Pod Insights How I Invest with David Weisburd E346: $7 Billion CIO: Why the Endowment Model is Changing About this episode How do you build a $7 billion portfolio that performs across decades while keeping every client aligned and every manager motivated?
In this episode, I sit down with Karen Welch, Chief Investment Officer at Spider Management Company, to explore the evolving role of a CIO in today’s complex investment landscape. Karen shares how lessons from Stanford’s endowment shaped her approach, why the best investment edge comes from people and relationships, and how Spider leverages both to generate top-tier returns. She also unpacks how to navigate private markets, assess the illiquidity premium, and structure portfolios to balance opportunity with risk.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 David Weisburd? So Karen, you're the CIO of Spider Management, which manages roughly $7 billion. And you came from Stanford's Endowment nine years ago. What lessons do you take from working at Stanford's Endowment to how you're on Spider Management today?
0:13 Speaker 01 Good question that I've reflected on a little bit as I've been at Spider now for just over 10 years. When I sit back and think about the most important lesson, it's not the skill set or the mechanics of manager selection or portfolio construction. It's really all about people. And both the people of our internal teams and the relationships that we build with the external managers with whom we invest. It's actually increasingly important now in a world in which the pace of technological change is accelerating, information is ubiquitous. AI can do some of the analysis and research that I and my colleagues did in the early days of our careers. And I think what's really going to differentiate the best organizations, the best portfolios, the best investors going forward are the people on their teams and the relationships that they build to invest the assets that we steward.
0:59 David Weisburd? I've heard this analogy that investment analysts will become investment orchestrators. So they'll orchestrate and prompt the AI to do what needs to be done for the portfolio. Does that change how you go about building your team and what you look for in terms of future team members?
1:16 Speaker 01 It's a great question. Some of the things that I really look for in hiring my team are consistent in this pre and post-AI world.
1:25 Speaker 01 I look for team members who are really intellectually curious and willing to learn. And that's even more important now, again, given the pace of technological change. I want individuals who have deep experience and expertise in particular parts of their portfolio. But I also want individuals who are real team players and can think about that portfolio holistically, just like I noted at Stanford, and contribute that bigger picture view to combining the pieces to achieve our collective objectives. But we need people who have judgment, who have the ability to work with technology and AI and can leverage that and then apply judgment to making the best investment decisions.
2:03 David Weisburd? Taking a step back, what do you see the role of a CIO? What does a CIO need to do?
2:09 Speaker 01 I'm a big sports fan, former athlete. I like the analogy of a CIO to a coach. And I consider myself to be a player coach. And in that, I think the role is a couple fold. One, it's to attract and develop the best team and team players that have different and complementary areas of expertise. Secondly, it's to develop a real strategic game plan to generate the strongest investment returns. But it's also a third to make game time adjustments on either offense or defense in order to adapt to the evolving market environment and the opportunities that that creates.
2:49 David Weisburd? I've been thinking about this topic of monitoring your portfolio and what it really means. Obviously, you get K1s, you get statements, you're somehow updating your information, but there's more to it. What does it mean to monitor a portfolio? What exactly are you looking for?
3:03 Speaker 01 We want to understand what they're doing in their portfolio and why they're doing that. And that's important, not only in assessing those managers on an ongoing basis, but also leveraging their expertise and what they're seeing on the ground in their portfolio companies to help inform our decision making and applying that across the portfolio. So we're certainly looking at the data and, as I said, conduct rigorous analysis, both through our own tools as well as utilizing technology and AI to help us now. But we are rigorously, regularly reviewing the data, looking at performance, but really trying to understand the drivers of performance. And again, thinking about that holistically, thinking about how a manager's performance
3:46 Speaker 01 in a given environment impacts the overall portfolio. We're asking whether they're performing as we would expect in a given market environment. And if not, that obviously raises questions. And so that prompts some of our line of questioning and ongoing diligence as part of our monitoring efforts. It's all about the people. And so understanding the people, what's going on with the investment managers and ensuring that you have real strong alignment, I've found in my career. Strongest, most successful investments are those in which the, there's a really strong partnership and the managers have significant skin in the game and alignment with, with our objectives. So we're all, we're all in the same direction.
4:24 David Weisburd? And last time we chatted, you mentioned that you don't only like to play defense in terms of figuring out what's going on in portfolio. You also like to play offense and figuring out where those opportunities are embedded in your portfolio with the help of your managers. Give me some examples of that. How can a CIO play offense with their managers?
4:43 Speaker 01 It's building that mosaic, as you said, I think that's the right analogy. And talking to enough managers and other experts to help inform our view. And assessing whether there's an opportunity to lean in, take advantage of price dislocation, take advantage of an area where there might be strong prospective returns. A couple of cases over the past several years, one example that sticks, sticks out is in the credit space. We really leaned into credit during and after COVID when credit spreads blew out. There were really phenomenal opportunities in the credit space that we were hearing from our managers. We were seeing examples on the ground and so we allocated more to that space. We leaned in and that has been well rewarded.
5:28 Speaker 01 As I said, you fast forward a couple of years, spreads have compressed. There's more than ample liquidity in the credit space and the return, prospective returns just simply aren't as compelling as they have been. And so that's been an area where we've been given the insight we have from our managers and trusted partners. We've been harvesting those gains and not redeploying as actively into that area.
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7:14 David Weisburd? alongside filings, broker research, news and more than 240,000 expert call transcripts, turning raw conversations into comparable, auditable insight. Take advantage of AlphaSense AI-led expert calls now. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Learn more at alpha-sense.com/howIinvest. One of the interesting patterns that's starting to emerge as I talk to some of the great investors, I had Daniel Polley from Oaktree, I had Tim Barrett from Texas Tech, he's a CIO there. And they both believe that some of the best opportunities, investments sit below a bad headline. So in Danielle's example, everybody was selling software and you know, there was some baby
7:57 David Weisburd? in that bath water, meaning there were some interesting companies that were fundamentally sound that Oaktree was able to invest in. In Tim Barrett's example, he was going into arguably one of the most unloved asset classes in the world, office space, because there were certain markets and certain conditions where it made a lot of sense. Do you find out that sometimes some of the best opportunities hide behind some of the worst headlines?
8:17 Speaker 01 A hundred percent. And our first CIO at the University of Richmond, Lou Moltzer, is a true contrarian at heart. And he has certainly reminded me and our team of that. So I wholeheartedly agree. Some of the best investment opportunities are those where you really have to grit your teeth a little bit. You need a strong stomach, but they can create the most rewarded outcomes. So software is a timely one. We are very much looking at it. We're talking to our managers and that's an interesting case study in some of the mixed views that we're hearing. And so that's a key current topic that we're trying to figure out.
8:51 David Weisburd? So.
8:53 David Weisburd? The endowment model, which was started by David Swensen and really gained steam in the 2000s and 2010s, has recently come under some pressure as DPI has changed and liquidity timelines have changed. What do you believe persists with the old endowment model and what do you believe needs to be evolved moving forward?
9:11 Speaker 01 Super question. And as you noted, obviously David Swensen was one of the pioneers of the endowment model, along with the individual I just mentioned, Lou Moltzer, the first CIO at Richmond and Lori Hoagland, who had been the first CIO at Stanford, is an early friend and mentor of mine in the industry. Some of the tenants and attributes of the endowment model as they developed it are still very much valid today. Attributes, including the long-term time horizon and the opportunity for endowments to benefit from a really differentiated time horizon and the ability to take long-term views, as we just talked about, the ability to take contrarian views when others are fearful, is a real key pillar of the endowment model.
9:55 Speaker 01 Secondly, is inequity biased, which is essential in order to generate their returns that we need for our institutions to thrive over multiple generations. You simply need to take equity risk in order to succeed in doing that. But you also need diversification and a set of assets that is truly unique and uncorrelated to the equity markets so that we can fulfill our obligations to support our institutions, then the needs, regardless of the economic and market environment. The other two pillars of the endowment model, the importance of active management and embracing the opportunity to add value through skill by investing in less efficient parts of the market. And then the importance of alignment of interests, we touched on earlier.
10:37 Speaker 01 When you think about it that way, the team and I really embrace the endowment model and feel it gives the University of Richmond and our client partners the best opportunity to succeed in generating the returns that we need to, to support our institution's mission.
10:51 Speaker 01 But that said, I think it's important to avoid a few practices that perhaps the purest followers of the endowment model embrace and have generated criticism, rightfully so in my mind. And so a couple of those are, one, a real dogmatic focus on alpha and excess return. There are parts of the market where it is just more challenging, more costly to add value over the market. And we've certainly experienced that, particularly in the large cap U.S. public equity market recently, when the returns have been driven by a very small set of large-cap technology companies. We need to be realistic and recognize that there are parts of the market in which we might be rewarded by just simply, by parts
11:35 Speaker 01 of the market in which passive management can play a role in giving us exposure to the broad market.
11:42 David Weisburd? Said another way, there may be 100, maybe 200 basis points of alpha in certain markets, but if you're paying 220 on it, then you're, you end up in a negative position than if you just had the index and gave up that 1 to 200 basis of gross alpha.
11:56 Speaker 01 That's well put. I think there are two other areas. One is this, I think, well, diversification is important, and we need diversification to ensure that we can meet our spending needs in a range of environments. I think there can be an overemphasis on that at the expense of looking at the investment merit of certain investments. That is really critical to think about the prospective risk-return of an investment and not simply put it in the portfolio because the model tells you to, with a sense that, an expectation that a low correlation asset will provide its worth. At the end of the day, a low correlation asset does not help us meet spending needs, does not pay for financial aid in and of itself. And so it's really thinking about identifying, diversifying assets that can provide the protection in the time where you really need it and/or can stand on their
12:40 Speaker 01 own and create value over a longer-term time horizon. And then the third area where I think the endowment model, rightfully so, has encountered some criticism, and we've certainly seen headlines around this recently, are concerns around illiquidity and whether endowment model investors are truly rewarded for giving up illiquidity and investing in private asset classes. And that's where I think this notion of an illiquidity premium or a magic premium for which investors are compensated for locking up capital is just is simply comical and this nonsense that you have to look at investing in giving up liquidity in areas where it's most rewarded.
13:18 David Weisburd? Glad you went there because I've been thinking a lot about this topic. We had a lot of very smart investors question whether is there still illiquidity premium in the market? Illiquidity premium is the premium return that investors are supposed to get for being in illiquid investments like private equity, venture capital, and other long-dated investments. I have perhaps a really dumb question, which is how would you know whether the illiquidity premium was still there? And how would you go about figuring that out?
13:43 Speaker 01 It's a great question. The illiquidity premium comes not from simply locking up capital, but from investing with managers that have a unique skill set and ability to create value. And so I think it's really critical to incorporate that in your due diligence process and your ongoing monitoring and management of these managers and portfolios. But it often takes many years to figure that out. And that's part of the the reality with private equity and venture capital investments is these investments have very long life cycles. And so you need to really have access to the best managers in the asset class
14:28 Speaker 01 and not simply invest in the median manager. I think the data really bears that out. If you look at the venture capital returns over the five-year period ending in September, the median venture manager returned 4.7%. While the global public equity markets returned 13.5%. So the median manager underperformed global public equities by almost nine percentage points. There's no magic illiquidity premium there. Fortunately, Spider's venture capital portfolio meaningfully outperformed not only the median manager, but the public equity universe as well, which just really underscores the dispersion of returns in this asset class and part of the market. And the imperative that to generate the returns that we all want from the asset class,
15:13 Speaker 01 you have to be invested in the best managers who have the ability to invest in the best founders and really game-changing, industry-leading technology.
15:23 David Weisburd? And Spyder has had access to some great managers due to historically being in the asset class. If you wanted to expand your exposure to venture, or if a new family office was starting to a program today, what would be the best practices if you're not already in these names?
15:39 Speaker 01 It's a challenge, and I think that's where there is an advantage, where those of us who have been invested in these areas for a long period of time really benefit. And Stanford and Spyder have been invested in these asset classes for decades. And I think the benefit of that is a couple fold. One, it's the access that we had years ago to managers who have continued to perform very well and are top-tier managers. And so we have reaped the benefit of those investments. But that's also the fact that we have been invested for a long period of time, developed strong relationships and brands that's allowed us to access other top-tier managers and some of the newer managers that we see as
16:23 Speaker 01 the next generation of great managers.
16:25 David Weisburd? You bring up a really interesting point, which is your manager access is not just literally the funds you're in, but it's also the reputation you've built with the funds that you're in. Being with them through multiple life cycles and doing all the things that good LPs do gives you that reputational capital to now access other top managers. It's not just literally in those managers.
16:43 Speaker 01 Exactly. I think that's really well put.
16:45 David Weisburd? So I want you to correct my thinking. So if I was a family office or a CIO that did not have this reputational capital, and I wanted to allocate to venture, I would essentially have three and a half options. First would be you access a fund of fund that has access to some of these top quartile funds. Some of those funds in that fund of fund would be top quartile, some would not. The problem with that solution is it's another fee layer on top of what today is a two and a half and 30 fee layer in the top managers. That's solution number one. Solution number two is maybe concede that you're not able to get into the first quartile managers and target the second quartile managers, which may be above the median that you talked about and may have some returns. The problem with that is that the first top quartile managers really return not much more than the second
17:28 David Weisburd? quartile. And then the third is to build out an emerging manager program. Are those Kind of the three options. The fourth option, which I think is the worst possible option, is to try to do direct investing, which a lot of family offices do. Abathman actually talked about the statistics on that. If you're a non-top or top fund, you have access to a co-invest, especially in the earlier stage, and it's not through a manager, you are by definition adversely selected. So the definition of adverse selection is do you have access? And that's obviously problematic if you're the investor.
17:57 Speaker 01 You laid out the options quite well, and I think the which one is best for an institution depends on their objectives, their team, their expertise, and perhaps some of their unique attributes, too. In the spirit of relationship building, there are certain institutions that have strategic capital that they can employ perhaps to get access to some of the best managers. And if you are a family office with experience in a given industry, that can be relevant for venture investors. And if you have something of value that you can provide to the manager, I think that can help to open doors.
18:36 David Weisburd? You have $7 billion in capital. How do you use your capital source as an advantage? And what ways is it disadvantaged in the market?
18:44 Speaker 01 I really think that the $7 billion portfolio that we manage on behalf of the University of Richmond and our nonprofit partners is a real sweet spot. I've been at an organization that had a much larger endowment, which certainly has its positives. But I think in terms of balancing the ability to access almost any manager in the world, we're large enough to get the attention and opportunity to invest with nearly every manager and strategy on one hand. But on the other hand, we're small enough that we can write checks that are relatively small in capacity constrained managers, in niche strategies, and write them in a size that can still have a meaningful impact on our overall portfolio.
19:26 Speaker 01 So I really see somewhere in this 7 to 10, maybe a little bit more billion dollar range as a really optimal size from an investment perspective.
19:36 David Weisburd? I want to double click on this concept of value add. GPs are famous for providing value add. Can LPs be value-added enough to get access to top quartile managers into the most capital constrained funds? And if so, how do they go about doing that?
19:51 Speaker 01 In select cases, we can be value-add from an expertise perspective, and that's, it can be really focused. But bigger picture, it's important to look for ways that we can deepen relationships with managers by providing more than just capital. Capital is abundant, and there's certainly a great deal of global capital chasing the same set of capacity constrained opportunities. And so I think it's vital to provide something else in addition to just that capital. One example is we can work with managers who are often focused on a narrow part of the market, strategy, asset class, even industry, and are very deep in that domain
20:33 Speaker 01 expertise. But they don't have the same breadth of perspective as our team has, given our role investing across geographies, across asset classes, across industries. And so that's where we can provide some value and some broader perspective to these managers. For example, we spend time talking to our venture managers and understanding how they're investing in AI, what they're seeing from the ground up. And I think that perspective and insight is helpful for us to share with managers in our public equity portfolio and our buyout portfolio, who invest in software companies, back to some of the challenges and opportunities in software that we talked about earlier. And we can also provide perspective around best
21:13 Speaker 01 practices in the industry and what we see the best GPs doing from an LP perspective. And then we can also provide capital at points in time when others aren't providing capital, when our capital and liquidity can be even more rewarded, when others are perhaps selling and fearful that we can be that contrarian source of capital at a time when others aren't. I think both benefits the relationship and ultimately benefits the portfolio in terms of performance.
21:39 David Weisburd? So you have one of the most unique models where you give the same portfolio to every one of your partners, which is the people that you manage capital for. What are the pros and cons of forcing everybody essentially into one portfolio model?
21:54 Speaker 01 Oh, it is a really important question, David. And as I hear that, I reflect back on a founder of the OCIO industry who, at the time, had a single portfolio approach. And in response to the question, she would answer, well, do you want me and my team focused a third on thinking about individual customized solutions, a third of my time thinking about the best investment opportunities, and a third of my time reporting on a customized bespoke portfolio? Or do you want the team and I to be fully 100% focused on managing a best-in-class portfolio? So when you look at it that way, the answer to me is pretty clear in terms of the benefits
22:38 Speaker 01 of the single portfolio approach that we take. I think there are real key benefits for the University of Richmond and our client partners who share a similar long-term time horizon, similar investment objectives, and similar spending needs. I think two of the critical benefits I would highlight are, one, our team is fully aligned. I would say even more so than other OCIO peers of ours, because we don't think of this as a business. We're not focused on the revenue. We're really focused on maximizing investment performance for the long term to support the missions of the University of Richmond and our nonprofit partners. Every investment we make, as we talked about these relationships that we have with managers
23:19 Speaker 01 that span decades, or the newest investment in a capacity constraint opportunity, each of our client partners, from the University of Richmond to the smallest, get the exact same investment exposure to that. And so there are no questions about where we would allocate a certain investment, which portfolio it makes sense in, they all benefit equally.
23:40 David Weisburd? It's such a powerful razor, because it's almost as if you're making the minimum check, a large amount for every investment as well. And the downstream consequences of that is you're so hyper-focused on making sure every single investment is good. Sometimes, human beings could be lazy in their investment, thinking they could say, well, track record's not quite there, but maybe we'll get a toehold, we'll invest in the next fund, or maybe this is a relationship investment. And all of those could be good investments in theory. Oftentimes, these are just lazy thinking or not wanting to make a true decision. And this razor of, okay, we're going to put this into everybody's portfolio. Everyone's going to be exposed to it. Every single client is going to ask us why we made this investment as a powerful razor.
24:18 Speaker 01 That was really well put. It's a powerful razor, and I think we're better investors for managing external capital and having to engage with incredibly talented investment committees at some of our partners and answer the great tough questions that they ask us. There are real benefits in terms of the scale. We talked about the size that both the University of Richmond and our nonprofit partners benefit from the scale and benefit from the opportunity to access managers in a meaningful way and benefit from the team's best ideas thinking, to be clear. And before we reswitch to the next question, I want to acknowledge that as much as I am a fan of and proponent of the model, we recognize it's not for everybody. If the objectives don't align, then we're simply not the right fit for that enterprise.
25:01 David Weisburd? It's a great razor also for your partners to decide whether they want to be partners with you and really thinking through the second order effects of investing into this model. So it also makes sure that your clients are happy because they know what they're getting into. Sometimes customer satisfaction could be low because they don't really know what they're signing up for.
25:18 Speaker 01 Exactly. That's a great point.
25:20 David Weisburd? I alluded to this, and maybe a little bit flippantly, these relationship checks or these toehold checks. But sometimes CIOs and sometimes the very great CIOs make investments that don't have to do with returns. Is there ever a place for a CIO to make an investment that's not all about returns? And if so, where?
25:39 Speaker 01 That's a great question. Not that come to mind, at least not with the intent of generating returns over a long-term time horizon. If there's an area where somebody's investing in a new asset class, a new area with the intent of beginning to develop relationships and learning about that, one can envision the need to size that, the rationale for that and need to size that appropriately. But I think particularly as we think about, and I strive to manage a relatively concentrated portfolio, and we have a high bar for getting ideas into the portfolio. I don't think there's a lot of room to compromise, which I don't think there's room at all to
26:22 Speaker 01 compromise and make investments that we don't think will be additive to generating strong, long-term investment performance.
26:32 David Weisburd? I've had people like Professor Steve Kaplan from University of Chicago go on a podcast and say that infrastructure and real estate are just inferior asset classes. You should not have any money in those asset classes. Do you have any asset classes where at least today, 2026, doesn't make sense to invest in? And if so, why?
26:48 Speaker 01 Raises really interesting examples there in real estate and infrastructure. And that's actually a case where I think the endowment model has evolved over the years. When Yale originally constructed its portfolio and when I was at Stanford, we had a larger allocation to private real estate strategies. The global financial crisis in 08 really opened people's eyes to the inherent cyclicality and economic exposure in real estate. And we realized that it was not quite the same diversifying asset as people had perhaps expected before. And so that was, that's an example as we talked about the evolution of the endowment model and the need to go think about the real diversification
27:31 Speaker 01 that certain assets provide and the benefit of illiquidity. Or the cost benefit of illiquidity is really key. As we think about our real estate portfolio, we have reduced the size, raised the bar for investing in it, and certainly raised the bar for investing in illiquid real estate strategies and opted to take a little bit more flexible and opportunistic approach to investing in the real asset space where we can lean in and out of the asset class a little bit more with public investments and take advantage of evolving opportunities.
28:01 David Weisburd? As I said that, I started thinking, well, real estate isn't real estate. Infrastructure isn't infrastructure. Today, you have these large pools of capital that are going into, for example, servers and power and nuclear that isn't like traditional real estate, isn't like traditional infrastructure. It's constantly evolving. Do you revisit your portfolio based on either asset class or sub asset class? And if so, is it sometimes the tail wagging the dog? In other words, somebody gives you this sub asset class in real estate or infrastructure and you reassess whether to actually put more into that asset class as a second order effect of investing in the sub asset class? Are you always looking top down?
28:37 Speaker 01 It's really important to think about the portfolio holistically and not be boxed into a real static strategic allocation that forces or has the potential to force inferior suboptimal investment decisions. And that's where I think we're really fortunate that we have, we still, we use a traditional asset class model with five key asset classes and a larger number of sub asset classes. But we are not so constrained from a governance perspective that we have to be exactly on target and forced to making decisions that we don't think are in the best interest of the overall portfolio.
29:13 David Weisburd? Sometimes when somebody's overloaded on a certain asset class, like we had the denominator effect in venture capital, then everybody's looking at this problem. And if everyone has the same governance, then there's an opportunity to come in and actually, in that case, actually capture a significant illiquidity premium. So sometimes the fragility of the model could be, could be hurting returns, especially when you have these dislocations in the market.
29:33 Speaker 01 Yep. When I think when you and I chatted earlier, you had asked if there were areas that we just categorically, you know, wouldn't or couldn't invest in. And I think we're fortunate from our governance perspective that there are not areas that we just categorically have to avoid. And so therefore we can take advantage of opportunities that are created, as you note, by the, the structure. And so we've been buyers of things on the secondary market where we see opportunities and, and others are, are for sellers.
29:58 David Weisburd? You mentioned your five asset class model, and this is the same asset class you give to everybody. So I'm very curious, what's your model today look like and how has that changed in the last couple of years?
30:07 Speaker 01 What I would characterize as our midterm allocation model is we have 26% to public equities, 34% in private equity, 22% in absolute return, which is a range of hedge fund strategies and credit, and 12% in real assets and 8% in cash and fixed income. So we talked about the illiquidity premium, whether you're compensated for it or not and how selective I think you need to be in it. But we really like private equity and think it plays an important role in the portfolio. And the environment has changed dramatically over the past 10 years, such that to invest in leading companies in many industries, in AI, in space and defense. You have to invest in the private markets.
30:50 Speaker 01 You simply don't have those leading companies available to invest in in the public markets. And so I think the quality of the companies that we can hold in the private markets, the fact that our private managers are holding them longer before going public have been a couple of the factors that have led us to increase the weighting to private equity and feel comfortable with that weighting, given the opportunities we have there and the experience we've had generating stronger returns in that part of the portfolio.
31:15 David Weisburd? If you could go back to 2001, when you had just graduated grad school at Harvard Kennedy School, and you could give yourself only one piece of timeless advice that would either accelerate your career or helped you avoid costly mistakes, what would that one piece of advice be?
31:28 Speaker 01 One, only one?
31:31 Speaker 01 It's a timely question because I had a group of students from the University of Richmond, some of our partner organizations in the office today. And so I was giving them career advice. And I actually look at it not from the perspective of how to accelerate your career or avoid a mistake, because I think, like Sheryl Sandberg has said, think of your career as a jungle gym more than a ladder that you necessarily want to race. I think we learn from our mistakes. But so I think the one piece of advice, if you're limiting me to one, is just find a career that you absolutely love. That being successful in any endeavor requires a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of sacrifice. And I think to be successful, you really have to find something you love. And I've been really fortunate to find a career I love, an organization I love,
32:13 Speaker 01 where I can access and talk to the best managers, I can continually learn and develop, and I have the ability to make an impact and help to support the missions of the University of Richmond in our nonprofit partner.
32:24 David Weisburd? There's so many downstream consequences of that. One of the tenants of our organization is quality is downstream of quantity. So you cannot just sit and make a great painting, produce a great podcast, be a great investor. You have to have enough quantity. And the only way you get enough quantity for decades is you must love it. You must love it on a relative basis versus the other really sharp people in your industry, high IQ, Ivy Leagues, all these competitors that you have. You have to love it just that much. It's kind of like one of the last edges from a career standpoint.
32:54 Speaker 01 I think that's really well put. I like that analogy, David.
32:56 David Weisburd? I'm very curious. What is your second best piece of advice?
32:59 Speaker 01 My second best piece of advice is the power of to spend time networking. I benefited from the power of networking. As we talked about what really differentiates the best investors, I think it is relationships. And I think in this rapidly evolving environment, networking and building deep, meaningful relationships is going to be really critical to success.
33:19 David Weisburd? Can I take the contrary on that? In the beginning of part of my career, I'm obviously a people person. Obviously, when you say networking, you mean small dinners and curated networking. But I found out the opposite also. The opposite axiom is also very true, which is spend your time. This is an avalism. Spend your time building something great. If you think you have two hours a day, you could network or you could build, put all your life and effort into something really useful, then people will find you as well. So obviously, networking has value. There's all sorts of studies. Stanford actually had the study where the the power of loose affiliation. So it's not really your best friend that gives you the career opportunities. It's your friend's teacher that you met at an event. That also is true. But I think also spending that marginal time on building something truly great so that you could have something to talk about and so people know you for that thing is also very powerful.
34:03 David Weisburd? So I've kind of gone converted from the networking standpoint to the product standpoint.
34:08 Speaker 01 That's a really interesting perspective. And I wonder if they're dichotomous or if one can can take elements of both. And perhaps actually the importance of of both vary on where you are in your career and what you have to offer as well.
34:21 David Weisburd? There's a time to learn and there's a time to work. And on that note, Karen, thanks so much. It's been an absolute masterclass. Really enjoyed it and thanks so much for spending time.
34:30 Speaker 01 Thank you, David. I really enjoyed the conversation. It's great to be with you.
34:34 Speaker 01 Take care.
34:34 David Weisburd? If you found this conversation valuable, please click Follow How I Invest so that you don't miss the next episode with the world's top investors.
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