Senior Decision Makers: Luis Laboy, Hewlett Foundation (EP.512)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Release Date: 07/20/2026
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
AI is top of mind for everyone in the investment business. Our Summits are abuzz with curiosity about what others are doing. I asked 8 CIOs to share how they’re using AI today, including what’s working and what isn’t, the tools they’ve adopted, and where they’re headed next. They range from a single-family office with one investment professional to one of the largest pension funds in the world with thousands. What emerged is a range of use cases — from using AI as a personal productivity tool, to changing investment workflows, organizing institutional knowledge, improving...
info_outlineCapital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This week’s Summer Series concludes with a two-fer on habits. There may be no better way to improve the investment process than to understand what it takes to improve ourselves. We’ve got two of the best – James Clear and Katy Milkman, experts and authors of wildly bestselling books Atomic Habits and How to Change. Please enjoy my conversations with James Clear and Katy Milkman, both from 2021. We hope you’ve enjoyed this summer exploration in improving the investment process with some of the best conversations over the last nine years. Learn more about . Try by Admired...
info_outlineCapital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This week’s Summer Series concludes with a two-fer on habits. There may be no better way to improve the investment process than to understand what it takes to improve ourselves. We’ve got two of the best – James Clear and Katy Milkman, experts and authors of wildly bestselling books Atomic Habits and How to Change. Please enjoy my conversations with James Clear and Katy Milkman, both from 2021. We hope you’ve enjoyed this summer exploration in improving the investment process with some of the best conversations over the last nine years. Learn more about . Try by Admired...
info_outlineCapital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
We’re excited to share something we've been working on for a while: we're bringing Capital Allocators University online. For years, CAU has been an in-person, once-a-year cohort of 25 or 30 professionals, built around a set of disciplines that matter enormously for investors and investor relations professionals but rarely get taught explicitly. We put together a brief conversation to share more on what the course covers, who it's for, what we learned from the past five years, and why we decided to move it online. . We look forward to welcoming you as a member. Special thanks to our...
info_outlineCapital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This week’s Summer Series is another two-fer, this time on negotiations. The first is with legendary former FBI-hostage negotiator Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference and founder of the Black Swan group where he teaches tactical empathy in negotiations. The second is with Yale professor Daylian Cain, who opened my eyes to the importance of walking away. Learn more about . Try by Admired Leadership. Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at or Subscribe to the Access Transcript with Editing and...
info_outlineCapital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This week’s Summer Series is another two-fer, this time on negotiations. The first is with legendary former FBI-hostage negotiator Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference and founder of the Black Swan group where he teaches tactical empathy in negotiations. The second is with Yale professor Daylian Cain, who opened my eyes to the importance of walking away. Learn more about . Try by Admired Leadership. Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at or Subscribe to the Access Transcript with Editing and post-production work for...
info_outlineCapital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This week’s Summer Series is a two-fer on the essential skill of storytelling. Whether pitching an investment fund to a prospect, an idea to a portfolio manager or CIO, or a request of a family member, storytelling helps you get what you want. To help understand the art and science of storytelling, Matt Dicks – a retired middle school teacher and author of the best-seller Storyworthy, and Don Miller – creator of Storybrand, a business started with his book of the same name – describe how to improve your storytelling ability. Learn more...
info_outlineCapital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This week’s Summer Series is a two-fer on the essential skill of storytelling. Whether pitching an investment fund to a prospect, an idea to a portfolio manager or CIO, or a request of a family member, storytelling helps you get what you want. To help understand the art and science of storytelling, Matt Dicks – a retired middle school teacher and author of the best-seller Storyworthy, and Don Miller – creator of Storybrand, a business started with his book of the same name – describe how to improve your storytelling ability. Learn more...
info_outlineCapital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This week’s Summer Series covers the pre-mortem analysis with its founder, Gary Klein. Gary discovered pre-mortems while working with fighter pilots and wrote a white paper applying the tool to investment analysis alongside Paul Johnson and Paul Sonkin. Please enjoy this discussion of the proper use of pre-mortem analysis with Gary, Paul, and Paul from 2019. Learn more about Capital Allocators University: https://www.capitalallocators.com/capital-allocators-university/ Try ALEX by Admired Leadership: Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at or Subscribe to the Access...
info_outlineCapital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This week’s Summer Series is a highly atypical episode, where I appear as the guest. Matt Breitfelder from Apollo asked to interview me about interviewing, something I learned far more from hosting the show the last nine years than I ever did while interviewing managers for 20. The conversation has been sufficiently popular that it made the Summer Series on investment process. Any leader should see for themselves the benefits of elite coaching. Try ALEX: . Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at or Subscribe to the Access Transcript...
info_outlineOur next guest on the Senior Decision Makers series is Luis Laboy, Director of Public Equity at the Hewlett Foundation, where he's spent the last decade running the public equity book alongside CIO Ana Marshall — a mentor and colleague he first met nearly thirty years ago. The foundation's assets stand at roughly $14 billion today.
Luis spent fifteen years as a direct emerging markets investor at Everest Capital before crossing to the LP side, and our conversation digs into how he’s leveraged that experience as an allocator. We discuss how the cadence and depth of decision-making changed when he went from a high-turnover book at Everest to a handful of high-conviction relationships at Hewlett, how his time split between portfolio construction and manager selection has evolved over, and how his time marketing the fund shaped the way he interviews managers and thinks about turnover.
Luis is incredibly insightful about how his early interests and upbringing have shone through across his career. He thinks and speaks in analogies, he's wildly entertaining, and — in short — he's just a genuinely good dude, and that comes through in spades in our conversation.
Any leader should see for themselves the benefits of elite coaching. Try ALEX: tryalex.admiredleadership.com.
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