How I Invest with David Weisburd

E310: The DPI Problem Plaguing Venture Capital & PE

35 min
Feb 23, 2026about 2 months ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

Alex Shahidi, former CIO of Aberdeen Investments, discusses the critical DPI (distributions per invested capital) crisis plaguing venture capital and private equity. Distribution yields have collapsed from historical 25% to 9-12% in recent years, creating a liquidity crisis for allocators and forcing a fundamental rethinking of private asset portfolio models.

Insights
  • Distribution yields in private assets have fallen from 25% historically to 9-12% in 2024-2025, creating a structural liquidity crisis that forces allocators to sell public assets, exacerbating the denominator effect
  • Private companies staying private longer (14+ years vs. historical 4-year IPO timeline) is becoming the new normal due to regulatory burden and access to private capital, requiring allocators to fundamentally restructure portfolio models
  • Continuation vehicles (CVs) have reached $100B in market size and represent a structural shift where GPs retain assets instead of distributing cash, creating tension between LP liquidity needs and GP value creation strategies
  • Secondary sales of private assets now trade at 80-95% of NAV for quality funds but 50-60% for older/weaker funds, forcing allocators to choose between accepting haircuts or remaining illiquid
  • The LP-GP relationship is fundamentally asymmetric: GPs control access to top-tier funds (top 10 firms raised 40% of all private assets), giving them pricing power and ability to dictate terms like CV participation
Trends
Private is the new public: mega-cap private companies (Stripe, SpaceX, OpenAI) staying private indefinitely, eliminating traditional exit mechanismsLiquidity premium inversion: as illiquidity becomes structural (10-14 year hold periods), institutions with long time horizons should demand higher illiquidity premiums or face IRR deteriorationGP-LP misalignment on marks: emerging managers mark assets more aggressively to fundraise; established firms mark conservatively, creating valuation discrepancies across the same portfolio companiesContinuation vehicle proliferation: CVs now standard practice to extend hold periods and defer distributions, fundamentally changing the risk/return profile of private asset commitmentsCareer tenure mismatch: 5-7 year average LP tenure vs. 10+ year fund lives creates principal-agent problem where decision-makers never see outcomes of their investment decisionsAI tools reshaping allocator workflows: operational efficiency gains (meeting notes, email drafting, file sorting) but not replacing analytical thinking or investment decision-makingFactor model analysis gap: allocators ignore Fama-French multi-factor models and rely solely on CAPM beta, misattributing factor exposures as alphaSecondary market normalization: secondary sales becoming standard portfolio management tool despite political relationship risks with GPsPrivate credit outperformance: only private asset class maintaining historical 22-24% distribution yields while PE/VC yields collapsedReputation-based access economy: private markets function as access class not asset class; relationship damage from secondary sales can exclude LPs from future top-tier fund access
Topics
Companies
Morgan Creek
Alex Shahidi's former employer, mentioned as part of his prolific career background
JP Morgan
Alex Shahidi worked here; David Weisburd was part of Facebook IPO distribution desk in 2012
Cleveland Clinic
Alex Shahidi worked here; example of healthcare foundation with debt market borrowing constraints
Aberdeen Investments
Alex Shahidi's most recent role as CIO; Ireland-based investment firm
MSCI Burgess
Data provider cited for historical distribution yield statistics (20-25% baseline)
Abu Dhabi Investment Corporation (ADIC)
Sued private equity fund over continuation vehicle valuation; believed $7B IPO value marked down to $5.5B
Kleiner Perkins
Venture capital firm with independent valuation marks on portfolio companies
Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z)
Venture capital firm with independent valuation marks on portfolio companies
Fidelity
Marks portfolio companies differently than Silicon Valley peers; example of valuation discrepancies
Stripe
Example of mega-cap private company (10+ years old) that would have gone public in 1980s-2000s
SpaceX
Example of mega-cap private company staying private despite billions in revenue
OpenAI
Example of mega-cap private company; allocators clamoring for shares in private markets
Facebook
2012 IPO example; David Weisburd worked on JP Morgan distribution desk for this IPO
Yale University
David Swenson's team created foundational private asset distribution models used for 25+ years
MassPrim
Mike Trotsky quoted on AI tools outsourcing work but not thinking; known for employee retention
AlphaSense
Sponsor: channel research platform used by 75% of top hedge funds; 500M+ premium sources
People
Alex Shahidi
Guest; former CIO of Aberdeen Investments with experience at Morgan Creek, JP Morgan, Cleveland Clinic
David Weisburd
Host of 'How I Invest' podcast; worked on Facebook IPO distribution at JP Morgan in 2012
David Swenson
Yale endowment CIO whose private asset distribution models have guided allocators for 25+ years
Dean Takahashi
Long-tenure allocator cited as rare example of career-long commitment to single institution
Steve Gafflin
Professor and previous podcast guest; conducted study on mark aggressiveness by fund size
Mike Trotsky
MassPrim leader quoted on AI tools outsourcing work but not thinking; known for team retention
Barbara Huang
Co-author of 2019 white paper on factor model analysis in allocator decision-making
Ken Leach
WAMCO fraud example cited as rare post-Madoff era; illustrates improved compliance procedures
Quotes
"The portfolio grinds to a halt. You know, full stop, literally full stop."
Alex ShahidiOn the impact of low DPI on allocator portfolios
"Private assets, particularly venture capital and private equity are an access class instead of an asset class"
David WeisburdOn the concentration of top-tier GP access
"AI tools can be used to outsource work, but not to outsource thinking."
Mike Trotsky (MassPrim)On limitations of AI in investment decision-making
"We went from four years to now really 14 years."
Alex ShahidiOn the shift from 4-year IPO timelines to 14-year private company hold periods
"Reputation drives access in the private markets."
Alex ShahidiOn why LPs rarely sue GPs despite valuation concerns
Full Transcript
So Alex, you have one of the most prolific career backgrounds of any guests, having been at Morgan Creek, JP Morgan, Cleveland Clinic, and most recently, CIO of Aberdeen Investments, Ireland. You have a deeper pulse on the LP community than almost anybody that I know. Give me a sense for the biggest issues facing LPs today. Pensions, endowments, foundations, family offices, outsource CIO firms, consultant firms. We talk to a lot of allocators and we try to listen to them about what they're interested in, what they're worried about, and three big ones that have been coming up. Two that we hear about a lot and one that we ask about a lot. The two that we hear about a lot are the lack of distributions and the changing nature of distributions from private asset funds, something that's really accelerated in the last, it's been happening for the last 10 years, but really the last five years. The second one is the absolute meteoric rise of AI tools generally. And then specifically for allocators and investors, people who are assessing markets and funds, how can they use AI tools? And are AI tools going to replace us as investment professionals? And then the third one, factor model assessment of how their individual funds are doing and how they can assess, importantly, the most important question in any fund evaluation process. Am I paying alpha fees for beta performance? I do want to get into whether AI tools are going to replace the two of us as well as factor analysis. But first, let's start on the DPI question. Maybe set some context for where DPI was in 2024 and 2025 versus historically. historically. So that would be distribution as a percent of NAV. So that gives you distribution yield. So distribution yield for the portfolio for private assets has hovered very strongly at 20, 25%. This is data from MSCI Burgess. So Burgess put out this study to point it out. Yes, this distribution yield has historically hovered at around 25% or so. So you invest $100 million, you're getting 25% of the invested amount on average on a yearly basis. The distribution yield reflects the distributions that you're getting on an annual basis as a percent of the private asset NAV. For the last four years, that distribution yield, instead of averaging 25%, has averaged 12. And the lowest it's been in the last four years has been 9%. And that is incredibly important because what that means is that the models upon which, deterministically, allocators have used to evaluate their expectations of the size of the private portfolio relative to the public and how much they need to commit in private assets each year to maintain that exposure. Instead, what's happening is that private assets are getting to become a larger and larger and larger portion of the total portfolio. The university endowment, the foundation, the pension, they still need the distributions from that pool of assets. And so the only thing the allocator can do then is to sell the liquid assets, which have been performing well. So what happens is you get this denominator effect where the private assets become a larger and larger pool because you have to sell the public assets. And so in 2021 and in early 2022, we saw this huge kind of outlay of private equity funds or firms being sold to either strategic or financial sponsors. There was a tiny little explosion of some IPOs that happened that had been kind of held up because of COVID-19. But then once we got past that, I wanted to share with you a critical number that we're seeing. So vintage 2020 and vintage 2021 funds, half of them, about half, 45%, have a DPI of less than 0.1. 0.1x. So 50% less than 0.1. Yeah, of vintage 2020 and vintage 2021 funds. Now, it's still only five, six years later since those funds raised. But something that you see people talk about in other parts of financial markets is the lack of IPOs. Lack of IPOs in London on the London Stock Exchange has cratered to near zero. In America, IPOs and something that you see a lot of investment firms and allocators and people talking about is maybe private is the new public. So people are clamoring for shares, for example, in SpaceX or in OpenAI, because a lot of these companies that historically would have gone public years ago, they just stay private forever. The key for allocators, though, is that they're not getting the expected distributions on a cash basis. Sometimes they're getting distributions of actual equity securities, or sometimes these funds are pushing the assets into continuation vehicles. So in 2024, we had 9% DPI, which was way below the 25% model. Well, what is 2025? One of the hardest things of investing is seeing what's shifting before everyone else does. 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The best part, these proprietary channel checks integrate directly into AlphaSense's research platform trusted by 75% of the world's top hedge funds with access to over 500 million premium sources. From company filings and brokerage research to news, trade journals, and more than 240,000 expert call transcripts. That context turns raw signal into conviction. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Check it out for yourself at alpha-cents.com slash how I invest. 25 look to be about the same. Look, it's so far, we're still waiting to get some of the statements in, but what we've heard from allocators so far as it's looking to be somewhere between 9% to 12%. And what are the second order effects of that for allocators? Why does that matter? The portfolio grinds to a halt. You know, full stop, literally full stop. You're making commitments to private asset funds and your cash flow pacing model is telling you to make X number of commitments at this dollar amount size. But part of that model is also telling you to expect distributions which will support future commitments as well as support spending policy needs. If you're not getting those distributions, you can't support the spending policy needs. And how will you be able to make future commitments without tying up additional capital? So it becomes, in essence, a downward spiral of illiquidity. Tell me about this downward spiral of illiquidity. Part of what you get with investing in hedge funds, for example, it's very common to see maybe a three-year initial lockup. And then you'll have the ability to withdraw capital on a quarterly basis with 90 days notice. But with private assets, the way you're getting liquidity is from the distributions of cash into your portfolio. And historically, private equity funds, once they sold an underlying firm to a strategic or financial sponsor, great, we've made a sale of one of the underlying firms that we invested with. Here's the cash from that sale. Or maybe it's a venture capital fund, and they've taken it all the way up to IPO. Here's the cash after the lockup post IPO. usually six months. Here's the cash distribution to you as a representative LP investor in this fund. But what's happening now is that the funds, they're not selling the underlying companies and they're not taking them to IPO. Or when they do take them to IPO, instead of selling and distributing cash, they're distributing shares. Or what's also happening, and increasingly it's happening more and more, is that the private equity funds, instead of distributing cash, they're putting an underlying investment company into a continuation vehicle. What are smart GPs doing to address these DPI issues from LPs? So Abu Dhabi Investment Corporation, just a few months ago, they sued a private equity fund that moved an underlying investment to a continuation vehicle instead of selling it to someone else. That very rare but it does happen The other thing that allocators can do our secondary sales So secondary sales are when you know hey we have this remaining commitment in this underlying fund or we have several funds with which we still have underlying commitments And we are going to go out to the market, usually using a third party firm to help you with this process. And we're going to seek to sell them for as much a percent of NAV as possible so that we can get liquidity today. Oftentimes, executing a secondary sale of any private asset fund, you're going to take a haircut. Hopefully you take the minimal haircut you can. But one thing that's tough for allocators when they decide they want to go to the secondary sale process is that it can be damaging politically to the relationship that you have with the underlying private investment firm. And it may mean that you are not allowed, that you don't get the call about the next fundraise that they have if they raise a second fund, if they raise the next fund. So secondaries, it's a very, very common process that allocators can take part in. And it's very common in the industry. But there's a lot of allocators that just will not execute them for fear of damaging relationships and also damaging their reputation with other private asset funds for which they did not execute a secondary sale. You're working with hundreds of ERA down to the ground in terms of secondaries. What's the discount today, 2026, for private equity funds, venture capital funds off of NAV? What's commonplace in terms of where deals are getting done today? 80 to 95% is what you're expecting. If it's a great fund, if it's a fund, and this is the tough part too, imagine you're the CIO, you're the head of private assets, and you've been carrying a line item at a hundred million on the balance sheet of a private asset fund that's been there for years. I've seen this myself when I was managing assets and the fund is there. It's marked at a hundred million. It was marked at a hundred million last year, and it was marked at a hundred million five years ago. You decide to get it off your balance sheet. If you get a haircut, maybe a fund that's older, lesser quality, a team that isn't as strongly held together, doesn't have a strong reputation, instead of getting 80 to 95% of the NAV, as you'd hope, maybe you're getting 50 to 60% of the NAV. So the positive there is you're getting actual liquidity. You're getting out of a line item that has just been sitting deadweight on your balance sheet in your portfolio for years. The negative aspect of that is you have to acknowledge when the performance gets written down and that valuation comes down to your investment team, to your investment committee, that something you've been carrying at $100 million, in reality, the valuation, when you realized it in the secondary sale, maybe the valuation was only $50 to $60 million. And sometimes that can be difficult. It's difficult to acknowledge sometimes that the valuations that we carry are not the true valuations of the assets. CVs are another tool in the marketplace. What do LPs think about CVs? Love them, hate them at the same time. On the positive side, you have to imagine that from the private investment firm perspective, they invested in this company, they watched it grow, they support it, and they can try to sell it. But if they try to sell it, they may feel, the private asset firm, that there is unrealized value that they're leaving on the table. And they don't want that to happen. They don't want to- Is there generally distrust of the mark on these CVs and that the GPs have incentive to mark them lower? Or is it truly an independent process where LPs are comfortable with the mark? Yeah, that's a great question. The example I was giving earlier about ADIC, Abu Dhabi Investment Corporation, the reason they sued the private asset firm is that they believed the underlying company that was being put into a continuation vehicle could have had real-life proceeds of maybe $7 billion in an IPO or in a sale to another firm. But the mark in the continuation vehicle gave a valuation of just $5.5 billion. And so the conservative marking into the continuation vehicle is in many regards beneficial to the private asset fund manager, because then it can only go up. If you are too positive when you push it into the continuation vehicle, it may help out in the short term, but it may hurt in the long term. The key for the allocators, though, is that, and then I've seen this myself, and I've participated in this, is that you trusted, you committed, you backed this private asset firm, and specifically this fund that you committed to because of the quality of the analysis, the capability of the team that's investing, that's picking these underlying private asset companies. And if they tell you, we think there is unrealized value that we want to hold on to, we think there's more we can do here. That's tough to argue with because you as an allocator are not a securities analysis. There's a cognitive dissonance in that you go to your doctor who's a specialist in the area, and now you're trying to outsmart your doctor. It's a great analogy for it of, we trust this fund, we trust this firm, we trust this team, they've done great before. But the flip side, and this is where the love and hate for it is great. We trust that there's more value that you as a private asset firm can wring out of this company. And you're telling us what you sincerely believe is the reason for pushing it into this continuation vehicle. But the other side of it is we could really use those distributions. Maybe it's undervalued by 5%, 10%. Let's just pick a number out of there. It's still better than taking a 10%, 15%, 20% discount on the secondary. And there's no political issues with not committing to the CV. That's the other thing too, is that some of the larger brand name firms may say, commit to the CV vehicle because this is part of our firm ecosystem. And you're either with the firm ecosystem and everything that we're doing, or you're not. And that can be very difficult when maybe the firm has a great brand and a great reputation, and they have that great reputation for a reason. And the reason there's much fewer lawsuits like the ADIC lawsuit is because reputation drives access in the private markets. You call it out venture capital being an access class, not an asset class, where getting in the very top firms, the VCs are able to pick their LPs, especially in capital constrained strategies. The same is across the private markets. We've had several oversubscribed, even lower middle market private equity funds. You're not just playing one iteration of a game. You're playing multiple iteration where your reputation is your key to access. Extremely well said. And that's exactly right. And so therefore, it's very rare to see an LP suing a GP firm. It usually only occurs if they think there's something egregious. And where you knowingly give up future access. And I think your assessment, I've heard that before of private assets, particularly venture capital and private equity are an access class instead of an asset class is 100% true. And those relationships with those very few top firms, I saw somewhere that the top 10 firms last year raised over 40% of all private assets. And if you don't have a relationship with one of those top 10 firms, you're not in what may be some of the largest funds. And then it feeds upon itself. The private companies want to partner with the largest firms because that gives them in turn access to a great network and great capabilities to grow as a private company. The very top GPs in the world, what are they looking for from allocators? The first thing is an understanding of the firm's mission, the private asset firm's mission, the goal that they have as an investor. And is there an alignment of that understanding? Because the key as well, from the allocator's perspective and what the firm wants is not just an investment in this fund, but an investment in the next one and the next one after that. And almost always a growing investment in fund three and then a larger investment in fund four. The other aspect of it as well is that the private asset fund managers, the firms that are going to allocate is the GPs. They're looking for great partners with which they can have great conversations, great support and looking for help of, hey, we're raising this next fund. Would you serve as a character witness for the quality of us as an investment firm and for us as a team. So each side are looking for great partners. When it comes to these CV opportunities, what are the best practices that allocators should use in order to decide whether they should invest? The key thing is, does this align with the allocators goals for the portfolio? Do they have the ability to continue to withstand the illiquid nature of this continuing continuation vehicle? And so if you had mapped out in your cashflow pacing model that you were expecting, for example, 10 years of, you know, about three to five years of the investment period, and then between five to 10 years of the harvest period, and we're late into that harvest period. And now the underlying firm is telling you that instead of harvesting an asset or some of these assets, we're instead going to put them in the continuation vehicle. And maybe that is exactly what the firm thinks is the best thing to do for these underlying companies because there unrealized value But from an allocator perspective not just trusting what the fund is saying and trusting what the team is doing but also their ability to continue to withstand that illiquidity And high net worth portfolios you can borrow against your public shares, sometimes also on your private shares. Why do you think that hasn't made its way into the endowment, foundation, pension fund market where these are some of the best counterparties that you can have from a credit risk? Why aren't more allocators borrowing against their private book? That is a spicy question. That's a great question. I'll give you a simple answer to it, which accounts for a huge swath of them. Number one, they're not allowed. It might be written into their legal documentation, usually their investment policy statement, that any type of borrowing at the institutional level. So they recognize that there's a lot of leverage in a lot of the underlying investment strategies with which they're working. But borrowing for any purpose at the institution level is almost not allowed. This is usually also reflective of the fact that a lot of institutions, so think of healthcare foundations or university endowments, they may already be in the debt markets themselves. And that debt market borrowing, they're usually, so for example, a healthcare foundation may put out a municipal bond and they're getting a decent credit rating because they, as a sophisticated business, have very good credit quality. And so therefore they're able to borrow great rates, but that's for the institution themselves. The endowment or the foundation pool for our healthcare system may be a large part of the balance sheet, but the institution may be precluded legally from borrowing on that part of the balance sheet. The other side of it, in all honesty, is, you know, a lack of exposure in borrowing from that part of the portfolio or thinking about borrowing from that perspective of the portfolio because of an understanding that historically crises, when they happen, you know, bubbles, when they pop, almost always don't pop because of valuations. Bubbles almost always pop because of leverage. And if your underlying investment portfolio already has some baked in leverage, adding more may be detrimental, maybe adding a little bit more risk for quasi incremental return. Is the lack of liquidity in private markets and allocators portfolios a moment in time, or is this a new normal? It feels like we've moved to this new normal of large private companies with billions and billions of dollars in revenue. established companies with hundreds, if not thousands of employees. Think of a company like Stripe. Two Irish brothers moved to America, built one of the largest and most successful payment processing firms. They've been around forever, over 10 years. Normally, back in the 80s and the 90s, early 2000s, they would have already had an IPO. But there's a lot of commitments when you have an IPO, a lot of new governance structures you have to put in place, a lot of governance requirements. And so this whole conundrum of private is the new public seems to have taken hold. And there don't seem to be any material forces pushing back against that. Do you know the origin of the four-year vesting schedule for startup employees? The numbers are easy, 25% a year over four years. Four years used to be the expected timeline to go from private to going public. I wish that we could see more of that today. To give you a sense for how much we've drifted from the original assumptions, really going back to the 90s, we went from four years to now really 14 years. is kind of feels like a new normal. I remember in 2012, when Facebook went public, and I was working at JP Morgan, we were part of the desk that was distributing shares to ultra high net worth and high net worth individuals, institutions that were looking for shares of this IPO. And it was a big deal. That had taken a while for them. They've done so well. And we were so grateful to be part of the team that was leading that IPO. But yeah, I don't know what changes, because the benefits are so diffuse in terms of the allocators asking for it that it's hard to get them together as a group and advocate for it. Whereas the benefits to the private firms and the private funds that are managing this are so tight that it may continue like this for a long time. Assuming this is the new normal, what decisions upstream should allocators be making in order to prepare for this new normal in their portfolio? All allocators need to adjust models to acknowledge the fact that the expected distributions, the models that we had for years handed to us from David Swenson's team at Yale over 25 years ago, that these models of the expected timeline of distributions from all private assets need to be stretched out further. The only asset class in a private perspective where we're seeing distributions stay approximately in line with expectations is private credit. So private credit has historically been the one private asset class with a very short call down schedule and a very short distribution schedule. And that seems to be sticking to history. So for the last 25 years or so, it's had approximately a decent, you know, 24% distribution yield. And for the last couple of years, it's still around 22, 24%. This is in stark contrast to private equity, buyouts, and to venture capital, where the distribution yield has dropped to, you know, low double digits, if not high single digits. So number one, for all allocators, adjust the models to acknowledge the fact that the illiquid part of your portfolio is going to remain illiquid for longer than you thought. A lot of people are looking towards 2026 liquidity via IPOs almost as the savior in their portfolio. And although it might help minimize some of the issues in the short term, I think you have to take a step back and look at what are the incentives that are driving private marks and private assets to stay private longer. I think the incentives are obviously on the asset level. These assets want to stay private longer. It's only become more and more difficult to become a public company. You have to deal with a quarter by quarter scrutiny, which, in my opinion, is value destructive. And two is you have to look at these other factors like CVs. I think CVs have now reached $100 billion. I think CVs are here to stay for many of the reasons that we talked about. And a great IPO run may even solve issues for one to two years. But if you're starting to deploy in the next vintage for the next 10 to 15 years, you should not rely on a hot bull IPO market. I think you really have to look at the decisions of this new normal and of all these players and how their incentives are aligning. Because in many ways, allocators are at the mercy of the incentives of GPs and GPs are at the mercy on incentives of the portfolio companies. Obviously, everybody has leverage and everybody has some power in the market, but ultimately the decision lies with the underlying asset. 100%. And I would just summarize that to something you hinted at, which is why. Why go public? In the past, private firms would go public to raise capital, to help with their expansion needs, to help recognize the entrepreneurs that started the company financially. But if you can get that in a secondaries market, because you're doing another series round for your private investment firm or your private company, and you can raise the capital on all the capital that you need on the private markets, then why deal with the hassle publicly? There is a silver lining here, if we assume that this is a new normal. And that is that there may be the comeback of the liquidity premium. As more capital has come in and as liquidity has become more and more of a thing, some argue that the illiquidity premium has gone down. If the opposite happens and now the new normal is that it's 10 to 14 years, the institutions, which primarily are these endowments and foundations and to degree pension funds are able to hold for that long. They should be the natural beneficiary of this lack of liquidity. As long as they demand it. So if your assets are going to be illiquid for longer, then this illiquidity premium historically was based on a given understanding of a capital call and distribution schedule. But if that distribution schedule is going to be pushed out longer and longer, well, then we should get a greater and greater return from it. Otherwise, our IRRs are going to deteriorate over time. Talk to me about private marks. Oh, very controversial. Very controversial. Thankfully, most firms have very serious third-party valuation processes that they use. And a lot of times, something that we see with a lot of allocators is they have a good understanding of the private investment companies. So the underlying companies with which they're invested in a venture capital or private equity fund. Sometimes there's investments from other firms. And so you'll see marks. So Kleiner Perkins has a valuation. A16Z has a valuation. Everyone has a valuation. And so hopefully these guys are all in line with each other. There's sometimes differences. Fidelity, for example, sometimes will have a very stark difference between how they're marking it on their books relative to how Silicon Valley may be marking the exact same company But most of the companies are keeping their heads above water because ultimately they want to maintain what is their most important asset in the industry especially with allocators and that their reputation Professor Steve Gafflin, previous guest, did a study on this, and he found that the bigger funds, the more traditional and established funds had a more conservative marking than the emerging managers in that the emerging managers wanted to maybe mark a little bit more aggressively, hoping to land into the next fundraising cycle. Whereas the more established firms really focused on the long-term relationship with the LPs more. That's what the numbers showed. That sounds right. That feels right too, because the newer firms have to establish themselves and are just trying to raise fund two or fund three. And so, you know, by their nature, it might be a little bit more aggressive. But the larger, more established firms, they don't need your money. There's a line out the door waiting to invest so they can be much more conservative in their marks. Talk to me about why there's not more pressure from LPs towards GPs to mark down their books. Partly it's because if the LPs pressure them to mark it down to maybe what the LPs think it should appropriately be in one part, well, that would mean acknowledging that the LPs performance is also going to drop. And they have to explain that to their investment committee, to their trustees, to some politically exposed persons if there are political appointees to a pension. That can be a difficult conversation. And in some cases in the past, performance calculation updates have led to people losing their jobs. So not a conversation you want to have sometimes. But the other part about it is much more functional from an LP's perspective of what is their role in managing a portfolio of assets. And their role is finding, evaluating, investing, trusting GPs, trusting the investment managers and their processes. Their roles as LPs are not securities analysts. They're not valuation analysts. And so they may think it from a big picture perspective, but just historically and professionally, it's not something that they're always comfortable with doing, even if. And I remember sitting around table joking, seeing in 2018, 2019, I'll never forget, there was a 2006 vintage year fund that was still being marked at one X on the book, you know, 10, 15 years later with no distributions. And we used to joke about it. You know, what are these guys doing? When are they ever going to give up the ghost? But a large part of the LPGP relationship is trust in the separation of duties. And there's also career management aspects to this on the LP side. Tell me about that. Most senior investors working at an allocator, I saw somewhere that their average tenure working at a given allocator may be between five to seven years. And if you're making investment decisions, you're locking up capital with a private equity or venture capital fund that's expected to be on paper 10 years plus optional two one-year extensions. Great. That's, you know, at least approximately a 10-year life on that investment. And if there are continuation vehicles and it just keeps going, well, we may never see the end of that fund. But it may not matter to you because you're already working at your next role. And so the outcome of the investment decisions you made at the prior place, you never actually get to see how they fully played out. It is rare to see a senior investor, any allocator who stays in one place their entire career. The David Swenson's, the Dean Takahashi's of the world were rare in their time and are rarer still today. What are some other ways that there's a principal agent problem between the allocator and the pool of capital that they're managing? The biggest thing for the allocator is the risk that they're taking in the portfolio and their understanding of the managers is so much deeper because they're in the markets every day. They're seeing what's going on in the news and they're making investments that they think in the decision that they're making are the best ones from a fund perspective, from an allocation perspective, from the asset class perspective. But from the institution side, the institution is forever. And so if there is incentive compensation involved, then there might be an incentive to have great performance this year for the next couple of years. But if the incentive performance compensation is based upon relative performance, not realized relative performance, then there can be an incentive to make lots of illiquid private investment decisions that may not pan out at the end of the day. It's tough, though, because everyone I've met, at least in my career, from an allocator's perspective, and almost all of the funds that I've met with, are sincere, hardworking, dedicated investment professionals doing their absolute best. it is rare. It is rare, especially today. So you might meet some sketchy or shady people or interesting people back in the early 2000s. But post Bernie Madoff, post Amaranth, post Bayou, post Galleon, post all of the frauds and the blowups that we saw in the 2000s, the 2010s, they are much, much more rare today. Something like what happened with Ken Leach at WAMCO is almost unbelievable because so many processes and procedures have been put in place to prevent any bad actors. So for the most part, the LPs are trying to work in the best interest of the institution. The investment office, the team themselves are trying to work in the best interest of the institution itself. We started talking about AI tools and whether they'll replace us. The last time we chatted, you mentioned Mike Trotsky of MassPrem recently said that AI tools can be used to outsource work, but not to outsource thinking. What do you think you meant by that? Yeah, I thought it was a great quote. One fun fact, almost no one who has joined the mass prim team has ever left, which speaks to the quality of the work and the quality of the people that they work with. But his quote about AI tools and outsourcing thinking, you know, we can outsource a lot of work. So AI tools, I'll give you a few examples of where we see allocators using them. They can be useful, but we can't just offload the most important part about being an allocator, which is the analysis side, what we're doing up here in analyzing the markets, the investments, the firms, the people, everything. So AI, as an example, on talent and recruiting, it's made things a little bit more difficult. So back in the old days, meaning just a few years ago, you'd get a lot of different and a spectrum of the quality of resumes. But now everyone can use an AI tool to have a perfect resume. In operational efficiency, it's really helped. This has been one of the greatest places that AI has come into play for allocators and for a lot of other folks. So for example, it will take notes for you. It will take meeting minutes. It will draft emails. It will sort all of the incoming files that come in. So it's allowed you to not have to do a lot of the drudgery work. The key phrase that we had at the Cleveland Clinic when I worked there was maximum value per unit of effort, max view. So max view in terms of operational efficiency for an office means that a managing director, for example, should always, for the most part, be doing managing director work. And if there's something that the managing director or the CIO is doing that could be done by an analyst or an intern or could be offloaded to a third-party tool, then we should go for that. And AI tools really help with that. So before we started recording today, you said that the five-factor analysis could be completed in under a minute. How can investors very quickly ascertain the factors in their investment? The first thing I tell you, and this is, I just want to reference a great white paper that all allocators should take a look at, which is from Barbara, Huang, and Odeon, 2019. And one of the key things they found- That's it for today's episode of How to Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network who'd find it valuable or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support. That was really discovered and understood in factor model analysis. But we're ignoring every other factor research, every other factor insight that's come out since then. And this white paper that I mentioned, Barber 2019, they noted that almost all allocators, almost all investors, they pay attention to beta, CAPM, first factor, but they ignore every other factor. And Fama French came out with a three-factor model and then they expanded it with a five-factor model. And there are tools, portfoliovisualizer.com, finpilot.ai, Excel, where you can run this five-factor model research. You can get all the data for free. Fama French still put it on their website for free. You can run it within minutes for a given fund. The key insight, though, from this white paper was that nobody's doing this. They are not running this research and they're relying just on the CAPM beta and attenuating to alpha what is actually beta, what is actually factor exposures from the other four factors. On that note, Alex, it's been an absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for jumping on. And looking forward to doing this again soon. Thanks so much for coming on. Absolutely. So good to see you, David.