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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Ted's blog here.

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

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

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

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

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John Kim, or Kimmer, has raised more than $70 billion across his career for leading venture capital and private equity firms. Kimmer recently distilled three decades of lessons into The Tao of Fundraising, the best book I've ever read on fundraising for investment managers. Since then, Kimmer joined a General Catalyst portfolio company, Lila Sciences, as Chairman and President of Corporate Development.


Our conversation covers Kimmer's philosophy about raising capital, the sales process, art of persuasion, best practices in a meeting, frameworks determining fundraising success, taxonomy of institutional investors, ideal sales team structure and compensation, and the features he carried over from capital formation for funds to a new operating role.


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