Sam Garetano is Senior Vice President at Brookfield Asset Management, where he works in the infrastructure area with a particular focus on data centers. He has spent his entire career in various roles in finance including at Blackrock and Adams Street Partners.

Steve Kim is a partner in investment strategy and risk management at Verdis Investment Management in the Philadelphia area. He has focused over 30 years in his career in implementing and managing operating infrastructures. Prior to his role at Verdis held various Chief Technology Officer roles. He now focuses on integrating his insight from systems modeling and data analysis into an investment approach, particularly in the venture capital arena. 

Mark Steed is Chief Investment Officer at Arizona PSPRS Trust, a US public defined benefit fund with over $13 bn AUM, where he has spent over 14 years. He previously worked as a banker and prior to that as a financial analyst, and has a Masters in Predictive Analytics. He describes himself as an “investment ideas” guy and an out of the box thinker at that.

An out of the box thinker and public fund CIO takes us out of the box to discuss his current investment ideas and what it takes to motivate a retain a team.

Lindsey Bass is Head of Marketing and in charge of Fundraising at ImpactA Global, a position she has held since late 2023. She is a passionate advocate for more diversity in the investment industry as well as emerging managers. She has been active on the Asset Owner Diversity Charter as an Advisory Board Member, and in the Diversity Project – investment industry, where she has co-led the Mental Health Workstream as well as other responsibilities. She has also been an early and consistent supporter of Fiftyfaces – for which we are hugely grateful.

Nadia Cobalovic is Senior Vice President at Northern Trust and Global Head of Omnium Services, where she oversees teams encompassing Middle Office Operations, Back Office Administration and Data Delivery. She also contributes to business growth, strategic initiatives and new initiatives.

It has been an exciting summer, but we have managed to squeeze in a set of global guests for Series 4 of our 2025 Fiftyfaces Podcast – which takes us from the evolving world of hedge funds and the support infrastructure needed, to emerging market equities to late-stage venture capital to public pension pooling.

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.

Series 2 of the 2025 podcast was born into a time of tremendous market turbulence. In our ten conversations with a diverse range of guests – sourced globally, we go top down, and bottom up – into the weeds, and take helicopter views. Tune in to hear about the technologies in venture capital and climate tech that excite even the most experienced investors who have seen multiple cycles with podcasts featuring Hunter Somerville and Beverley Gower-Jones, OBE on topics of big swing innovation in venture capital and what is on the cutting edge of climate tech. Eric Hirsch of Hamilton Lane describes private equity’s evolution, the essential role of data and what lies ahead, while Peter Wilson of Harbourvest shares his views on the topic as well as the importance of authenticit