Episode summary
CIO Greatest Hits: Multi-Family Offices - Jenny Heller (Brandywine Trust Group, 2017)
Capital Allocators with Ted Seides
· · Hosts: Ted Seides · Guests: Jenny Heller
Summary
Jenny Heller describes a path from microfinance curiosity to long-horizon investing, starting with South Africa and India experiences that taught her patience, humility, and the limits of well-meaning institutional programs. She says an early stint in investment banking helped her learn the mechanics of markets, but Stanford’s endowment work showed her the breadth and impact of institutional investing, and Bill Peterson at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation became a defining mentor.
At Brandywine Trust Group, she frames the job as managing taxable family capital with an unusually long time horizon. That means pairing fiduciary discipline with portfolio construction that emphasizes alignment, process, culture, and the quality of returns rather than just headline performance. She argues that taxes make turnover expensive, so every decision must clear a much higher hurdle than it would for an endowment.
Heller is constructive on active management, but only when managers clearly understand their edge and can survive long enough to compound it. She is especially interested in small, undercapitalized opportunities on the private side and in permanent-capital-style structures, while warning that passion alone is not enough; judgment, risk control, and the ability to live with uncertainty matter more.
Key takeaways
- Heller says Brandywine’s taxable family mandates create a higher hurdle than endowments because selling a long-held manager can mean reinvesting only 75 or 80 cents on the dollar.
- She prefers managers whose process, team, and culture match the strategy, then tests whether the returns are repeatable and consistent with how they claim to make money.
- Heller thinks active management still has room, but only after clearing the after-tax cost of passive investing and a tough break-even alpha threshold.
- She sees opportunity in small, ill-followed private investments, including a first-time healthcare fund and other buy-and-hold structures.
- Her biggest manager-selection lesson is that passion is not enough; judgment, risk awareness, and position sizing discipline matter more over time.
Notable quotes
“what we share with an endowment, and I have lots of great friends in the endowment world. I love that world. And our investment committee has endowment folks on it”
“But because we pay taxes, we have to think even longer term than an endowment. I would say we have to be even more conscious of turnover”
“we actually model out a break even alpha for every active manager we invest in on the long side”
“I think a lot of it is just spending time with the manager and the team and asking, you know, I mean, really, really diving into”
“passion has to be married with judgment. This sounds really obvious, but I was very very sucked in by passionate managers”
How the episode opens
Hello, I'm Ted Sides and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation through conversations with the leaders in the money game. We learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital.
You can join our mailing list and access premium content at capitalallocators.com. All opinions expressed by TED and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is forformational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of Capital Allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions in securities discussed on this podcast. With eight years and over 500 podcasts under my belt, I'm often asked to recommend my favorite episode. But I can't really answer that question.
I feel like I have 500 children and don't think I've disowned a single one. So when asked, I usually offer up a great recent episode to get a listener started. Finding the best episodes in a big library of content isn't easy, so we thought we'd help.
Each summer going forward, we're going to share our best. Over 7 weeks, we'll replay conversations curated from our favorites and yours, excluding those from the last 12 months. Our 2025 summer series focuses on CIOS.
We're blessed to have an incredible library of long shelf life content, and we just couldn't pick seven. Instead, we'll share a dozen gems canvasing every type of institutional asset owner. This week's summer series is a multifamily office twofer with Stan Miranda, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Partners Capital and Jenny Heler from Brandywine.
Both firms started as multif family offices that have evolved in different ways. Partners Capital has grown and scaled as a leading OCIO, while Brandywine has remained a boutique with a fixed set of family clients.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- family office multi-family strategy
- manager selection
- taxable investor constraints
- long-term investing execution
- learning from mistakes
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Brandywine Trust Group
- Sloan Foundation
- Stanford University Management Company
- Merrill Lynch
Watch the episode
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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Capital Allocators with Ted Seides, this episode and its artwork belong to Ted Seides – Allocator and Asset Management Expert. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
