3G Capital’s buyout of Burger King may be the most successful private equity deal you’ve never heard about. Over the last fourteen years, or the length of a typical private equity fund, 3G turned a $1 billion investment into $28 billion in value. The annual dividends from the investment accruing to 3G today are around 70% of its invested capital. The deal is one of the highest earning buyouts ever. 3G is an organization with a storied history. Founded by Jorge Paolo Lemann, Carlos Alberto...

Alex Abell is a Managing Partner at RCP Advisors, which at $14 billion of committed capital, is one of the largest firms focused exclusively on lower-middle market buyouts. Alex has spent twenty-three years in the business, starting on the LP side, building Atlas Diligence – a research and advisory platform focused on advanced analytics, and then merging Atlas with RCP a decade ago. Today, he helps manage RCP’s research efforts, its customized solutions, and advisory services. Our...

Letitia Johnson is the CIO of Amherst College, where she manages the school's $4 billion endowment. After thirteen years working with twenty-five clients and attending over 1,000 Investment Committee meetings at Cambridge Associates, Letitia developed a view about investing that differs from many similar pools of capital and has applied that view over the last five years. Our conversation covers the subtleties of managing an endowment with a concentrated, bottom-up manager-selected...

David Morehead is the CIO at Baylor University, where he oversees the $2.2 billion endowment. David came to Baylor thirteen years ago after an eighteen-year investment career that spanned every aspect of public markets investing. He created an approach to investing at Baylor that is quite different from others in the seat. David recently started sharing his insightful perspectives on the craft on Twitter/X under the handle @CIO_Baylor. Our conversation covers David’s background and path...

On today’s show, we’ll discuss another empty room – an opportunity ignored by most investors because they either don’t want to or can’t participate. We’ve shared conversations under this theme about a range of forgotten opportunities from specific emerging markets to biotech. Previous episodes are available under the mini-series or topic search at capitalallocators.com. This time around, we discuss a room that was overflowing two years ago, has been abandoned since, and might be coming back...

Chris Dixon is a General Partner at a16z where he leads Crypto investing, overseeing the largest pool in the space at $7 billion across four dedicated venture funds and a team of eighty professionals. Chris is one of the leading voices in the crypto ecosystem and topped the Forbes ‘Midas List’ as the most successful venture capitalist in the world in 2021. He was a guest on the show last year, and that replay is available in the feed.   Our conversation covers Chris’ framework for web3,...

Chris Dixon is a General Partner at Andreesen Horowitz, where he focuses on the a16z Crypto Funds.  Before joining Andreesen in 2013, Chris co-founded, built and sold two technology companies and was a prolific seed investor, founding member of Founder Collective, and personal investor.  At various spots along the way, Chris was an investor in BuzzFeed, Uber, Venmo, Hotel Tonight, Coinbase, and Oculus, among many others.     Our conversation covers Chris’ early interest in computers and...

Shiloh Bates is the Chief Investment Officer at Flat Rock Global, an alternative credit manager specializing in the junior tranches of CLOs. Last year, Shiloh published CLO Investing, a comprehensive review of the structure, payoff rules, and historical performance of CLOs. Our conversation covers Shiloh's twenty-five years spent in and around the space, an overview of the market, the characteristics of CLOs, the attractiveness of CLO equity relative to other credit opportunities, and Flat...

Nigel Dawn is the global head of Private Capital Advisory at Evercore, where he leads the secondaries business he started a decade ago. Under Nigel's leadership, Evercore had become the market leader in transaction volume and is involved in approximately 30-40% of all secondaries market activity . Our conversation covers Nigel's observations on the growing secondaries market, including its history, rationale for LPs and GPs, incentives, critiques, other liquidity options, and advice for both...

I've been thinking about the investment office playbook and what managers don't see when they meet with allocators. Read Ted’s blog here.

Today’s show is the first in an ongoing mini-series discussing Breeding Grounds, organizations that have developed and spawned future industry leaders. We’ll cover both allocators and managers to see what we can learn about developing talent. In the first episode of the mini-series, we discuss Carnegie Corporation of New York. Ellen Shuman became Carnegie’s first CIO in 1999 after working for David Swensen at Yale. Over her dozen year tenure and that of Meredith Jenkins and Kim Lew for the...

Blythe Masters a Founding Partner of Motive Partners, a $6 billion specialist private equity platform that builds, backs, and buys technology companies that enable the financial services industry. Blythe spent 27 years at JP Morgan, starting as a teenager and rising to the firmwide Executive Committee. Her path included roles as the head of global commodities, head of corporate and investment bank regulatory affairs, CFO of the investment bank, head of the global credit portfolio and credit...

Jonathan Tepper is the CIO of Prevatt Capital, a $450 million long only firm he founded in 2020 that takes a quality and value approach to own a concentrated portfolio of global monopolies. He is also the author of The Myth of Capitalism, a book we discussed alongside his career path on the show five years ago. That conversation is replayed in the feed. Our conversation this time around bookends our prior discussion, covering Jonathan’s unique upbringing and education on one end and his...

Jonathan Tepper is the founder of Variant Perception, an economic research group that works with institutional managers, hedge funds, and allocators to provide objective and comprehensive data to form actionable ideas from leading indicators and emerging trends. He is also the author of three books, the most recent of which, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition, received widespread acclaim earlier this year. Our conversation covers Jonathan's unusual upbringing,...

Mike Freno is the Chairman & CEO of Barings, a $400 billion global manager that invests across public and private fixed income, real assets, and capital solutions on behalf of its insurance company parent MassMutual and other institutions. Barings emerged from a combination of four investment brands in 2016 and has expanded its capabilities by acquiring partners with complementary skills that fit into its culture. Our conversation covers Mike's path to the CEO seat, the creation of the...

Michael Leffell is the Managing Member of Portage Partners, Chairman of Canoe Intelligence, and Founder and Chairman of 10 East, an investment platform for sophisticated investors to access private markets by co-investing alongside Michael. Michael was former Deputy Executive Managing Member of Davidson Kempner, where he spent twenty-one years before retiring in 2010. He formed a family office shortly thereafter and developed Portage, Canoe, and 10 East out of his investing activities. Our...

A long time ago, 33 years to be exact, Mike Milken pled guilty to 6 counts of violations of securities laws, went to jail for 2 years, and received a lifetime ban from the securities industry. He was at the time the most successful and powerful man on Wall Street and remains one of the smartest and most successful backers of talent in finance, cancer research and education.   Most of us have formed beliefs about Mike based on accounts in the media or books written like Den of Thieves. We...

Michael Milken is a legendary financier and philanthropist. Mike is best known for his role in creating the high yield bond market in the 1970s and 1980s at Drexel Burnham Lambert, his guilty plea, and his remarkable philanthropic efforts over fifty years supporting medical research, education, and public health. Under Mike’s leadership, upstart Drexel became the most successful securities firm on Wall Street, enabled capital to become available for the 99% of companies that could not...

Michael Mauboussin is the Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global, a $70 billion equity manager. Michael is renowned for his ability to articulate important investment concepts backed by academic research. His first of three prior conversations on the show is replayed in the feed. You can find the rest at capitalallocators.com. Our conversation explores Michael’s most recent piece on pattern recognition, including when it works and when it doesn’t. We then transition to...

Michael Mauboussin currently is the Director of Research at BlueMountain Capital, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund and asset manager. He spent the majority of his professional career thinking and writing about decision making, behavior and complex systems, with long stints at Credit Suisse and nearly a decade alongside Bill Miller at Legg Mason. Michael has been an Adjust Professor at Columbia Business School for 24 years. Our conversation covers Michael’s early career, the paradox of...

Magnus Grimeland is the CEO and founder of Antler, one of the world’s largest day zero investor. Antler’s pre-seed strategy canvasses 27 countries, 1,000 portfolio companies, 8,000+ founders, and over 120,000 annual applications for 2,000 spots in its residency programs. Magnus founded Antler in 2017 after serving as the co-founder of Zalora, a tech-enable fashion brand in Asia. Our conversation covers Magnus’ journey from growing up in rural Norway to developing a global startup platform,...

Brad Jacobs is a career CEO and the founder of Jacobs Private Equity (his family office). Brad created and grew three platforms using a roll-up strategy that resulted in seven multibillion-dollar publicly traded companies. He and his teams have raised $30 billion of capital, completed 500 acquisitions, created hundreds of thousands of jobs, and generated annual returns to shareholders in excess of 50%. Brad shares his playbook in his aptly named book, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. In...

Ron Biscardi, the CEO of iConnections, whose Global Alts conference in Miami is the largest capital introduction gathering in the industry. In addition to the annual event, iConnections hosts an annual charity cap intro event and provides its technology platform to connect the industry year-round. Last week, I joined 6,000 industry peers in Miami at Global Alts. The main event at the conference were an incredible 15,000 one-on-one meetings between allocators and managers. As a side...

Sanjay Ayer is a portfolio manager at WCM Investment Management, the Laguna-based $80 billion equity manager profiled on three popular past episodes with CEO Paul Black, President Mike Trigg, and emerging market portfolio manager Mike Tian. Sanjay joined WCM in 2007, and alongside Mike Trigg, leads the firm’s research process that follows the mantra: think different and get better. Our conversation is a fascinating exploration of the differentiated mindset at WCM. We discuss topics,...