The Importance of Private Markets: A Conversation with Jack Brennan & Mario Giannini

**Tom Lankto** (0:07)
Welcome to the webinar posted by Catholic Investment Services. Thank you for joining us today for a conversation about private markets investing. My name is Tom Lankto and I'm privileged to serve as board member and senior advisor for Catholic Investment Services and pin share for our CEO, Tim Darcy.
Tim is actually headed to the Vatican today for an important conference at Montserrat Bonhomme and Faith Consistent Investing. Catholic Investment Services was founded by some of the investment industry's most respected leaders to address the investment challenges faced by Catholic organizations. We are a Catholic nonprofit providing sophisticated investment solutions for Catholic institutions and their investment consultants, and now manage over $1.6 billion of client assets in five different strategies. An important part of our nonprofit mission is offering educational programs like this one for the Catholic investing community. My colleague Sophia Kyra has done a great job organizing this program and is at the Zoom controls. Today's format is conversational. Our audience is muted, but there will be time for audience questions during and after the formal part of the program. So please use the Q&A feature on your Zoom screen to submit a question. You receive biographical information for our panelists, but I want to mention a few highlights. Jack Brennan is familiar to many as the headliner of various CIS programs and through his many noteworthy corporate and philanthropic leadership roles. Jack is a co-founder of CIS and serves as founding chair of our board.
CIS has been privileged to partner with Mario Giannini and his colleagues at Hamilton Lane on three CIS Catholic Impact Funds and our CIS Catholic Venture Access Fund. Hamilton Lane focuses exclusively on private markets and manages or supervises more than $1 trillion in client assets. Mario is also a talented musician who performs with the aptly named company band, the Hamiltones. Mario also sets the tone for a very positive corporate culture that has benefited CIS and its investors. Mario and Jack, we're very grateful to have you with us today.
We normally begin our programs with a short prayer, and since it's May, we'll start by praying to Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal.
O Mary, conceive without sin, pray for us and for all who invoke you with faith. Guide us in difficult times, enlighten our path, and keep us under your maternal protection. Give us the strength to remain faithful to God and to open our hearts to the graces you wish to bestow upon us. As always, we pray for peace and civility and offer prayers and thanks for the women and men religious, their late colleagues, and the many volunteers who, through their work for Catholic ministries, have devoted their lives to something bigger than themselves. Amen. Jack, take it away.

**Jack Brennan** (3:09)
Thank you, Tom, and thank you, Mario, for being with us today. And for the seven years, hard to imagine partnership with Catholic Investments. It flies by.

**Mario Giannini** (3:18)
It does, and thank you for having me.

**Jack Brennan** (3:20)
Well, one of the things, as Tom mentioned, that we do, and this is for those who are new to our audience, when we started up over a decade ago, we thought leadership would be a helpful thing for us to bring to our clients and interested parties. We've been very fortunate over the years to have leading lights from various parts of the investment business join us on calls like this. But we don't always get a chance to get somebody who probably will deny this, I would say, pretty much invented the business of managing pools of capital in the private markets for a variety of clients, and that's Mario Giannini.

**Mario Giannini** (3:56)
Thank you, and I will deny it.

**Jack Brennan** (3:58)
But when I first met Mario, I think we were talking in millions, certainly not even billions back then. Now you're in some form or other at a trillion dollars plus, it's quite a story of success.

**Mario Giannini** (4:12)
I will tell one story, and I think I've mentioned it to you Jack, I will never forget the board meeting you had me come to at Vanguard. You didn't tell me that Messrs. Bogle and Burton Malkiel, who had no belief in private markets, anything other than public markets and random walk, and it is the worst meeting I ever had in front of a board. They shredded me.

**Jack Brennan** (4:35)
It wasn't that bad.

**Mario Giannini** (4:37)
I learned from it, but it was just an amazing experience to be with those two people and you, and going after, how do we think about private markets? Why should we think about private markets? How should we think about them? It was amazing.