CIO Greatest Hits: Multi-Family Offices – Jenny Heller 2017 (Brandywine)

Summary

Capital Allocators: CIO Greatest Hits – Jenny Heller (Brandywine, 2017)

Podcast: Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Host: Ted Seides
Guest: Jenny Heller, CIO – Brandywine Trust Group
Date: August 25, 2025 (original interview from 2017)

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Overview

In this episode, Ted Seides sits down with Jenny Heller, Chief Investment Officer at Brandywine Trust Group, to explore her non-traditional path into investment management, her perspectives on institutional and family office investing, manager selection, learning from mistakes, evolving her investment process, and balancing professional and personal fulfillment. Jenny shares insights from her unique journey, spanning early experiences in microfinance and NGOs, roles at distinguished endowments, and ultimately running a multi-family office. She reflects on the adaptation required for investing on behalf of families, the nuances of manager evaluation, and the value of mentorship and community in the industry.

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Jenny Heller’s Path to Investing

Early Influences and the Start of Career [03:19–06:00]

• Not a “born investor.” Jenny comes from a family of professionals outside of finance and had no early proclivity for markets.
• Developed an interest in microfinance in college after a semester in South Africa—sparked by Muhammad Yunus’s writings.

  "I knew that I knew nothing about what a balance sheet was or an income statement was, and I needed to get some training." [03:37, Heller]

• Brief stint in investment banking at Merrill Lynch; found selling not to her taste, leading her to the Stanford Endowment after persistent pursuit.

Lessons from International Experience [04:56–07:10]

• Lived and worked in South Africa and India, which instilled patience and appreciation for different economic and cultural rhythms.

  "...there's a lot of value to slowing down and learning to take your time and allowing that time… to really absorb a culture." [06:28, Heller]

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Institutional Investment Training

Stanford Endowment Years [07:18–09:24]

• Joined during a period of portfolio transition and new leadership, offering substantial asset class exposure and analytical growth.
• Emphasized importance of evaluating senior roles:

  "Pay attention to what the senior people are doing every day. And is that work that you think you love?" [08:39, Heller]

Post-Business School: Sloan Foundation [16:17–19:28]

• Mentored by Bill Peterson, who taught primarily by example, emphasizing honesty, engagement, and critical inquiry.

  "He viewed himself as the chief cynic and could get to the heart of what mattered in, like, 30 seconds or less." [16:34, Heller]

• The small team during the financial crisis enabled her to explore new investment opportunities, notably in distressed assets and market innovation.

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Transition to Family Office Leadership

Decision Process & Brandywine’s Structure [19:31–21:24]

• Recognized a need for challenge and growth; Brandywine “scared” her in a constructive way.

  "It seemed like a leap. So that was the first, you know, the first thing was understanding that I was walking towards something that scared me, which I think is something you always have to do in your life..." [20:37, Heller]

• Brandywine manages assets for a select group of families with long-term, illiquid time horizons, focusing on multi-generational stewardship and pooled investing.

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Investment Philosophy and Process

Frameworks and Long-Term Thinking [23:41–26:49]

• Prioritizes ultra-long horizons:

  "Everything we do is with an incredibly long term time horizon... we're not thinking about monthly volatility, or even quarterly returns..." [23:54, Heller]

• Manager selection emphasizes:
  • Process clarity
  • Team and culture fit
  • Durability and repeatability of returns

  "Trying to figure out whether a manager has a competitive advantage in what they do relative to what is often a very efficient market." [24:23, Heller]

• Taxation forces even greater long-term focus; average manager hold >11 years.

Active vs Passive, and Market Challenges [31:18–33:55]

• Passive strategies set the “break-even" or hurdle for active manager inclusion, especially important in taxable portfolios.

  "We view passive investing... as essentially our break even. So it's the hurdle for anything we do." [31:41, Heller]

• Acknowledges alpha is scarcer now due to better information and increased competition, but remains committed to selective active management.

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Private Equity and Permanent Capital [34:48–37:13]

• Sees opportunity in micro private equity — finding value well below institutional radar.
• Evaluates permanent equity strategies, and the challenge of alignment and manager credibility over ultra-long holding periods:

  "...understanding first of all, the right way to compensate people when they're buying an asset and never selling it." [35:20, Heller]

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Manager Evaluation and Learning from Mistakes

Taxable vs. Endowment Mindset [37:33–39:45]

• Identified the importance of reframing approaches for taxable investors:

  "It's a different animal to manage money for taxable investors... we have to be even more conscious of turnover, both at the fund level and at our portfolio level." [38:08, Heller]

Passion vs. Judgment [39:45–42:19]

• Realized over time that passion and intelligence are not enough—judgment and risk awareness are critical:

  "The person that's running the strategy has a huge amount of judgment. They understand what they know and what they don't know." [39:53, Heller]

• Stresses the importance of scenario analysis and deep reference checks with managers.

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Evolving Process and Organizational Culture

Design Thinking [42:42–45:31]

• Implements an iterative, team-driven approach to process development:

  "Design thinking is... based on iterative learning and it's based on... open minded problem solving, which means you need to create a culture where that's allowed." [42:44, Heller]

  • Keeps the investment team small to foster trust and candor; ensures every member has a voice.

Investment Committee Dynamics [45:13–45:31]

• Engages committee members early to extract maximum wisdom rather than late-stage rubber-stamping.

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Personal Dimensions

Managing Life and Career Balance [45:31–47:25]

• Husband Scott is a hedge fund manager, but work talk is limited at home to maintain perspective.

  "We try not to talk about work that much. I think we recognize that our worlds are very closely intertwined. And there's a little bit of a danger... to making that too much a part of our dynamic." [45:45, Heller]

Mentorship and Community [47:25–50:06]

• Values mentorship from leaders like Bill Peterson and peers; founded a peer group that’s grown to over 100 allocators.

  "...it is now... this wonderful group of people... that know they have this set that they can reach out to when they might have a question." [48:51, Heller]

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Memorable Quotes and Moments

• On reframing investments for families:
  “Because we pay taxes, we have to think even longer term than an endowment.” [37:54, Heller]
• On manager selection:
  “Passion has to be married with judgment. This sounds really obvious, but I was very, very sucked in by passionate managers...” [39:45, Heller]
• On design thinking:
  “You need to have a team where people are willing to step up and say they've made mistakes, where people are willing to say that they feel uncomfortable about the way decisions are being made.” [44:00, Heller]
• On building quality into life:
  “With every year, I try to get more intentional about how I spend my time... and I hope in another 10 years I will have just honed my life into a few things that I love and do really, really well." [53:36, Heller]

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Notable Timestamped Moments

• [03:27] – Early career influences and start at Merrill Lynch
• [06:00] – Takeaways from living in developing countries
• [07:18] – Joining Stanford Endowment under Mike McCaffrey
• [16:17] – Sloan Foundation mentorship and team dynamics
• [20:36] – Deciding to join Brandywine Trust Group
• [23:54] – Investment philosophy: long-term focus
• [26:12] – Navigating the tax complexities of managing family money
• [31:41] – Discussing active vs. passive investments
• [35:20] – The challenge of permanent equity and alignment
• [37:33] – Lessons from mistakes and the importance of adapting for taxable accounts
• [39:45] – Moving beyond passion to judgment in managers
• [42:42] – Using design thinking in organizational process
• [47:25] – Importance of mentorship and building a professional network
• [50:16] – Favorite "waste of time" (art with her daughter)
• [53:36] – What she wishes she knew a decade ago: intentionality and focus

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Closing Thoughts

Jenny Heller’s journey offers a masterclass in blending purpose and pragmatism in asset management. From microfinance idealism to the realities of managing complex, multi-generational wealth, Jenny’s reflections on long-termism, process design, learning from errors, and the value of authentic professional relationships serve as enduring lessons for allocators and investors alike.

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Transcript

[Ted Seides]

Foreign.

Hello, I'm Ted Seides and this is Capital Allocators.

This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money.

Game, we learn how these holders of.

The keys to the kingdom allocate their.

Time and their capital. You can join our mailing list and access Premium [e-mail] All opinions expressed by.

[Jenny Heller]

Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Capital Allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Capital Allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.

[Ted Seides]

With eight years and over 500 podcasts under my belt, I'm often asked to recommend my favorite episode, but I can't really answer that question. I feel like I have 500 children and don't think I've disowned a single one. So when asked, I usually offer up a great recent episode to get a listener started. Finding the best episodes in a big library of content isn't easy, so we thought we'd help. Each summer going forward, we're going to share our best. Over seven weeks, we'll replay conversations curated from our favorites and yours, excluding those from the last 12 months. Our 2025 Summer Series focuses on CIOs. We're blessed to have an incredible library of long shelf life content and we just couldn't pick seven. Instead, we'll share a dozen gems canvassing every type of institutional asset owner. This week's summer series is a multi family office twofer with Stan Miranda, co founder and Chairman Emeritus of Partners Capital and Jenny Heller from Brandywine. Both firms started as multi family offices that have evolved in different ways. Partners Capital has grown and scaled as a leading ocio, while Brandywine has remained a boutique with a fixed set of family clients.

[Capital Allocators University Announcer]

Before we get to the interview, a quick announcement. We've set new dates for our Capital Allocators University for investor relations and business development professionals. Those dates are December 3rd and 4th in New York City. Later in the year is just a better time of year for this gathering. It's post AGM season. Travel starts to wind down. It's right before the holiday crunch time and it's a great time for capital raisers to reflect on their previous year and plan for the year ahead. December 3rd and 4th in New York City. CAU for IRBD is a closed door gathering for capital raisers to connect with peers, learn from allocators and other experts and really share in best practices with each other. You can learn [e-mail] University. Thanks so much for spreading the word about Capital Allocators University for investor relations and business development professionals.

[Ted Seides]

Please enjoy my conversations with stan Miranda from 2023 and Jenny Heller from episode seven back in 2017 and a follow up in 2021.

Jenny, thanks for joining me.

[Jenny Heller]

Thank you so much, Ted.

[Ted Seides]

So it's really fun starting just at the beginning. How did you first get interested in investing?

[Jenny Heller]

Well, I'm not one of those people that has been interested in investing since middle school or grade school. My dad is a doctor, my mom is a attorney and an art historian. And when I got my first job at Merrill lynch in investment banking, they both thought I was going to be a stockbroker. And the reason I ended up there, quite honestly, is because I developed a little bit of an interest in microfinance in college. I spent a semester in South Africa and I was a liberal arts political economy major. And I knew that I knew nothing about what a balance sheet was or an income statement was, and I needed to get some training. So that's how I started in banking. And even then I wasn't sure where I was going to go. But I learned a little bit about the endowment world when I was there.

[Ted Seides]

From investment banking.

[Jenny Heller]

From investment banking. And it was largely sort of a post 911 crisis moment when I said, this is not what I want to be doing with my life. But I enjoyed the analytical side of the job. I really didn't like selling and I wasn't good at it, frankly. So I was searching around my college website, seeing what jobs were open. I saw a job at the Stanford Endowment and I said, wow, this is a really cool intersection of finance and kind of the nonprofit world, which I wanted to move back towards. And I begged them for eight months to give me a job until they.

[Ted Seides]

Finally just circle back for a second. What was that microfinance like? How did you first get interested in it and what was the experience like?

[Jenny Heller]

I spent a so when a lot of my friends were going to Europe in college to do their semester abroad, I decided I wanted to go to South Africa. I don't know what drew me there. I think I traveled a lot as a kid with my parents to developing economies and I really had a love for it and I knew that there would be something there to learn. As a political economy major four years post apartheid, it just seemed like a really interesting time to be there. And when I was there I was in a program that was very focused on experiential learning and very focused on sort of letting us find our path, terms of what we were interested in. And I connected with an economics professor that gave me Muhammad Yunus's book. Muhammad Yunus is a guy that founded the Grameen bank. And I read his book and it just sort of opened my eyes. Of course, here I am now working, you know, running a family office. So clearly my life has taken some twists and turns, but it just really excited me.

[Ted Seides]

And so was there a moment or an insight you had in that experience in South Africa that stayed with you till today?

[Jenny Heller]

Oh, my goodness. That's a great question. I think. Well, it's interesting. I've now spent time, a little bit of time living in two countries very, very different from the U.S. so I spent that period of time in South Africa, and I also spent six months living in India prior to business school, working for an NGO trying to scratch my microfinance itch. And I think some learnings have come out of both of those experiences. One that you have to have a lot of patience for the time and the pace in which things move in other countries. You often have to slow yourself down a lot, largely because, especially at the times I was there, these economies were a lot less efficient. And in India, for example, getting a package to my parents mailed meant spending an hour at the post office watching someone tie up the package with strings. And it could be incredibly infuriating. But I think there's a lot of value to. To slowing down and learning to take your time and allowing that time, allowing yourself, I guess, the time and the space to open up and really absorb a culture. There's just such tremendous value in that. It's something I want to offer my kids.

[Ted Seides]

We'll get to families a little later, I think, so we'll come back. You landed at Stanford Endowment. And what year was that?

[Jenny Heller]

That was in 2002.

[Ted Seides]

Pretty early on in people understanding sort of. Endowments today are in the newspaper every year for their performance. That was a lot before that. And who is was that under John.

[Jenny Heller]

Powers, under Mike McCaffrey?

[Ted Seides]

Oh, right, under Mike. Okay.

[Jenny Heller]

Yeah.

[Ted Seides]

And what was your experience like?

[Jenny Heller]

It was incredible. It was, quite frankly, a huge relief coming from the banking world. I had the pleasure of being at the Stanford Management Company at a time when there was just a lot going on. Mike was a pretty new cio. I was working for a portion of the endowment that had been a little bit under managed. Historically, it was 11 different school and department funds, so sort of mini endowments that all of the schools there had. And you know, they had an incredible amount of assets because we'd just been through sort of the tech run up and then the tech collapse. But there was still a lot of value that had been created during that period. But no one had ever really looked closely at those assets. So it was my job as an analyst or associate, I guess they called me at the time to try to make some sense of that and put information together in a way that would be usable for folks. Which ended up being an incredible training across asset classes because these assets were so diverse. But it was also just a really exciting time to be working for the endowment because the team was quite new. There was a lot of energy, there were a lot of folks that had actually come from the banking world there. So I think there was a really high, high level of sort of discipline and work ethic there, but also a lot of freedom to kind of figure things out. So I just, I fell in love with the work and I also. This was on the advice of my husband. I tend to romanticize jobs and he always would say, you know, pay attention to what the senior people are doing every day. And is that work that you think you love? And the truth was I loved the work that the senior people were doing. You know, I'd get to sit in on weekly meetings with them and I love the breadth of the work. I loved that they were meeting with really, really smart people all the time and I loved that they were having a tangible impact. So it was fun.

[Ted Seides]

And how long did you stay?

[Jenny Heller]

I stayed there. So it was structured as sort of a pre business school experience. I was supposed to stay there two years. I ended up sort of compromising with my boss at the time to stay two and a half years and then spend six months in India before business school so I could make sure that I understood what path I wanted to go down post business school. Because I sort of view that period in anyone's life as a freebie period where you can take a lot of risk. Postgraduate school, you have to kind of start to focus a little more on what you want your career to look like.

[Ted Seides]

And so when you were. It sounds like you had a passion for this work before you went to school. What happened at school? Was there anything that came up that made you think, huh, maybe I should try something else? Or did you just continue down that path with, with great two year experience?

[Jenny Heller]

Well, it seems so boring to me that I would keep doing the same thing. I'D done before school. I just never thought I'd be one of those people. The time I spent in India taught me that I did not want to go into the full sort of nonprofit microfinance world.

[Ted Seides]

Talk about that a little more. What happened that changed that thought process?

[Jenny Heller]

Well, I was working for, you know, a really interesting NGO there that had a big microfinance arm and a public private partnership arm. It was very well funded by the World Bank. It seemed like sort of the perfect institution to really explore that passion. And I frankly found the work incredibly frustrating. And it was frustrating probably because I came in with a degree of arrogance about what I could bring to an organization that I knew nothing about. There was no reason they needed me there, quite frankly. But the pace at which they moved was not only slow, but I think I was frustrated because the institution was more focused on getting grants from the World bank than they were on making a difference. I think they wanted to make a difference in people's lives, but they didn't always know how. And so, so much of the program ended up being oriented around earning the next grant that there wasn't enough focus sometimes on just the blocking and tackling that was involved in trying to make very poor women's lives better. And I think there's some things the organization did very well. But, you know, as an outsider looking in, there are times when you come into a new place and you see things that seem glaringly obvious. They were involved in some public private partnerships, for example, that were actually losing money for the people that they were trying to support. But they looked really good on paper. It looked really good to say you had a partnership with X large agriculture firm or X retailer. So I think I was a little disillusioned by that. I also think, frankly, in India at the time, talent wasn't rushing towards the nonprofit sector. It just. That's a luxury. It's a luxury to be able to work in a nonprofit to a degree. But, you know, I think when you're. When you're in a really fast growing economy, talent wants to rush towards technology, they want to rush towards finance. So. So there was a bit of a talent gap in the sector, and smaller organizations were figuring it out and filling it, but bigger organizations I don't think were doing such a good job. Secondarily, I realized I didn't want to live. I think the best work is being done on the ground in a lot of developing countries when it comes to not just microfinance, but any sustainable development work. And my friends and my Family and my husband are all here, and that's very practical. It was a question someone asked me when I was applying to business school if I was realistic about my goals. And I wasn't realistic. The truth is, I love being an American.

[Ted Seides]

Yeah, well, there's some definite benefits of being an American. Just to dive a little deeper on the first part of that, do you think that the experience you had was pervasive across other NGOs and other nonprofits at the time, or was it specific to the one you were working for?

[Jenny Heller]

I found some remarkable nonprofits when I was in India. And I thought a couple of times about switching over to a smaller organization that I thought was doing just had better metrics for measuring themselves. You know, what gets measured gets managed. But I was only there for six months and I felt I'd made a commitment to this organization and I needed to give it its fair shake, seem right to kind of jump ship after two months. Even if they didn't need me. I just felt I'd made a commitment to them. But there were some incredible small organizations, and I don't want to be hard on the world of NGOs and nonprofits. I think there's a lot of amazing organizations out there. I just think my experience with this particular organization and specifically sort of the unit I was working in within this specific organization was disappointing relative to my very lofty expectations.

[Ted Seides]

There's one other little thread that is kind of interesting. So you were at the Sanford Endowment just after the bubble had popped.

[Jenny Heller]

Yes.

[Ted Seides]

And so you're probably aware of all these then.com companies that were building traffic, losing money so that somewhere down the road they'd have an audience and presumably could sell a product. And the pets.com aren't here anymore, so most of them didn't work. Was there any chance that the organization you were working for was making these sort of higher profile, presumably with multinational partnerships to build their brand so that they could do something better with it in the future? It sounded, the way you were saying it, a little more like you're not sure the business plan was along those lines.

[Jenny Heller]

I think it's an interesting question. And there can be value to brand building in any organization. And maybe at times you do that at the expense of the bottom line, whatever that bottom line looks like. I frankly am not sure that. Well, a couple of things. One, I think sometimes the best, and I feel a little silly talking about this given where I work and given that it's not my expertise, but outside looking in, I wonder if sometimes the best nonprofit ideas aren't easily scalable. Paul Farmer talks about this a bit in his. Well, at least in Mountains Beyond Mountains, the book that was written about him. You know, he had this incredible way to bring healthcare to the developing world, but the scalability piece was the reason he didn't get funded for a long time. And yet his outcomes were phenomenal. So I think figuring out how to scale a nonprofit is an incredible challenge. This organization was doing some things incredibly well that worked at scale. They had built a movement of women in who really didn't have a voice in rural India. And that was powerful. And I think there, their brand did matter, but I think their issue was that they weren't focused anymore. So they built this movement, and they gave women a voice, and they organized women, which was a powerful thing at the time. And. And then they built a microfinance bank, which is very successful. And then they started building all these ancillary vehicles, which were kind of not so successful. And I think they were building on their brand to do that. But I don't think anyone was kind of taking a step back and saying, what should we focus on? And maybe we can put all of our brand equity and our energy into the one or two things we do really, really well and let other folks try to solve these other problems.

[Ted Seides]

Yeah, some great business lessons right there, for sure. So we leave business school, and where'd you end up?

[Jenny Heller]

I ended up at the Alfred P. Sloan foundation in New York with Bill Peterson. With Bill Peterson, who is amazing and to this day is one of the best mentors I've ever had and remains a very close friend.

[Ted Seides]

And what was it about Bill and mentorship that you learned from him in this business?

[Jenny Heller]

Well, for anyone that's listening that knows Bill, he is honest, maybe to a fault. He has one of the most active minds I've ever seen. He never stops thinking. He never stops questioning. He viewed himself as the chief cynic and could get to the heart of what mattered in, like, 30 seconds or less. He's deeply passionate about investing, and he was deeply passionate about the institution he worked for. He really built that endowment for 16 years. I hope I have that time period right. Bill, if you're listening to this, and he's someone that taught me by doing and by acting, he wasn't one to sort of sit down and have lengthy conversations with me about the meaning of life. He would show me how to invest just by being actively engaged in every aspect of our portfolio, asking really hard questions of me and of our managers. And just being up for any type of discussion on investing. And I think it was a powerful way to. He would always tell me that he enjoyed mentoring more than managing, but I think that's what he needed to do. And he, you know, it's a statement that everyone that's left the Sloan foundation has ended up in really interesting spots, I think because of Bill's teaching.

[Ted Seides]

Yeah, I know it's something he's very proud of. I've talked to him about that. And how long did you stay?

[Jenny Heller]

I was there about five years.

[Ted Seides]

And what different roles did you play? I know it's a small team.

[Jenny Heller]

It was, it was a very small team. Remains a small team. But when I started, it was me, Bill and Joe Borer. So there were three of us managing the portfolio. I was one of two directors and had the least experience by far. Both Bill and Joe had been working together for a long time, were both very experienced investors. I came in right out of business school and I think they were willing to take a chance on me because it seems like I've top ticked a lot of places I've worked. I went there just before the global financial crisis. It ended up being this incredibly exciting period there because I got to be the new opportunities person by default. We were all generalists, but Bill and Joe had built this portfolio and then had to see it through a period of crisis, which they did remarkably well. But I had the benefit of, and I mean everything we did was team based. But the fact that I hadn't been there when the investments are made, I think just allowed me to kind of step out and troll around for new stuff. And, you know, Bill gave me the freedom to do that. So I ended up getting to spend some time, you know, looking at the structured credit market and mortgage backed securities and all the things that, you know, had blown up all of a sudden became incredible opportunities for investment. So that, that was the investment side. And in terms of other roles, I think there, you know, as a group, having some fresh blood allowed us to build more process. We hired our first associate. So there was, that was really, you know, an early experience for me in managing someone very bright who was a little bit younger than I was, but not that much younger. So that was a piece of it too.

[Ted Seides]

And how did you decide to leave?

[Jenny Heller]

I found myself, I was getting a couple of calls from recruiters after a couple years and at some point I started picking up the phone and I started listening to what they had to say and occasionally when opportunities sounded interesting and there were a few Things I looked at over the years, I found myself interviewing and taking myself relatively far down certain processes. And I was a little concerned with why I was doing that. And I called a mentor of mine from graduate school and I said, can I talk to you about this? I said, I'm thinking about this opportunity. What should I do? And he said to me, this is the second time you've called me about an opportunity you're thinking about. I think the bigger question is why you're interviewing, not whether this is the right opportunity or not. And this was not Brandywine at the moment. But he said, either you're going to be one of these people that wants to jump around a lot in life, that's okay, or you're going to be maybe you're getting a little bored and maybe you've hit a certain plateau and you're learning and you're ready for another leap. And I sat with that for another year or two. And when I got the call about Brandywine, it scared the heck out of me.

[Ted Seides]

It really always a good sign.

[Jenny Heller]

It was a great sign. It seemed like a leap. So that was the first, you know, the first thing was understanding that I was walking towards something that scared me, which I think is something you always have to do in your life, even though it never feels particularly good in the moment. And then I got to know a lot more about the organization and the governance and the families and just the investment opportunity here. And it was like, this is a no brainer. I mean, it's one of these once in a lifetime opportunities to build something at a place that has this incredible track record in history.

[Ted Seides]

So let's frame where you're sitting today. So you took the helm at Brandywine Trust Group, and today you're the chief investment officer for a small group of families with a lot of money. How do you think about or how do you frame the challenge of taking a large pool of money and putting it to work in the markets?

[Jenny Heller]

Well, I think some of the thinking was done for me before I got here. So to just give a little bit of background on how we're structured. We manage money for a handful of families. A smaller group of them own the management company and are still the bulk of the assets. So in many ways, we feel more like a single family office. And what the families have in common, they all have a very, very long time horizon. They're all able to take a high degree of illiquidity risk, take a 10 or 20 year view, or even longer in many cases, when they think about the markets. And I think we sort of view ourselves as having a fiduciary and an investment challenge that need to be married together. So the reason that Brandywine started as a trust company and it was a very deliberate action by the four founding families 25 years ago, is they thought it would be the best way to manage their assets long term to ensure that they had a multi generational approach to managing their wealth. It gives us very clear fiduciary goals and makes sure that everyone is on the same page. And then on the investment side, for the most part, we manage our assets through pooling. And that again means that everyone's getting access to the same opportunities. And it allows my team and I to spend all of our time focusing on optimizing these pools. It doesn't mean that families don't have some assets sitting outside of the pools, because that's the nature of families. There's always going to be stuff that they have that is unique to them. But we're spending a lot of our time and energy on thinking about the best way to invest a global equity portfolio broadly for taxable investors, or a, we'll call it a hedge fund portfolio. I know that's a silly thing because hedge funds aren't really an asset class, but a diversifying portfolio in the marketable space. The best way to create a private equity program for families. So it simplifies my life. I don't have to find a manager and say, no, which family does this fit with? It's just, let's find the best managers we can and put them together in a way that makes sense and offer our families kind of a sample asset allocation that makes sense for a very long term investor. And different family members are going to have higher or lower risk tolerances. Our trust company in Delaware spends a lot of time working with our families on that. But we also encourage, and I think our families naturally think about themselves in aggregate. So when you roll all their assets together, what does it sort of look like? Does it make sense? Are the right assets sitting at the right level? I don't know if I really answered your question there.

[Ted Seides]

Yeah, no, that's a good start. So let's talk a little bit about what you believe about investing and the process of investing and as a starting point to dive in a little bit deeper on how you go about managing these pools.

[Jenny Heller]

So I think they're slightly different per pool. But the overarching framework is that everything we do is with an incredibly long term time horizon. So we're not thinking about monthly volatility, for example, or even quarterly returns when we're investing in a manager.

[Ted Seides]

So how does that translate into. Because these managers have clients that might be thinking shorter term than that. So how does it translate into how you go about either looking for certain managers or the research you do or the decisions that you make?

[Jenny Heller]

Sure. So you know, we have a framework that we use that actually permeates everything we do in many respects that where we really focus first on what a manager's process is, what their strategy is and then what their team and culture is. And those are really, you know, in many ways sort of. There's a lot of touchy feely, qualitative stuff going on in there. Trying to figure out whether a manager has a competitive advantage in what they do relative to what is often a very efficient market. That's a piece of it. And then thinking about the complexity of what we, what they do, is it something that we can really understand? Is it something that they understand? It's shocking. I think sometimes managers use a lot of jargon when they talk about what they do and when you ask really basic questions, even they have a hard time explaining it sometimes. And then understanding whether they've built a firm and a team that marries with their process. So there's no one right way to build a firm or a team or a culture even. But it really has to marry with what they're trying to achieve. And then we back that up with looking at what we call their quality of returns. So rather than just saying have they performed well? It's trying to really disaggregate their returns and understand how they've made money. Has that changed over time? Is the way they're making money, does it marry with what they say their process is and what they say they're doing? And do we think that it's repeatable? You know, there are point in time strategies. We tend to be less drawn to those than strategies that we think are durable. Over multi decades, hopefully understanding that organizations change. But I think that marries with another core reality that we have is that we are managing taxable money. And that means that the cost of wrong decisions is really high. Because if we redeem from a manager, we're often reinvesting a 75 or 80 cent dollar. So that means that the next manager has to be that much better.

[Ted Seides]

75 or 80 cent dollar because of taxes.

[Jenny Heller]

Yeah, because we are. All of a sudden you're locking in realize gains. And especially if you've had a manager in a portfolio for a long Time the, our average hold for a manager is over 11 years. We try to keep our turnover very low. And you know, I think that gives us some really the ability to form partnerships really with managers. But, but we also recognize when we're going in that the cost of that decision is going to get higher and higher with every year that we're invested because hopefully the manager compounds, makes a lot of money for us. But, but then to move on to something else, there's a tax cost to that beyond a reputational cost.

[Ted Seides]

So does the necessity going in, not the necessity, the desire going in to have a really long investment horizon, does that translate into you're looking for a certain type of existing stability in a manager from the get go. So maybe they're a little bit larger in size because you don't have to worry that, that there's business risk.

[Jenny Heller]

As one example, I would say in some ways the opposite is true. We do, we have some managers in our portfolio for sure that had been in existence a really long time. Interestingly, in some cases we put those managers in business. In one case over 20 years ago, we put a manager in business and it's still the largest part of our global equity portfolio. But in some ways, and this might relate back to your beliefs from being a protege, I think that there can be less business risk earlier in a fund's life. Now it really depends on the strategy. I think that can be really true in private equity where we tend to want to invest well, we love investing with folks that don't ever want to sell and we could have another conversation about that. It's hard to find those folks within the fund model. We'd like to be there for at least three funds and we'd prefer to be there for five, six, seven funds. It's much easier to do that if you invest in funds when they're small, when the alignment is high, when they can buy businesses more cheaply. If you're investing at fund five or six, when there's a really stable business, often the lifecycle on the strategy is just shorter. I think on the public side it's a mixed bag. Hedge funds fail. So you need to be really careful when you're investing early. I've made some mistakes in that regard. Investing early with folks where just frankly their LPs didn't have the same time horizon that we did. When thinking about giving managers the ability to figure themselves out. And that creates huge business instability. And I think for the manager forces them to think short term because whether they want to or not they're managing to quarterly returns. So I think it's very strategy dependent. And one of my learnings has been if we're going to invest with a smaller, newer fund on the long only side, that we really need to make sure that there's not an asset liability mismatch, that we know who the other partners are and that we really understand that the manager has the fortitude to stick with what they know, which requires a lot more than just passion.

[Ted Seides]

As you do your homework on an early stage manager, is there much of a difference if it's a private equity manager or some form of a public equity manager in the work that you do and then the conviction that you can build that a past pattern of success is likely to repeat itself in a new organization?

[Jenny Heller]

I think there is, I mean, the work that we do, while there is an overarching process to everything that we do, I think we're always trying to gather as much information from as many places as possible when we invest in newer managers. And we're often cobbling together some sort of a track record, which can be different and more challenging. I think sometimes on, I would say it's more challenging actually on the public side. Usually if we're investing in a new private equity fund, there's often a strong pattern of our record of operating history and often they've been investing themselves in 5, 6, 10 deals. So you have the ability to. And also the. I don't know, I found there's just a higher level of transparency often on the private side where managers can really, really dive in and tell you exactly how they were adding value at companies. You can talk to the CEOs of the companies, often because they're small businesses and they're willing to spend time with you. So I think it's easier to reference check on the private side. On the public side, when someone's new, it's a bit of a struggle because often that person hasn't been a trigger puller. So you're trying to make a bet on whether they can transition from being an analyst to being a portfolio manager. And often I think the individual isn't aware of how hard that is. And I can even say that coming from the Sloan foundation to Brandywine, I went from being a director where there was a CIO sitting on top and vetting all my decisions to being the person vetting decisions. And the weight that I bear because of that is remarkably different. And it took me a number of years to figure it out. I'm still figuring it out quite Honestly. And it can be very distracting if you're not careful. So understanding how to lead an organization, build a portfolio, manage risk on the public side, where you have the pressures of the market weighing on you day to day, I think. And you also don't have locked up capital, which private equity funds. If you can raise a fund, you know, you've got 10 years or so to figure it out. I just think it's a lot harder on the public side.

[Ted Seides]

So on the public side now there's a big wave of discussion and movement of capital towards passive strategies. And certainly in the US large cap, it's been very hard for anyone to know that you should have owned Google and Facebook and Amazon. And if you didn't, you're probably going to underperform the S and P. How do you think about active versus passive in the portfolios you're managing?

[Jenny Heller]

It's interesting, we just had a big discussion about to our families about this. We view passive investing, I have a very healthy respect for it and we view it as essentially our break even. So it's the hurdle for anything we do. And I'm specifically talking about let's focus on long only investing first because I think in long only investing, any retail investor knows that there is this tax efficient, cheap way for them to invest their money. And that is a market cap weighted index. And that's a very sensible option for a lot of people. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I think that has to be the benchmark for institutional investors as well when they think about managing money, but especially when they're taxable because tax efficiency creates an additional 150 to 200 basis point annual hurdle for every active manager in the portfolio. That's what you can lose through turnover. And it can get worse than that. It can also be better than that depending on the manager's strategy. So we actually model out a break even alpha for every active manager we invest in on the long only side to understand what we have to believe they have to earn to be able to put them in the portfolio. And we use passive indices in the portfolio and we acknowledge that. When I think about active and passive investing and the team and I have done a lot of work on this, I think we're at a cyclical low for active management. You can actually look back to the 70s and see these cycles of alpha. I think a bunch of banks have done research on this. Often the negative alpha periods tend to be in momentum and growth periods when markets are kind of screaming upwards which is what we've been in for the past number of years. But I also think that there's some structural challenges. Whether it's. I know it was a while ago, but there's some reasons I think it matters today. Whether it's Reg FD passing in 2000 or the democratization of information or the fact that there's just more smart money in the space. And there's a number of statistics you could look at to tell you that there's over 10,000 hedge funds I think now and that's a marked difference from 10 or 15 years ago. I think Alpha is never going to be as high on a repeatable basis as it probably was in 2001. But we still believe in active management very much. I just think again, it has to meet this hurdle of what we can get passively. So we think there's room for both in the portfolio.

[Ted Seides]

Is there anything in the markets today that you're, you're really excited about?

[Jenny Heller]

We actually are seeing more interesting opportunities than we have capital for on the private side because we are just starting to see a lot of interesting stuff pop up on the really small end of the market. So we just, you know, anchored a really small health care fund. It's someone's first time fund. But he has experience as an investor and operator and I'm amazed at the value that he's finding in that space. But it's because he's so far below the institutional, the typical institutional mark of 5 to 10 million in EBITDA and up. I mean he's really, it's a micro strategy, so that's kind of fun. I'm excited about some more long lived opportunities that we're pursuing to buy and hold businesses for the long term. I think there's some structural challenges in this space, but it's such a wonderful opportunity for families to be able to compound their capital outside of the funds.

[Ted Seides]

We were talking offline. Patrick o' Shaughnessy and I are doing some work on this he's calling permanent equity.

[Jenny Heller]

Yes.

[Ted Seides]

And how there are really two models. Sometimes you see people buy businesses that generate cash and they dividend out that cash. Brent B. Sure does that. And then there are other models where people will create, as you said, sort of hold assets for the really long term with private equity, but with no intention to sell. Have you looked at those opportunities and what are the challenges of investing in someone without a known potential exit date?

[Jenny Heller]

We have looked at a number of these opportunities. We've looked at a lot more than we've said yes to, which is somewhat disappointing and frustrating to me right now. But a lot of the challenge has been what you just framed, which is understanding first of all, the right way to compensate people when they're buying an asset and never selling it. So do you pay them a percent of carry or profits on the asset value that they're building of the firm? How can you get comfortable with that? What does it look like in the out years and what does that mean for the partnership and what you're sharing with them? But I think another challenge is just finding folks where you really have the confidence that they have the longevity to do what they say they're going to do. If someone comes out of a private equity fund and says, oh, I'm so sick of that model, I hate raising funds every three years. I just want to find a great business and hold it forever, well, do they have any credibility doing that? I think for some folks you could get to know them and believe that they do. And for other folks it's simply that they got tired of fundraising and they're probably going to go back in some form or another after giving up. Because it's really hard. I think it's really hard to find a business. And for some folks, it can be boring too. They want to do deals. And while you can have a buy and build strategy where you are doing deals, it's a little less frenetic than the typical private equity fund. And it takes a certain constitution to be able to do that. So I do think we're finding that we've actually seen this a couple of times now. We've met some really interesting folks. We've encouraged them to stay outside of the fund model and try to find a way to partner with us to just build and hold something long term. But we aren't necessarily enough capital for them. Maybe in some cases we are, but in some cases they want to raise a bigger pool of capital and they have a hard time finding other folks that are willing to commit for that long. And they end up going back to the traditional fund model because it's just, you know, it's cookie cutter, it's set up for them already.

[Ted Seides]

Would you talk about making mistakes? It's really hard to learn if you just kind of get everything right all the time. And especially as you came over here, you're in, as you said, in the chief investment officer seat for the first time. What are some of the mistakes generally that you made and how did you learn from them?

[Jenny Heller]

Oh, I've made a lot of mistakes. But I think some of my standout mistakes, one standout mistake that I made, which I've learned a lot from, was wearing my endowment hat into an office where I'm managing money for families.

[Ted Seides]

And what does that mean?

[Jenny Heller]

Again, it's back to this idea. And maybe I seem obsessed with this, but I've gotten religion over the past couple years. It's a different animal to manage money for taxable investors. And I think what we share with an endowment, and I have lots of great friends in the endowment world, I love that work world. And our investment committee has endowment folks on it. It's a small committee, but we share the long time horizon. We share the focus on the bias towards investing in people who do deep fundamental research, who are heavily aligned with us in terms of being heavily invested in their own strategies. But because we pay taxes, we have to think even longer term than an endowment. I would say we have to be even more conscious of turnover, both at the fund level and at our portfolio level. And it also means there's some opportunities for us. You know, there's some strategies that just make, you know, we really love private equity as an asset class here. It's a wonderful asset for families also. It's a wonderful asset, not just from an investment perspective, but from an estate planning perspective. It has some wonderful benefits. You know, when I was at the Sloan foundation, we wanted current income that was fabulous for us. When you're paying out 5% every year and you don't have money coming in the top, current income strategies are a wonderful, wonderful thing. So it's just you have to reframe everything you do. Maybe it's reframing at the margin, but I wish I had had that religion sooner because I think I would have just asked better questions initially. So that's been a big learning. And finally, I think on the manager selection side, a big learning for me has been that passion has to be married with judgment. This sounds really obvious, but I was very, very sucked in by passionate managers when I joined, when I joined here. And passion and smarts, that was kind of what I was looking for. Just that brilliant person that is so committed to what they're doing, it's not enough. And I think some of the strategies I've come to appreciate the most aren't necessarily super sexy when you first look at them. But the person that's running the strategy has a huge amount of judgment. They understand what they know and what they don't know. They understand what they're good at. They hire appropriately for that. They Understand risk. And that's not stuff that is super fun to talk about all the time, but I think it can often make for the best long term investments.

[Ted Seides]

And is that something I always struggled in the process of interviewing managers, how you test for judgment. I think when you have money with a manager, you see it over time, you see it play out and then you have either more or less conviction in the manager as a result. How do you think about trying to figure that out before you allocate money to someone?

[Jenny Heller]

That's a great question. And I think it can be really hard to do. I think a lot of it is just spending time with the manager and the team and asking, you know, I mean really, really diving into, especially if it's a younger manager. How do you think about constructing your portfolio? Let's sit, let's run some scenarios by you. You know, this is what's happening in the markets right now. And sometimes you can use history, let's talk exactly about what you did then or what you would do and really see how much they've thought through those decision points. It's much easier, of course, if a manager has a track record and you can look, you know, at their exposure management, you can look at the companies that they bought at their position sizing and understand how much thought was put into all of those decisions and walk them back through time and say, you know, when, when you moved X or Y one way or another, why were you doing it? And I think you do it enough and you get a sense for who's deliberate in their actions and for who's kind of putting a finger up in the air and, and has more of a fly by the seat of their pants, I guess, approach to managing money. But I also think that, and this is sort of relating back to a very specific mistake that I made. There was a very bright manager who did really, really pretty good work on the credits actually that he or she purchased. But he was completely off the reservation when it came to sizing his portfolio. And it should have been a red flag. And I think it was just like concentrated is better. You know, I really want to sort of push the envelope here because I don't think, you know, at my last organization we didn't take enough concentration and that was a really big problem. And I think it, you know, it led this person to not be able to manage the risk in their portfolio properly. And in hindsight it was a very obvious thing. But I think especially when you're dealing with young managers, they need to put risk first. And I don't think, I think it sounds sexier to just say I'm going to put the pedal to the metal in terms of wanting to earn the highest returns. So that's something that we try to probe for.

[Ted Seides]

There's an interesting parallel when you're talking about a manager in this case who has position sizing issues at some point in time they could grow and learn. Just as you're talking about the lessons that you learn and growing and learning in your process, how do you go about within your organization trying to improve how you learn, how you improve your process, how you make better decisions going forward?

[Jenny Heller]

I think we are constantly trying to iterate and I shared with you an article that I had written a while ago, which actually in sharing with you, I realized I hadn't read it for a couple of years now. And it was titled Using Design Thinking to Inform the Investment Process. And what does that actually mean? Design thinking is an alternative to the scientific method which is really based on iterative learning and it's based on, you know, sort of open minded problem solving, which means you need to create a culture where that's allowed. So. And it's easier said than done, actually. I think it's very easy for people to get either very stuck in a process or very stuck in their own minds. So, and this is something I, it's one of the main reasons that I keep the team really small here because we need to have complete trust amongst each other. We need to have the ability to say, in fact, this happened at a meeting last week. One of my team members said, you know, I don't like this. I feel like I'm fighting for an idea that I don't fully believe in yet because we have right now more opportunities than capital in this, you know, in our private equity asset class. And it doesn't feel intellectually honest because I haven't totally bought into this idea. And then we stopped, this was in the middle of our team meeting and we said, okay, well how can we, you know, what do we need to do to make our process better in this moment so that you don't feel that way? And we decided that we were going to, you know, set up a separate meeting, kind of not talk about it anymore, where everyone on the team, we have a framework that we use, essentially grades every opportunity according to this framework. Not so that we can stick with these grades, but because it forces a really intellectually honest discussion around all the managers in the portfolio. And it forces everyone on the team to have a voice and to have an opinion, but it has to be deliberate and it has to be minute to minute. And you need to have a team where people are willing to step up and say they've made mistakes, where people are willing to say that they feel uncomfortable about the way decisions are being made. And that's something that I fight for as a CIO every day. And I don't always get it right, but I think it's allowed for a lot of innovation and process improvement. And the same has been true with our investment committee, where we were really struggling to find the right way to communicate with them. Because a lot of investment committees, I think we have a very small and very smart investment committee. It's four people now. It will never get bigger than that. And these are folks with a lot of wisdom to share. But a lot of investment committees at organizations like ours, frankly, exist to rubber stamp ideas. And it's very easy to get into that model because you meet with them quarterly and you're meeting with your team weekly. And it's hard to find the right balance. But we wanted to be able to use that, you know, to use our investment committee for their wisdom. And we realized we needed to engage them early in our process as opposed to late in their process, so they could help make sure that we were asking the right questions.

[Ted Seides]

I want to turn a little bit to something different in your life than many people in your seat. So your husband Scott is a hedge fund manager. What is dinner conversation like at your household?

[Jenny Heller]

Well, this is maybe not the answer you want, but we try not to talk about work that much. I think we recognize that our worlds are very closely intertwined. And there's a little bit of a danger, I think, to making that too much a part of our dynamic. You know, Scott and I have. We've been together 17 years. We're hitting on our 10 year anniversary, this year of marriage. So we've grown up together in many ways. But while we don't. While our dinner table conversation doesn't focus on the investments in our portfolio. And in fact, Scott won't even tell me how they're doing usually until year end, even though I have edited a letter or two for him, it's always with the numbers blocked out. I do think we've been helpful to each other in terms of thinking about various challenges that might have come up for each of us. And Scott in particular is. He always keeps me really focused. You know, he's just, he's incredibly disciplined. We have very different personalities. Not saying that I'm not disciplined as well. But sky kind of takes it to the next level in everything he does. He's very deliberate about everything he does, and he keeps me on my game. So even when it came to getting this job, he said, you know, what are you going to do to really stand out? And he's always asking me that and sort of asking me how I can up my game and keeping me honest. And I really appreciated that. And I think the fact that he is in this business and he's built his business from scratch gives me a little bit of perspective on what it means to build a fund and the time horizon you need to give managers. You know, they've done great over a long period of time, but it's never easy, you know, those first couple of years when you just don't know if your business is going to be there over time. So seeing him manage through that, I think quite elegantly, has given me some perspective and patience.

[Ted Seides]

The great cliche that it's lonely at the top, and you've had the experience. You talked about being mentored by Bill Peterson. You have this wonderful investment committee, but also throughout the last 15 years, you've been involved in trying to engage a community of allocators at different points in your life. Why don't you talk a little bit about the importance of mentorship, of developing a community of peers, and how you've been involved in it?

[Jenny Heller]

Well, I agree with you. I think one of the hardest things when I came into this role as CIO was feeling all of a sudden like a big portion of my peer group that I had known was relating to me a little bit differently. And I couldn't ask some of the same questions I had. I think what initially happened for me in this space was I came to work at the Sloan Foundation. I'm relatively shy, and I would show up at annual meetings and sort of beeline to the food table and then not really know who to talk to. And I hated the cocktail hour. I found it very stressful. But every once in a while, I'd meet one or two people that were pretty fabulous, and maybe also they didn't love the cocktail hour either. And we'd end up getting into a pretty deep conversation at these meetings. And little by little, I was collecting business cards of people that I really admired and liked and wanted to develop deeper relationships with. And I said, you know, maybe there's room for all of us to kind of get together and have some sort of an informal community. So in 2008, I emailed about 13 people I think and said, do you guys want to form sort of an informal network? I don't really know what this is going to turn into, but it could just be an email list. I knew it actually already existed at the CIO level, but it didn't exist at that time at kind of the younger director level. And it turned out that there were a lot of people that felt like me at these meetings. And that group has now grown to healthily over 100 people. Initially, I really didn't want it to get that big, but I think the value of the group has changed and evolved over time. And what it is now is this wonderful group of people that exist across the nation in family offices, endowments, and foundations that know that they have this set that they can reach out to when they might have a question. And more than that, you know, we host events once or twice a year. People develop subgroups of people that they really like, and it's just a way for them to connect with people. And I think the mentorship for me has existed beyond that much more on a personal level, both trying to mentor my team and also being reminded of the fact that the reason I ended up getting the job at the Sloan foundation in the first place is because a mentor of mine from Stanford put in a good word for me. So I try to be as willing as I can to have conversations with young folks who are interested in this business while also being mindful of my time. It's always a balancing act.

[Ted Seides]

Well, let's turn to a couple of closing questions, as I like to do in these. We'll start with what is your favorite thing to do that is a complete waste of time.

[Jenny Heller]

My favorite thing to do that is in some ways a complete waste of time is probably doing art with my daughter Kira. We actually spent Mother's Day that's the.

[Ted Seides]

Sweetest non waste of time I think I've heard on any of these podcasts.

[Jenny Heller]

We spent Mother's Day with sidewalk chalk, just creating beauty in a little park by our house. And it was so joyful for both of us. And you're right, it isn't a waste of time because it's tremendous quality time with her. And it also engages another part of my brain. It's the wonderful thing about having kids is that they remind you that there's beauty in the world in ways that you forget to see every day. As I'm saying this, it isn't a waste of time at all. I also like watching Billions, I guess. So maybe that's a no. That's Closer.

[Ted Seides]

That's closer.

How about a favorite book?

[Jenny Heller]

Oh, my goodness, I have so many. So one book that I. Well, I'm going to give you a couple answers. I can't give just one. I love reading the biographies of great entrepreneurs, so I've now made my way through Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, maybe. Some would argue he's great. Some wouldn't. But I think there's some pretty fabulous things about him. Jeff Bezos, you name it. Now I'm reading Phil Knight's book.

[Ted Seides]

So good.

[Jenny Heller]

It's great. And it's just. It's wonderful to read a bunch of them in sequence and understand the parallels between them and the differences. Beyond that, there's this book called beyond the Beautiful Forevers that was written by an incredible journalist from the Washington Post who spent seven years living in a slum in India. And it's beautifully written and it doesn't trivialize poverty. And I didn't realize I was reading a nonfiction book until I was done with it, and I just think it's a remarkable feat.

[Ted Seides]

How about your favorite sports moment? Either as a participant or a fan.

[Jenny Heller]

It actually happened earlier this year. I've been a big skier since I was three years old. I grew up in Colorado, and I had the opportunity to go to a place called Bald Face Mountain and go backcountry skiing for the first time with a group of outstanding skiers. I had no business being there. These were skiers that all. There were some former Olympians there, some current Olympians, lots of folks that had been on. I was on kind of a competitive ski team in high school, but these were serious competitors, and it was just so thrilling. It was thrilling.

[Ted Seides]

That's fantastic. What do you know now that you Wish you knew 10 years ago?

[Jenny Heller]

What I know now that I Wish I knew 10 years ago is the importance of building quality into your life. I think I used to believe in multitasking. I used to believe that I wanted to have lots and lots of stuff in my life filling my time, or I just did. Maybe I didn't want to, but I just. My life was. Was full, but it was not particularly intentional. And with every year, I try to get more intentional about how I spend my time. I try to do less. My team would probably tell you I'm still not good enough about doing less, but it's something I'm actively working on. And I Hope in another 10 years I will have just honed my life into a few things that I love and do really, really well. That's sort of what I'm aiming at.

[Ted Seides]

And one last question. It is your waning days in Life. You're about 120 years old now, sitting in your rocking chair. What advice would you give yourself today?

[Jenny Heller]

I imagine that I will tell myself to appreciate the joy that exists in small moments, to cherish every moment I have with my children, to love the work that I do because it's time away from my kids. So it's not worth doing if I'm not loving it. And to just to live richly.

[Ted Seides]

Fabulous, Jenny. Thank you so much for the time.

[Jenny Heller]

Thank you.

[Ted Seides]

Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our [e-mail] where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast, transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more. Have a good one and see you next time.