E1126: Capital Allocators Host Ted Seides goes deep on endowments, LP turnover, public/private market insights, ESG investing & more

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Jason Calacanis** (1:12)
Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. One of the questions I get a lot is what podcast you listen to.
And I have some peculiar ones. I have some ones that you probably listen to already. On the weird side, I listen to Brett Easton Ellis, who is an author who wrote Less Than Zero and American Psycho. And he's got an amazing podcast that's on Patreon. It's paid. I listen to Red Scare, which is like part of this dirtbag left, all these crazy lefties. And then on the right, sometimes I'll listen to Ben Shapiro. I like to get the range of ideas that are different than me, still processing on the New York Times, lots of different ones. But then a really interesting thing that's happened in my world is I discovered a podcast that I became obsessed with because, listen, there's only like one group of people, honestly, that I answer to anymore, and I barely answer to them, but I do have to go hat in hand and do a little dance and tap dance. Like literally, you would think I probably don't have to tap dance to anybody. I got the F you money. I don't care what anybody else thinks. There's like one group where I put on a suit and I go on tour and I go to them. And who are those people? LPs, limited partners.
I have to every three or four years when I raise a fund to angel invest and to do early stage investing, I got to put a suit on. I got to go to the East Coast. I got to get on that Amtrak up and down the corridor, go into these rooms with 12 MBAs. So I went to Ivy League schools and I went to school at night at Fordham. And I literally have to tap dance around the room and tell them what I'm planning to do for the next decade, only to have them say, gosh, I would love to get to know you a little bit more. Maybe we'll do the next fund. It's literally my life.
It's literally my life.
But part of that is that there is somebody who interviews these people. So I get to at least know what I'm dealing with on the other side of the table when yes, as crazy as it seems, the greatest angel investor of the last 10 years, except maybe for Chris Sokka. But I have to deal with constantly being, constantly being told no.
And Ted Seides, did I pronounce it correct? Seides?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:15)
Seides.

**Ted Seides** (3:15)
Seides.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:16)
Seides, Seides. I will get it by the end of the pod.
Ted Seides runs a podcast called Capital Allocators.
And it's just awesome. It's fricking awesome because you wonder who runs like the Harvard Endowment, the Yale Endowment, the Duke Endowment, or who does this derivative trainings? Who are these people in finance? Well, he does what I do with founders and venture capitalists on this podcast, except he does it with the capital allocators who give people like Bill Gurley or Chamath or myself money to invest in startups. So welcome to the podcast, Ted Seides.

**Ted Seides** (3:48)
Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:49)
How, who are you?
And how did you come up with this idea for capital allocators? How did you get to all of this? Give us a background on who you are.

**Ted Seides** (3:59)
Yeah, I mean, look, we can go through the long version and the short version. The short version is I've spent 20 years on that side of the table. So very beginning, first job out of college, I worked for the Yale Endowment for David Swenson for five years, and then went to business school, thought I wanted to do direct investing, tried, you could say tried and failed or tried for a little bit, and went back to it and ran a hedge fund of funds for 14 years.