David Brenner, COO – TIFF

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Hello, I'm Ted Seides, and this is Investment Management Operations. This show explores the inner workings of the most sophisticated institutions in the industry. Through conversations with executives across operations, compliance, legal, and finance, you'll hear how key operating partners run their businesses in an ever-changing and complex investment landscape. You can join our mailing list and access Capital Allocators content at capitalallocators.com. I'm Scott McDonald, and I'm your host. My guest on today's show is David Brenner. David is the COO of TIF Investment Management, an OCIO for non-profit organizations. Stepping into the COO role of an established manager takes a unique set of skills, so I turned to David for his insight. We discussed the common challenges of assessing culture, talent, and legacy, and the importance of timing of when to listen and when to take action. We then turned to David's perspective on his four pillars framework as TIF shifts from what he calls going from TIF 1.0 to TIF 2.0. We talk about the role of AI in automation and why data transformation plays a critical role in everything that they do. Please enjoy my conversation with David Brenner. David, excited to talk about the COO role today. Maybe, for background purposes, give a little snapshot on your career path on your way to TIF. Well, Scott, first, thanks so much for having me. I've had a bit of a tour before landing at TIF, starting my career in consulting at Arthur Anderson until the Enron Debacle. So I was up through the very end, and then my partner and I moved over to KPMG. Those four years of consulting gave me a strong grounding in business fundamentals. I really enjoyed how the Big Five provided so much training, how much they invested in the junior consultants, the variety of sectors and industries that I was able to get involved in. I also really enjoyed traveling. I was on the road every week and got to see a lot of different parts of the country. Unfortunately, due to somewhat Enron related again, but due to Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and compliance with the rules, many of the consultants at KPMG were put on audit engagements to help implement Sarbanes-Oxley. I ultimately became the Midwest SAS 70 experts as a result, and that was really what drove me to leave KPMG. The audit work just wasn't interesting to me. I missed consulting. Can I ask you a question about the Enron piece that is always interesting? Is there any kind of story there that you can share around what you learned from that unique situation? I was so junior in my career that it was a little bit oblivious to me in terms of what ultimately was happening. I do remember being on engagement out at Duke University. I had clients cracking jokes about Enron and about Anderson, and I was just like, "Wow, this is really interesting to be a part of this." We can argue how much or how little Arthur Anderson was responsible for the very schemes that were implemented at Enron, but ultimately they were proved innocents in the court of law. What I learned is that the media can really drive an outcome, sometimes an unwanted outcome before truth comes out. Do you think that event changed the arc of your career path? I loved Arthur Anderson. It felt like an extension of university. It was very young, it was very exciting, it was very dynamic. Going over to KPMG, it was a little bit more buttoned up, and I think that was a positive aspect for me because I needed to be a little bit more mature and talk how to be a little bit more mature. I don't think it was a defining moment of my career or altered the career. It was a good move to get more of those skill sets around being buttoned up. Let's circle back to KPMG. How long were you there for? I was at KPMG for about two and a half years until I left. As I was contemplating exiting, I really needed to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Do I go back to grad school, find another job? I really liked the markets. I enjoyed a client and some exposure to an asset management client, Bagot Anderson. I particularly seeked out that type of role and coincidentally enough got a call from a recruiter at the very end of 2004. I moved into asset management with UBS in Chicago and years later eventually became CEO of UBS Global Asset Management in the Americas. UBS was really a formative experience for me. I did a ton of different roles. I learned a ton from a very large global asset manager. I did everything from technology projects and integration to corporate development and strategic planning to product development to sales execution. I launched an analytics team to institutional and retail business management, which helped pave the way to my promotion as COO in 2012. After about 11 years at UBS, my boss and I left together. He was New York based. That was Chicago based. We moved out to Philadelphia and joined Delaware Investments, which was owned by Macquarie. Initially at Macquarie, Delaware, I had two roles. The first was Chief of Staff, helping run the business in the US. The second, which was more interesting to me, was as Chief Strategy Officer for the Public Investments business. That role was really focused on the vision and the strategy and the execution plans around how to build a global business. That's what we did. We built a global business over the course of five or six years. After that, businesses evolved. My role evolved. I transitioned into a new role called the Global Head of Digital Data and Products. That role was really to tackle a significant challenge across the firm. We had nine different instances of Salesforce. We had multiple P&Ls. It was very hard to get the source of truth and to trust the data. That team and that role was created to really overhaul how Macquarie leveraged data across its global asset management business. After about eight, nine years at Macquarie, doing all sorts of varied experiences, spending strategy, process, operations, transformation, that really set the stage for my move to TIFF at the beginning of 2024. I think the move to TIFF was really a T transition for me because it meant taking everything I'd learned at big institutions and then applying it to a smaller, mission-driven organization. It also gave me the ability to have a bigger impact to help shape strategy and to really drive the operations more holistically at a smaller firm. What are the main differences in your mind? What do you keep from the large company? Any thoughts on the differences based on your experience? Well, organizations have their own challenges and opportunities. Bigger ones are just on a bigger scale. At bigger organizations, you also have teams of consultants, of strategists, of change managers, of attorneys, of all sorts of folks to help make the decisions. At smaller firms, you don't have that, so you're rolling up the sleeves, you're diving into the various initiatives or challenges or opportunities yourself. It's exciting because you get to really unpack and learn a lot more in smaller organizations. The big difference for me is the resource pool to lean on and the ability to pick up and learn a lot more in a smaller organization. For those who don't know about TIFF, maybe you share an overview of the organization. TIFF has a unique history. The organization was founded in 1991 with the mission to serve nonprofits, primarily endowments, foundations, and charitable organizations. The idea was to give these institutions access to top-tier investment management in a cost-effective way, effectively an OCIO, before that term was really popular. TIFF has always been mission-driven. Our goal is to deliver client-centric advice and investment solutions specifically crafted to support the long-term mission and objectives of those charitable organizations, while also helping them reduce their administrative burden. What's interesting to me, given I'm fairly new, I've been there now just over a year and a half, is how TIFF is evolving. I like to talk internally about that as the move from TIFF 1.0 to TIFF 2.0. So I equate TIFF 2.0 a shorthand for our transformation. TIFF 1.0 is how I describe the legacy TIFF model, essentially a product-focused approach. Historically, TIFF offered pooled investment products and strategies to clients so that they could participate in these pooled vehicles. And that worked well for a really long time, but as clients needs change, we realized we also needed to change. So TIFF 2.0 is really about shifting from being a product provider to a solutions provider. This means going beyond that one-size-fits-all approach and delivering more customized, flexible solutions for our clients. For example, rather than just slotting a client into a set fund, set it and forget it, we now tailor advice and portfolios to each client's unique circumstances. We're able to meet different governance models, different strategic asset allocations, some clients might want access to a specific asset class, some might want us to handle everything. TIFF 2.0 is about being able to provide that more bespoke advice. This has led us to expand offerings like parts of our services to some clients. For example, a private equity solution for those that just want that slice. The evolution has also meant some internal changes. We are now 100% employee-owned. That gives us a great ability to motivate and retain talent. And that means that employees are aligned with the success of the overall organization. Additionally, our board governance model has shifted a bit more towards TIFF's early days and the board continues to be true partners in TIFF's strategy. This is something that makes TIFF very, very special, in my opinion. We're also pretty methodical about where to change and how much to change. TIFF's evolution has been about honoring the 30+ year legacy while modernizing for the future. We're still the nonprofit community's dedicated investment partner, but we're broadening our toolkits, whether it's offering a better client experience or using data and technology in smarter ways. It's a really exciting time because we're effectively reinventing certain aspects of TIFF to ensure we remain as relevant and impactful in the next 30 years as we were in the first 30 years. Every COO role is a little bit different. I'd love to hear a little bit about the number of roles and responsibilities for your role. My responsibilities span all of the operational aspects of the business and some of the strategic aspects of TIFF's work. That includes direct oversight of finance and accounting, investment operations and middle office functions, technology and data teams, legal and compliance and HR. My role, it's about making sure the trains run on climb, but also about change and change is important. I see the COO role at TIFF as the connective tissue of the organization, and I have to connect the dots between the different departments so that we all move in the same direction. Because I have a view across finance and tech and ops, etc., I can help spot where a decision in one area might impact another. It's a broad role by design and the idea is by having central oversight we can break down some of the silos. Another big part of my job is both setting, given my prior experience, and executing TIFF's strategic vision. It's a role that really requires wearing a lot of hats, and that's what I love about it. You've been in the role for a year and a half, and I'm always curious as to what did that roadmap look like to come in? It's a little bit of a tricky balance around listening and action at the same time and knowing where you need to accumulate some information and where you need to make some strategic change out of the gate and just love your thoughts on how you approached it. Sepping in as a new COO, the first order of business for me is really about listening and learning. When I arrived at TIFF, I spent a lot of time meeting people across the firm, asking questions and absorbing the culture. I wanted to understand TIFF's legacy, what had made it successful over the last 30 plus years, but also understand what are the pain points or scar tissue that might exist, and answering questions like who are the key people and what are their talents, how do decisions get made around here, what are the sacred cows, what are the open wounds. I also looked at the talents, of course, on the team with fresh eyes. Thankfully, I was really lucky to inherit a solid group of very dedicated people and many that had been with TIFF for a long time, and at the same time, I needed and wanted to get a pulse on the culture. Is this an organization that was risk averse or change a bracing? Was communication open or siloed? In TIFF's case, I found a mission-driven culture with a lot of people who took a lot of pride in serving nonprofits, but also a team that was eager for some modernization, but rightly proud of what they built in the past. So respecting the existing culture and legacy was important to me. I wasn't coming in to rip and replace, so my approach was very much let me honor what's been done and only then figure out where we should evolve. As a new leader, you have to earn trust to make changes. That comes with showing respect for the work that people have done and those that have come before you. Were there any areas when you think about the team in this day and age, how do you think about upskilling? We're just in a moment, and they love your thoughts about what you felt as though you could bring to the table to help enable that to the team. One of the most important aspects to any leader's job is shaping a team. I inherited a very solid team at TIFF, but there were some opportunities to add some capabilities in some key areas and to re-energize some of the existing talents. This included some role shifts, several internal promotions. In my mind, those moves not only put the right skills in the right jobs, but they also send a message that excellence will be rewarded. Fostering motivation isn't just about titles and hires. Another key aspect to a high-performing team is culture. I'd like to encourage a culture of continuous improvement. We celebrate wins, but we also reflect and do retrospectives on projects to learn what we can do better in the future. I want my team members to feel safe to suggest new ideas or to flag issues. What's open is what helps lift the performance over time. And then finally, I do believe in professional development. At TIFF, we've spent a lot of time thinking about this and we've been investing in training and encouraging people to expand their skill sets. If somebody sits on the operations side, I might have them sit down with the investment teams and vice versa. This cross-pollination, which I'm doing more and more of, keeps people engaged and also breaks down silos and builds a more versatile organization. Looking at your background, you have this strong experience in the data element. I'd love to turn and get your thoughts about the role of data today as it applies to people processed technology, the usual suspects. But I think, as you pointed out, when we were prepping here, data is the fourth pillar. And I'd love to talk a little bit about that. In business management, many people talk about the three pillars, people processing technology. And that framework has been around for years. It's a great mental model. But to your point, I do fundamentally believe there is a fourth pillar that now deserves equal billing. And that's data. Data is the new oil. Data has become so critical in today's world that it's not just a subset of technology. It's a strategic asset in its own right. When I joined TIFF and we started planning our transformation, I made it clear that our philosophy would be people, process, technology, and data. By explicitly calling out data, we ensure we're always thinking about how information is managed and used and not just about the systems and the art charts. To give a quick analogy, if you consider a business like a car, people are the drivers, processes are the rules of the road, technology is the engine, and data is the fuel. You can have a great engine, but if you put bad fuel in it, it's not going to run well. Having that framework meant instilling a mindset that data quality, data governance, and access are just important as having talented people, efficient processes, and up-to-date technology. By explicitly adding data in our pillar, it keeps it front and center. One of the things that people talk about all the time is the amount of data that we have at a friend of mine who was telling the story, he was at a large investment consultant, and he was like, "We probably have more data that falls on the floor than we know what to do with." What strategies are you guys using to evaluate and improve each pillar? From a people perspective, beyond the shifts and hiring, improving the people pillar means continuously developing the team that you have. I guess we've instituted more frequent feedback loops. We've introduced more frequent goal-setting and more frequent real-time feedback, so folks know what they aim for, but also get the feedback and the ability to grow. Aligning incentives has also been a big part of that pillar for us at TIFF. Every single employee has investment performance and net new flow targets. Every employee literally has skin in the game to help ensure TIFF does well. The idea there is really to foster an ownership mentality for all levels. From a process side of things, my mantra has always been simplify and standardize where possible. When I arrived, I found some process at TIFF that were overly manual, maybe had too many checkpoints and often assigned that they devolved and patches over time. We built the business capability model as the first step, and then we undertook process mapping exercises for key workflows such as mapping a client transaction throughout the system or how reporting gets done. This helped us spot inefficiencies, so one by one we're re-engineering these processes to eliminate those unnecessary steps and automate as much as is sensible for us. The goal with streamlining is twofold, and I think people are probably sick of hearing this at TIFF, but it's always about efficiency and scalability. We want processes that are efficient today that save the team time and reduce error rates. We also want to be scalable for tomorrow. We want to be able to handle, say, double or triple the volume than today if we grow, but we are also very careful not to sacrifice effectiveness for efficiency. Some checks are there for a reason, as my CFO likes to tell me. So we streamline, but we also ask, is this control truly needed or is it redundant? Often we find smarter ways to maintain quality and speed. And then from the technology pillar, we've embarked on a pretty comprehensive modernization strategy. Like many firms our size and our age, TIFF had a patchwork of legacy systems, a bunch of Excel-based workflows, and some vendor tools that didn't always talk to each other. We knew that wasn't going to be sufficient for TIFF 2.0. So our strategy there was to move towards a more unified, cloud-friendly, and flexible tech infrastructure. For example, we're currently in the process of selecting a new portfolio management system that will replace a handful of systems and eliminate a bunch of manual processes. When modernizing technology, I really think it's important to prioritize interoperability. We don't want a new system that becomes another silo. We want systems that can feed into our data platform and feed into each other via APIs. The final aspect that we think about a little bit is user experience. Even the best system is useless if it's too complex and if our folks find it too hard to use. We've recently introduced end users into the evaluations of our systems. And then finally, from a data pillar perspective, our strategy has really been about building a strong foundation of data governance and quality before we chase the fancy analytics or the fancy AI. I saw that a lot of our data was fragmented, even Excel-based, which is inherently time-consuming and error-prone. Step one was to get a handle on our data sources and flows. We undertook data assessments. We engaged an external consultant to help. We didn't have all those capabilities in-house, so part of the engaging consultant was to teach us some of those capabilities. So that helped us really identify where all the data resided across the organization. Starting from investment performance to client information, and then how it moves throughout the organization. Off the back of that, we established a data governance framework. We've kept it lightweight because nobody wants piracy, but even a lightweight governance framework helps enforce accountability in my perspective. We also started creating a data dictionary so that definitions are understood by all. What do we actually mean by AUM in the context of commitments versus invested assets versus regulatory AM? We just want to ensure that there are no discrepancies across the organization. And then on the data quality fronts, we have implemented more controls, more checks, automated reconciliation checks, data validation rules, and exception reporting have gone a long way. The big initiative for us is building that unified data platform, which will inherently help improve data consistency over time. The strategy is really to treat the data as an asset. Just like you maintain a piece of equipment, you have to maintain data quality. Just like you have rules for using a tool, you have rules for how data is entered, stored, and used. And when that's all in place, the insights and the fancy dashboards and the AI will flow naturally. That's the next step. What about workflow? You're making some significant changes. I would guess that how people work and what they're doing changes with these types of optimizations. You have a bunch of people and you can't just throw technology out. You have to think about what they're doing and maybe of the same people, but maybe the role in which they play needs to be adjusted in order to optimize for these new frameworks. Part of bringing these concepts into any organization is education. People have to get up to speed with these tools. They have to get up to speed with thinking differently. In a lot of cases, you have your various functional leaders and functional teams head down focused on what's in front of them and their day to day. Some of this is also education about taking a step back and seeing the force through the trees coming back to that role as COO, connecting those docs throughout the organization so that my various functional leaders can understand how a impacts be, how that flows through the organization and why it is so important to not only change, for example, vendors or to alter workflows or to put in piece that new place of technology. It's also about laying out that vision, helping individuals see the light at the end of the tunnel without that. We're kind of wandering aimlessly at TIF. We created a multi-year strategy. We have communicated that strategy. We've gotten all of our staff on board with that, and it's about getting everybody moving in the same direction. How do you think about budget? Is this steady as she goes, or do you have to recalibrate everything? That has been one of the most interesting challenges for me for a smaller organization. Every single person that we have at TIF has a day job and is executing at a high level. There's not a lot of change capacity in each of those individuals, but I have to balance that with a transformation agenda and a P&L that allows for investing in some consultants, for investing in new tools, for investing in some new people, but the magic is really finding the balance around how do we use all of our different levers effectively so that we can move that transformation agenda sensibly. Based on that, I'd love to turn and thinking about how you prioritize foundational work over the shiny new things that are out there. It feels like every day there's some new thing coming to market that could be really interesting, but is it really going to meet your prioritization of needs? It's a topic I feel strongly about. It's so tempting in today's world to chase the latest shiny tech tool, especially recently, but every week there's a new software or flashy dashboarding tool or AI product that promises the revolutionized something. We've been very deliberative though. We want to get the basics right first. Many often say don't put lipstick on a pig. In the context of data, a fancy visualization tool on top of bad data is just going to give you a very pretty looking wrong answer. We've been prioritizing the plumbing over the paint. By doing that foundational work, we avoid this scenario of having it reuse things later, and that's expensive. I've seen companies rush to roll something out flashy and then spend twice as much time fixing things later. We want to avoid that if our approach is get the data model and get the data pipelines right first and then layer on the cool stuff. Is there anything that you guys are working on that helps demonstrate prioritizing some of the major tech? It comes back to data, and it comes back to what our flagship initiative has been, and that has been about building a unified data platform. How we have decided to roll that out and get in front of that before doing anything else which just reinforces the importance of data. When thinking about the legacy challenge, the vision is really to have that one central platform where all of the critical data resides, where it's all accessible, where users can get self-service to it, where consistent definitions are applied. As we built out the data platform, a key concept we embraced there was really what I call semantic modeling. Essentially, we began structuring our data to capture both meaning and relationships. That provides a framework for representing data in a way that is both meaningful to humans and machines. By standardizing this representation of data, semantic models are able to not only enhance the data quality and improve that decision making, but what it does is it's setting us up for the future, and again, this reinforces the point I just made. It allows AI to be leveraged to look across the TIF universe of data to create those actionable insights. It's just so important to get that data right before putting in place the portfolio management system or anything else. Are you seeing a big shift in the market of people creating data lakes and then building up off of that? I think about it in the analogy of almost the anchor stores at the mall is you have data lake portfolio management system, research management system, analytics engine, reporting layer. If somebody were to walk in and say, "Hey, I'm at a small organization. We just take custodial data and have Excel," what would be the key components in your mind? One of the things we're starting to see in our industry is the consolidation across both the vertical and horizontal nature of technology. We're starting to see these major established platforms doing consolidations to put in place these all-in-one solutions that many big firms might use, but that are also probably fairly expensive, sometimes more than what's needed and probably not very flexible. You kind of offset that with all of the emerging solutions that are more modern, more API-friendly and have better user interfaces, be combined to do the reporting or to do the portfolio management or any of the other various tasks that you just mentioned. That comes with the risk. Will this startup or will this emerging vendor be around in five years? What will happen? Will it get consolidated? Will it run out of money? Will it scale with us? So at TIFF, we've approached that trade-off by running proof of concepts with some of the more emerging tools. We've done a lot of relationship building with some of the bigger vendors. In our case, we kind of lean towards that hybrid approach. We want to put in place a more established core and then build some tools around that where those tools can do these various initiatives and pass much better. If some of those startups don't pan out, we can then swap it out without disturbing the core. So with the project of actually building out the data framework, I suspect that you're also keeping an eye on AI and automation and curious to your thoughts of where you think things are going, whether at TIFF or in the market in general. The rise of AI tools in our industry has been fascinating. We've had the opportunity to kick the tires out a few of them. Last year, we put in place a broad, large language model tool for staff to start experimenting with AI. It was fairly new 18 months ago. We wanted staff to get more comfortable with it. This tool that we put in place, it was key for us because it retained all of the prompts and various results and we thought the SEC was going down that path. It also kept the data secure within the four TIFF walls. There's been an evolution of that as people have gotten more comfortable with that. We also have been working with a couple of other vendors that are pretty interesting. So one of those is a platform called Covenant. Covenant is provided by a law firm and it's specialized in document reviews, particularly for private equity. I think hedge funds fairly soon. We use it to facilitate a time near and, in our opinion, a more cost-effective review of legal documents like NDAs and LPAs. What the tool does, it allows us to extract and store various key contractual terms in their tool to then later query and use however we need. For us at TIFF, where the legal team is small, this has been a home run. The other tool or example that we're working with is a platform called FinPilot. They were introduced to us by one of our existing venture partners. We have used this to enhance the workflows and the initial use cases really around the seamless integration of unstructured documents really on the investment side of the business. Manager letters, pitch decks, research notes, or data sets that residing OneNote or Teams or really wherever across the firm, FinPilot can rapidly convert all of this into structured query ready data and it allows our teams outside of the investment thing. So think clients, think other teams across the organization. It allows them to, with simple English, ask questions and so this has been a very successful pilot for us and one that we look forward to continuing to do more things with. So this is a concept of around lifting the burden on basic information on portfolio activity changes and just arming them with better information and more timely information. It saves that step of picking up the phone or walking down the hall to ask that portfolio manager or CIO a question. It just gives them more time back in their day. Sky also do want to make the points though. We've had proof of concepts in this space that have gone poorly. The results are mixed. What it's taught me is that first and foremost, AI in business operations is real. It's not just hype. There are use cases that are absolutely benefiting all aspects across the business, but if you don't tailor or train the AI for the specific use case, the results aren't going to be good. What are those lessons learned from the things that didn't work? Part of it's about integration. Integration matters. If there's a cool AI tool but it sits outside of all of our systems, it's of limited use. We need those third-party tools to sit within our TIFF data sets so that we can bring all of the various knowledge and insights from across the platform. The other thing I want to talk about is we have this concept of institutional investing. We have this convergence of going to the high net worth market. Are you guys focused on that at all? Yeah. It's a trend that I find really interesting. The blurring of lines between what was historically very separate and distinct markets. You had high net worth individuals and their family offices, financial advisors, and then you had institutional investors like endowments and pensions, et cetera. Traditionally, those segments were served by very different platforms and had very different products. High net worth folks often went to private banks or wealth managers. Institutional investors typically went to consultants and got a lot more complex and cost some solutions. What we're seeing into your point is there's been this convergence. The needs and offerings of both are somewhat meeting in the middle. For instance, wealthy individuals increasingly want access to the kind of investments and sophisticated strategies that institutional investors have always deemed. Get equity, hedge funds, bespoke opportunities. Thanks to technology and product innovation, they're starting to get it. You have feeder funds, you have lower minimum versions of institutional products. All of this is helping bring that institutional quality or institutional platform to those high net worth investors. Then at the same time, you have institutional clients like smaller endowments that are now expecting a more higher touch user-friendly experience that was somewhat akin to high net worth world or private banks. They want intuitive reporting dashboards. They want quick responses. They want customization. For TIFF, this convergence has definitely been something on our radar and something we've thought about and how do we navigate it carefully. That said, we sit in a sweet spot where we can deliver it to both, but we're thinking about it carefully. Any kind of lasting thoughts on leadership lessons? You spend a lot of time working at different organizational sizes, any key takeaways for you that you commonly share with others? When I look back at my own career, it absolutely wasn't a linear path that I had perfectly charted out. I didn't 20 years ago say, "I want to be COO of a mission-driven OCR firm." Instead, opportunities arose somewhat unpredictably for me, but to your question, I'm a big believer in that you create your own luck to an extent. In my case, whenever I was in a role in the past, I tried to do that role with excellence. Really nail those core responsibilities, go above and beyond, do it at 120%. But then find another 30% and network like crazy around the organization, meet new people, understand new functions, volunteer to help them figure out how it all fits together. By reaching beyond your silo, you pick up skills that others don't have and you also become known as somebody who can bridge gaps. Those are the kind of people that organizations tend to tap for bare roles because problems in companies usually span multiple areas. I do believe there's an element of luck being in the right time at the right place, but I do think you can improve those odds by doing what I just said, doing your job at 120% and knocking it out of the park, and then looking left and looking right and seeing if you can contribute there too. I think that habit really creates the kind of momentum in your career and often leads to interesting places that you want to predict it at the start. What are your thoughts on mentorship networking today? We're kind of post COVID, there's been a shift in mentality, you got younger generations coming up who didn't know what it was like before. Any advice for people on that aspect? You need the hard skills for whatever your very functional role is day to day, but there's also some software skills that are incredibly important. Networking is something I didn't fully appreciate when I was heads down early in my career, but relationships matter immensely. Networking isn't just about collecting business cards or getting LinkedIn connections. It's about building genuine relationships where there's mutual respect. My advice here is really to approach it with authenticity, be interested in others, look for ways to help them, not just what they can do for you. Over time, that goodwill comes back around. And then internally, networking is just as important. Get to know colleagues in other departments, the higher ups, the juniors, a broad internal network makes you more effective and visible. And then mentorship, for me, it's been a big factor in my career. I was fortunate enough to have a great couple of mentors that taught me, that guided me and advocated for me. One boss early took me under his wing and taught me not just how to do tasks, but how to think about strategy, how to think about leadership. That was invaluable. Another mentor gave me tough feedback that I needed to hear that probably helped correct course on a weakness. I was really two in the weeds at times and he coached me on how to delegate and look at the bigger picture. So my advice here is to seek mentors who you admire and who are willing to share insights and offer their time. And it doesn't have to be mentors in your company. It can be industry mentors, formal colleagues, et cetera. And then finally, especially again in today's world, there's the concept of adaptability. I can't stress how crucial this is. The world changes, industry changes, companies reorganize, new technologies emerge, hello AI, the people who thrive are those who are adaptable. Mentors that don't mind stepping out of their comfort zone and learning something new, adjusting to a new role, sometimes even taking a lateral move if it makes sense. I've had to do this many, many times throughout my career. And each time there's a learning curve, sometimes anxiety, am I prepared for this? Can I do this? Adaptability means being a continual learner and staying flexible in your identity. I also do find that maintaining a growth mindset, believing you can learn and improve also helps here a lot. In industries like ours, senior leaders, they value the people that can handle this type of change. The last couple of years especially with everything from market swings to pandemic related changes, it has shown how important adaptability is. The more that you embrace change rather than resist it, the more opportunities you'll find in those changes. So, David, I want to turn to our closing questions and the first one is what advice would you give to an emerging manager from an operational perspective? Don't treat operations as an out of thought. You could have a seller investment strategy with great investment performance, but if an institutional allocator comes in, spots a sloppy operation, they can walk away. And I've actually seen it happen in my past. It's early in building a solid operational foundation, and that ultimately comes down to having the proper controls, processes, and documentation in place. And then what one book, article, or other resource you commonly recommend to others? Outside of Funfire, which is an industry rag that I read every day, it's kind of a great mindless resource, but you get timely industry updates. But outside of that, there's a book I often find myself recommending called High Output Management by Andy Grove. Grove was the legendary CEO of Intel, and this book is really kind of a gem on the art of science and management. I came across it in grad school. I had to read it in an entrepreneurship class. I just love it because it's so practical and timeless. It covers everything from how to run effective meetings to thinking about performance metrics and how to train teams, and the beauty of it is it's really applicable to all organizations and all industries. And the gist of the book is really that a manager's output is basically the sum of their output plus the team and their contributions. So it really reinforces the importance of delegation and training your team, because if you can make them just 10% more effective, it's a huge output boost overall. Good stuff. David, thanks for the time. Look forward to staying in touch. Thanks for having me, Scott. Thanks for listening to the show. 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