Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

Our Summer Series kickoff is with one of the all-time greats, Annie Duke. The former world-class poker player has become a noted academic and practitioner in the art of decision-making. Her best-seller Thinking in Bets is a one-of-a-kind set of tools and tips to try (emphasis on try) to get past our embedded behavioral biases.  And her follow-up works How to Decide and Quit pull different threads in the decision-making process.
 
Since writing Thinking in Bets, Annie has consulted several investment organizations to apply her insights to investing, including becoming a Special Partner focused on Decision Science at venture firm, First Round Capital.
 
For the series, we've shared two of Annie's most popular appearance on the show – coinciding with the launched of Thinking in Bets in 2018 and Quit in 2022. Please enjoy these great conversations with Annie Duke.
 
Any leader should see for themselves the benefits of elite coaching. Try ALEX: tryalex.admiredleadership.com.
 
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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

Our Summer Series kickoff is with one of the all-time greats, Annie Duke. The former world-class poker player has become a noted academic and practitioner in the art of decision-making. Her best-seller Thinking in Bets is a one-of-a-kind set of tools and tips to try (emphasis on try) to get past our embedded behavioral biases.  And her follow-up works How to Decide and Quit pull different threads in the decision-making process.
 
Since writing Thinking in Bets, Annie has consulted several investment organizations to apply her insights to investing, including becoming a Special Partner focused on Decision Science at venture firm, First Round Capital.
 
For the series, we've shared two of Annie's most popular appearance on the show – coinciding with the launched of Thinking in Bets in 2018 and Quit in 2022. Please enjoy these great conversations with Annie Duke.
 
Any leader should see for themselves the benefits of elite coaching. Try ALEX: tryalex.admiredleadership.com.
 
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)

Lauren Hochfelder is Head of Global Real Assets at Morgan Stanley, where she oversees a team of 300 investment professionals across 13 countries, managing $80 billion across real estate, infrastructure, equity and credit. Lauren joined Morgan Stanley as an investment banking analyst directly out of Yale 26 years ago and has spent her entire career at the firm, helping build one of the industry's leading platforms.

 
Our conversation traces Lauren's journey from analyst to Global Head and the evolution of Morgan Stanley's real estate business before, during, and after the Global Financial Crisis. We cover the firm's thematic approach to investing behind structural demand tailwinds, combination of global perspectives and on-the-ground teams, operational improvements to assets, portfolio construction, and themes across industrial real estate and infrastructure, senior housing, and net lease properties. We also touch on riskier areas of real estate and Lauren's new role adding infrastructure to her real estate oversight.
 





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Michelle Knudsen is Chief Investment Officer of NYU, where she oversees the university's $8 billion endowment. Michelle joined NYU two years ago, after fourteen years as an allocator at Partners Capital and the Mellon Foundation, with a mandate to build a best-in-class endowment from a clean sheet of paper.
Our conversation traces Michelle's lessons learned working at Goldman Sachs, a growing OCIO, and a foundation that shaped her investment philosophy and views on portfolio construction, risk management, and manager selection. We then turn to the transformation of NYU's investment office from the ground up across governance, portfolio strategy, investment process, and the team. Along the way, we discuss manager selection, emerging managers, venture capital, hedge funds, AI, stress tests, and what it takes to build an enduring investment organization.
Any leader should see for themselves the benefits of elite coaching. Try ALEX: tryalex.admiredleadership.com.
Learn more about our Strategic Investments: OWL.
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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

Our next guest on the Senior Decision Makers series is Luis Laboy, Director of Public Equity at the Hewlett Foundation, where he's spent the last decade running the public equity book alongside CIO Ana Marshall — a mentor and colleague he first met nearly thirty years ago. The foundation's assets stand at roughly $14 billion today.

Luis spent fifteen years as a direct emerging markets investor at Everest Capital before crossing to the LP side, and our conversation digs into how he's leveraged that experience as an allocator. We discuss how the cadence and depth of decision-making changed when he went from a high-turnover book at Everest to a handful of high-conviction relationships at Hewlett, how his time split between portfolio construction and manager selection has evolved over, and how his time marketing the fund shaped the way he interviews managers and thinks about turnover.

Luis is incredibly insightful about how his early interests and upbringing have shone through across his career. He thinks and speaks in analogies, he's wildly entertaining, and — in short — he's just a genuinely good dude, and that comes through in spades in our conversation.


Any leader should see for themselves the benefits of elite coaching. Try ALEX: tryalex.admiredleadership.com.

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