2024 will be a year of tremendous change, and tremendous noise.  With elections in key regions, we are likely to be subjected to a volley of rhetoric and uncertainty will be the order of the day. In times like this, it seems even more important to reach out to our wise community for their insights on what should stay the same, and evolve, amid this uncertainty. 

Afsaneh Beschloss is the Founder and CEO at RockCreek, an investment firm which invests across diverse sectors with a special focus on climate, affordable housing and education investments in developed, emerging and frontier markets. She is on the Board of Directors of the World Resources Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation and holds numerous other Board and Trustee roles. 

Vivian Lin Thurston is a Partner and Portfolio Manager at William Blair Investment Management, where she is based in Chicago. She previously covered global consumer stocks in a research role both at William Blair and a series of other financial services firms. She is Chairman of the Board at the Chinese Finance Association of American and a Principal Dancer and Director at the Xilin Dance Company. 

Maureen Downey is a Managing Director in Alternative Assets at The Beneficient Company Group as well as a Venture Partner at DigitalDx Ventures, and has specialized in alternatives investing with a particular focus on secondary investments and ESG integration for over 15 years. 

Welcome back to The Fiftyfaces Podcast in 2022. In this first series we meet with ten more inspiring guests and draw out in particular themes relating to impact and the importance of education.  For some of our guests their commitment to educating the next generation – whether through personal sponsorship, Board Roles, teaching decision making or the founding of The Skills Workshop – there is universal belief in its importance.

Impact takes many forms, and includes investment in education, but for some of our guests it also includes solutions to alleviate homelessness, house vulnerable women and adults with learning differences, or address the problem of climate change. 

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.

Erin Archer is Treasurer at Syracuse University, which she recently joined after a period as Treasurer and Director of Investments of DePaul University in Chicago, where she oversaw the endowment. She started her career in sell-side research and has had a global career including four years in London and two years in South Africa, where she focused on the consumer sector.

A varied career journey that has spanned three continents is shared along with the importance of the golden rule in life and in one’s career.