Senior Decision Makers: Luis Laboy, Hewlett Foundation

**Luis Laboy** (0:00)
If I describe a market to you, I tell you, this market has geopolitical risk, it has political uncertainty, it has social polarization, it's got policy risk. The market structure was changing. And I asked you to tell me which market I'm describing, you would most likely say an emerging market, but it's not. Today, it describes any market that's out there. Once upon a time, I went into Ana's office. This is back at RCM. It was maddening for a young analyst. The dollar was weakening, emerging markets were falling. And I asked her, is a strong currency or a weak currency good or bad for emerging markets? And she just said, depends on why, which was a deeply unsatisfying answer for someone that still believed that the answers were in the spreadsheet. I wanted to put something into a model. What I actually realized many years later, and this is probably why this answer from her has stuck around for 20 plus years, is that my question was wrong. That's where I'm thinking a lot about today. Are we asking the right questions about markets? Markets have indeed changed, and all of those risks that I mentioned now described any country in the world, not just emerging markets and developed markets are somehow the bastions of the opposite of all of those things. Should we be thinking about the whole structure of markets differently? What does that mean for portfolio construction?

**Ted Seides** (1:22)
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators.
The CIOs of the largest pools of capital have jobs that require broad skill sets. They cover the world across asset classes and strategies, determine portfolio construction, and decide what goes into their portfolio. They're also leaders, managing people in an investment office, working with a board, and taking care of all their stakeholders, whether students, grantees, pensioners, family members, insured recipients, or sovereign states. It's a complex role that involves far more than just investing. But they don't do it alone. Behind every successful CIO is a talented team who focuses most if not all of their time on investing. We've spent time with many of these senior decision-makers at our summits, and find they're closest to the action and deeply insightful about investment opportunities and the investment process.
This mini-series, Senior Decision-Makers, features conversations with investors that have not yet ascended to the CIO seat. These professionals are the primary driver of decisions that lead new ideas into a portfolio or exits from a manager strategy and are at a fascinating point in their career. My partner and the CEO of Capital Allocators, Hank Sturmach, will take the mic and lead an exploration of the investment thinking and role of Senior Decision-Makers.

**Hank Sturmach** (3:00)
Our next guest on the Senior Decision-Makers series is Luis Laboy, Director of Public Equities at the Hewlett Foundation, where he spent the last decade running the public equity book alongside CIO Ana Marshall. A mentor and colleague he first met nearly 30 years ago. The foundation's assets stand at roughly $14 billion today.
Luis spent 15 years as a direct emerging markets investor at Everest Capital before crossing to the LP side, and our conversation digs into how he's leveraged that experience as an allocator. We discuss how the cadence and depth of decision-making changed when he went from a high turnover book at Everest to a handful of high conviction relationships at Hewlett. How his time split between portfolio construction and manager selection has evolved over his career, and how his time marketing funds shaped the way he interviews managers and thinks about turnover today.
Luis is incredibly insightful about how his early interests and upbringing have shown through across his career. He thinks and speaks in analogies, he's wildly entertaining, and in short, he's just a genuinely good dude, and that comes through in spades in our conversation.

**Ted Seides** (4:05)
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. Best of all, we get to serve this community without really selling them anything. The first is investor relations. The role includes both building real relationships with allocators and managers, and creating the experiences that bring them together. The relationships come first, knowing who should meet who, what each person is working through, and where the connections lie. The experiences are how you deliver on them, the kind of unreasonable hospitality that makes Will Gidera smile, thinking about how we make someone feel like the only person in the room. It takes off the charts EQ and real curiosity about how AI can deepen the way we connect with people. Tamar, our relationship savant, owns the world today, and she'll tell you it's the best seat in the business.