Director at the Trinity Wall Street endowment, where he joined CIO Meredith Jenkins at the founding of the investment office in 2016 and has spent the last decade helping build a young endowment inside a 320-year-old institution. Today the endowment has grown to over $6 billion.

Nick's path into investing is a fascinating one. He studied composition and earned his Doctorate of Music at Juilliard. While there, he talked his way into an internship at Juilliard's endowment and never looked back.

Our conversation covers the lessons he carried from music into investing, his investment philosophy, and the details of his process. Manager selection sits at the heart of his work, and he articulates what separates the relationships that endure from the ones that don't. Nick is a remarkable storyteller and shares a number of real-life examples of manager relationships — some that worked out well, some that didn't, and others with insights for allocators and managers alike.

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

Abigail Wattley is the Chief Investment Officer of Williams College, where she oversees the school's $4.5 billion endowment. She became CIO three years ago upon the retirement of Collette Chilton, whose past conversation is replayed in the feed. Abigail has spent two decades in the Williams investment office, and her tenure manifests the benefits of duration and institutional knowledge in the seat.

Our conversation traces Abigail's nearly twenty-year journey inside the Williams Investment Office, from joining as an early analyst to becoming the internal successor CIO. We discuss the consistent mandate throughout alongside Abigail's evolution from analyst to deputy to decision-maker, including the knowledge retained as an internal candidate, the tension between respecting an institution's history and putting her own stamp on the portfolio, and perspectives on hedge funds, private markets, liquidity management, real assets, team development, and AI.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

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Collette Chilton is the CIO of Williams College where she has overseen its $3 billion since 2006. Collette is nothing short of a legend in the business. She has sat in a CIO seat since the early 1990s at the helm of public pension MassPrim and corporate pension Lucent before joining Williams. Institutional Investors bestowed its Lifetime Achievement Award on Collette in 2019, and Barron's named her one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Finance in 2020. Our conversation covers Collette's career path and lessons learned before joining Williams. We then turn to her arrival at Williams in 2006 to a phone, a computer, and a legacy portfolio, Williams' governance structure leveraging alumni advisors, asset allocation, manager selection, manager monitoring, hedge funds, venture capital, and navigating around popular managers. Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

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This WTT, AI: Fundamentals, Valuation, and the Next Allocator Dilemma takes on a high-level assessment of AI companies as late-stage private winners prepare to go public, and the next big challenge allocators face as a result. Read Ted's blog here.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

Jonathan Wang is the founder and CEO of EOS Investors, where he has built three real estate investment platforms totaling $2 billion in assets under management across the hotel and residential sectors. Jonathan also created a wholly owned hotel management company that oversees 60 properties for the EOS funds and five core partners.

Our conversation covers Jonathan's path to hotel investing and EOS' hotel investment process across market selection, property type, underwriting, vertically integrated operations, and managing through cycles. We also discuss extensions into residential real estate, hotel credit, and opportunities and risks going forward.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

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Rajiv Jain is the Chairman and CIO of GQG Partners, a global equity manager he founded in 2016 that has soared to $160 billion in assets, rebuffing the challenging decade for active managers.

Our conversation covers Rajiv's path from trading in India to his long tenure at Vontobel and founding of GQG. We discuss the periodic crisis lessons that shaped his approach, his definition of quality, team dynamics, and portfolio construction to avoid losses. We then turn to Rajiv's contrarian views, including current significant positions in energy, utilities, steel, tobacco, and emerging markets, avoidance of hyperscalers and semiconductors, and nimbleness to change his mind.

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Erik Brooks is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ethos Capital, a middle-market private equity firm built to bring seasoned C-Suite operators into every aspect of the investment process. Erik's experience prior to founding Ethos in 2019 spanned privatizations in Eastern Europe, value investing at Baupost, and twenty years at Abry Partners.

Our conversation covers Erik's path to private equity, lessons learned about risk, the importance of betting on people, and the evolution in his thinking that led to forming Ethos. We then cover Ethos' focus on durable business models, one-deal-a-year cadence, operating system to evaluate and improve companies, and an investment example that brings it all to life.

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

John Kim, or Kimmer, has raised more than $70 billion across his career for leading venture capital and private equity firms. Kimmer recently distilled three decades of lessons into The Tao of Fundraising, the best book I've ever read on fundraising for investment managers. Since then, Kimmer joined a General Catalyst portfolio company, Lila Sciences, as Chairman and President of Corporate Development. Our conversation covers Kimmer's philosophy about raising capital, the sales process, art of persuasion, best practices in a meeting, frameworks determining fundraising success, taxonomy of institutional investors, ideal sales team structure and compensation, and the features he carried over from capital formation for funds to a new operating role. Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn Subscribe to the mailing list Access Transcript with Premium Membership

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

Josh Steiner is a polymath of the New York and D.C. power corridors across government, media, and finance, and co-author of From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You.

Josh rose to national prominence as the youngest-ever Chief of Staff at the U.S. Treasury in the Clinton administration, where he made a high-profile mistake he unpacks in the book. He pivoted to finance as a media investment banker and co-founder of private equity firm Quadrangle Group in 2000, worked as an operator at Bloomberg in the 2010s, has served on Yale's Investment Committee for nearly a decade, and five years ago returned to private equity as co-founder of SSW Partners managing capital for a few families.

Our conversation focuses on mistakes, quite a contrast from other discussions on the podcast. We kick it off with Josh's big mistake at Treasury and analyze the nature of mistakes and what happened to Josh. We then turn to his mistakes in investing across deals, managing an investment business, managing people, and serving on Investment Committees. We close with frameworks to avoid mistakes and with Josh turning the table on me to discuss an impactful mistake I made that I've never discussed before.

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

Today's show discusses an innovative joint venture between asset owners and a multi-manager hedge fund that seeks to deliver smooth, equity-like returns at a lower cost than available in the marketplace.

My guests are Will England, Derek Drummond, and Tony Caruso. Will is the CEO and CIO of $12 billion multi-strategy hedge fund Walleye Capital. Derek is head of external public markets investing at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, and Tony Caruso is Managing Director of hedge funds at UTIMCO. Together, they co-founded Dockside Platforms, a managed account platform that gives institutional allocators direct access to portfolio managers using the infrastructure, risk systems, and financing capabilities of a multi-strat underneath.

Our conversation traces Dockside's evolution from a barstool brainstorm to a platform with more than 60 managers and billions in assets. We discuss the accessibility of talent through managed accounts, differentiated manager sourcing, due diligence with trade-level transparency, capital efficiency across portfolios, hedging, risk management, and onboarding and exiting managers on the platform. All told, the combined heft of large asset owner capital and the sophisticated infrastructure of a multi-manager hedge fund have created a win-win for everyone involved.

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)