Seema Hingorani is the founder and chair of Girls Who Invest and a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley Investment Mangement. She previously was CIO at her own hedge fund and Chief Investment Officer of NYC Retirement Systems where she spent 4 years following a long career in asset management.
Seema’s story has been told just recently in this podcast hosted by my friend Susan Soh so we took things in a slightly different direction. We first looked back at Seema’s extraordinary career and asked about her career highs and lows. One of her high points was her time as CIO in the NYC Retirement Systems and we discuss the surprising benefits of a stint in public service.
Another highlight was the starting and success of the Girls Who Invest program (see link: https://www.girlswhoinvest.org/) which went from proof of concept to a program that has placed over 100 scholars into the financial services industry and is expanding rapidly from here. We discuss the pushback that Seema received at the beginning and how she went about proving some naysayers wrong and continues to “flood the system” with impressive talent.
We speak about the advice that the Girls Who Invest scholars receive, about how they are encouraged to optimize for career success and then turn to the particular strains that Covid restrictions and impediments to networking have put on young people at this stage of their career.
Series 1 of the 2022 Fiftyfaces Podcast is brought to you with the kind support of Heard Capital, a Chicago-based asset manager invests in public equities in the technology, media, telecommunication, financial and industrial sectors. The firm was founded in 2011 and manages assets via a long/short fund and a long-only fund.