Christopher J. Ailman

speaker

229 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 3 Feb

Christopher J. Ailman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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How I Invest with David Weisburd · E296: Former CIO of CalSTRS on Why LPs Overpay for ‘Innovation’ · 3 Feb 2026 podcast

Early in my career, I'll give credit to Steve Myers in South Dakota, Matt Clark now.

I copied some of their ideas in terms of how to operate like a money manager inside the government business model, which is not easy to do.

Government business model is not a good model for almost anything, and certainly not money management.

But learning how to operate

Working with the board, we were blessed in that we had fairly good governance.

Yes, our board turned over.

I think I had over 200 trustees sit in front of me over my 20 years.

But what I found by being a teacher system is teachers are focused on education.

They think long term.

They care about the future of children and they know what they know, but they also know what they don't know.

So they were willing to learn when it came to the investment portfolio, give us some latitude to operate, as I said, discretion.

I can't hit it on enough.

Governance really does matter.

Whether you're a private firm or a public firm, institutional investor, the governance structure of how you make decisions, who has what role and are those clear and clarified, literally adds a lot of value.

We talk a lot about, you mentioned the Canadian model and the fact that it's a very different structure.

Back in 1991, Ontario teachers and California teachers were almost identical.

California teachers was bigger, but they were very similar.

But Ontario teachers at that point had a crisis of paying their benefits, and the government said, hey, we're either going to take this full government or we need to go private.

And that sort of branch in a tree, I think CalSTRS became more public, unfortunately, and government and teachers became the Canadian model.

Wall Street's very famous for creating new products and new fancy ideas.

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