Wellington’s Jean Hynes on the Art of Investing and Finding New Markets

The art of equity investing is really dreaming what is the potential of something that could be so transformational that people can't imagine it. I'm Allison Mass, Chairman of Investment Banking in Goldman Sachs' Global Banking and Markets Group, and your host for this episode of Goldman Sachs' Exchange's Great Investors. Today, I'm sitting down with Gene Hyens, who's the CEO of Wellington Management, an Investment Management firm specializing in equities, fixed income, hedge funds, and private assets with over $1.3 trillion in assets under management. Well, welcome to Great Investors, Gene, so happy to have you here. Thank you so much, Allison, really, really glad to be here. So I'd like to start these interviews by talking about your background. You majored in economics, but your college experience was somewhat unusual, so tell us about that. So I went to wealthy college, just maybe a little bit of background. My parents were Irish immigrants, and so I didn't know where I was going to go to college, just going to college was a big thing in my family, and I arrived at Wellesley. I had pretty much a full scholarship, so I loved the Wellesley alums ahead of me that provided that, and my mother being Irish immigrants, my mother wanted something she recognized. So my first semester was computer science, which is the only C I got in my whole academic career, but I found my way to economics the second semester, and I loved it. And actually, the interesting thing is I loved micro-economics, which is actually what I've done for my whole career. It wasn't just macro-economics, it was the micro part where I really excelled at. Were you a first-generation college? I was. Student in your family, so they must have been really proud. Yes. You've been at Wellington for over 35 years, which is amazing. Today? Today at Wellesley. Congratulations. My third Monday of 35 years ago, I started. Wow. July 20th. That's fantastic. What a milestone. So tell us a little bit about your first role at Wellington. So going back to Wellesley, I took one course. I didn't know what I was going to do. I loved economics, but I didn't really know about the finance world or the research world, but I took a sociology class, and I got a job in my junior year of college. And that's how I got introduced to the stock market, got introduced to the world of finance. I want to learn why stocks go up and down. I could verbalize that, leaving my senior year of college. And back in 1991, it was not a great job market. You had the Iraq War, but I found my way to Wellington. Wellington was a pretty small firm at the time, under 300 employees. And I took a job as an administrative assistant in the research department of Wellington. That is a great story. And I remember the recruiter telling me, this is a great company. Don't worry about the title. So I would always say-- We use that same line of gold. And it was true, actually. It was very true. And I immediately did research. It was sort of a combination of administrative assistant, research assistant. I worked with three analysts, global industry analysts. I worked on models, and I opened mail. Well, I was very fast at opening mail, because I was very interested in sort of the research aspect of it. So you said when you joined there were 300 employees, how many do you have now? 3,000. Wow. That's a big difference. So you said you didn't initially see yourself as a future CEO. So tell me about when that changed. So I never saw myself as a CEO. I think it began to change in 2014 when I became a managing partner at Wellington. And I was working with an executive coach for the first time. And she asked me, in the beginning of our session, do you want to be CEO someday? And I said, no, absolutely not. I was managing $70 billion in assets from Vanguard health care all the way to Longshore biotech. I love investing. I love health care. And so it just wasn't my ambition. The managing partner part of it was like a leadership part of it, talent part of it that I was super interested in the talent leadership part of it. And then after working with Brendan Swords, our CEO for about a year, I could see, like, I could actually see, well, the decisions he was making were very similar to the decisions that investor makes, like operating in that gray zone all the time. And so I could see myself in him in some ways. And then I said, at the end of that year of coaching, maybe I do want to be CEO. And I should be really good advice. And she said, if you think you even have an inkling, then maybe we should continue working together. And that was really good advice, because over the next six, seven years, it was really about, could I be it? Did I have the skills to be it? How do I gain the skills? Did I want it? How did I want to spend my last period of time with my last decade of this great firm? Did I want to do it as in this role, did I want to stay in really shepherd the health care business? And so it was good to have a thought partner. Well, there's a lot of people who are very glad you made a decision. That's wonderful. So when you joined Wellington in 1991, the company was primarily focused on employees. And walk us through the growth from then to now in terms of the asset classes and the business base. So I love thinking about Wellington in decades. I think it's a great way to look at companies in general and industries in general. And so we were primarily, we were primarily equities and not only equities, we were primarily value equities back in 1991. And so I would think about the decade of the 90s as expanding our equity capabilities into mid cap equities and to growth equities into all aspects of equities towards the end of the decade, starting international and global equity capabilities. The decade of the 2000s would be our expansion beginning of our expansion into fixed income. We always had fixed income, but it was a much smaller part, a minority part of our business. So in 2004, we began a big investment into fixed income capabilities. And then also in the middle of that decade, which is why I went to London, we began to globalize our investment platform. And that meant, and I think the leaders at the time were prescient in saying, we are not going to be able to hire people in Boston to do everything we want to do because there were so many companies being created in Europe and in Asia, and we weren't going to get the best talent. And so that was the reason behind first London and then eventually Hong Kong and Singapore expansions of our investment platform. And your view of 2010s and 2020s. How is it evolved? Yeah. And then the 2010s, I would say two areas that we expanded in from an investment capability perspective, it was in, we began our private journey in 2014. We continued our globalization journey. And then we began to expand from a channel perspective into wealth in Europe and Asia. In the US, we had these two great partners, Vanguard and Hartford funds. And we were looking for them in Europe and Asia and actually, those kind of companies don't exist. And so we began our, that was a big expansion of our capabilities to really serve the wealth channel in Europe and Asia. And then this decade, and this decade, decade, decade, decade, I think if I had to take a step back and when I retire someday, I hope we will say that we are, we have a much stronger capability, manufacturing capability in alternative investing. The decision that was made towards the end of 2019, so starting in 2020 was to separate hedge funds out of our equity and fixed income business and to separate privates were to were then in our equity business. And that was the right decision because then that has allowed us this decade to really focusing on building those capabilities in a really deliberate way. And we have now 100 investors that are dedicated to hedge funds and privates up from a very small number in 2020. And that's, that's fantastic. Of your assets under management, I mean, what is the percentage across these asset class? So we have over 50 billion dollars now in alternative assets across privates, hedge funds, extension strategies, CLOs. So those have been the areas that we've expanded into in the past five, six years. That's real scale, yeah, real scale. All right. Now, you've spent most of your career investing in healthcare. What initially attracted you to that sector? So initially, I wasn't necessarily attracted to it, I was given the opportunity to work with what turned out to be my 20 or mentor at Owens. But the interesting thing about Ed is back in 1992. So I started in 1991 in 1992, he managed Vanguard healthcare. That was about 500 million dollars now back then in 1992. He was starting a biotech portfolio. He was starting in sort of an all cap global healthcare portfolio. He was the analyst. He was a global industry analyst that covered biotech and pharmaceuticals. And they wanted him to hire someone to work with him. And he did not like change. And he did not want to hire a senior person if you didn't want. And there you are. And there I was. For a year, I was his administrative assistant, plus his research assistant. But really from day one, he brought me to every biotech meeting, every pharmaceutical meeting. Early on, I would go to client meetings with him. we were done. just like a match made in heaven in terms of what he needed and someone for me to like, he was such a great mentor. - Yeah, well, it sounds like you're both very lucky. - Yeah, the great match. - Now, is there a specific investment or a deal from early in your career that taught you the really important lesson that you think about today? - First of all, working in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, which was the area that I focused on. What a privilege, right? Every industry, I actually have a lot of friends at Wellington who are just as passionate about insurance. - Right. - But really, when you think about biotech and pharmaceuticals and the ability for that industry to really change people's lives when it really comes to people's health. - So I have just had the privilege of interacting with so many amazing companies and CEOs over that period. - So maybe I'll talk about two. One, I'll start with the lesson. Early in my career, you've learned lessons that you hope you never repeat again. And I would say one lesson was there was a company called Alon, which turned out to have the early days of what is now the first Alzheimer's treatment. But they were a specialty pharmaceutical company. And I was very interested in them because of the Alzheimer's and their MS drugs, multiple sclerosis drugs. But they had come from a kind of a background of doing drug delivery and specialty pharmaceuticals. And I avoided them for so long until the science began to show and then they had a really serious earnings miss. And it was all in this other income line. So they had earnings hidden in the other income line that were not sustainable. And so that was a really harsh lesson, meaning as an investor, it's not good enough to say, I'm gonna focus on this fun part of studying multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer's. You also need to understand every aspect of the P&L that you understand every line and you dig in. So I never let that happen again. So that would probably be a lesson of, making sure you don't make the same mistake twice. And then maybe just as importantly, 'cause lessons are what works and what doesn't work. The other lesson was we were investors in this company called Immunex, which is now part of AMGET. And they developed the first drug that really changed how you treat inflammatory diseases. It's called Embrell, it's still around. It's still one of the largest drugs in this category. And it was so transformational. And I remember it was my first big call, meaning the call that really separated me from peers out in the market because you had to imagine a market that didn't exist. I mean, there was lots of people who had inflammatory diseases. It turned out to be rheumatoid arthritis and they were treated with steroids. There was no market for them. So you had to imagine both how fast you could penetrate that market and also what the pricing could be. And it was such a big advance. It wasn't like a lot of times in medicine, you step up, you step up to better treatments over time. This one was like a gigantic leap in efficacy. And so it was very surprising. So like dreaming, right? Like the art of equity investing is really dreaming what is the potential of something that could be so transformational that people can't imagine it. I'm just curious, how did you imagine that? How did you make that call? I think it was based on partly the data. Partly was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was presented, but it was really interacting with the rheumatologist, like the specialist. And you had to listen to them about what they were going to do. And so it was the beginning of really using physician specialists to really dig into research. So that's part of your diligence process, really going to the source. That's fascinating. So there's a looming patent cliff driving innovation and M&A activity in the bioforma sector today. Do you think this will turn around the recent underperformance in the healthcare sector? So I would say there's always a patent cliff. It's a looming patent cliff, but it's perpetual in the sense that it's the only industry in the whole world where once a patent expires, you could lose 80% or 90% of your revenue. So the cliff part of it is the reality when a big drug goes off patent, you lose it right away. So it's an industry that constantly cannot be complacent and constantly needs to innovate and evolve. And that's the exciting part of doing the research. And it's also because there's so much going on. They can evolve because there's so much going on in science. And so I would say that's the natural part of the industry. I think the recent underperformance, and now I'm 18 months away from investing in healthcare, but I do think the sort of uncertainty of governments and it's interesting. We're still in a, for healthcare at hospitals and insurance, we're still in this post-COVID normalization. And so I think it's like getting out of that plus having more certainty about pricing, which is innovation number one and what the price will be is probably number two is what will matter for the sector. And then maybe you mentioned innovation. The interesting part of the biotech and pharmaceutical industry is that it's the discovery, it's kind of like our industry. The discovery is not a scale business. You might have thought 25 years ago the big companies are going to have this huge advantage on discovering drugs and has proven not to be the case. Small innovative companies have more of a chance because they're so nimble at discovering new science as big companies. And now, science is happening at big companies and small companies, but when you think about the scale of capital that big companies have, it's amazing that half the drugs are discovered, originally at small companies. And that's the exciting part of it. If you can find one of those gems that is going to have a new drug that's going to transform medicine and buy it at size at an early stage, there's a significant way of adding value to clients. So as a bio-farmist specialist, you're always looking ahead. What medical advances do you expect to see over the next five to 10 years? And what are you most excited about in those medical advances? So first of all, when you think about where there's the most medical need, still in cancer, right? We've made so much progress in cancer, but I do think we are still in the early stages of understanding what we described as cancer. Are you describe it as lung cancer? Are you describe it as breast cancer? But it's really 10 or 12 different kinds of drivers of that cancer. And the more biologists can figure out what drives those, the more we're going to be able to have very specific drugs. So that would be number one that I think we've made with so much progress, but there's still so much more left to do. I think the other part of it is this whole using the immune system to target cancers. That started about 10 to 15 years ago, and we're going to get better and better targeting the immune system to help fight off the cancers as well. So that whole aspect is just really still very early days. And then I go back to my immune ex-example. We've gone from let's say 1991 when I started, where all inflammatory diseases were treated with steroids. To now in 2026, where you have maybe six or seven categories of anti-inflammatories, and I think we'll continue to break those down. There are so many anti-inflammatory diseases that are driven by different aspects of the very complicated and complex immune system. And if you know anyone who's been treated with some of these drugs for RA or for skin diseases, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, their lives are so much better today and their lives will be better in the future because the medicines will be more targeted, easier to use, longer durations. So that aspect, I think those two are probably where the complexity of it is still not understood well enough that we're going to have a lot of innovation. - So I want to talk a little bit about the metgro. And you mentioned that you moved to London, right, around the global financial crisis. But your investment career spans multiple crises, bubbles, market regions. So what period do you think taught you the most? - Yeah, so I will say I'm going to talk about maybe three periods, maybe 99, 2000, the global financial crisis. And maybe it's not a crisis, but a real regime change in pharmaceutical and healthcare investing. So the first one, and this is where I think Ed being my mentor was really, I learned so much during the 99, 2000, and I would call it, it was the internet bubble, but it was also the biotech bubble. And we had, if you look at the biotech stocks, they were just on a tear and not based on real sound fundamentals. And I remember alerting from him just being very disciplined about selling, about giving money back to clients and our dedicated strategies about raising a ton of cash and just the ability to stick with the thesis that you knew was right. And so that year then we were very well prepared then when the biotech bubble burst. So I was just so young and to learn that so young about these big regime changes and that's when you really have to protect your clients' capital. So that would be number one. I would say in '08, I didn't navigate '08, well, but '09 was one of my best years. And so when I think about the two of them, But the reason 08 was hard is because so many companies had issued convertible debt and that was kind of a new thing in the 2000s and I never had to worry about debt. The company's had net cash and so actually then when the global financial crisis came and anyone with debt as you remember was under significant pressure and so we had some companies that had this convertible debt that actually then really reduced their cash position and navigating that. I learned a lot in that and I actually had so many conversations with biotech companies because they didn't know how to deal with it either right. So I remember talking to some of my big holdings I'm like you've got to reduce spending you've got to let this work. So I remember the conversations it wasn't about the stocks were down it was about how do you help your companies that also hadn't really navigated having leverage and they thought it was equity and then it became debt. So that part of it really was quite interesting and then so I think you just learn these lessons over time and then you go from like healthcare started working again in 2010 until 2015. 2015 was like an amazing year and I remember then sitting in our morning meeting every day and really realizing healthcare was going up and energy was going down and really recognizing that it wasn't healthcare. It was this transition it wasn't that healthcare was fundamentally outperforming to that level. It was that energy was going like something was happening in the energy markets and they were looking for a place to put the money. And so just recognizing that this is probably a time to reduce our exposures and go up and cash and if you were in just one bubble and didn't recognize the environment around you we might not have been able to position that. So just learning lessons there's these big regime changes that happen. Yeah, I know there's a three interesting perspectives. So in today's market inflation is a top concern and in fact Wellington's research key predicted inflationary growth at the start of this year. Have you changed your outlook and where are you looking for opportunities. Yeah, so actually our team really changed their view on inflation five years ago and they recognize they probably emphasized it at the beginning of this year, but they really recognize back to these structural changes. That's where Wellington's research is so good is like when you have people that study inflation for 30 years or and they really recognize that these structural changes are happening. And so I think for our macro investors who did recognize that trend, it was the change in globalization, the change in structural expectations and volatility of inflation that it was going to be stickier than the market expected. So I think we still believe we're in that regime. I think the big unanswered question is will AI be inflationary and will it eventually be deflationary. I think those are some of the things our team is really thinking about will AI be a deflationary factor eventually, even though now it's probably an inflationary factor. I want to get back to AI because we can't have conversation without talking about it, but you mentioned globalization, so I wanted to get your perspective on in what ways portfolio management has changed in this era of heightened geopolitical tension. I think it's another factor that impacts portfolios. I'm not sure it's drastically changed portfolio, like how you think about portfolio management, the real change in portfolio management is two things. One would be clients, particularly since the global financial crisis, want a smoother ride and so portfolio construction techniques has become a much bigger part of the portfolio management job. The second thing is that the markets, particularly the US, not everywhere are much more concentrated. So how do you navigate a really concentrated benchmark is a portfolio construction change that is really impacting the art in the job of portfolio management. So those are two sort of structural things, one from the client side and one from the market structure side, and when I think about geopolitics, it's just part of the job, great, like if you're any kind of investor, you need to understand what is going impact prices and sometimes it's very micro, which is where I thrive and sometimes it's macro, we've already talked a little bit about the macro. So I'm going to give you a specific example of what I consider geopolitics now to be or similar to an analogy back in 2008, President Obama was elected and we might forget with the 60 Senate majority. So it's really unheard of and back at the same time health care was a number one issue. So I didn't talk to a portfolio manager for a year at Wellington, they had no interest in the health care sector because the health care sector was potentially uninvestable if we went to a single payer health care system. So during that year, I remember my colleague and I, we studied the Senate, we studied the Senate in Nebraska and Montana and moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats really studied the moderate Democrats and would read everything about them because we had to figure out if they were going to get 60 votes. At some point, we made a bet that they would not and that we would not have a single payer system. And then as the year went on, they actually, you know, when obviously Obamacare is not a single payer system. But that was the role for a year, like really studying down to the macro could this have been and thought it would have been spent spending all that time. Just an example of this time, we like our investors really don't have to understand geopolitics and how it could impact the asset prices of their specific industry and sector or country. And so that's part of the job. Yeah, that's nice. All right. So back to AI. So how are you thinking about AI within Wellington? So AI is a topic we talk about quite a bit. And I would say a few years ago, like many CEOs, we decided to have an AI task force. And I remember the advice at the time there's 50 use cases start with a few. And the interesting thing is those use cases are well in practice now. The most important one for us is using our what is our own IP. And so now we have all of our company meeting notes sort of mandatory anyone who goes to see a company goes into our data lake. And that is resulting in a lot of push meaning the AI can say this is what's happened based on all the company meetings we've had in the past week or month and then also a poll for our investors can imagine like the treasure trove of data when you think about 20,000 company meetings. All over the world. So that was like a very important use case. And so now the question from here is taking it up a level we're working on lots of tools for our investors and how do you use agents to help with the portfolio management job. But I do think we're taking it up a level for Wellington and have three big projects that are about to start that will hopefully change our operations, hopefully change our client experience and really change how our investors workflow operates and so that's exciting. Yeah, no, it is a lot of companies are focused on operational efficiency using a I think for us. It's really about how we augment knowledge like how do we make the investment management like we're really focusing on how do we augment the investment management practice because at its heart what we're trying to do when we're a company focused on the manufacturing and the investment management part of it and we're trying to figure out what's going to happen in the world in five years and 10 years and generate insights from that if we can do that. Then we can make recommendations and we can create portfolios, but like how can AI augment that connecting dots at a much faster scale. So maybe you talked about when you retire, so maybe this will be your legacy. Yeah, what you've done with AI for this. I think it'll be the legacy of all CEOs in my era. That's probably right how they adapt and adjust and who will use it to gain share and knowledge and who will fall behind. So I want to pivot a little bit to talk about the culture at Wellington. You've chosen to remain private while many of your peers have gone public or merged or been acquired. So what do you believe that remaining private has allowed you to do differently? So we'll be private for 50 years in 2029. And the interesting thing, Allison, about that is that the private partnerships started out of crisis. We were once one company with Vanguard and there was a separation and there was a crisis for both companies. Actually, crisis of identity, what were we going to do and what was Vanguard going to do and we still relied on each other. And that was also a period in the midst of a very difficult financial market. And so the ability to take the company private probably wouldn't happen. It had been a more positive market backdrop. And they studied partnerships. So they went out and studied all kinds of law firm partnerships, financial partnerships, and they went their own way. And so when you think about 50 years later, the roots in the partnership agreement hasn't really drastically changed because they did such a great job of creating the right long term words in processes and governance processes that allow a few things. One, it was a broad partnership at the beginning. It wasn't three or four people. It was 29. And I talked about the three managing partners, three managing partners. There's a responsibility of them in the end is really to promotions and compensations all about talent. And so you separate sort of the talent part of it from the running the business part of it. The CEO is always one of the managing partners. But what it allows us to do is create this very long-term incentives because you have three people that are looking and being stewards of Wellington over long decades. We've just elected our 13th managing partner. So people stay in the roles for a long time and they really are very focused on how do we think about the long-term sustainability of the partnership. And I think it allows us to attract great talent because talent all over the world wants to be an owner and run their business. And so that ability to create this long-term stewardship of the firm that aligns with our clients that allows us to attract great talent and then perpetuate sort of an ongoing edge. That is, I think, what's special about the private partnership. So I want to talk a little bit continuing on about leadership and culture. You are one of only five female CEOs among the world's 20 largest asset managers. With their moments in your career that being one of relatively few women and senior investment roles shaped your perspective at all. I think what shapes my perspective and what I've learned, and I think this is true of running a company. I think it's true of running an investment team. You want diverse broad perspectives. And being female is one perspective, being a child of immigrants is another perspective. I think all of those perspectives are really important. You want people that are extroverts. You want people that are introverts. You want people that think analytically. You want people that think out of the box. This industry, when I started, had little of that diversity, of the broad diversity. I think it has a lot more of that diversity now. And I think that's the most important thing back to what we're trying to do is hard. Trying to figure out where the world's going is really hard. And so having that diverse perspective both on investment teams as well as in leadership I think has proven to be one of the success factors of Wellington. But I want to talk about outside of work and you mentioned you have four daughters which we talked about. What is the most important lesson you've tried to teach each of them? And I'm curious whether any of them followed in your footsteps to be an investor. So the most important lesson I think I can teach my daughters and I always say to them is it's a long life. You should be doing something you love. So like how do you make sure that you're in a career, you're hanging out with friends and family that provide you joy? And I think work can provide a lot of joy. It's provided me a lot of joy. One story back to when I have twins and they were in the magic marker phase. Anyone that's a parent will know the magic marker phase where they get it all over themselves and you're constantly trying to get it off their clothes and off your walls and off their body hands and face. So we're Catholic and during Lent they had to give up their favorite thing and at that time it was magic markers and I remember that twins being in they were I think they were four maybe and they were in the back seat and they're like mom what are you giving up for Lentz and they said I didn't answer they're like you have to give up your work. So they and I think that's a funny story but yeah they knew I loved work. There was like that was I actually that made me happy. Like that made me happy. I wasn't a guilty mom moment. It was a happy moment that they realized that I love work. So that's my number one lesson. Find work that you love no matter what it is. And I have the four daughters, two are in finance and two are in the consulting industry. So all professional and happy and learning a lot and we'll see what what life brings them. What a great role model to have a mom like you they're lucky. I understand you're an avid reader so I'm just curious when you're reading now. So I'm going to I'll be 100% honest and transparent. I'm reading a Taylor Swift book going back to the daughters. I'll tell the daughters my you know the four daughters like Taylor Swift is I had no interest in Taylor Swift until a few years ago Taylor Swift was on the background. My whole raising my four daughters all the time. And so we went to the heirs toward I went three times because I had to break course. He did all four daughters, but you know find tickets to go and we went sort of in all in what cities did you London Boston Toronto okay and then since then there's been two books written one by the editor of the Harvard Business Review which is the strategic genius of Taylor Swift. It's all about her background and the decisions she's made and I love that book was excellent and it really is when you think about it's like she's a CEO. She's a CEO of her enterprise and that was a book about really the three or four strategic decisions she's made in the past ten or fifteen years that has resulted in her success. So I thought it was a really fascinating book. And then just recently in the last few months a Harvard professor has a class on Taylor Swift and it's all about the art and poetry of her music. And I'm not I don't play piano I'm not a musician and so it's a totally different aspect of it. It's about the music and so I'm almost done that book and I'm learning about chords and the art and actually I was an economics major but art history I took an art history class for a year that was one of probably one of my favorite classes of all time at Wellesley. And so in some ways it's learning about the music part of that and the art part of it's like she's almost like an investor like the mindset of the art part of the music has been fascinating to look at it in that lens. Well I love that answer not the answer I thought I was going to get when I asked you a book it's truthful it's on my I love it my beach bag right now all right so I like to end these things with a little bit of a lightning round so our listeners get to know you a little bit what do you think is your greatest strength as an investor I have two strengths I connect dots really well which is actually why the CEO role became like I always thought I had to be super creative I'm actually not super creative but I'm a super doc connector and that leads to strategy so that part of it like seeing connecting tons of dots and seeing where an industry can go I think that's probably number one and then I'm also like a high high relationship skill it's just who I am and it's sort of an innate skill of connecting with people so connecting dots and connecting with people and I think that has served me people do their job in different ways having that relationship skill I think has served me really well in investing as well as in leadership all right so what is the best piece of advice you've ever received I'll tell you a story I think it was a pivotal moment this is coming from Ed Owens who by the way it doesn't like change he also wasn't a big feedback he was like feedback by Osmosis rather than feedback directly so he never actually gave you direct feedback until 2008 we are on a train in it's funny you remember where I was it was really awkward and I've been working with him for almost 20 years at that point but he was giving me feedback he could see it from afar I had been away from him in London for almost a year and he could see this tendency from afar or more than that when I was investing I wanted it to be right and so I was starting to like and I was a partner for many years of the time I was starting to have thesis creep or stubbornness when things didn't go when the data changed and so he briefly gave me this awkward feedback and I bravely accepted the feedback and I think it took me probably a year and by the way my results at the time my results were my performance was quite good I told you later in the year it became more difficult but I do think he could just see I was becoming stubborn which is the worst possible characteristic of an investor so I think for that I pivoted in a took a little while but then I just became really much better at just taking it every data point and not having thesis creep and I love the fact that you remember where you were and I don't remember what I was weird but I remember 16 years working with him yeah so how do you spend your time outside the office what are your hobbies so I have a reading about Taylor so I'm from a gigantic family I'm one of six siblings on one side of the family I'm one of 51 grandchildren wow I have like this cocoon of a family and so really the most important thing I like to do out of work is just spend time with family and friends it's really important to me and then separately maybe from a what what do I do when I spend time like actually getting better at tennis like going on a tennis journey and then I spent 15 years getting better at skiing so I went from a never being on skis to I this winter I did a black diamond every weekend oh that's very impressive it's been a slow journey but it's kind of like the investing journey once I learn how to do it I'm willing to take some risk that's great it's a great life sport so which investor do you admire most well I have to say Ed Owens who you know for those of you who have never heard of him and you probably haven't heard of him because he was he never really sought the spotlight but he would probably has one of the you know top when he retired in 2012 he had one of the top probably 10 records on a history of all investors and so I think what I admired about him him so much, which I got better at over time. And it's part of the lesson that the feedback he gave me. He was so forward-looking. He was so client-oriented. And he knew what the job wasn't to research biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies. The job was to create portfolios of generated alpha. And so learning that whole thing, like you have to do the research in order to generate the insights that have to be differentiated. And then he was such a risk-taker and his ability to take risk and be very comfortable with big, outsized bets. And the ability to change his mind, like when things change, he was very dispassionate. And so all of those, like that whole continuum of what made him a great investor, I have adopted parts of it and part of it as my own, but that ability to see the whole process and how you have to, it's not one thing can be good. You have to kind of be good at all of it to be a great investor. He was an amazing investor. Yeah, it sounds like it. All right, so my final question is, what are you most excited about in the world right now? I haven't thought about that one. What am I most excited about in the world? I think there's just the world's ability. I grew up as an industry following an industry that innovates, that was innovative. And so what I'm most excited about is that I think we're going to go down a journey in the next five, 10 years with AI, just like we did 25 years ago with the internet, that I think is just going to create whole new, it's going to improve health, it's going to create new industries, it's going to just going to be a fascinating, we're in a moment, like a really important moment that is going to change how companies operate and how and what is created in the future. And I think that's super exciting. So that's why I have to say, we're in a pivotal, pivotal moment. Well, Jean, thank you so much for joining me. This was such a fun conversation and fascinating insights. Thank you so much, Allison. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Goldman Sachs Exchange's Great Investors, which was recorded on Monday, July 20th, 2026. I'm Allison Mass. If you enjoyed the show, we hope you'll follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, and leave us a rating and a comment. The opinions and views expressed here are as of the date of publication, subject to change without notice, and may not necessarily reflect the institutional views of Goldman Sachs or its affiliates. The material provided is intended for informational purposes only, and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation from any Goldman Sachs entity to take any particular action, or an offer or solicitation to purchase or sell any securities or financial products. This material may contain forward-looking statements. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Neither Goldman Sachs nor any of its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the statements or information contained herein, and disclaim any liability whatsoever for reliance on such information for any purpose. Each name of a third-party organization mentioned is the property of the company to which it relates, is used here strictly for informational and identification purposes only, and is not used to imply any ownership or license rights between any such company and Goldman Sachs. A transcript is provided for convenience and may differ from the original video or audio content. Goldman Sachs is not responsible for any errors in the transcript. This material should not be copied, distributed, published, or reproduced in whole or in part, or disclosed by any recipient to any other person without the expressed written consent of Goldman Sachs. Disclosure is applicable to research with respect to issuers. If any, mentioned herein are available through your Goldman Sachs representative or at www.gs.com/research/hedge.html. Goldman Sachs does not endorse any candidate or any political party. Copyright 2025 Goldman Sachs, all rights reserved.