For two decades, we’ve heard that data is the new oil. It was a clean line, the kind that makes its way into every keynote, every board deck, and every LP deck, and like most punchy lines, it skipped a step. Oil is not valuable because it exists. Oil is valuable because somebody built refineries, pipelines, and tankers, and established a global price for the barrel. Until that infrastructure showed up, oil was a thick, corrosive sludge that ruined boots and poisoned the wells around it.

Data, for most of the last two decades, has been unrefined crude oil. Companies sat on enormous reserves of it and treated it like exhaust from the real business. Logs, tickets, transcripts, internal Slack threads, edit histories, the back-and-forth between a customer success rep and the engineer she escalated to at 11pm. Nobody was buying those interactions. These activities and data points were just the price of doing business. The refinery did not exist.

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Kate Simpson started her career as a history major. No finance background, no roadmap. The UNC endowment took a chance on her anyway, and she spent the first stretch of her career doing exactly what a non-finance person does in that seat: listening, asking questions, and building mental models from scratch. She took intro accounting classes at night to supplement what she was learning during the day. She went deeper inside private assets because that was where her team spent most of its energy. And she kept going, from Parish Capital to TrueBridge, where she spent twelve years watching the venture industry scale and evolve in real time, to now leading the venture strategy at GEM, a multi-asset OCIO firm that has been around since 2007.

What struck me about Kate’s path is that it never looked like the fastest way to the top. It looked like someone trying to genuinely understand the craft before assuming they had mastered it. That patience, which is different from caution, runs through how she thinks about everything from building a new venture program to evaluating an emerging manager for the first time.

There is a concept that came up early in our conversation that I want to dwell on before we get to the barbell. Kate described what she looks for in any venture manager as three things: how they source, how they pick, and how they win. The sequence matters. You cannot pick or win consistently unless you are sourcing in the right places. That means the first thing she wants to walk away from an initial meeting understanding is the manager’s network, specifically what ponds they are fishing in and whether those networks carry a real edge.

That is a different question than most GPs think they are being asked. Most people walk into an LP meeting ready to talk about portfolio performance or investment thesis. Kate is asking something that comes earlier: where are you finding things that other people are not finding yet? The answer to that question is more predictive than almost anything else.

The barbell idea is where GEM’s strategy gets interesting. Kate is clear that access to scaled platforms still matters, but argues that the alpha in today’s market is increasingly at the edges. On one end, a handful of top-tier, established platforms retain real competitive advantage. On the other end, the small, craft-driven funds that most institutional programs cannot or do not prioritize are generating the kind of right-tail skew that makes the math work. The middle, the firms that are too big to win at the seed stage but too small to compete with multi-billion-dollar platforms at Series A, is where she is spending proportionally less time.

The math point is not abstract. GEM builds what Kate calls a “what you need to believe” model for every manager who advances in their pipeline. It overlays fund size against target ownership, number of positions, reserve strategy, and a practical range of outcomes to pressure-test whether it is reasonable to expect a 3x, a 5x, or better. One strong outcome returning the fund, not necessarily a unicorn, is the baseline they are testing for. The point is not to find reasons to say no. The point is to know, specifically, what has to be true.

The sub-$200M threshold GEM uses for their dedicated seed and micro fund vehicle is a version of that same discipline applied at the portfolio level. There is something they are protecting when they draw that line, and it is not just vintage diversification. It is the recognition that the fund math on a small, concentrated, high-ownership fund looks different from the math on anything larger, and that difference is worth constructing around deliberately.

Kate also talked about something I have been thinking about more lately, which is what this AI cycle actually looks like from an LP seat. Her read is that we are in early innings of a genuine paradigm shift, comparable to the move to mobile or the move to cloud but potentially larger in terms of the size of outcomes being created. Companies staying private longer has helped the secondary market grow into a real asset class rather than a niche workaround. That normalization changes what liquidity looks like for early investors and founders in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

Nick Cassin from Sidley also joined us to break down the secondary market side of this. The numbers alone tell the story: from roughly $20 billion in annual transaction volume when he started in 2010 to potentially north of $250 billion today. Continuation vehicles, once a niche exit mechanism, have become a mainstream strategy. The pool of buyers has expanded dramatically. That is not just a market structure observation. It changes how GPs should think about what they are building and how they are building it.

The through line I keep coming back to from this conversation is that the best managers Kate has worked with over her career share one characteristic above most others: they know what they are good at and they stay focused on it. Not because they lack ambition, but because discipline around the edges of your own competence is what lets you build a durable brand and a repeatable process. That is true for fund managers and, honestly, for anyone trying to build something that compounds over time.

If the show has been useful to you, the best thing you can do is leave a rating and review wherever you listen. It matters more than most people realize.

with gratitude,
earnest

In 1973, a USC physicist named Jack Nilles coined the word “telecommuting.” The original problem he was trying to solve was not talent, not flexibility, not work-life balance. It was the energy crisis. Americans were using too much oil driving to offices. His proposal was straightforward: keep workers closer to home by connecting them to their work electronically. The future of work, in 1973, was about the price of gas.

His catalyzing challenge came from an urban planner’s taunt: “If you can put a man on the moon, why don’t you do something about traffic?” Nilles secured a National Science Foundation grant in 1973, published his Final Report in December 1974, and ran a pilot with an insurance company that cut turnover to near zero and raised productivity 15 percent. The company declined to adopt the model, fearing union-organizing dynamics. As Nilles later recalled: “The experiment was a success. But the company said, no, we’re not going to do that.” For the next thirty years, the dominant frame remained congestion relief, clean air, and post-9/11 business continuity, not personal flexibility.

Then the internet arrived and the conversation accelerated. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the promise of technology-enabled flexibility was everywhere. The vision was expansive: people would work from wherever they chose, hierarchies would flatten, knowledge would flow freely across organizations, and geography would stop being a constraint on talent.

When the major consultancies adopted the phrase in 2017-2018, they still meant automation, not location. McKinsey Global Institute’s landmark “A Future That Works” (January 2017) estimated about half of all work activities could be automated with then-current technology, equivalent to roughly $15 trillion in global wages. Deloitte’s 2017 Human Capital Trends framed the “augmented workforce” driven by AI systems, robotics, and cognitive tools. PwC’s “Workforce of the Future” (2018) built four scenario worlds around automation, AI, demographics, and globalization. None of the three flagship reports centered location flexibility. That reframing came only after 2020.

As a venture investment category, “future of work” was claimed early by Bloomberg Beta, launched in June 2013 with $75 million, describing itself as “the first VC to declare a focus on the future of work and the first to say we wanted to invest in AI.” Managing Partner Roy Bahat defined it broadly, “beyond productivity tools, to how work can serve everyone,” and pushed back when the press collapsed it into remote-work software alone. Emergence Capital similarly developed theses spanning coaching networks, the deskless workforce, and deep collaboration, noting in 2018 that less than 1 percent of venture investment had gone to deskless-worker technology despite that group representing 80 percent of the global workforce.

Somewhere around 2015 to 2019, the phrase became a VC category, a conference theme, a consulting practice, and ultimately a shorthand that meant: remote work tools, flexible scheduling, and the Slack-ification of the enterprise.

All of that was real. None of it was the full story.

I think about this now because the phrase is being used again, and again it is being used to describe something smaller than what is actually happening. The people who got it partially right in 1973, in 1999, in 2016, were pointing at a real direction but describing the first visible symptom rather than the underlying condition. The underlying condition is this: what work actually is has always been in the process of changing, and the changes have always been larger and slower and more consequential than anyone predicted while they were happening.

We are still inside that change. It is just that now the technology doing the changing is different in kind, not just in degree.

Era-by-Era Summary

II. Where I Started

In 2007, I was an equity research associate at BMO Capital Markets in New York. My workstation was a desktop. If I needed to work from home, I had a laptop available, but it required a BitLocker decryption sequence before it would open (a security protocol that also functioned, not coincidentally, as a mild deterrent). The office was where work happened, and that felt self-evident to everyone, including me.

Writing a client-facing email back then took me roughly fifteen minutes. Not because I was slow. Because the standards were different, and the process reflected those standards. Every sentence had to be constructed, considered, and reviewed. The email was the work. Its clarity was a direct proxy for the clarity of the thinking behind it. A sloppy email was a sloppy analyst. There was nowhere to hide, and nobody expected anywhere to hide.

Nobody was measuring my output in emails per hour. They were measuring the quality of the thinking those emails carried. The email was just the container. The judgment inside it was the job.

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This week we published our hundredth episode. I want to use this post to do three things. Thank the people who got us here. Share what I actually learned along the way. And ask you, if the show has meant something to you, to do a couple of small things that help us keep going.

The thank you

The first thank you goes to the guests. Over a hundred conversations, we have had people in the water with us who had no obligation to spend an hour explaining how they actually think. Allocators do not usually talk like this in public. The ones who came on did it anyway, and they did it generously.

When I look back at the range of who “sat” across from us, I am still a little stunned. We had a senior investor from a Texas public pension managing more than forty billion dollars walk through what it really takes to win an institutional check. We had the chief investment officer of a Danish sovereign fund explain how a small country built a global technology engine almost from nothing. We have hosted allocators from institutions like StepStone, Top Tier Capital Partners, Altimeter, Sapphire Partners, Foundry, Screendoor, and Capricorn, alongside multi-billion-dollar foundations, university endowments, family offices that invest on behalf of more than a hundred families, state programs, secondary specialists, and emerging-manager backers. People running impact mandates. People building working capital products for first-time fund managers. People whose whole job is to tell the difference between a manager with an edge and a manager with a good deck. That is not a niche. That is the actual machinery of how capital finds the future, and these people opened it up for anyone willing to listen.

The second thank you goes to the partners and sponsors who made this a real production rather than a hobby. The recurring expert segments with legal and financial services executives gave the show a backbone of substance that a lot of investing podcasts never bother with. Thank you to Sidley, our anchor sponsor, and to every partner who has supported the show along the way, including SVB, Gunderson Dettmer, Passthrough, Canopy, Sydecar, Armstrong International, Vested, Camber Road, and Bottega8. You believed in a show about limited partners, of all things, before that was an obvious bet. And thank you to the people who actually make the episodes sound like episodes. Our producer Jonny and the whole Heard Media team turn two busy people and a pile of raw audio into something worth your time, week after week. None of this reaches you without them.

And the third thank you, the one that matters most, goes to you. The listeners. The people who message me at a conference to say a specific episode changed how they thought about portfolio construction, or fundraising, or their own career. The folks who are not in venture at all but listen because they like hearing smart people think out loud. You are the reason a niche show about the least visible layer of the venture stack found a real audience. We see the audience numbers, we read the DMs and emails, and we do not take a single one for granted.

What I learned

A hundred conversations will change you if you are paying attention. Here is some of what stuck.

People do not differentiate themselves by explaining their strategy. They differentiate themselves by who they are. Our podcast guests have heard managers over-explain their thesis in a way that makes them sound exactly like the fund that pitched the day before, same logos on the deck, same language about value-add. The ones who stand out are the ones who can tell you what they actually sourced, what they actually led, and why a founder picks up the phone for them specifically. Differentiation is not a slide. It is a track record of behavior.

Trust is the moat now. For years the moat conversation was about technology, and then everyone had access to roughly the same technology, and the question quietly changed. Across episode after episode I heard the same shift in different words. The durable advantages now look more like distribution, proprietary data, brand, and trust than like a pure technical edge. That is true for founders and it is just as true for fund managers. The thing that compounds is whether people believe you will do what you say.

Snapshots are not destiny. I wrote about this recently in another essay, and a hundred episodes only deepened it. A hot mark, a top-quartile ranking, a breakout fund, a buzzy round. These are timestamps, not verdicts. The market loves to turn a moment into an identity. Time is usually less generous, and the people who last seem to know the difference.

And the biggest one, the one that took a hundred reps to fully understand. The edge is in showing up. Not in being the smartest person in any single conversation. In being there for the next one, and the one after that, when there is no immediate reward and no guarantee anyone is listening yet. Curiosity keeps you open, but consistency is what builds the body of work.

The numbers, briefly

I am not going to pretend the metrics are the point, but a few are worth naming. We launched in October of 2023 and we have kept a weekly-ish cadence for more than two years to get here, which in podcasting terms is most of the battle, since the vast majority of shows never reach episode ten, let alone a hundred. The guest list spans public and corporate pensions, sovereign funds, foundations, endowments, family offices, fund-of-funds, secondary specialists, and emerging-manager backers, a wider cross-section of the allocator world than I expected we would ever get access to. And the show holds a five-star rating from the people who have taken the time to leave one. None of that happens without the three groups I thanked.

What this is really about

A friend of mine, someone who builds companies and venture firms, said something to me that is relevant to this podcast achievement. His point was that real confidence does not come from sounding certain. It comes from commitment and consistency. Most people can talk confidently for a day. Fewer people show up every day, especially when it is hard. For him, confidence is not a feeling you summon before a big moment. It is just the quiet fact of being committed today and tomorrow, and the day after that. He tied it back to his own routine, the same food, the daily training, the refusal to stop, as proof that the consistency is what produces the confidence, not the other way around.

That is the whole story of this podcast. We were never the most certain people in the room. We just kept getting back in the water. A hundred times now. And we are not stopping.

If the show has given you something, here is how you can give back, and all of it genuinely helps us keep going:

Follow and like Swimming with Allocators wherever you listen, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. A follow and a rating do more than you would think to help new listeners find us.

And if you want to rep the show IRL, we have merch.

To the guests, the partners, and most of all the listeners. Thank you for a hundred. Here is to the next hundred, one episode at a time.

See you later, Allocator.

earn

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome Mike Kakenmaster, Director of Investments at Loyola University Chicago, for a conversation about what it really looks like to build a modern private capital and venture program inside a smaller endowment.

Mike brings a wide lens to the allocator seat. Before Loyola, he spent time across hedge funds, a family office, and multiple asset classes, which now shapes how he evaluates risk, opportunity, and cycles. That generalist perspective matters, especially in a market where LP attention keeps shifting between private markets, hedge funds, credit, buyout, and venture.

We get into how Loyola doubled its private capital allocation, why the team moved deliberately into venture instead of chasing brand-name access, and how Mike thinks about early-stage track records, manager quality, reserves, portfolio construction, access, networks, and the underlying quality of founders and companies.

One theme I appreciated: smaller and emerging managers can be compelling, but only when the strategy, discipline, and judgment are real.

We also hear from Chuck Daly of Sidley on what first-time fund managers need to understand about building operational and governance infrastructure from the beginning. That includes disclosures, conflicts of interest, LP communication, and the basic but important work of treating the firm like a real business before the market forces you to.

A sharp conversation for anyone thinking seriously about how endowments build venture exposure, how emerging managers earn trust, and how institutional discipline shows up long before a fund is “institutional.”

Check it out. - earn

The first time I remember really feeling the weight of rankings, I was somewhere around twelve or thirteen years old, sitting in the stands of a hot Memphis gym, watching a kid the room had already decided was the best. He had not done anything yet that morning, but the air around him was different. People nodded and started talking when he walked onto the court. The coaches in the bleachers leaned forward. The other kids on the floor adjusted, quietly, the way you adjust when you walk into a room where somebody has already been declared important.

That is what rankings do, before they measure anything. They tell the room where to look.

When you grow up around competitive youth sports, you learn that rankings carry strange power. Somebody is the best point guard in the state at twelve. Somebody else is top ten nationally before he is allowed to drive. The list circulates through camps and gyms and one or two older guys who seem to know which sixth grader can shoot from the top of the key in three different states. You hear the names and you start to believe them, even before you have seen the player. The ranking does the work the eyes have not done yet.

It takes a long time to understand what the rankings are actually saying. They feel like a verdict, but they are really a timestamp. They describe one moment, in one set of bodies parties, against one slice of competition, on the way to a destination nobody has reached yet.

Some of the kids ranked early stayed ranked. Some were prodigies whose athletic abilities caught up later, or whose work ethic caught up later, or whose situation never gave them another real chance. Some grew six inches in a year and changed the equation. Some were carrying a label that got heavier every season as everyone else got closer to their level. You only learned which kind of basketball player somebody was once enough time had passed for the truth to show itself.

I have been thinking about this lately because I think we make the same mistake in the business world, and especially in venture capital. We see a startup, an individual fund or a VC firm at one point in their life and quietly turn that point into a permanent identity. We talk about top quartile like it is a residence instead of a snapshot. We treat a hot markup like a decree. We assume that because somebody has been called excellent, excellence is now what they are.

But a ranking is not a residence. It is a timestamp.

That has two implications, and I think we usually only talk about one of them.

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This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome Yuri Lee, Director and Head of Venture Capital at TMRS, for a candid conversation on what it actually takes to win institutional LP commitments.

Most GP decks sound the same. The thesis feels sharp on paper, the team slide checks the boxes, and the market timing sounds urgent. But institutional LPs have seen enough pitches to know when a manager is performing conviction versus actually having it. That gap, between presentation and substance, is where most fundraises quietly die.

The antidote is not a better deck. It is a clearer edge. Yuri is direct about what she is looking for: differentiated sourcing, picking, or winning, not all three, but real clarity on one. Genuine product-market fit between a manager’s strategy and how they actually generate returns. And ideas that are non-consensus by design, not by accident. In a market saturated with AI theses that all rhyme, that last one matters more than ever.

Yuri brings a rare vantage point, she crossed over from growth investing into an LP seat, and is now building TMRS’s $3B+ venture and growth mandate from the ground up, including an ambitious 50/50 funds and co-investment program. She knows what it feels like to be on both sides of the table, and it shows.

I hope you enjoy.

Somewhere in Marketing 101 at Kellogg, Professor Julie Hennessy taught us the difference between a branded house and a house of brands. A branded house is Apple, Nike, or Google, where one name carries the trust, and new products borrow credibility from the mothership the moment they appear. A house of brands is more Procter & Gamble, Unilever, or LVMH. Conglomerates with different brands that speak to distinct audiences, with the parent company (or house) sometimes invisible in the background. Tide does not need to remind you it’s roommates with Pampers.

At the time I probably filed this somewhere between useful and I hope she does not cold call me on this. Now years later, while building the institutional infrastructure of a venture firm before the fund officially exists, I keep returning to the competing concepts. Not as a marketing question exactly, but as a trust question. And those, I have found, are different things.

A few months ago, a private markets marketing and investor relations advisor I deeply respect gave me an honest read on how my work and pre-raising activity looks from the outside. She said something like: this guy is too scattered, he seems really smart, I’m just going to wait until he figures out what he wants to be when he grows up. She was not being unkind. She was being candid and providing useful feedback. The advice she and several others have echoed is to put everything under one name, build a branded house, make every podcast and dinner series and essay and advisory engagement point back to one logo, Stresswood, so people can track the through line without having to work through the complexity.

I understand that argument. But here is where my thinking keeps landing.

The name Stresswood comes from a concept in biology. When trees grow under natural stressors, wind, rain, gravity and humidity, they develop internal wood fibers that are structurally denser than ones grown in ideal conditions. In the late 1980s, scientists tried to create a perfect growing environment inside a sealed dome called Biosphere 2. Controlled temperature, ideal soil, abundant water, no stressors. The trees grew quickly and then fell over on their own weight because they had never been asked to develop the internal structure required to hold themselves up. I named the firm Stresswood because I think that pattern holds for people and institutions too, that pressure is not incidental to growth but part of what makes exponential growth durable. But the metaphor cuts in another direction as well. A firm built on announced ambition before earned trust has a version of the same problem. The pre-raise season, for me, is not about waiting. It is about building things that can actually hold weight.

An LP friend has reminded me that a fund manager is a capital entrepreneur, which means the job is not just picking companies. It is building a business around judgment, access, distribution, and trust across several different communities that do not naturally talk to each other. LPs and founders share almost no common interests. The upstream investors who feed deal flow and the downstream investors who might follow your rounds have different priorities still. The corporates and hyperscalers I spend significant advisory time with are operating in a different conversation altogether. One brand doing the work of earning trust in all of those rooms at once is probably asking something of the brand it was not designed to do, and I think that is the part of the advice toward simplicity that I have not been able to fully accept. It is less about aesthetics and more about whether a single front door can honestly serve rooms that open onto very different landscapes.

Swimming with Allocators has been the clearest proof of concept for me.

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There’s a moment in the conversation when Erik Balck Sørensen describes the Danish startup scene he came up in. No venture funds. No ecosystem. No infrastructure for what he was trying to build. He figured it out anyway, founded a few companies, and a generation later he’s the CIO of Denmark’s Export and Investment Fund, a sovereign platform backing innovation at the country’s scale.

That arc is the through line of this week’s Swimming with Allocators.

Erik joined Alexa and me to talk about how Denmark went from a thin venture market to a global presence in biotech, green tech, and deep tech. What landed for me wasn’t the policy or the capital. It was the culture. Tight founder communities, a real ethic of giving back, the founders who had made it cycling back to help the next wave. The infrastructure followed the relationships, not the other way around.

We spent real time on what it actually means to run a sovereign wealth fund with a dual mandate. Financial returns for taxpayers on one side, societal impact on the other, and the steady work of holding both without one quietly swallowing the other. Erik was candid about the political momentum that shapes their work, the past missteps that have sharpened their discipline, and how a platform like theirs has to think about time horizons differently than almost anyone else in the market.

Then we got into what comes next. Denmark’s 2030 plan is about moving faster, professionalizing as an LP and as a direct investor, and doubling or tripling down on the verticals where they already have an edge: life sciences, selected green technologies, quantum computing, and European growth-stage capital. The strategy reads less like a pivot and more like a deepening.

Worth a listen.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome Wes Panek, Head of Fund Investing at Astera Institute, for a conversation on deep tech fund investing.

Deep tech is one of the areas where the normal venture playbook can break down. The timelines are different. The technical risk is different. The talent networks are different. And the best opportunities often require investors to understand both scientific ambition and institutional constraints.

Wes brings an unconventional path and a thoughtful lens to how allocators can back deep tech managers with more clarity, patience, and conviction.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I talk with Avivar Capital co-founders Lisa Richter and Tina Castro about aligning capital with community impact.

This episode is a reminder that capital has consequences. The question is not whether money shapes communities. It does. The real question is whether allocators are being intentional about the outcomes they are helping create.

Lisa and Tina bring a grounded perspective on impact, accountability, and what it means to build investment strategies that serve both financial objectives and community needs.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome Juan Diego Briceno for a conversation on venture co-investments and how LPs should think about the opportunity set.

Co-investing sounds simple until you actually have to do it well. Access, speed, adverse selection, relationship dynamics, and internal decision-making all matter. The playbook needs more nuance than “we want more direct exposure.”

Juan Diego brings a helpful perspective shaped by private banking, Latin American wealth, and the practical realities of building trust across markets.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome Charlotte Zhang, Senior Portfolio Manager at Inatai Foundation, for a conversation on how LPs evaluate managers.

Every GP wants to know what LPs are really looking for. This episode gets into the checklist behind the checklist: strategy, team, portfolio construction, references, judgment, alignment, and the ability to explain why the firm deserves to exist.

For emerging managers, this is a practical episode. For LPs, it is a useful reflection on how disciplined underwriting can still leave room for conviction.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome Anthony Giambrone, Partner at StepStone Group, for a conversation on power laws, secondaries, and the importance of consistency in venture allocation.

This episode gets into the mechanics that matter. Venture returns are not evenly distributed. Liquidity is not always clean. And great programs require a framework that can survive multiple cycles.

Anthony brings the perspective of an institutional allocator who has seen enough market turns to know that consistency is not boring. In venture, it may be the whole game.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I are back for another DDQ episode, this time digging into founders, fraud, and the dangerous line between ambition and deception.

Venture has always rewarded belief before proof. That is part of what makes the industry powerful. But it also creates room for narrative to outrun reality. We get into where “fake it till you make it” becomes a problem, how investors should think about diligence, and why trust is still the most important currency in the business.

This one is a timely conversation for founders, GPs, and LPs alike.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome Zach Ruchman, Shareholder and Managing Director of Private Investments at HB Wealth, for a conversation on private markets, differentiation, and what it takes to stand out when everyone’s materials start to look the same.

This is one of the core tensions in venture fundraising right now. The market is full of smart people with polished decks and reasonable strategies. But LPs are looking for evidence of real edge: sourcing, judgment, discipline, alignment, and a reason to believe this GP is uniquely suited for the work.

For GPs, this episode is a useful mirror.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome Marcia Mitchell to trace her path from FF Venture Capital to New York venture and fund investing.

What stood out to me in this conversation is the blend of problem-solving and people work. Venture is often described as pattern recognition, but the best investors are also translators, coaches, relationship builders, and steady hands in uncertain situations.

Marcia’s perspective is especially useful for emerging managers and LPs thinking about what kind of partnership actually helps a firm grow beyond capital alone.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome Iliana Oris Valiente, a Fortune 500 corporate executive, independent LP, and founder of the Venture Forward Institute.

This conversation is for the next generation of LPs, but it is also useful for GPs who want to understand how capital allocators are being formed today. Venture is full of unwritten rules, but the market is changing fast enough that the next generation cannot simply inherit the old playbook.

Iliana brings a thoughtful perspective on what new LPs need to learn first, and how they can build judgment without getting lost in the noise.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Alexa and I welcome David Clark, CIO at VenCap, for a conversation on data, venture returns, and what it takes to build a durable view of the asset class.

Venture can sometimes feel allergic to structure. But great allocation requires both judgment and evidence. This episode gets into how data can sharpen manager selection without pretending that the numbers alone can do the whole job.

For anyone thinking about how LPs evaluate venture at scale, David’s perspective is a valuable one.

This week on Swimming with Allocators, we wrap up our “Best of 2025” reflections with more of the moments, lessons, and conversations that shaped the season.

What I enjoy about these recap episodes is that they let the audience hear the throughline. The venture market changed. The allocator market changed. But the fundamentals kept coming back: trust, discipline, differentiated judgment, and the ability to stay thoughtful when the market tries to make everyone reactive.

Part 2 is a strong listen for anyone who wants the year’s lessons in one place.