Carin-Isabel Knoop - Executive Director of the Harvard Business School Research and Case Writing Division
Release Date: 05/29/2024
François de Visscher - Fourth Generation Wisdom
Private Capital
The Private Capital podcast spent a delightful afternoon with François de Visscher, a fourth-generation family member of the Belgian multinational firm Bekaert, which was founded in 1880. François has been a longtime and respected consultant and banker to family offices and family businesses, and it was a real pleasure to listen to his accumulated wisdom. We spoke about what families get right and wrong about direct investing, where families have an edge over private equity funds, and how to compete for top talent against the Street. Most interesting of all were the rules their...
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André Perold - Beautifully Inefficient Markets
Private Capital
We think of the markets as complex systems but today’s guest André Perold, sees it as a fascinating puzzle of human behavior, asymmetric information, and 'beautiful inefficiencies.' André is a legendary figure in the world of finance. He has worked with Harry Markowitz, Jack Treynor and Bill Sharpe and is a longtime Harvard Business School professor, a board member at Vanguard, and the co-founder of HighVista Strategies. André has spent his career deconstructing how markets work and where they break. In this episode, we discuss the illusion of liquidity, the dramatic rise and fall...
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Kathryn Leaf - CEO of Pantheon on the Rise of Secondaries
Private Capital
Kathryn Leaf is the CEO of Pantheon, a $76 billion private equity firm that has been doing secondaries, among other things, for decades. We had a deep discussion with her about the dramatic growth in the market. Her perspectives on the current state of PE secondaries, as well as evergreen and continuation funds, were fascinating, and the market has a ways to go, she notes: “There has been about $600 billion of capital raised by secondary funds that’s servicing a roughly $15 trillion private market asset class.” We also talk about doing infrastructure at scale, right...
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Avi Kalichstein - GP Stakes at Hunter Point Capital
Private Capital
Today’s guest is Avi Kalichstein, the CEO of Hunter Point Capital. He’s deeply invested in the rapidly expanding world of private equity stakes. We delve into the influence of his father, a renowned pianist, and his early career at Goldman Sachs, where he met Chris Flowers, who significantly impacted his career. Flowers sent him to Japan to work on revitalizing Shinsei Bank, which was an education in cultural nuances. We also discuss his meeting with Bennett Goodman and the decision to establish Hunter Point. The conversation also covers the evolution of private equity stakes, their unique...
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Lawrence Calcano - The Private Markets Revolution
Private Capital
Lawrence Calcano, CEO of iCapital, began his path to finance with a surprising fork in the road, a theater audition on the very same day as his Morgan Stanley interview. That moment set the stage for a remarkable career shaped by both creativity and strategy. Lawrence discovered that the same skills that bring a story to life on stage are just as essential in building successful teams and businesses. From helping to build Goldman Sachs’ East Coast Tech Group in the early 1990s when the internet was a “fire hose” of innovation to witnessing the highs of the Netscape IPO and the...
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Arjun Raghavan - Returns With Resilience
Private Capital
Partners Capital is a $60 billion asset manager that outsources investments for institutions including family offices, foundations, and endowments. The firm was founded with particularly sophisticated clients, most of them private equity partners, which I covered in my previous podcast with founder Stan Miranda. Today we talk to his successor, Arjun Raghavan, who has continued to grow and expand the firm as well as its thought leadership. We talk about his own personal beginnings in India and his consulting and quant background, then talk about how one builds a global...
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Shirl Penney - Champions and Breakouts
Private Capital
Today’s guest is Shirl Penney, founder and CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners, which is a comprehensive platform that allows wealth advisors to go independent and form their own RIA. Shirl’s story starts with a thrift store suit and a bus ticket and leads to the helm of this billion-dollar firm. We start off talking about the inefficiencies and economics of horseracing, Shirl’s passion outside of work. We then go through the formation story of Dynasty post-GFC, their early challenges with technology and data, what the decision is like for a team to break out and start...
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Adam Waterous - M&A Mastery in Oil and Gas
Private Capital
Adam Waterous is the founder of Waterous Energy Fund, the largest private equity fund in Canada’s oil and gas sector. He gives us a masterclass on the past fifty years of oil and gas investing. From humble roots and with no background in oil and gas, he pioneered the competitive sales process in Canada, identified the critical shift in the market and technology after 2012, used a value investing strategy influenced by Buffett to build his firm, and tells us about the importance of finding good rock and the power of consolidation. Adam Waterous began his career in management...
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Roger Ferguson - The Making of a Policymaker
Private Capital
Hello and welcome to the Private Capital podcast. I’m Joe Reilly, head of Circulus Group, a network for family offices based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Our next family office summit is on November 20th in New York. It will feature Jose Minaya, Head of Investments at BNY, and former podcast guest Ken Kencel, president and CEO of Churchill Asset Management. Please subscribe at to stay in the loop. Roger Ferguson, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has had a compelling professional and intellectual career. In our candid and wide-ranging interview, we learn valuable...
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Andy Unanue - Family Culture and Family Capital
Private Capital
Today we are traveling through one of the great family business stories, that of Goya Foods, the formation of their family office, and the creation of a free-standing private equity firm that focuses on family businesses called AUA Partners. Andy Unanue is the founder and Managing Partner of AUA Private Equity Partners, an operationally focused, lower middle-market investment firm with expertise in supporting and growing family-owned and demographic-driven businesses. Andy is a member of AUA Private Equity’s Investment Committee, and under his leadership, AUA has deployed over $600 million...
info_outlineCarin-Isabel Knoop is the founder and executive director of the Harvard Business School Research and Case Writing Division. This conversation was spurred by two things, one that I found out on the Business Breakdowns podcast last year that Harvard Business School Publishing is larger than Forbes, and two that I’ve also always been curious about how case studies are actually written. Anyone who has done security or competitive analysis will appreciate the level of detail that goes into a case.
This is similar to the great conversation I had last year with Paul Edelman, who has developed psychological tests to find talent for leading hedge funds. I would encourage you to listen to that one if you haven’t, Paul is great at breaking down conceptual thinking.
Cases are used to teach decision making and business reasoning for analysts, business owners, consultants and investors, but what are the decisions that go into the cases themselves and why are they such a good tool for teaching this mode of thought? What I found was intriguing and in some ways pleasantly surprising, and Carin was great fun to talk to. Please enjoy our discussion.
Carin-Isabel Knoop is the Executive Director of the Harvard Business School Case Research and Writing Group which she began in 1995. Previously she was a consultant at McKinsey and Price Waterhouse Coopers. Carin has her bachelors summa cum laude in Government, Economics and International Relations from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Harvard Business school with honors. She is also a very active writer on Medium and where she writes about creating better workplaces.
https://carinisabelknoop.medium.com/