Tom Duffy

One of the best ways to diligence a manager is to do a deal with them, especially at TIFF when a big one of our key pillars is finding and investing alongside emerging managers in fund one, two or three, where historically performance is at its highest compared to when they get into their later fund vintages.

Being able to have done an investment alongside someone is one of the best ways to determine if it's worth going into fund one as an emerging manager or fund two.

Some of the key things that we're looking for is, do we like them as investors?

Do we like them as people?

Is there a transparent relationship that's built around trust and trust?

and long-term trust especially, we need to know we're not in this for the short term.

We're not in this for just one deal.

We ideally want to be partnering with sponsors for the long term.

If you think about some of our first two sponsors that we partnered with back in 2014,

Two of them we're actually still invested with today in their funds since they launched an institutional strategy.

That's not the case for all of them, but it's been about a 50% ratio of managers that we've backed and done deals with as an independent sponsor to those who have gone on to become a funded manager where we've been one of their first institutional investors.

Those are all key things that we think we can glean and get this real deep insight into that others aren't able to if they're not backing them as sponsors.

So a lot of people's diligence process, what I've gleaned over the years from working at various firms and talking with peers, so much of it focuses around people process and philosophy, right?

How do they function as a team?

What does the long term roadmap look like?

Is there a plan in place for key person risk when one person moves on and retires?

Who's going to fill their shoes?

Those are the key basic things that most firms look at.

And of course, we look at it, too.

But there's always a lot of other things that we're looking at the hood as well.