Best of Pre-Mortem Analysis: Gary Klein

**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 covers the pre-mortem analysis with its founder, Gary Klein. Gary discovered pre-mortems while working with fighter pilots and wrote a white paper applying the tool to investment analysis alongside Paul Johnson and Paul Sonkin.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:05)
Before we get to the interview, we're excited to introduce the next chapter of Capital Allocators University, an online on-demand curriculum with an annual in-person gathering for investment professionals committed to continuous learning.
One of the great ironies of investing is that the skills that matter most over a long career are often the ones least formally taught.
Things like decision-making, communication, leadership, time management, interviewing and building relationships. That's why we've evolved Capital Allocators University into an online on-demand experience, making those lessons accessible to investment professionals everywhere. The best careers don't compound through knowledge alone. They compound through knowledge and relationships. If you'd like to explore the curriculum or someone on your team comes to mind, visit the link in our show notes or the university page on our website. Thanks so much for spreading the word about the next chapter of Capital Allocators University.

**Ted Seides** (1:59)
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. And, they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back to an exact verifiable source. Because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it. And with AlphaSense, you know exactly what that is. See it for yourself. Try a free trial at alphasense.com/capital.
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 coworker 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 has 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.
We use Alex and our team at Capital Allocators swears by it. Try Alex for yourself at the link in our show notes, tryalex.admiredleadership.com.
Please enjoy this discussion of the proper use of pre-mortem analysis and investing with Gary Klein, Paul Johnson, and Paul Sonkin from 2019
Gentlemen, thanks for joining me.
Nobody wants to respond, there's too many people in the room.

**Paul Johnson** (5:45)