About these summaries
Octagon has summarized 31 episodes of Swimming With Allocators published between Feb 25, 2026 and Nov 11, 2026. The companies discussed most often are Sidley Austin LLP, SpaceX and Anthropic. Frequent guests include Michael Podolny, Shane Goudey and Chuck Daly. Each summary lists key takeaways, short timestamped quotes and the companies and tickers mentioned, with a link to the full episode.
Most-mentioned tickers
- GS 2
Most-mentioned companies
- Sidley Austin LLP 28
- SpaceX 4
- Anthropic 3
- Goldman Sachs 2
- OpenAI 2
Frequent guests
- Michael Podolny 7
- Shane Goudey 7
- Chuck Daly 4
- Nick Cassin 4
- Rebecca Stuart 3
Episodes
- Can You Index Venture Capital?
Alex Kirk describes Verdis’s early-stage venture program as an index-like answer to seed’s power-law structure: rather than concentrating in a few brand-name funds, the team…
- The Fund Everyone Will Wish They Backed
Babson College’s endowment built its venture program slowly and deliberately, starting from a small asset base and using a concentrated approach to back a few managers…
- The $9B Portfolio That Fits on One Page
Frank Mihail describes how North Dakota’s roughly $9 billion trust lands portfolio is run as a lean, concentrated book with a long time horizon and no pension liabilities.
- The Biggest Untapped Impact Money Pool You’ve Never Heard Of
The guest argues that impact investing has moved from a niche, KPI-heavy exercise into a more mature approach that integrates products, governance, and operations.
- Stop Taking Dumb Money
The guest argues that a corporate venture program needs a clear north star: whether the goal is an M&A pipeline, financial returns, or, most often, strategic insight that helps…
- LP Destroys ‘Fees on Fees’
The guest traces his path from Baltimore and Cornell’s operations research program into endowment investing, saying the appeal was always a mix of quantitative work, people, and…
- DDQ: Why LPs Still Aren’t Buying the Venture Comeback
The hosts argue that the venture rebound is not being unlocked by headline liquidity alone.
- Doing Good Is Not the Trade-Off
Roy Swan argues that impact investing is not a concessionary strategy but a way to find more opportunities to do more good things that make more money.
- What LPs Really Want From Venture Funds
Rachel Kloepfer argues that allocator work in venture looks a lot like investigative journalism: the best diligence comes from unscripted questions, follow-ups, and checking…
- Ep 107 Henrik Reimavuo
The guest argues that venture in Europe is driven less by a shortage of capital than by a quality and allocation problem.
- Inside the LP Mindset: What Makes a Venture Manager Stand Out
Michael Wooten argues that family offices are highly idiosyncratic, shaped by the principals’ goals, control preferences, and tolerance for illiquidity.
- Finding Alpha Before Consensus: Data, Judgment, and Early-Stage Venture
The guest argues that early-stage venture still offers the best chance at true alpha, but only if investors resist lazy consensus and look past headline metrics like TVPI, DPI…
- AI, SaaS and the Next Private Markets Shakeout
A guest argued that AI is already creating both genuine disruption and pockets of excess valuation, with the most exposed areas including simple horizontal software, low-value…
- How Canada Can Become North America’s Trusted Innovation Hub
Senia Rapisarda argues that Canada’s venture market has moved from underdeveloped to strategically important, but still needs more domestic capital, better institutional support…
- Why This LP Is Staying Consistent in an Unpredictable Venture Market
Teddy Repko argues that venture investing is still a business of consistency, but consistency now requires combining base-rate thinking with relationship-driven judgment.
- Why Venture’s Best Opportunities Are Moving to the Edges
Kate Simpson traces her path from a history major at the UNC endowment to leading venture strategy at GEM, emphasizing how institutional investing was learned through repetition…
- DDQ: Celebrating 100 Episodes with Swimming with Allocators
The hosts use their 100th episode DDQ to argue that emerging managers need sharper differentiation than a slide full of familiar logos.
- Cultivating a Venture Program Without Chasing the Hype
A guest from Loyola University Chicago described how a small endowment built a private capital program by starting with data, staying patient, and avoiding the urge to chase…
- What It Takes to Win With Institutional LPs
Yuri Lee argues that her global upbringing shaped both her investing lens and her confidence that talent can come from anywhere.
- How Denmark Built a Big-Tech Future From a Small-Country Base
The guest traces Denmark’s startup ecosystem from near-zero infrastructure in 2008 to a more mature market with founders, VCs, universities, family offices, and large corporates…
- A New Playbook for Deep Tech Fund Investing
Wes Panek traces his path from consulting and international development into venture and then into LP work, arguing that the common thread has been trying to get closer to the…
- Aligning Capital With Community Impact
Avivar Capital’s Lisa Richter and Tina Castro describe impact investing as a discipline that should be applied across an entire portfolio, not treated as a niche sleeve.
- Rethinking the Venture Co-Investment Playbook
The guest argues that family offices should treat venture as a cyclical, highly specialized asset class and build programs slowly across multiple vintages, managers, and…
- What LPs Want and GPs Need to Hear
A guest traced her investing approach to growing up as the different one in predominantly white institutions, saying that experience made her a stronger listener and more willing…
- The Allocator’s Checklist: How LPs Size Up Managers
Charlotte Zhang describes an allocator role that is less about fitting into asset-class buckets and more about evaluating where inefficiency, innovation, and impact overlap.
- Power Laws, Secondaries, and Staying Consistent: StepStone’s VC Framework
Anthony Giambrone traces StepStone’s venture framework to a career built from humble beginnings, including work as a gas station manager, nightclub employee, and investment…
- DDQ: Founders, Fraud & ‘Fake It Till You Make It’
The hosts argue that venture is entering a period of weaker guardrails, where narrative can outrun substance and founders can more easily slip into fraud-like behavior.
- How to Separate Yourself When Everyone Has the Same Deck
The guest argues that private-market investing is really an exercise in making decisions under uncertainty, and that venture in particular only makes sense if allocators are…
- Built for Venture: Problem-Solving Meets People Work
Marcia Mitchell argued that the emerging-manager market is crowded but still mispriced, because capital continues to miss talented investors from non-traditional backgrounds and…
- The New Rules of Venture: What Next-Gen LPs Should Know First
Iliana Oris Valiente argues that venture capital is changing fast enough that allocators need a new learning model, especially next-gen family office members who are being asked…
- Inside VenCap’s Data-Driven Playbook for Venture Returns
David Clark argues that venture capital should be judged with data, not narratives, because the asset class has long feedback loops, sparse public data, and a power law that…
Swimming With Allocators, its episodes and artwork belong to Earnest Sweat, Alexa Binns. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; these pages are independent summaries.
