Dry Powder: The Private Equity Podcast
This episode originally aired on Dec. 7, 2023.
Today on Dry Powder, I have a lively conversation with Ashby Monk, the executive director of the Stanford Research Initiative on Long-Term Investing. Ashby studies the inner workings of pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and foundations—in short, all of those LPs that sit somewhere in between the public and private sectors.
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“That means that they are optimizing for things that are not entirely evident to just the casual observer,” Ashby says.
Ashby calls them “civil society organizations,” and he argues that no two funds are alike, even if they seem to be running identical investment models.
“Doesn’t matter if they tell you they run the Yale model or the Canadian model,” Ashby says. “All of the Maple Eight pension funds running the Canadian model are so different, one from the next, in terms of their philosophy, the maturity of their liabilities, the number of clients they’re dealing with. They’re all so different, and so we really do need detailed, granular information about each plan.”
In this episode of Dry Powder, I ask Ashby to take us inside the $140 trillion universe of long-term investing and help us understand what these organizations are optimizing for.
The Private Equity Podcast
In our podcast series, Bain's Hugh MacArthur interviews leading experts on the trends and opportunities that will redefine the private equity industry.
First published in mayo 2025