Dr. Ashby Monk is the Executive and Research Director of the Stanford University Global Projects Center. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford, a Senior Advisor to the Chief Investment Officer of the University of California, and the co-founder of Long Game. Ashby advises sovereign wealth funds and large pension funds, and is involved with a bunch of fin tech companies, all of which attempt to create innovative solutions to fixing the financial future for individuals, pensions and countries in the years ahead. Our conversation starts with Ashby’s early work experience and path through academia, and flows into an exploration of next generation, lower cost approaches to active management for large asset owners.  We touch on investing in public equity, private equity, venture capital, and hedge funds using examples from the Canadian and Australian pensions, New Zealand Super Fund, and University of California endowment. Lastly, we discuss Long Game, an innovative company seeking to improve personal savings in the U.S.  Ashby is a passion-driven, creative thinker who rightfully has the ear of some of the most important pools of capital in the world.  His ideas will change the way you think about allocating capital. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Ellen Ellison is the Chief Investment Officer of the University of Illinois Foundation, which she joined in 2013 as its first leader of the now $1.7 billion pool of assets. Ellen restarted a program and a portfolio from scratch at a time when longer-established University investment offices already had their chips carefully placed in the markets. Yet with a small team, she built a clever portfolio and is starting to reap its rewards. Prior to joining Illinois, Ellen was the Executive Director of Investments at the University of Miami for five years, the leader of a small family office for a year, and a thirteen-year veteran of Fiduciary Trust Company.  She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Columbia University Business School, and currently sits on the Investment Committee for Mount Holyoke. Our conversation starts with Ellen’s career path and dives into the challenge of starting an endowment investment program from the ground up, including establishing governance practices and figuring out when to put cash to work when markets feel pricey. Her favorite opportunities in the market, including a long discussion of agriculture investing, offers a very different take on the world today. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides