Ted Seides: 'How Do You Learn to Listen?'

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

**Jeff Ptak** (0:06)
Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I'm Jeff Ptak, Chief Ratings Officer at Morningstar Research Services.

**Christine Benz** (0:11)
And I'm Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance for Morningstar.

**Jeff Ptak** (0:15)
Our guest this week is Ted Seides. Ted hosts the popular Capital Allocators podcast where each week he interviews leaders in the investing and finance fields, including hedge fund managers, endowment chiefs and prominent academics.
Prior to launching Capital Allocators, Ted was a founding partner at Protege Partners, a firm that invested in and seeded hedge funds. Ted began his career at the Yale University Investment Office before doing stints at Stonebridge Partners and JH. Whitney and Company.
Ted recently published a book reflecting on his conversations with investment leaders and experts entitled Capital Allocators, How the World's Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest. Ted earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University and his MBA from Harvard Business School. He's also a CFA charter holder. Ted, welcome to The Long View.

**Ted Seides** (1:07)
Thanks, Jeff, thanks for seeing.

**Jeff Ptak** (1:10)
A lot of our listeners will be familiar with you, but not all of them will be. Can you talk about your background and how it's led up to this conversation in which we'll talk about the book you recently authored, Capital Allocators?

**Ted Seides** (1:24)
Sure. Well, I've spent, I guess, the early part of my career, earlier part of my career, 20 years as an institutional investor, primarily investing in funds. The first five were right out of college. I worked for David Swenson at the Yale University Investments Office and really learned the business at his feet, that business of multi-asset class investing, primarily through managers. And I left to go to business school. I came out thinking I wanted to be a direct investor and did that for two years across public and private markets and found myself longing to be back picking managers and ended up forming a partnership that was a hedge fund of funds called Protege Partners back in 2002 and stayed at Protege for 14 years.
Had some great results for our clients. And then I left in 2015 and wrote a book, which was a series of lessons and really case studies I had learned about the ecosystem for startup hedge fund managers, so fairly narrow. And that led to me appearing on a couple of podcasts. I was doing some consulting projects along the side and decided to start a podcast where I could mostly run around and talk to some of my old friends in the endowment world and see what they had been up to when I had my head down focusing on hedge funds for 14 or 15 years.
So that really just started as a productive extra use of my time and about a year ago, some of the projects I've been working on sort of fell away and that became the core of my activities. And so now we're kind of four years into this podcast, I've had just about 200 episodes and 5 million downloads. And somewhere along the way, really as my kind of COVID project, I could not keep track of what I was learning anymore. And I decided to start distilling the lessons which turned into this book.

**Christine Benz** (3:17)
So a lot of our listeners are individual investors and financial advisors. They won't necessarily have the same chance that you've had where they're sitting in front of investment managers and sort of taking stock of how good they are. So what are the lessons that you think this book imparts that they can apply to their own practices or to their own investments?

**Ted Seides** (3:37)
Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, most of the book applies to just about anyone who's tasked with allocating a pool of capital.
And the reason is that it's really broken into three sections. The first is a section that I call a toolkit.
And there are a set of skills that aren't really taught in the investment world, but they're very well known outside of it. So you think about things like interviewing and decision-making and leadership and management. And although those people may not be specifically interviewing money managers in the way that I have, it could be that the lessons that you learn about interviewing can equally be applied to how are you communicating with your clients? How do you learn to listen? How do you prepare for those meetings?
So that toolkit is very broadly applicable. The next section is an investment section. It's really investment frameworks. So that gets into how do people think about their strategy and process. And again, it's applicable to anyone who's trying to think through how to allocate capital. And then the last section is a bunch of the best quotes from my guests that didn't really fit into one of the first two. So those are really, they're a set of investment lessons and they're a set of life lessons that I think anyone would enjoy quite a lot and learn from.