Steve Neel is Deputy Chief Investment Officer at the New Mexico Educational Retirement Board.  He spearheads the substantial alternative investing program at the fund. Our conversation starts with Steve’s childhood in the wettest state in the US – Hawaii – and how he ended up in one of the driest – New Mexico

“An investment in education gives the best returns” Benjamin Franklin

Tony Miller is managing director of Excolere Equity Partners, a private equity firm focused on the education space.  He holds a number of board roles including Apollo Education group, ACT, Criteria Corp and Go Guardian.  He was co-founder of the Vistria Group, a Chicago based private equity firm and prior to that was Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer in the US Department of Education

LaRoy Brantley is a managing principal at Meketa Investment Group. He has over 20 years experience in an investment consulting capacity. We first met when we joined Cambridge associates earlier in our careers. He has had multiple public fund board positions and has a particular focus on raising awareness of diverse investment managers. 

Kimberly Smith is Head of Capital Formation at Techstars.  She was previously Director of Marketing and Investor Relations at Owl Creek Asset Management and before that worked at Davidson Kempner and ABN AMRO.  She holds a number of Board Roles and is an active advocate for education.

Thomas Knowles is Managing Partner of Gratitude Railroad. Gratitude Railroad is a community driven impact investing firm championing innovative businesses that generate compelling financial returns and enduring impact. 

As we prepare for Series 5 of the Fiftyfaces Podcast, we are delighted to bring you this preview from Series 5, a joint podcast between Fiftyfaces Productions and Alvine Capital.  Alvine Capital is a specialist investment advisor and fund placement boutique. 

Nate Kirk is the co-founder of Everside Capital Partners, a private credit fund focused on the lower-middle market based in New York City. He founded the firm together with Moritz Poehl in 2016, and was previously a portfolio manager at Third Avenue Management, where he focused on stressed and distressed credit, special situations and flexible credit, and prior to that worked as a Trader and High Yield Credit Researcher at J P Morgan. 

Lauren Juliff is Climate and Sustainability Product Lead and Head of UK Institutional at Storebrand Asset Management UK. Her educational background is in science and she has a MSc in Climate Change: Environment, Science and Policy. We start our conversation with Lauren’s background and a passion for dance that she has carried throughout her life. We mention this as a reminder to take time to nurture health, and joy, even in the small moments.

Are we slipping in our intellectual abilities? Have we lost the ability to read, reason, analyze, and more importantly pay attention?

Over the past decade we have seen a deluge of challenges – from Covid and its disruptive effect on education, to the rising use of screens and smart phones to the more recent threat from LLMs and an increasingly proficient set of AI tools that threaten to compete with and ultimately replace humans in almost every dimension. Each of these threats is nuanced and subjective, but we are starting to see patterns emerge in terms of the impact  on our attention span, and ability to think critically and absorb new information.

We are delighted to release as a bonus episode this conversation with long-time industry member, mentor and advocate Jennifer Strickland.  Over the course of Jennifer’s career she has held a series of roles starting out in the annuity space, moving into private wealth, hedge fund business development, alternative asset business development and most recently was Head of Business Development for Pretium, a $50 bn specialized asset manager focused on real estate, structured credit and legal opportunities. She is a Board Member of Women in Private Credit and an active advocate for mentorship and diversity within the financial services industry.