David Weisburd

During your time at CalSTRS, you really focused on hiring the very best talent internally to manage different asset classes.

What were you looking for from those LPs, essentially, that would be allocating capital for you?

Somebody that's good at Excel and somebody that's good at multidisciplinary thinking, it's almost never in a single person.

Last weekend, I spent 10 hours with a famous investor who wanted to be off the record.

So we'll keep him off the record.

But he had done multiple deals with Buffett, with Bill Ackman, with Tony James and all these famous investors.

One of the things I realized very quickly that I fallaciously thought that these were very similar people.

And what I realized is they were extremely different, distinct styles.

And my theory, not his, is that if you had actually moved that investor into another space, they'd be maybe median.

Maybe they'd still be top quartile, but they would not be a Bill Ackman.

They wouldn't be a Warren Buffett if they were in a different context.

And you mentioned quite a crazy form of doing diligence on the spreadsheets, which is sitting in on a PM meeting at the fund.

What are other sources of what I would call diligence alpha, which is how you could get to ground truth on when managing when diligencing a manager that most people don't take advantage of?

What excites you most about asset allocation and investing today, 2026?

I'm going to ask you a very difficult question.

You got to, in 23 years at CIO and before that, University of Washington, before that also at County.

State of Washington.

You got access to the greatest minds, the greatest GPs of that generation.

If you had to pick one GP that was the most special, which one would you pick?

I know you're only semi-retired.