Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

Josh Wolfe and Brett McGurk are Partners at Lux Capital, a $5 billion venture capital firm that specializes in emerging science and technology companies that turn sci-fi into sci-fact. Josh co-founded Lux and is a repeat past guest on the show. His first appearance from 2018 discusses his story, including phrases: 'chips in shoulders put chips in pockets,' 'failure comes from a failure to imagine failure,' and 'directional arrows of progress.'

Brett joined Lux last year, following a 20-year career in public service where he advised four U.S. presidents and helped shape national security strategy across the Middle East.

Our conversation kicks off with Josh's state of the venture industry and Lux's positioning within it. Brett then describes his background, sovereign ambitions, and geopolitical risks. We discuss directional arrows of progress across AI, cap-ex maintenance, biology, defense systems, and space.

This Sponsored Insight features Robert Boucai and James Broyer. They are the Co-Founders of Newbrook Capital Properties, a multifamily real estate investment platform built to generate optimal long-duration, tax-efficient income. Robert is also the Founder of Newbrook Capital Advisors, a hedge fund he launched twenty years ago that today manages $1 billion across long-short and long-only strategies. He was born with sensorineural hearing loss and today serves on the Board of the Hearing Health Foundation, which is dedicated to preventing and finding cures for hearing loss.

Our conversation covers Robert's path from real estate to hedge fund investing and back to real estate. We discuss the real estate strategy he designed with James, including alignment, market and asset selection, property improvement, and supply-demand drivers to create durable rental growth. We close with risks, synergies with Newbrook's public equity business, and plans to scale the real estate platform.

John Khoury is the Founder and Managing Partner of Long Pond Capital, a hedge fund that specializes in publicly traded real estate securities. After 15 years in the business, Long Pond is one of the few remaining firms in the niche. Long Pond recently launched an active ETF, ticker: LPRE, which invests in the most attractively priced stocks from Long Pond's list of the highest-quality real estate businesses.

Our conversation covers John's path into public real estate investing, changes in the investable universe, and the impact of passive flows and pod shops on the sector. We turn to Long Pond's investment process, focused on identifying and exploiting asymmetry, and cover John's perspectives on the major real estate sub-sectors. We close with a discussion of Long Pond's new actively managed ETF.

Our continuing exploration of the intersection of private wealth and alternatives takes us to Future Standard, one of the largest distribution platforms bringing the wealth channel exposure to the middle markets.

Michael Kelly is Co-President and Chief Investment Officer of Future Standard, a $90 billion alternative asset manager focused on private middle-market strategies for the wealth channel. Michael has been in the alternatives industry for three decades, starting as an analyst under Lee Cooperman and Julian Robertson, helping build FrontPoint Partners, which began the institutionalization of hedge funds, serving as CEO of ORIX USA, where he led the acquisition of $250 billion global asset manager Robeco, and for the last decade turning to the democratization of alternatives.

Our conversation covers Michael's path from working in hedge funds to building alternative asset businesses, including lessons about incentives, leadership, and culture. We then discuss his pivot from the institutional market to the wealth channel, and the growth from a single strategy at Franklin Square with $12 billion in assets to a full suite of strategies under the rebranded Future Standard with $90 billion across private credit, private equity, real estate, infrastructure, and multi-asset investing. Michael also shares his views on performance expectations and what the flood of new capital means for the institutional market.