How Institutional Investors Think and What Emerging Managers Must Know

A Swimming with Allocators Episode

This week on Swimming with Allocators, Earnest and Alexa welcome Wendy Li, Co-Founder and CIO of Ivy Invest. Wendy translates the institutional playbook for the rest of us, walking through how endowments and pensions actually evaluate emerging managers, what makes a fund narrative survive a committee, and why alpha still lives in smaller, earlier-stage vehicles. The most useful thread for emerging managers: institutions don’t just buy returns, they buy decision-making frameworks they can defend internally. Wendy also gets into how technology is reshaping access to alternatives and why educating individual investors on venture’s long duration is the real unlock.