Nicole

But during my tenure there, I always felt very supported by that board.

And I really always felt that they showed up at every meeting wearing one hat, which was let's make sure that our constituents can retire with, you know, with dignity and retire with a pension.

we had to step back and say, you know, where are we trying to get to?

And are the tools or the levers that we're pulling on going to get us there?

And I think the first exercise we did during that last listening tour was what have we missed?

And it was pretty evident from the data, from the history, what was in front of us that we'd missed a really big chunk of participating in the private equity markets for like almost a decade.

It was like a lost decade.

We were in, we are out.

We were not, um,

You know, really leaning into the opportunities that were in front of us with respect to building a co-investment platform, with respect to making sure we weren't over diversified, with respect to making sure we are right sizing our checks, with respect to are we in all parts of the, you know, the menu, if you will, of options across alts.

So we did a real deep dive in particular onto the illiquid side of the business, which was, you know, a safe place for me to lean into initially because of my private markets background.

And we came to some conclusions that were, look, we need to do better.

We need to do more.

We need to do better on the private equity side.

And we need to really lean into the partners, the GPs, where we have high conviction, high conviction being, you know,

really being decided based on track record, their track record of being, you know, good partners, whether that meant because they perform well, whether that meant because they showed up and, you know, with that teaching hospital mentality, showed us deals, helped us get there, et cetera, et cetera.

We had

a real hard look at who we thought in that stable of GPs were our high conviction partners.

And from there we said, okay, if we've decided that these are high conviction partners that we feel good about their work,

approach to risk-taking and their ability to generate great risk-adjusted returns, let's start setting up more of a programmatic approach to co-investing.