Intro
John-Austin Saviano, founding CIO of the Berkeley Endowment, takes David Weisburd through what an LP is actually underwriting when it backs a fund manager: the process behind a track record rather than the record itself, why a first-time fund is the most knowable thing in an institutional portfolio, and how an emerging manager should run a raise.
Guest: John-Austin Saviano, founding CIO of the Berkeley Endowment, previously an investor at the Moore Foundation, twenty-five years evaluating fund managers, now advising founders launching investment firms
Host: David Weisburd
Published: 28 August 2026 on How I Invest with David Weisburd
Show notes | 1 hr 9 min
Key Takeaways
GPs pitch the track record; LPs are buying the process behind it
"they'll overemphasize things like track record or the fanciness of their bio"
A track record is an artifact of the conditions that produced it
Saviano's analogy is recording artists, whose "best albums are usually their first couple albums"
Durability is a count of investments, not a count of years
"A private equity fund might make a few investments a year. Citadel might make hundreds of investments in an hour."
The unforgivable sin for a CIO is owning something you don't understand
First-time funds are not riskier — they are knowable
A $25 or $50 million check buys real access at fund one and a courtesy meeting at fund 14
New firms are the R&D line in an institutional portfolio, and an all-fund-10 book buys beta
The great returns come from doing what is unusual, not from doing what is illiquid
That, he says, is the mislearning people took from David Swensen and Yale
Scarce capital is the whole point — "if your capital isn't scarce, why would it be valuable?"
Credit is the market he is most interested in over the next ten years
"we haven't seen a true credit cycle for a good long while now. And we can't hold back the ocean forever."
The second-best outcome of a first meeting with an LP is a clear no
Fundraising is fishing, farming or hunting, and hunting has the worst odds
Don't outrun your governance — a differentiated portfolio needs an investment committee prepared for differentiated results
The Mistake Saviano Sees GPs Make Over and Over
Weisburd opened by asking for the one mistake GPs repeat, and Saviano put it on a misread of the audience
"they have in their mind what they think is most important about their work, and they don't fully understand what an LP really cares about" — John-Austin Saviano
The symptom is a pitch built on credentials: "they'll overemphasize things like track record or the fanciness of their bio"
What LPs actually want to hear, he says, is about the manager and their process
His warning on the track record itself: "track records are inherently backward looking and track records can be an artifact of what has happened"
He cites the standard disclosure — past performance is not necessarily predictive of future results — and calls it "a 100% true"
What a Track Record Can and Cannot Tell You
A robust record needs three things at once: a lot of transactions or data points, a consistent set of decision makers, and a consistent set of market conditions
Most records have none of that — they span different market conditions and different decision makers, which is why he says a firm's record is less robust than it looks
What he is reading a record for is the process underneath it: "What we want to see from track record is evidence of an investment process at work that is compelling, is repeatable, is understandable"
A fantastic record earned over too long a period, in an environment very different from today's, is a lot less reliable
On why the moment matters more than the name: "I sometimes think about it as you think of recording artists, their best albums are usually their first couple albums"
A certain group of people come together at a certain moment with a certain set of life experiences — a firm terrific in the post-GFC period is not automatically terrific now, and some of those firms are floundering today
Weisburd played devil's advocate with Warren Buffett, Ken Griffin and Renaissance Technologies as examples of decades-long sustainable advantage
Saviano's answer: those firms feel common because they are famous — "We all know who Warren Buffett is because there aren't 25 Warren Buffetts. There's one."
The Citadel distinction is about data, not genius: "A private equity fund might make a few investments a year. Citadel might make hundreds of investments in an hour."
"you frankly, you're getting a lot more data from a hedge fund than you are from a private equity fund"
Weisburd pushed the point with a baseball analogy — "if you had a batter that was batting once a day, a 100 games a year for ten years, that would be a thousand at bats" — against a firm taking that many at bats in a single day
Twenty-Five Years of the Private Markets Getting More Crowded
The change he names first is access. In the early aughts at the Moore Foundation, with Gordon Moore as founder and tons of liquidity, he says they had access to virtually any firm they wanted
At today's scale, he says, it is much harder to find terrific firms, and the assets those firms compete over are far more competitively bid
On how thoroughly the mid-market has been picked over: "There's no $100,000,000 services company in this country that doesn't get called on by a private equity firm multiple times a month"
Weisburd brought a prior guest's anecdote — University of Chicago's Steve Kaplan, who asked private equity firms pitching him in the nineties what their differentiation was, and had some of them tell him they didn't do that
Saviano's verdict on the things that used to be differentiation: proprietary deal flow, unbanked assets and operational resources for unsophisticated businesses are all "table stakes now"
As table stakes, he says, they squeeze out a lot of the excess returns you would expect from most private strategies
On re-ups: he says backing a manager in a prior fund should never make the next one automatic — a good LP re-tests why it backed them and whether those reasons still predict returns
Process Is What an LP Is Actually Buying
With his CIO hat on, he wants to see the whole chain: what a manager sees, how they find investments, how they evaluate and structure them, what they do with them after they own them, and how they sell
Firms are rarely good at all of it: "you have to be demonstrably great at least one, if not two of those things and be very good at the rest of them"
Some firms are terrific at sourcing; some pay market prices and are extraordinary with assets after they own them
He then reads the record backwards to confirm it — whether the firm bought below market, or paid full price and did something extraordinary afterwards
Knowing which it is tells him how the firm will actually earn a return, and lets him build diversification across kinds of managers rather than across labels
The bar he sets for himself as an allocator: "the really truly unforgivable sin is doing things you don't understand"
If there is no process and you have no intuition for how a manager does what they do, he says, "that's not really investing anymore"
What Process Buys the Manager
For the firm itself, process is where durability comes from — a manager who keeps changing how they approach the market is unlikely to be very good at it
Process is also how a team gets clarity: "What's our strike zone?" — what counts as their kind of asset, how those assets are evaluated, how they come together as a portfolio
Every team member from the most junior to the most senior should be able to answer that
Weisburd argued it solves two problems at once: chasing, and the firm's own ability to see where its thesis was wrong and evolve it between vintages
He relayed Stanley Druckenmiller on the pull of a rising price — "Stanley famously said that nothing is as cheap as after it's gone up 40%" — and noted even Druckenmiller is not immune
Saviano's framing is a firm knowing where it is not good: "A firm needs to know where its sweet spot is. And it's almost as important to know where it's not."
Core competencies can evolve as markets and teams change, but he wants to see that a firm knows what it wakes up every morning to go and do
Learning Across Vintages, and Backing the Person in a Fund I
What learning looks like inside a vintage is responsiveness to the market, not a change of mind
His read of the current environment: credit spreads are super tight and base rates have been relatively high for a long time
A firm reliant on leverage invests very differently now than it did several years ago when money was almost free and spreads almost didn't matter
Weisburd put the institutional LP view to him — that in a fund one, and sometimes a fund two, you are backing the manager more than the strategy, eyes open to the strategy evolving
Saviano agreed and extended it: every good firm should evolve, and with younger firms you are backing the person or team and their ideas because there is no obvious track record to lean on
"Really, you shouldn't be relying on just the track record in any circumstance"
The question he is answering is whether this is the right person, at the right point in their career, executing a strategy that is right for right now
The Patterns Exceptional Managers Share
"Exceptional managers know who they are." They can say what their kind of asset is, what their process is, and what kind of situation they invest in
They are grounded, and they are learners — they evolve, but from a sense of purpose rather than from drift
The second trait is stewardship: he looks for managers who take seriously their role as a fiduciary of someone else's money, and says that seriousness shows up in how the firm treats its LPs and the standards it holds its team to
How it shows up inside a fund: investments made because they fit the manager's ideas, not because capital needs deploying
The bad version is asset management wearing an investor's clothes: firms doing okay deals that aren't high conviction, thinking about deployment and pacing and where they are in the investment period
"They'll worry about, have I put enough money to work this month, this year, versus is this the right time?"
What Makes a Good LP Partner
"Good LP is one who does their homework." They arrive ready to understand what the manager does and to see the world through the manager's eyes
The good ones are difficult on purpose: "the best LPs are a pain. They ask a lot of questions. They want a lot of access. They want a lot of data."
That work is what lets them stay when results hit a weak spot, because they understand what is actually happening
"It can separate a bad outcome from a bad decision"
Where the advantage shows up is in the rough patches — investors who understand the team stay calm through a bad mark or a bad quarter because they can tell whether it is time to panic
He frames the underlying job the same way for both sides: "the critical thing we do as investors is try and separate a good decision from a bad decision versus a good outcome from a bad outcome"
Rootedness, and Weisburd's Bitcoin Illustration
Weisburd's own worked example is Bitcoin bought on a friend's recommendation: in at $10, up to $150, a 15x, then a 20% drawdown to an 11x — and the investor with no thesis sells to lock in the 11x
His punchline is the zoom-out — "now it's at 69,000"
His conclusion: rootedness takes more work upfront, and "it keeps you from doing the wrong thing at the exact wrong time"
Weisburd extended it to institutional capital: at the Moore Foundation and at Berkeley the money wasn't Saviano's own, and a one-person decision wasn't available — there was an investment committee to communicate with
Defending a fund that is down 30% is very difficult if you can't say why it is in the portfolio
Saviano's version of the same discipline is that enough good decisions, made with enough grounding, pile up and overcome the bad outcomes that still come from good decisions
The Criteria Berkeley Used to Pick Partners
He says he ran an explicit set of criteria under his watch at Berkeley — characteristics that indicated a firm would be a good partner, which made it easy to be a good partner back
First criterion is alignment: "Do we feel like the investment team is motivated to generate results that are aligned with our capital?"
GP commitment is one simple measure, but he says there are a lot of ways to get to alignment and the question is only whether it is there
Second is comprehension, and the manager's ability to communicate. How well you understand what a firm does drives both the initial decision and your ability to stick through underperformance
Third is fiduciary mindset, which he grounds in his own seat — capital from Berkeley or the Moore Foundation was "not our money. We're there as stewards of that capital for future generations."
The criteria run both ways. Just as a fund manager should have a strike zone, an LP "should know what you're looking for and why you're looking for it"
Staying With a Manager Through a Bad Vintage
Asked for an example, he described a sector-focused firm he backed as a new firm and declined to name
The sector went through a really tough patch during the first fund's investment years, and what let them stay was unpacking how much of the result came from the environment versus the manager's own efforts
On an objective standard the results weren't great; on a relative standard, given the sector, he says they did just great — and the firm has delivered outstanding results for the last decade since
Weisburd brought in prior guest Cliff Asness, "founder and CIO of, I think now, roughly a $150,000,000,000" firm, on the benchmarking whiplash of being praised in years he should be criticized and criticized in years he beat a falling market
Why a Great Track Record Is Dangerous
"you don't want to be tricked by the good outcome. You can have a great outcome that was a result of a really bad process."
If the record isn't repeatable, he says, "well, that was just luck"
He half-remembers a line he could not source on air — something along the lines of there being "nothing more dangerous to an LP than a GP with a great track record" — because a great record makes it easy to be lulled into security
Weisburd traced the problem back to Harry Markowitz's Nobel-winning case for diversification: a diversified portfolio guarantees some assets are down in some years, and selling the down ones and buying the up ones produces negative alpha rather than just worse returns
Outperformance requires looking wrong for stretches: "Any managers that's going to outperform is going to have to be doing things differently than everyone else"
"And different is another way of saying bad" — which is why he wants to know why a manager is underperforming before deciding whether to stay
Weird Is Where the Returns Are, and the Mislearning From Swensen
Weisburd asked whether a genuine right to win tends to look weird or low status, since anything everyone can do gets competed away
Saviano treats differentiation as arithmetic: "We have to be doing something different to generate differentiated results. That's axiomatic."
The endowment model is his proof that weird becomes normal. When David Swensen wrote his book in the late nineties into 2000, venture capital, private equity, real assets and hedge funds were relatively new to institutional investors and seemed risky; they are now fundamental parts of investor portfolios
What he took from Swensen was the willingness to be different and to use a long-term asset base to do things that are illiquid
The mislearning, in his words, was reading Yale's record as a formula — that doing lots of private, illiquid things generates higher returns
"The great returns coming from doing things that are unusual, that a lot of other people aren't doing."
"I used to say, if your capital isn't scarce, why would it be valuable?" — parts of the market flooded with capital are unlikely to pay, while places with little interest or expertise give you a chance to be the smart money in the room
Weisburd cited CalSTRS CIO Scott Chan, a prior guest, on running "over $350,000,000,000" and having to be big enough in a new asset class to move it — and argued the crowding problem is universal, naming large buyouts and the trillions of retail dollars now coming on board
"whether you have $350,000,000,000 like CalSTRS or you have $350 as a retail investor, you need to be wary of that" — David Weisburd
His own example is a country fund nobody wanted. Comparing notes with other CIOs, he told them he was headed to Brazil, and got asked why
"that's why we're going down because no one thinks there's a reason to go down there" — and it turned out to be one of their best fund managers for ten years
Credit as the Underrated Market of the Next Ten Years
Asked what is underrated right now, he hedged that predictions about the present are tricky, then named credit as what he is most interested in watching over the next ten years
"Credit spreads are an all time tight." He pairs that with enormous issuance, including issuance around new technologies
Those conditions, he says, tend to lead to excesses, which tend to lead to accidents and blowups
"we haven't seen a true credit cycle for a good long while now. And we can't hold back the ocean forever."
The question he is actually asking is who is equipped for it: who has the skillset to invest in a highly disrupted credit market if one emerges over the next quarters or years
The Charismatic Founder Problem, and FOMU
Weisburd described a trade that ran from non-consensus to consensus and back — smart money first, then crowded, then a crash
"Then a bunch of people came in, and it was $45,000,000,000." — David Weisburd
He disclosed he is long the manager and predicts it becomes a smart trade again
Saviano declined to judge a portfolio he doesn't know, saying he isn't privy to how it was set up, and allowed that "the end to end results are still really astronomically high in terms of total return"
His caveat is the how: "But the way in which he's gotten there is something that would give a lot of LPs pause."
A charismatic, clearly brilliant founder generating great results does not remove the homework — the question is whether you understand how the results were generated well enough to think they repeat
Weisburd raised Ashby Monk's concept of FOMU, fear of messing up, and the career risk that stops LPs acting on something interesting
Saviano reframed career risk as competence: "LPs can only do things that they understand. And if you do something you don't understand, that's where you really get in trouble."
A serious LP cannot "blindly sign the sub docs on something that has had a great return and just hope that it'll continue to do so"
Why First-Time Funds Are Not Riskier: Knowability
His most contrarian position is that first-time funds carry no extra risk, and the reason is access
"One of the biggest differences with newer firms, I like to call them challenger firms, is their knowability."
A founding team raising a first pool is highly motivated to spend time with a reputable institutional LP, share detail, and show assets
The contrast is a high Roman numeral fund. A firm that reached fund 14 has clearly done a lot right, but fund 14 comes with an enormous amount of complexity
The check-size asymmetry is the whole argument: a $25 or $50 million check buys tons of insight and access at a fund one raise, while "if I show up with that same 25 or $50,000,000 check to a fund 14, that's maybe a multi billion dollar raise"
What that buys instead is a courtesy meeting with a partner, a great IR team, a great data room and a lot of anecdotes
Complexity is what makes it a harder investment, because you don't really know who the decision makers are or how congruent the record is with the team sitting there today
New Firms as the R&D Line in a Portfolio
"Newer firms, I think are best seen as the R&D in an investment portfolio." He wants a book where people aren't all doing the same things the same way
Newer firms have less baggage and different motivations, and what looks edgy at fund one can be conventional wisdom by the time they raise fund four
What R&D means in practice is a different way of seeing, not a different asset class — they may be doing buyouts or credit, but they approach the work differently
His archetype is the 38- or 40-year-old with years at a big mainline firm who has an insight they can't execute there, either because they aren't senior enough or the investor base isn't aligned, and who leaves to build around it
Weisburd added the AI-native cohort — Earlybird in Europe, now almost entirely AI native, and Footwork on its third fund doing everything from an AI-native perspective — and argued that without access to the next generation of firms you go stale even in how you judge a fund
Saviano agreed the staleness risk is significant, with the tools investors use to analyze investments changing under their feet; a firm with a great legacy, a big team and twenty years of habit has to be very agile to move
On a portfolio of nothing but fund 10s and later: "you're going to have probably pretty average performance"
Those are very good firms deploying lots of capital and are likely to generate beta for their segment; very few strategies make size an advantage, and very few private capital firms build a culture that keeps a fund 10 as agile and aggressive as a fund one or two
Building an Endowment From Scratch: Don't Outrun Your Governance
Asked how he would build a portfolio if he were starting an endowment today, he began with governance rather than assets
The line he says CIOs joke about is "don't outrun your governance" — building a portfolio that meets the institution's objectives in a way the team and organization can sustain
Spending a lot of time with challenger firms was a big part of what he did at Berkeley, and he says that required bringing the investment committee along
Differentiated thinking means differentiated results, including periods behind the benchmark — and the committee has to be not merely prepared for that but excited by it
On what happens when they aren't: if you are behind your benchmark and always looking over your shoulder, whether you run an endowment or pick stocks, "You're not going to be on your best game"
What an Investment Committee Is Actually For
He says committees vary mostly on one lever: how much authority they have delegated to the CIO
The job, in his framing, is picking and managing the CIO — much like a board picks and manages a CEO, rather than deciding who runs European sales
A good committee understands the plan the CIO is executing and backs them in it
That puts work on the CIO too: the committee has to understand the plan before hiring, and the CIO has to keep communicating how it is being implemented
The last requirement is restraint: good committee members listen more than they speak and forgo the chance to tinker — "They're there to guide, not tinker."
What GPs Get Wrong in the Room, and Beginner's Mind
Weisburd framed the underrated difficulty of spinning out as a feedback problem: a GP can repeat the same error indefinitely without ever learning why an LP put their pencils down
The common error is leading with the record: a GP comes in hot with the track record and thinks that is what they're selling
Quartiles and DPI numbers matter, but a good LP hoping to back a manager across many vintages needs to know who they are and how they think first
He concedes the record is what buys attention, and says the LP's job is to hear the signal in the noise and know it when they see it
His antidote to allocator cynicism came from a Buddhist boss who was a great investor and taught him "the idea of a beginner's mind"
The pressure that creates it is volume: an LP might get pitched "a couple 100 times a year, year after year after year" and back a shockingly small percentage
The balance he argues for is cynicism against the possibility that the next meeting is the one that occupies the next six months of your life
Novelty, and the Sense of Inevitability
Novelty for its own sake is worth nothing — what matters is an obvious, compelling reason for doing something differently
"A good pitch has a sense of inevitability to it."
The components he lists are the person's experience, the part of the market they're addressing, the timeliness of it, and mastery — is this an obviously interesting thing to be doing right now, and are they demonstrably a master of their trade
Put together, he says, that gets an investor to sit up and pay attention without the strategy needing to be wildly novel
FOMO on the LP Side, and the Bucket-Filling Trap
He says FOMO is not a big driver of LP behavior, because LPs have the benefit of time
There are firms that are genuinely hard to get into and require LPs to build relationships and dance, but he says there are relatively few, and they are the famous ones
Access is inverted by size: a smaller pool needing "a 5 or $10,000,000 allocation" has far more it can do than the largest checkwriters
The bad version isn't FOMO, it's filling a bucket — an allocation to opportunistic real estate, an allocation to middle market buyout, and a commitment pace to hit
"don't just do something, stand there" is the expression he reaches for
He puts the blame on institutional incentives to deploy capital and to segregate people by strategy or asset class
Going a whole year without a commitment doesn't feel good and doesn't look good on an annual review — "But in some cases that may be the right decision."
Fish, Farm or Hunt
Weisburd raised the paradox of long relationship-building against the need for AUM, citing fundraiser Rahul Moodgal on spending fifteen years with UTIMCO before they wrote a first check
Saviano's framework, which he says he is stealing from someone he can't name: "You can fish, you can farm, you can hunt."
Hunting is what most people picture — targeting a specific Ivy League endowment, big game, an exorbitant effort and, in most circumstances, overwhelmingly low odds
Farming is the Moodgal model: cultivating and nourishing a relationship over a long period that ultimately bears fruit
Fishing is the one he thinks the current environment rewards — putting yourself and your ideas into the market through a podcast, LinkedIn or the things that drip out to LPs over time, and letting people find you
It used to just be quarterly letters; either way it is how people build conviction over time, and "part of fishing is also listening"
The payoff is being in the pipeline when a slot opens. Parts of an institutional portfolio are one in, one out, and when a manager is dropped or redeemed the CIO tells the team to light up the pipeline and get up to date on the five or ten firms they liked
That call can come six weeks after a first meeting or six years later
Believers Over Converts, and the Two-Gate Pipeline
Weisburd cited Mike Maples and, more recently, Rick Heitzman on looking for believers rather than converting people into a fund or an asset class
Saviano's coaching line is blunt: "the second best answer you can get is a no from an investor", because people who need an extraordinary amount of convincing either weren't told a compelling story or are too uncertain to act efficiently
"even still probably 90% of the people you talk to are going to say thanks, but no thanks" — and the 10% who are pulled forward are the better use of time
Weisburd put a double-gated thesis to him and asked him to shred it: of 100 LP meetings, only about 10 do real work, and conversion among those who do the work may run as high as 50%
Saviano called it absolutely right — tons of first meetings, a tiny fraction at second meetings, smaller still at third
The diagnostic he runs on a manager's raise is meeting depth, not meeting count: how many third meetings, how many on-sites where the LP came to see you
Those separate window shopping from honest, serious work, and conversion "goes astronomically higher" past that point
He describes the ladder explicitly: the first meeting is a sniff test, the second brings in the asset class head or the CIO, the third is where real work starts
His advice on the first rung: "Those first meetings should be half hour Zooms." Half an hour is enough to tell your story and to read the investor, and it stops both sides burning hour-long meetings on a non-fit
The two best outcomes are both decisive: the LP says this is super interesting, send me everything — or the LP is declarative that it isn't for them
Co-Founders, Inversion, and Building a Firm for LPs Instead of Yourself
Weisburd relayed his mentor Eric Andersen, a four-time unicorn founder, on never waiting for investors — execute day after day, keep them updated, and paradoxically that is what brings them around
Saviano only half agreed: "The real challenge the raw materials of investing is capital." You cannot build a team or demonstrate a record without it
What he takes from the advice is persistence in being in market, telling your story consistently and finding your people
Weisburd said he underestimated how much the co-founder relationship matters — he and Curtis worked together for five years before starting their firm — and argued the partner matters more than the strategy, because strategies evolve and a bad partner makes you quit after one or two misses
Saviano agreed and reached for marriage: "the analogies to like a marriage are real" — effective communication, a long courtship, and a deep level of trust
Weisburd introduced Charlie Munger's inversion — study the failure modes and avoid them — and asked where emerging managers fail repeatedly
The failure mode he names is building the firm LPs are imagined to want, rather than starting from a convicted view of who you are and what the opportunity is and then finding the investors who fit it
Fitting yourself to what you think investors want, he says, seems disingenuous and not core to who you are
Even a successful raise on that basis doesn't fix it: you may not have great returns, and you will have a firm you don't feel deep in your bones
The best founders he has backed would do the work whether or not he funded them — "They've burned the ships. They're on their way."
What He Does Now, and the Minimum Viable Firm
On his own seat today: "I've been on the other side of billions of dollars worth of sub docs." He now uses that experience to help entrepreneurial founders navigate the launch and growth of their firms
The work is helping them through what can amount to thousands of decisions in the early years, to increase the speed and likelihood of success
What new firms most often lack is a real team before the money arrives. Many hope to raise capital, generate fees and build the organization from there, avoiding the risk of hiring and paying people before any LP has committed
He says that generally doesn't work: if the strategy requires a team, LPs will reasonably expect to see a minimum viable product of that team
"this is what the minimum viable version of our firm looks like" is the honest question a manager has to answer for themselves
On the chicken-and-egg problem: asking LPs to believe you will be a great investor, a great firm builder and a great recruiter all at once is asking a lot
Showing them attractive people already hired, a great pipeline and a machine that is already working makes it far easier for them to get on board
The One Piece of Timeless Advice: Alignment
Given a message to send himself twenty-five years ago, he chose alignment: "Just understanding why people are making the decisions they are."
He is explicit that it is bigger than the GP commit — it is where someone is in their life, what they have invested in their conception of the work, and where the work is going to take them
The same test applies to hiring, or to reading a mid-tier person at a firm: understand where they want to get to and you understand how they will behave
Asked whether you simply ask, he said sometimes you get a direct answer and sometimes you tease it out or make your own judgment, "because not everyone always knows"
The bad version of starting a firm is doing it because it feels like your turn — friends did it, it seemed easy — and he says that doesn't typically work
The good version is commitment that doesn't need a big check to prove it: someone willing to leave the comfortable thing, "even if they don't have $40,000,000 to write as a GP commit", is pot committed through their career and their reputational risk
Saviano's bottom line is that an LP is underwriting a process it can see working and a person it can actually know, which is why he treats a first-time fund as the more knowable investment and a celebrated track record as the thing most likely to lull an allocator into a decision it can't explain.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Berkeley Endowment (Saviano's founding CIO seat; where he ran an explicit set of partner criteria and spent heavily on challenger firms)
Moore Foundation (Where he started as an LP in the early aughts; with Gordon Moore as founder they had access to virtually any firm they wanted)
Citadel and Ken Griffin (His example of a durable process — hundreds of investments an hour, so an LP gets far more data than from a private equity fund)
Warren Buffett and Renaissance Technologies (Weisburd's devil's-advocate examples of decades-long edge; Saviano's answer is that they feel common because they are famous)
Yale and David Swensen (The record everyone copied; Saviano says the lesson was being different, not being illiquid)
CalSTRS and Scott Chan (A prior guest, cited by Weisburd on running over $350,000,000,000 and needing to be big enough to move a new asset class)
Bitcoin (Weisburd's illustration of what happens to an investor with no thesis: in at $10, up to $150, and out at an 11x)
Earlybird and Footwork (Weisburd's examples of AI-native venture firms — one of Europe's most famous firms now almost entirely AI native, and a third-time fund built that way from the start)
Benchmark (Named by Saviano among the few firms LPs genuinely have to dance to get into)
UTIMCO (The endowment in Weisburd's example of a fifteen-year cultivation before a first check)
Books & Resources Mentioned
David Swensen's book (Written, as Saviano dates it, in the late nineties into 2000; the source of the endowment model and, he argues, of the mislearning that illiquidity itself is the return driver)
Previous How I Invest episodes with Steve Kaplan, Cliff Asness and Scott Chan (All three cited by Weisburd — Kaplan on nineties-era differentiation, Asness on benchmarking whiplash, Chan on the scale problem at CalSTRS)
Ashby Monk's concept of FOMU, fear of messing up (Raised by Weisburd as the career-risk counterweight to FOMO)
Charlie Munger's inversion (Weisburd's framing for the failure-mode question: avoid the ways firms fail rather than chase the ways they succeed)
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