← How I Invest with David Weisburd
How I Invest with David Weisburd
E148: TIFF's $8B Portfolio Revealed: Strategies Institutions Need
00:41:47
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- [00:02]
Brendan Parry
I think early on I would consider sort of a wider range of investment opportunities willing to take certain risks that I wouldn't now. But maybe those risks depended more heavily on a very specific future state of the world. Hey, I was confident about it. The experts I talked to were confident about it. But there were fewer paths again, fewer paths to victory, fewer ways to win. And so you really needed to believe that you could predict the future a bit better.
- [00:30]
Interviewer
Tell me about how David Swenson from the Yale Endowment got involved in tiff.
- [00:34]
Brendan Parry
TIFF has been fortunate enough to have involvement of a lot of fantastic people over the years from the non profit community. It all started with MacArthur foundation and the Rockefeller Foundations back when TIFF was founded in 1991. And David Swenson, a TIFF board member hall of Famer and he was involved with tiff and it's, it's very early days. I think there are myriad reasons why any CIO or other senior executive typically gets involved with TIFF and they're typically CIOs or senior execs at larger nonprofits and they come sit on our board. I think a fairly universal one is that they have a desire to serve a broad array of nonprofits while at the same time getting to share ideas and best practices with other accomplished investors who sit around the table. So I had not yet joined TIFF when David was on our board. But I have been told over the years of his many contributions and lasting contributions from asset allocation help recruiting other great board members and clients. Potentially most importantly, particularly in those really early days, he helped TIFF access great closed managers just as we were ramping up. And a fun fact I learned fairly recently. So I haven't verified this and if I'm wrong, I apologize. I was recently told that in the first edition of his his famous pioneering portfolio management Swensen called out TIFF is actually one of a very few number of ALLOC or or fund of funds that he thought merited consideration by serious investors. So instrumental board member in the early days and thankfully we have a great board still of amazing CIOs and other senior execs at a great list of.
- [02:06]
Interviewer
Nonprofits and tell me about Tiff, what is Tiff exactly?
- [02:09]
Brendan Parry
Sure. So Tiff Tiff's existed over 30 years to provide investment solutions primarily to nonprofit institutions. We're really specialized as outsourced chief investment officer and specialize in private market solutions. When we started again, MacArthur and Rockefeller foundations looked at the investment landscape of the non mega nonprofits of the day and they saw the Lack of scale, the inability to find and access the best investment opportunities. And they saw really high fees for pretty bad investments. They created TIF to help solve each of those issues. So it's been our mission to partner with our clients closely, educate them on areas of our investment expertise and other areas of expertise, and create investment solutions that help them and support them with their long term objectives. Most importantly, delivering what we view as the top investment returns consistently over long periods of time.
- [03:00]
Interviewer
How does TIFF partner with foundations and tell me exactly how that's done?
- [03:05]
Brendan Parry
At the core of it, we are trying to deliver client centric investment solutions crafted to support that institution's long term mission and objectives. Typically large, medium to larger sized nonprofits, small nonprofits as well. It's really been our mission to serve, serve a broad array of clients that could fit with our expertise. So what's included in that? The first piece is investment portfolios that is core to our client needs based on each client's unique situation. We believe that any institution, even if it is another foundation of a very similar size, they have their own unique needs. And we want to make sure that we can customize to build around that. We try to partner on other topics outside of investment as well though investments is really the core of it. So many clients come to TIFF to outsource their entire endowment and some come to TIFF just to manage a portion. Those clients for endowment will be typically coming for all or a portion of our private markets program. As you know, me and my team, we focus on deeply on seed and early stage venture, lower mid market PE and then direct investments, primarily alongside independent sponsors in that sort of micro cap private equity space.
- [04:13]
Interviewer
Foundations, are they essentially understaffed? They might be too small to have all the proper staff to do these functions. And talk to me about what you see from your foundation clients in terms of capabilities in staffing.
- [04:26]
Brendan Parry
It does vary and it depends a bit on how they partner with us. You could have a very, a much larger endowment with a deep team, deep back office, lots of resources, but they're of a size that they don't have the resources to necessarily dedicate to the areas in private markets that we focus. And so that could be a very different nonprofit than, or a different client than someone who is fifty million dollars or a hundred million dollars. They're doing everything, they're handling all the investment reporting historically and things of that nature, but they're also managing the finances of the, of the institution. And so it is actually quite a large variation in the resourcing that any of our individual clients would have. Again, one reason TIF was founded was to support all sorts of different types of nonprofits, from the very small and maybe under resourced to ones that are a bit larger and more sophisticated. And so we want to have the capabilities on the investment side, the advice side and the client management side, as well as the back office to support that wide range of different type of institution.
- [05:27]
Interviewer
I want to talk about model portfolios. So if somebody came to you, let's say a close family member or friend was starting a foundation, given kind of average liquidity and average foundation constraints, what would be your model portfolio for that foundation? What would you advise them to do?
- [05:45]
Brendan Parry
The standard portfolio is something like 25% private markets, 40% public equities, 20% diversifying strategies. Think sort of low beta hedge fund portfolio as a diversifier and then about something like 15% to pretty traditional fixed income. Think Treasuries. The average nonprofit's trying to obtain sort of a CPI +5 to maintain purchasing power after inflation and withdrawals. So talking about sort of an 8% target with 3% inflation. Clearly lots of nonprofits also want to grow their corpus, not just maintain it. And so that does require this cornerstone of risk assets that could be private, private, public. You need that sort of equity risk really to have any sort of hope of building the corpus. And so for a nonprofit with good financial standing, for example, moderate reliance on endowment for annual cash, fairly routine P and L, moderate sensitivity to cash needs for some sort of lockup of capital, all this comes into play as we would think about how to what the proper asset allocation is and helping that institution meet their objectives.
- [07:01]
Interviewer
And TIFF really doubled down on lower middle market and see it in early stage vc. Tell me about why you go after these two parts of the private markets in alpha.
- [07:12]
Brendan Parry
Really. That's the summary, I should probably say more than just that, but a core component in our view for long term alpha generation, long term outperformance. It's choice of strategy and approach. We believe that's really important to generating alpha. So we are focused on owning equity in good fundamental business that they're smaller, they're earlier in their life cycle. But we're looking to capitalize on inefficiency. So think smaller transactions, smaller managers. Everything we do is focused on inefficiency in these smaller, less mature companies because that's a fertile ground for alpha generation in our view. Less competition, certainly less sophisticated competition at our size we can be really effective in these areas of the market. We think that's a key competitive advantage relative to much larger firms putting a lot of capital to work and they can't focus on these parts of the market. So again that less competition in a massive investable universe and then frankly many levers for managers we partner with, sponsors we partner with to create value through strategic and operational involvement with their portfolio companies. And so we're looking to partner with smaller specialist managers who can drive alpha, who can take advantage of these opportunities in these attractive parts of the market. Finding in picking the right investments in lower mid market PE early stage VC is not easy. There's clearly a much wider return dispersion in these parts of the market than when you go up market. There's risk. It's extremely important to have tested regimented sourcing and diligence processes tailored to these markets. It's also really important to have a purpose built team to attack these markets because again it is a different animal to invest. Be really focused here versus be more diversified across all parts of the markets or be more focused on less volatile larger cap strategies.
- [09:03]
Interviewer
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- [10:09]
Brendan Parry
I sort of agree with that. If you have the expertise and the team to focus on that part of the market it can be less how private equity has gotten more and more competitive over the years. Fewer paths to victory than there were in the past. As you move up market to perfection. The ability to add economic value be a growth catalyst or an organizational change catalyst. Is this harder with larger, more complex organizations and companies? Are you overly reliant on getting somewhat lucky with the cycle where you can buy lower at attractive leverage with attractive leverage terms and then the market accommodates with valuation multiples expanding and then you sell and make some money and maybe you made the business a little better. But it's pretty hard to change a large company in two to three years. Companies that lower mid market PE firms or independent sponsors might partner with, they're smaller, more fragile companies, more customer concentration, real key person risks sometimes in the management team it's harder, sometimes underinvested in terms of capex or technology. I wouldn't necessarily want to buy just a pure index of lower mid market PE managers. I do think there are a lot of ways, a lot of things that could go wrong. But if you have a process to find and sort of validate the quality of a lower mid market sponsor, I think at the end of the day that is a more attractive strategy. Not only from a like a upside perspective, but also I think you can dampen your volatility over long periods of time. Again, you have multiple paths to win if you do it well.
- [11:32]
Interviewer
Talk to me about leverage. That seems to be a lot of the returns for the larger private equity funds. Is that leverage not available to lower middle market? And when does leverage start to be a driver of performance? What size.
- [11:47]
Brendan Parry
Certainly available in the lower mid or mid market. The quantum of debt is going to be less than you could get up market. And the cost will be the cost, the spread will be higher. And so flexibility I suppose of that debt wouldn't be as great as you'd see in the lower mid market, particularly today or in the last couple years where debt has been a lot more expensive. They're more transactions we see sponsor comes in unlevered, particularly if maybe they want to do some M and A. So they over equitize the business, avoid the sort of more costly debt and then we'll work to get to a greater scale. Five to $10 million of EBITDA maybe that gets a little bit more to your size question where they feel like they can add on the debt, the company's been a bit more de risk. They have greater flexibility because there would be covenants to any debt the debt in the lower mid market then they can get cheaper, more flexible debt later on. But there's so much, so much return sort of baked into the base case even in an over equitized transaction that you could see your way to really attractive returns in that transaction. I don't think that that dynamic exists in the larger part of the private equity world. You really, given the prices you have to pay, you need to Be able to have a substantial amount of debt the equity to create the equity value that some of those managers are targeting.
- [13:00]
Unknown Speaker
So PIF along with other top allocators are really focused on independent sponsors. Why are independent sponsors so sexy today?
- [13:10]
Brendan Parry
You know, we think they've been been sexy for a decade. So it is exciting that other people are starting to appreciate that the universe can be a really attractive place to drive returns. Why is it, why is it interesting? The first piece is that the independent sponsor universe, it's a way to access microcap PE that you just, you can't get even if you're focused on lower mid market fund investments. You know, 90% plus of deals in that independent sponsors do are sub 10 million of EBITDA. Many are less than 5. So again there are fewer lower mid market firms that will will go that small. And so it does open up a massive universe of opportunities that a really high quality independent sponsor can sift through to find hidden gems. The second piece is, you know, at least today, I mean people don't get too too excited about dumping capital to back independent sponsors. It is the least efficient part of the least efficient part of the market, the PE market, the lower mid market. Many of the companies independent sponsor might back again too small for a typical lower mid market PE manager. The use of sell side bankers isn't universal. The quality of those intermediaries are is variable, let's say put it kindly, is highly variable. And then institutional peers, even though there is more interest, as you say, most institutional peers of ours don't invest in this market either. It's complicated and hard to navigate. It requires a combo of company underwriting and RV manager underwriting. Massive amount of time and effort. And so it's hard to get people to devote. A lot of people just don't have the resources or don't want to devote the significant resources and time you would need to be in this market. Being less efficient as the independent spirit sponsor market is, allows for more attractive entry prices. And over 80% of these deals are less than 7 times EBITDA. Many are cheaper than that. Cheap pricing, no guarantee of success by any means. But it is a good starting point oftentimes and provides some downside protection. And then if a sponsor finds a good company can actually create economic value, really help build that into a better take a nice small business with a good product or service and make it a really great bigger business with that same great product or service. There's a huge universe of middle market private equity firms to sell these companies onto Achieve significant multiple expansion and you have again lots of paths to victory, including just being a catalyst for change and organizational improvement in these microcap PE companies through more basic blocking and tackling, which we think is a less risky way to add value then you know, upmarket, where companies again are more complex, harder to move. And some of that low hanging fruit's already been achieved by you know, earlier private equity owners oftentimes.
- [15:54]
Unknown Speaker
And independent sponsor is a team without a specific deal. And today there's not a lot of capital for new funds. So you have some high quality managers. When you approach independent sponsors, are you approaching it from the lens of is the deal good or is the team good?
- [16:10]
Brendan Parry
We, we, we care about the deal and the sponsor. For us it does all start with that sponsor that, that is effectively the top of our funnel. So we have a variety of ways that we try to find new independent sponsors. Well, whether it be through, through peers, through other GPS spin outs, basic attending of conferences, publishing thought pieces and trying to like we have a regimented process that we all have metrics to focus on to make sure we're mining our networks to find that next great independent sponsor. Most people in the independent sponsor universe aren't going to be a perfect fit. We are looking for people who have more traditional private equity training at good firms that are typically middle market, maybe larger than middle market, that want to raise a proper fund someday, but might be taking the next year to five years to build out a track record as an independent organization to build out the team to prove the model to do deal by deal along the way. And those are the types of people that we will typically start spending time with. If someone is interesting, we'll take them through our full manager underwriting process effectively and at that point if we approve them, then we'd consider deals with them. When a deal comes, we'll do a full deal underwriting as opposed to just having said hey, we underwrote the sponsor, that's great, we'll do all the deals that he or she brings us. And so then there's another deeper deep dive into that company. Spending time with the management team, doing our own independent research on the sector verticals, working, spending a lot of time with the sponsor, understanding their thesis risks, how they're going to add value to the company. We view this as a great way not only to build conviction or not in an individual deal, we view it as a great way to build or not conviction in that sponsor to consider another deal with them and maybe after some number of deals to potentially anchor a Fund 1 commitment. If we think that it is time for them to move on from being deal by deal to having a proper.
- [18:00]
Unknown Speaker
Fund, they have this funnel where you're focusing on quality of the sponsor in order to confirm that the sponsor is indeed quality. You look at the deals to see how quality the deal flow is for that sponsor. It's kind of like you're checking both criteria, but in the order of sponsor first and deal second.
- [18:18]
Brendan Parry
That's right. We view it as this virtuous cycle of that it feeds on itself and it helps us build conviction in that manager. And all the while we have this nice curated deal funnel with these people we respect as investors, bringing us opportunities with a higher, certain, higher certainty of close. And then we can sort of pick and choose which of those, those investments that we want to participate in and all the while sort of hopefully building greater conviction in that sponsor. There are times at times as we dig in and partner with someone longer term, we do not build that conviction and so we may stop working with them deal by deal and certainly not advance to a fund commitment.
- [18:53]
Unknown Speaker
And you mentioned that you look for metrics for independent sponsors to partner with. It's kind of a paradox. Are you looking for their track record at their previous fund or what metrics exactly are you looking at?
- [19:04]
Brendan Parry
In terms of what we look for though in sponsors or sponsors with experienced individuals, sort of a purpose built team that aligns well with their strategy, where we think they have some sort of competitive edge in an area of expertise and that we believe that they have strong enough sourcing capabilities but certainly strong ability to add value to their company, then we do that deeper dive. A lot of the assessment with independent sponsors is a more qualitative assessment on people. One or two, oftentimes one or two people with a brand new independent sponsor. That said, it's not that different than when we might, you know, evaluate a fund, one where you're, you don't necessarily have a deep attributable track record yet you have to do a little bit of sleuthing because we're not looking at back independent sponsors who've never done a deal or never been a senior investor, like leading a company from beginning to end. And so while they may not have attribution, they certainly probably don't have attribution from the firm that they left. We can find out which deals that they were involved in. We can talk to, you know, the CEOs, CFOs at those companies, try to figure out what they did, what they didn't do put together, cobble together a track record and sort of degree of attribution for their prior deal so that we can, you know, using so that qualitative assessment as well as kind of putting together some quantitative metrics to look an important part of our diligence process for an independent sponsor.
- [20:23]
Unknown Speaker
And that's because at the previous firm they, they left the firm. The previous managers might not be thrilled about other top people leaving the firm. They're not necessarily going to open.
- [20:32]
Brendan Parry
That's right. I mean even if they're happy for them and are excited for their next step in their career doing something entrepreneurial, you know, private equity firms wouldn't want to give attribution. They want to keep the attribution themselves. They have their own business to run, their own funds to raise.
- [20:46]
Unknown Speaker
It's a zero sum. Attribution is a zero sum game.
- [20:48]
Brendan Parry
That's right.
- [20:49]
Interviewer
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- [20:56]
Unknown Speaker
There's so many great fund ones. There's, you know, if you look at the supply and demand dynamics in the market right now, there's more quality managers than there is quality capital in that space. Why even go for independent sponsor deals? Why not just do fund ones?
- [21:10]
Brendan Parry
TIFF does do fund ones as well. A variety of reasons why we don't just do that, but maybe I'll just focus on one primary reason. I guess it was years ago, maybe I guess over a decade ago at this point when we did our first independent sponsor transaction, TIFF would, would look at fun ones in the lower mid market though I guess the terminology was different way back then and we had some really fantastic successes, but there are also some mistakes and there was a greater volatility of outcomes than I think we would ideally like. We had experience as sort of evaluating deals alongside of our lower mid market managers. More traditional kind of co investing, we had experience underwriting fund 1. So things you need to do to cobble together that track record and figure out attribution and get to that qualitative assessment that's so key with earlier managers. And so yeah, I think the independent sponsor work started as this idea of how can you make open up your universe, your investable universe for direct equity investments as well as improve our manager selection and our Fund 1 selection, keeping the really high alpha that you can get in fund ones, but limiting the number of mistakes that you can make at fund one. And so independent sponsor investing not only has been a great way to make money, make returns for our investors on those individual investments, but also to find the next great fund one and actually have real data points and a long relationship, really deeply knowing that partner. Good and the bad. Being able to dissect what was sort of good luck in an investment versus bad luck, which is very hard to do. As someone evaluating a fund one who's just gotten to know this manager in the last three months or six months, it gives us a competitive advantage in underwriting those fund fund ones. So that's the main reason we think that, that, that you know, fund ones are great, we will continue to do those. But we think actually doing independent sponsor work allows us to make great returns on the the individual deals but then also improve our returns when we do invest in a fund one.
- [23:12]
Unknown Speaker
Why do and why invest in fund ones? Are they historically better performing than fund twos and lower mill market?
- [23:21]
Brendan Parry
Looking at the data we have that you can generate outsized returns in fund ones optimally sized, there's great alignment of interest and the key investors at that organization are the key investors leading the deals as they advance from fund 2, 3, 4. Even if they're still in the lower mid market and they haven't moved up market sometimes those key investors are now managers and they're not the key decision maker. They're not doing the deep work that they, that, that they used to do that they had such great success in. So fund ones we do see great return opportunity. That said, like I think it's, it's. We certainly have plenty of managers we backed where the fund one where it's fund two where everything clicked, where they didn't have to deal with some of the startup aspects of a Fund 1 and their sourcing engine was going, was really clicking and going better. And it was, you know, that fund two where they really accelerated. So we don't think there's necessarily a magic that we have to enter at a fund one in order to generate returns in this part of the market. But we're not afraid to I guess, invest in a fund one if we think we have deep enough knowledge of that manager. And that oftentimes means that these days we're working with a former independent sponsor in a fund one or a spin out from another manager that we know extremely well or that we invested with previously. As opposed to meeting someone, diligencing them for six months to a year and then taking the plunge, we might wait a little longer to build conviction and wait to a subsequent fund.
- [24:43]
Unknown Speaker
And what you're doing when you invest in an Independent sponsor deal is actually incredibly difficult. You're paralleling both the diligence on a sponsor as well as the specific opportunity and sometimes a compressed timeline. Tell me about how you go about diligencing an independent sponsor time as it comes through the timeline.
- [25:03]
Brendan Parry
In a perfect world do our sponsor diligence before they necessarily have a new deal that they're looking to raise capital for that that's not all. That doesn't always work out right when we are able to front load the sponsor diligence and then a deal will come later then it's not that different than a normal sponsor manager underwriting process that we would for sort of an emerging manager with eliminated same process. It's a ton of work but you have, but there's not, there's not that deal clock ticking in the background. When we have a, when we have a direct investment a sponsor brings it to us. You know either before or right after the LOI signed we have. There might be you know, 60 to 90 days want to load up load heavy work upfront to get to answer our key questions or at least to. To figure out what's diligent threads we need to focus on for the remainder of those days and so that we can give a little more certainty so the sponsor knows like what our big questions are and what would cause us to not move forward with the investment. But again like that timeline is really manageable with our team which has a good mix of people with manager selection backgrounds and direct deal backgrounds. Overly hard what we have to do. If there's a situation where we really are excited about a sponsor and really excited about a particular deal that they are raising capital for and we haven't finished our sponsor work we effectively create two deal teams. So there's a sponsor deal team, there's. There's the deal deal team and then our work according so it. So it fits in with the timeline of the deal. There's lots of coordination and communication with the sponsors because the worst thing would be that we decide not to approve them not to that we don't like the deal and they're really counting as on that capital. So we. It is, it is a ton of effort. It's a ton of resources. It's a lot of work once and a devotion of a lot of resources to do that at the same time. Luckily we have the team that's good at it. We have pretty regimented processes in how we what we focus on in any. In our diligence for whether it be sponsor or deal. And so we can get it done. Again, our preference would be to, to not have it, not have to dedicate two deal teams at the same time to one sponsor. But, but we will do it for the right sponsor and the right deals.
- [27:01]
Unknown Speaker
And it's two separate teams at TIFF diligencing the sponsor versus the deal.
- [27:06]
Brendan Parry
There's clearly a ton of coordination and communication and overlap in certain sessions of diligence or, or things like that. And so there's we, we need to be able to have people dedicated to digging into that company, that sector and we need to have people who are really digging into that manager's background. All the stuff I talked about earlier, putting together that qualitative and semi quantitative assessment of their track record. It takes a massive amount of work. And then the deal itself as you know, would take. It takes a lot of work to underwrite a company that we're going to be, you know, partners in for three to six years.
- [27:37]
Unknown Speaker
If several years ago went through an organizational change. Tell me about that organizational change and how does affect your clients today.
- [27:45]
Brendan Parry
TIFF became a public benefit company, an employee owned company about a year and a half ago. Prior to that it was tax paying, non stock corporation, sort of complex legal structure with no actually, you know, no owner. So a sort of a pseudo nonprofit. Not much has changed which I think is good, right? Being a public benefit company, TIP's mission is the same mission as it was when I joined. Our focus is still the same. Our advisory board, board didn't change. It's these CI, great CIOs and senior executives at these wonderful nonprofits who were the board pre conversion and post conversion. And so that hasn't really changed. I think the thing that is particularly valuable about this current structure that we have is many of our peers have had equity to grant as a form of retention and comp. Long term retention. We now have that ability and so we only think that it will you know, keep the team, same team in their seats for as like for as long as possible. Thankfully I've been able to work with the, the same crew, senior crew on the private markets team for many years at this point. I think now having a pretty broad base of, of employee ownership allows us to feel even more confident we're going to have the same people doing the, doing the work here, doing the investment work here that we, that we would otherwise that we, that we did pre conversion.
- [28:58]
Unknown Speaker
What do you wish you knew before starting at TIFF 14 years ago?
- [29:02]
Brendan Parry
So many things. So many things. I think even lots of success investments is humbling I'm clearly not the first person who's ever said that, but it really is. And at least for me, mistakes bring me more pain than successes bring me joy. It sounds sort of depressing. Don't worry. I love my job, I like my life, but I really love what we do. And thankfully, the successes have outweighed the mistakes. But what do I wish I knew? Prior to starting TIFF? Around 14 years ago, I got my answer. Sort of ties what I just said to a degree. I think I wish I'd better appreciated that we know a lot less about the future than any of us think. I think early on I would consider sort of a wider range of investment opportunities willing to take certain risks that I wouldn't now. But maybe those risks depended more heavily on a very specific future state of the world. Hey, I was confident about it. The experts I talked to were confident about it. But there were fewer paths again, fewer paths to victory, fewer ways to win. And so you really needed to believe that you could predict the future a bit better. Thankfully, I learned fairly quickly that there are certain investments that kind of fall into a too hard bucket, at least for me. Maybe they're way out of our core expertise. Maybe they're just really hard, near to impossible to really underwrite. Or they have. There's really one way that you win, and then there's lots of states of the world where you don't do well. There's a single factor, macro factor, or trend that you're relying on. There are plenty of great investments that offer multiple ways to generate return that I think we are well positioned to underwrite. Not all of them will work, but knowing that, like our ability to predict the future is just like everyone else is poor, allows us to just be honest with ourselves about the risks we're willing to take and the risks we're willing not to take. And I think that at the end of the day, allows us to be better underwriters and better investors and focused.
- [30:55]
Unknown Speaker
Just to bring that to life. You might have. You might have. You might be very. You may. You might have very high conviction that, let's say treasury rates will stay low or interest rates will stay low over the next decade. And you start talking to people and you start building this conviction, everybody has the same thesis. And you build an investment portfolio based on that. And of course, you know, we have something that happens both in 2021 and in 2022, which is basically 2021, the race went down to zero, almost unprecedented over centuries. And then they shot up. Also Kind of which was, you know, incredibly quickly, which was, had some precedent but also unusual. So you have this kind of, you have this framework into the future, this high certainty that's very difficult to actually have given the complex world. How do you. So let's say that you now realize that you don't have this crystal ball even if everybody in finance shares, shares your view or seen as quote unquote consensus. How do you build an anti fragile portfolio given that you don't know what the future holds?
- [32:06]
Brendan Parry
It's a great question. So you don't know what the future state of the world. I certainly know I predicted recessions when I joined tiff. I think I predicted like four years of recession in a row. That, you know, that didn't, that didn't come. But at the end of the day, if you. What do we want to own? We want to own good, good fundamental companies with a real reason to exist that can generate return either by buying low at a cheap price and using some cheaper debt, or they can win by bringing on a CFO and tracking KPIs better, hiring the first head of sales to actually start charging up and investing. All that goes well. And you can do like a little bit of an M and a strategy or you can improve your systems. These are all very achievable things that a company can do with the right sponsor partner or the right investor base and with, with the right time horizon that will be harder. In an economic downturn you could find yourself where something happens in the sector that company operates in and they go out of business or they default on their debt and the lenders take it. But if you put together enough a portfolio of these good companies that have multiple paths to victory and you diversify appropriately by sort of by sector, in particular sometimes the regional business. But you diversify across a number of different factors and you do a good job picking those managers, picking those deals. We think like over time that that is how you build that portfolio. That you're still worried about downturns, you're still worried about wars in the world and oil price spiking, interest rates going all over the place. Given that it's floating rate debt. If you have, if you have leverage. But, but you know, one, one single thing shouldn't sink your entire portfolio because you've owned equity and good businesses and you have good partners that are creating real economic value at these companies and catalyzing something, catalyzing growth or organizational change almost.
- [33:49]
Unknown Speaker
These multiple factors that make an asset anti fragile. There's the business Itself it has to be good, has to have enough margin, which is another way of saying margin for error, margin for margin for economic outlook. And then you also want management teams that are anti fragile meaning that could navigate different markets that make good decisions in even difficult markets. So you want this kind of. And you want to build an entire portfolio of these magical assets of these magical assets that survive under. Under every economic outlook.
- [34:22]
Brendan Parry
And as you know, we have a. We have sort of a framework we use to anytime we're evaluating a company typically would be a direct deal. But I think it applies to what the types of assets we'd want a fund to own or manager to own. Again, 76 lines of the framework but. But again at the high level it's looking at the business, the sector, the deal and the team. And again getting to what you just said like the business leadership position. Secular moats Right to win Leadership is often, I should say niche leadership. Leadership is a niche market because these are small companies and those attractive financial characteristics around recurring or reoccurring revenue, long margins, capital, efficient free cash flow. These aren't unique characteristics but they're important. Even with smaller companies that oftentimes will be some sort of niche leader or regional leader. The sectors we want to feel like they're less cyclical or non cyclical where there's some tailwinds. So that it is, you know, it's not just executing the business. You have something other than taking share. And then again the team is probably the next most important thing, if not as important as all these, whether that be the sponsor or the management team and having strong alignment with all the parties around the table. And then clearly the deal itself. So compelling entry dynamics from a valuation perspective as well as like a differentiated angle that you have on how you're going to make this a better company. And then we want to see that across our entire portfolio. An asymmetric return fan where the business is good enough, the price is low enough, maybe the structure is attractive enough and is sort of you're sitting above common equity, for example that you can protect your capital if you run into a really bad economic environment or something unforeseen happens. You feel good about a three times multiple money base case. But there are clear ways that aren't pie in the sky crazy ways, but they're clear ways to generate 5x plus multiple of money. Again, some of those will be wrong sometimes our managers or sponsors will be wrong sometimes. But if we look through at the portfolio and you feel like we're have enough green Lights on a lot of those characteristics that we're looking for and not a lot of reds and yellows. At the end of the day we'll be wrong because we can't predict the future. But we think we'll be right far more than we'll be wrong. And luckily history has proven that so far.
- [36:24]
Unknown Speaker
And this conversation reminds me of this confidence paradox which is when you start your career you're over indexed on confidence and under indexed on returns. And then the older you get, your confidence goes down and your returns actually go up. And this is a great example of that in that you're basically accumulating all this knowledge and you become very conservative by nature but you end up doing better from performance standpoint. And some people continue to be overconfident and don't really get the lessons. And we all know some of those.
- [36:54]
Brendan Parry
That's right.
- [36:57]
Unknown Speaker
When you said that you wrongly predicted that there would be recessions after a while and I think a lot of the market. We had this very conversation with the CIO of calstr, Scott Chan and he said that the market for three years had predicted a recession. Now this year wasn't predicting a recession. So he thought there might be a chance of recession. When you look at that do you at some point do you stop predicting or are you still index on your own view and personal view? You just don't as heavily index and talk to me about how you go about trying to predict the future. Is there a place for that in portfolio management?
- [37:34]
Brendan Parry
There is a place for that in port in portfolio management. Again my, thankfully my, me and my team, we get to focus on the focus on the micro to drive alpha and don't have to and at the end of the day we think well we might get have some detraction because we didn't spend enough time predicting broad macro factors because that's not our specialty in any way. But we think we do think more more in micro. I go back, I go back and forth because I, I feel like, I don't believe, I don't believe that, that I have an interest or an ability to predict broader macro factors and even sort of longer term trends in certain sectors can be very, are very hard to predict. Particularly with any precision. It is hard to make these predictions. I think I used to think more that there were some people who were great at predicting some of these macro factors even shorter term. I think as time has gone by I know enough to know that there's probably someone who has a way to better predict these factors even in the very short term they probably have lots of computers and PhDs. I think most people try to do it and it's fun to talk about at cocktail parties or in meetings, but there's. They don't have any edge to consistently predict some of these outcomes and oftentimes have selective memory. They remember the time they got it right. They don't remember the 20 times that they were wrong in their prediction. I mostly joke about my prediction of like the last of five recessions annually. But it like to a degree I and it. I don't think it impacted how we invested in like again this is way back but in those time periods that much but to that greater degree it's. It seemed like for me it is a general waste of calories and time to be to focus on overly focused on those factors. I think one has to be aware of what's going on but there's only a finite amount of time in any life and any day. And I do think a lot of people probably spend too much time ruminating on things that they'll probably that are impossible to predict.
- [39:40]
Unknown Speaker
Goes back to what you look for in managers niche focus, right. To win competitive advantage. You're applying that to your own team.
- [39:46]
Brendan Parry
That's right. You said that better than my answer right there. So totally right.
- [39:51]
Unknown Speaker
Well Brendan, this has been a masterclass on the private markets and how foundations invest. What would you like our audience to know about you or about tiff?
- [39:59]
Brendan Parry
TIFF is truly a special place. I actually got to know TIFF when I was at Harvard Business School. A professor and I in my second year wrote a case on TIFF and the endowment model. And I got to spend a lot of time with people here and fell in love with the mission and the place and thought there was just some really unique investors who were impressively not afraid to be different than the rest of the world and how executed and what they did. After business school I went on to do something else in the private equity world. But then I fortunately stayed in touch with enough people in the TIFF orbit that came back and it's been a great 14 years. I get to work with smart, humble and funny individuals, care deeply about our mission and also as most importantly generating great investments. I'd also say that one thing that I still love about TIFF is that we are smaller than some but certainly mighty, you know, around 8 billion of assets and growing. We're big enough to do some exciting things to matter on the investment front, but nimble enough to focus our capital on the most attractive parts of the markets. Certainly in our view, that plays to our advantage. Larger firms have billions of dollars to push out into private markets each year. It's hard to, you know, you can't execute the types of strategies that we do and have it. And certainly if you tried, it won't matter in the whole scheme of your portfolio. And I think it's a really special organization that, that I've been lucky enough to know for many more years than I've worked here.
- [41:20]
Unknown Speaker
It's a storied organization. Any organization that David Sonson was part of, obviously is in a league of its own and it's doing a lot of good. And how should people reach out if they'd like to chat with you?
- [41:30]
Brendan Parry
Sure. My LinkedIn Brendan Parry B R E N D O N P A R.
- [41:34]
Interviewer
R Y thanks for listening to my conversation with Brendan. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow and also provides the best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thank you for your support.