Wellington’s Jean Hynes on the Art of Investing and Finding New Markets

**Jean Hynes** (0:05)
The art of equity investing is really dreaming what is the potential of something that could be so transformational that people can't imagine it.

**Alison Mass** (0:13)
I'm Alison Mass, Chairman of Investment Banking in Goldman Sachs' Global Banking and Markets Group and your host for this episode of Goldman Sachs Exchanges Great Investors. Today I'm sitting down with Jean Hynes, who's the CEO of Wellington Management, an investment management firm specializing in equities, fixed income, hedge funds, and private assets with over $1.3 trillion in assets under management.
Well, welcome to Great Investors, Jean. So happy to have you here.

**Jean Hynes** (0:44)
Thank you so much, Alison. Really, really glad to be here.

**Alison Mass** (0:48)
So I like to start these interviews by talking about your background. You majored in economics, but your college experience was somewhat unusual. So tell us about that.

**Jean Hynes** (0:58)
Yeah, so I went to Wellesley College. Just maybe a little bit of background. My parents were Irish immigrants, and so I didn't know where I was going to go to college. Just going to college was a big thing in my family. And I arrived at Wellesley. I had pretty much a full scholarship. So I loved the Wellesley alums ahead of me that provided that. And my mother, being Irish immigrants, my mother wanted something she recognized. So my first semester was computer science, which is the only C I got in my whole academic career.
But I found my way to economics the second semester, and I loved it. And actually the interesting thing is I loved microeconomics, which is actually what I've done for my whole career. It wasn't just macroeconomics, it was the micro part where I really excelled at.

**Alison Mass** (1:46)
Were you a first-generation college student in your family? So they must have been really proud.

**Jean Hynes** (1:50)
Yes.

**Alison Mass** (1:51)
Yeah. Now you've been at Wellington for over 35 years, which is amazing.
Today. Today is my 35th. Today, congratulations.

**Jean Hynes** (1:58)
My third, Monday of 35 years ago I started.

**Alison Mass** (2:01)
Wow.
July 20th. That's fantastic. What a milestone. So tell us a little bit about your first role at Wellington.

**Jean Hynes** (2:09)
So going back to Wellesley, I took one course. I didn't know what I was going to do. I loved economics, but yeah, I didn't really know about the finance world or the research world. But I took a sociology class and I got a job in my junior year of college. And that's how I got introduced to the stock market, got introduced to the world of finance. I want to learn why stocks go up and down. I could verbalize that, leaving my senior year of college. And back in 1991 was not a great job market. You had the Iraq War, but I found my way to Wellington. And Wellington was a pretty small firm at the time, under 300 employees. And I took a job as an administrative assistant in the research department of Wellington.

**Alison Mass** (2:50)
That is a great story.

**Jean Hynes** (2:51)
And I remember the recruiter telling me, this is a great company. Don't worry about the title. So I would, I always say.

**Alison Mass** (2:58)
We use that same line, Nicole.

**Jean Hynes** (2:59)
Don't worry about the title. And it was true, actually. It was very true.
I immediately did research. It was sort of a combination of administrative assistant, research assistant. I worked with three analysts, global industry analysts. I worked on models and I opened mail. So I was very fast at opening mail, because I was very interested in sort of the research aspect of it.

**Alison Mass** (3:22)
So you said when you joined, there were 300 employees. How many do you have now?

**Jean Hynes** (3:25)
3,000. Wow.

**Alison Mass** (3:27)
That's a big difference.

**Jean Hynes** (3:28)
It's a big difference.

**Alison Mass** (3:29)
So you've said you didn't initially see yourself as a future CEO. So tell me about when that changed.

**Jean Hynes** (3:35)
So I never saw myself as a CEO. I think it began to change in 2014, when I became a managing partner at Wellington. And I was working with an executive coach for the first time. And she asked me in the beginning of our session, do you want to be CEO someday? And I said, no, absolutely not.
I was managing $70 billion in assets from Vanguard Health Care all the way to Longshore Biotech. I love investing. I love health care. And so it just wasn't my ambition. The managing partner part of it was like a leadership part of it, talent part of it that I was super interested in the talent leadership part of it. And then after working with Brendan Swords, CEO for about a year, I could see, like I could actually see, well, the decisions he was making were very similar to the decisions an investor makes, like operating in that gray zone all the time. And so I could see myself in him in some ways. And then I said at the end of that year of coaching, maybe I do want to be CEO. And she gave me really good advice. And she said, if you think you even have an inkling, then maybe we should continue working together.