Best of Interviewing: Ted Seides

**Ted Seides** (0:06)
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators.
For the second year, our summer series will share some of the best episodes of the past, curated from our favorites and yours. You can pull down many of the great ones on our Spotify playlists. This series pushes them to your regular listening feed. Our 2026 summer series focuses on improving the investment process. Over the next six weeks, we'll share 10 gems from interdisciplinary skill sets that will help you level up your investing across decision-making, interviewing, storytelling, negotiations, and habit formation.
This week's summer series is a highly atypical episode in which I appear as the guest. Matt Breitfelder from Apollo asked to interview me about interviewing, something I learned far more from hosting this show over the last nine years than I ever did while interviewing managers for the prior 20 The conversation was sufficiently popular that it made the summer series on investment process. Before we get going, we're hiring at Capital Allocators, two roles that will shape our next chapter. They're two of the best jobs in the business, at least in my opinion, that will help us bring together our community of allocators and managers to compound knowledge and relationships. And best of all, we get to serve this community without really selling them anything. Full descriptions of the role are available at capitalallocators.com. And thanks for spreading the word about our two new roles at Capital Allocators. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing, transcript, or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in the retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content, over 500 million curated documents from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls.
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That's alphasense.com with a hyphen in the middle slash capital. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Intap Deal Cloud. You already know Intap Deal Cloud. It's where your firm keeps its pipeline, its relationships and years of deal history. Now meet Celeste, Intap's new agentic AI and an expert co-worker that works right inside Deal Cloud. Together, Deal Cloud with Celeste changes what your firm can do. Celeste runs on your firm's own data and your own playbook, how you source, diligence and decide. It works inside your compliance rules from day one, so it screens your inbound deals against your thesis far more than your team could reach on its own. It tells you which LPs are most likely to re-up in your next race. Hand it a sim and it builds your first LBL model in minutes. Every firm can only chase as many deals as its people have hours to work. Celeste lifts that ceiling. Now the deals you walk away from are the ones you meant to. Deal Cloud with Celeste is generally available now from Intap. Learn more and book your demo at intap.com/capitalallocators.
Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Admired Leadership. Back in April on episode 497, I sat down with Randall Studman, the executive coach behind Admired Leadership, who's advised more than 500 CEOs, including some of the most respected names in asset management. Randall introduced me to Alex, an AI leadership coach's team built on 40 years of proprietary research into what the best leaders actually do. For investment professionals, that means your entire team gets on-demand coaching grounded in the behaviors that drive results, and build the kind of followership that retains your top talent.
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Please enjoy Matt interviewing me about interviewing in 2023
So Matt, this is all your idea.

**Matt Breitfelder** (5:25)
Yes, it was.
I think that the idea was, you're the ultimate interviewer, so why don't we interview the interviewer about interviewing? So why don't we cut this into two pieces? I think one is kind of the why of your background story, of how you got this thing started, and then I think we can shift into the how.
You've been doing this a long time. I'd love to help you unpack what the lessons learned are that may be useful to your listeners. As on a regular basis, we are all interviewing people, we are speaking on panels, we are giving presentations, and I think the thought was there may be some very useful lessons learned coming out of your experience that we can all benefit from. So if that works, why don't we start with the why? So how did you get started with the podcast and how did you in particular approach mastering the craft of interviewing?