Investing Billions - E19: Raja Doddala, Head of VC at Churchill Asset Management ($47 Billion AUM) on How LP’s Should Diligence GP’s

Starting point is 00:00:00 Ideal GP for me, I'll give you a name here. It's a small manager named Sean Marani. He's the solo GP at Parade Ventures. We're literally texting most days, either discussing how the portfolios are doing, discussing potential co-investment opportunities, diligencing new funds, whether he's introducing us to new funds or we're looking at funds that we'd like to get his opinion. Another couple that I mentioned, Eric Chin at Crosslink, Mark Suster at Upfront in LA. We're literally texting weekly and discussing, and sometimes I'm helping their portfolio companies

Starting point is 00:00:36 close deals. Recently, I helped close a pretty substantial contract with our parent company just by understanding where they're stuck and giving them advice. Raja, you have a truly remarkable and power-like story of coming to the U.S. at the age of 23 with $400 to your name and transforming that into a storied and humble career as a venture LP, including being the head of VC at TIA Cref, which currently has over $1 trillion with a T, to now running the venture and growth equity book at Churchill Asset Management today with hundreds of millions of dollars

Starting point is 00:01:11 and growing AUM. Welcome to the Limited Partner Podcast. Thank you, David. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here and a little nervous to follow some of the really impressive guests that you had so far. Thank you. Well, like I said, you're very humble. And I think by the end of this interview, the audience will agree with me. So tell me a little bit about Churchill. What is Churchill? Churchill is the private capital asset management subsidiary of TIAA. TIAA is a nonprofit founded by Andrew Carnegie about a hundred years ago with the mission of making sure that people that work in nonprofits, specifically higher education and health care, have a retirement that is secure. And that mission still continues today.

Starting point is 00:01:57 And all the asset management for TIAA is done at a few subsidiaries, and one of them is Churchill. Churchill's business is private debt and private equity and private debt for middle market companies and now venture capital and growth equity. Going a little bit off that, TIA Craft has a mission-driven background. Does that help you get into the top funds? I think it's certainly helpful. As I started to sort of take this business on and somewhat in a rebuilding phase, I didn't know what to expect. But as I started to sort of take this business on and somewhat in a rebuilding phase, I didn't know what to expect. But as I started having conversations, that mission story certainly resonates with at least some, if not most. So in terms of your governance, you have a very

Starting point is 00:02:37 flat organization. Tell me about how you come to decisions at Churchill and to what GPs to invest into. We try to be somewhat nimble and predictable and professional in terms of underwriting and setting expectations. We have a monthly IC process with three folks, some of them are peers and are managers. And once we start in terms of underwriting, it's a fairly small team. It's just me and one other person. And we have wonderful in-house legal and fund administration team that helps us. And when we start underwriting a fund or a company that we happen to directly invest in the company, once we start working on it, we try to wrap it up

Starting point is 00:03:20 in a four-week sprint. And we set very clear expectations before we start with our managers. And that monthly IC is where the approval happens, and we typically run the other stuff like legal due diligence in parallel. Let's talk about that monthly IC. A lot of emerging managers, a lot of GPs don't know what goes on behind the curtain of LP ICs. How does that function? Tell me about a typical IC meeting. When I speak to emerging managers, especially they ask me how institutions make decisions and I could see how that could be sort of come across as a black box.

Starting point is 00:03:56 And what we try to do is I tell them it's an open book test. It's not a mystery. It shouldn't be. There's very specific things that we look at and we could go into that in more detail. And we actually turn that into a couple of pages of very detailed sort of questions that we try to get answers to. And we actually share that with our managers. Answering those

Starting point is 00:04:17 questions really shapes the drafting of the memo, which is pretty detailed in our case, usually 40 to 50 pages. And that's a memo that's pretty standard across asset classes at Churchill. And obviously we had to repurpose it a little bit for venture because venture is slightly different, but our IC has come to expect pretty standard way of presenting funds and how we underwrite. You mentioned specific things that you look for in general partners at VC firms. What are those specific things? Venture is a bit of an idiosyncratic asset class. It is part qualitative, part quantitative. Obviously, if it's an emerging fund, a lot of it is qualitative. But if it's an established fund, there's track record. We like to look for managers that are people of

Starting point is 00:05:00 high integrity and show good judgment. And that could take in multiple different formats. Good judgment could be that they understand who the stakeholders are and they are able to judge the technology cycles in a mature way, that they're price sensitive, and then also that they're in quality networks, that they see good opportunities. And then once they invest in the companies, they're able to help what the minimum they want hurts. And then, you know, the other things that we look for is that when we underwrite a fund, we're looking for a long, you know, multi-vintage,

Starting point is 00:05:36 you know, potentially multi-decade relationship. So we like to make sure that the folks that we're working with are people that we like to work with and their values match our values, including our parent company's values. And just generally prudent investors. I mean, it's a super simple answer, but it's just generally how we look at underwriting. And your parent company being TIA Craft, correct?

Starting point is 00:05:58 Correct. So let's unpack that. You said a lot of nuggets there. High integrity. A lot of people say it mean different things with high integrity. What does that mean to you? People that are essentially at the basic, if you strip it down, they're doing what they said they'll do. Either that's in terms of portfolio strategy or in terms of making truthful statements in general to us and to founders and just generally good actors. You know, we both came from immigrant backgrounds. You came with $400. I came with $600. So I was essentially... By the way, the $400 thing, I want to downplay that a little bit. There's immigrants

Starting point is 00:06:37 that come here with $400. They don't know anybody. They don't speak English. They start at the very bottom. That wasn't my case. I had a graduate degree in computer science. I had a job and friends. Sure, I only had $400. I had to build my life, but I came in pretty privileged compared to some other applicants. I have to push back on that because although you may have come with a background,

Starting point is 00:07:01 you also came at 22, unlike individuals such as me who came at four. And that 18 years is very important as well. So let's call it net net. How do you suss out high integrity versus doing what needs to be done in order to succeed in business? I don't know that those two things are mutually exclusive. When we say high integrity, I think one of the ways that we diligence people is that every manager gives you sort of a list of references. We certainly check those. But fortunately, we have a pretty wide network.

Starting point is 00:07:31 It's a small world. And we're able to really get from other sources that they don't provide us kind of generally their reputation on both personal integrity, but also their judgment in picking the right companies. Yeah, I would also add to that. The nuance, I believe, is why sometimes you do have to break rules. Sometimes you have to do things like that. And the question is why? What is the intent behind that? Is it selfish intent?

Starting point is 00:07:55 Is it for the good of the company? When you look at some of my top founders in my portfolio, at some point, somebody like a Travis Kalanick, who I did not invest in, had to break those boundaries. So I think there's a nuance there that applies not only to startups, but also to VCs. But let's talk about the next bullet point, good judgment. What does that mean to you? This is probably going to be offensive to some people. So I apologize in advance. A perfect example of not having good judgment in our mind anyway, is if you're writing, I don't know, a $50 million

Starting point is 00:08:27 check at a $300 million valuation for something that doesn't, you know, there's no product, it's just maybe a page for pictures of tulips or monkeys. To us, that's bad judgment on the market and technology and product. And a simple question for me is, can I, maybe not today, two, three, four or five years down the road, can I potentially see this technology or product help people that live around me? Or is it just simply selling to other startups and other sort of enthusiasts? That's a good example of sort of the market and technology judgment. And the other is price, especially the last few years,

Starting point is 00:09:07 some people have gotten into this notion that it doesn't matter what the price, the entry price is, as long as we get into the right companies. So let's talk on that. You've invested in many, many managers and many of the top managers that you could imagine. If you imagine a basket of the very top managers,

Starting point is 00:09:22 is there ever a time, have you ever found managers that are not price sensitive that have delivered significant DPI? Very few exceptions. No. And what are those exceptions? We're in a fund that invested a significant amount of money into the seed round of OpenAI. Clearly, that was a rare exception for a product that didn't really exist, but in an area that this person has been thinking about, writing about for more than a decade, and they had super high conviction that that would be a good technology. And in that case, that manager asked the ELPAC, hey, this is off our strategy. This is generally not how we do things but we feel

Starting point is 00:10:05 strongly about it would you be okay with us writing this large check and they said yes and that worked out and that's the part that i say is the integrity part is that being transparent and if you're going to go off strategy at least be open about it it's a combination of good judgment and high integrity as well yeah you mentioned open ai i I didn't mention it. There's a rumored $86 billion or $80 to $90 billion valuation secondary. How do you advise your GPs when it comes to secondary? What's your ideal strategy for how GPs should access the secondary market? The honest answer is I don't know that I'm qualified to answer that from a GP perspective. The reason that we have managers and we trust

Starting point is 00:10:45 them, we do really hard work in picking these managers so that we have to trust them in terms of how they construct their portfolio and how they deliver returns. But having said that, if you have a position that you're sitting on, I don't know, I'm just going to make up a number, eight to 10 X, and, you know, more upside. There's nothing wrong with taking some chips off the table and providing liquidity at the end of the day. Liquidity is a part of the flywheel that makes all of this happen. So I don't fault managers and I get calls all the time. Hey, we're sitting on this position. There's a way to provide some liquidity to you guys and some employees and make up a number three, four, five, 10X, would you be okay with that?

Starting point is 00:11:28 And then more times than not, I say yes, when they ask. Your lack of desire in order to be activists in your approach to VC, I think has led to some of your positive selection. You mentioned you want people in good networks. What does that mean? Does that mean other VCs? Does that mean startup founders? Does that mean early stage? How do you really look at networks holistically?

Starting point is 00:11:49 I think it's all of the above. This business is about at the simplest level, getting into the right companies, the right time, the right price, and then helping them to get to an exit. So some notion of proprietary access is important, and that could come in multiple different ways. We have managers that started out as operators in some very successful tech companies, and that's their network. And some of them started as angel investors, and that's their network. Some of them worked at large firms where they were part of underwriting hundreds of investments, and that's their network. We just like to see some proof of whether they'll see potentially outlier opportunities

Starting point is 00:12:31 and some notion of whether they're in the flow or not. Today's episode is sponsored by Badaw Insurance Group. Badaw Insurance Group is run by my close friend, Amit Badaw, who insures me both personally and at the corporate level. Most people are not aware of the inherent conflicts in insurance, where insurance agents are incentivized to send their clients to the most expensive option. Amit has always been an incredible partner to me in 10X Capital, driving down our fees considerably while providing a premium solution. I'm proud to personally endorse Amit, and I ask that you consider using Badaw Insurance Group for your next insurance need, whether it be DNO, cyber, or even personal car and home insurance.

Starting point is 00:13:10 You could email Amit at amit at luxstr.com. That's A-H-M-E-T at L-U-X hyphen S-T-R dot com. Thank you. You mentioned your timeline is multi-vintage, multi-decades. Are there not situations where there's managers that could create alpha for two funds? Why is that so unattractive to institutional LP? The way we think about our portfolio construction, there's other asset classes in our portfolio, our parent company's portfolio, they're more liquid. You have a different risk profile. So we understand that this asset class is sort of a buy and hold. This is not a trading asset class. This is investment, not trading. So I think it's important that we have a portfolio that over time has a pretty, you know, I think I've listened to other guests on your podcast and some of them want to smooth out the risk and some of them want a concentrated portfolio.

Starting point is 00:14:08 We sort of err on the side of, you know, this asset class is risky enough and it's idiosyncratic enough. Let's take a three year sort of investing period. We like to sample the mean. And that's kind of how our approach is. In order to do that, I think you have to have vintage diversification and you have to have sector diversification and you have to have geographic diversification. Obviously, weights for each different geographies can vary. It also takes a lot of work to underwrite a manager. strategy is working and then team is still working and that we know there's going to be persistence, we like to take advantage of these multi-vintage, multi-generational sort of funds. Part of what LPs tell me, especially the very top LPs, is that part of this desire to smooth out time diversification and sometimes stage diversification is actually in the best

Starting point is 00:15:02 interest of the GPs. They're trying to keep the GP from shooting themselves in the foot because the last thing you want to do is pick a good GP that has one bad or two bad vintages just because the future is unfortunately not predictable, is probabilistic in nature. I agree with that. We have great managers in our book and most, if not all of them, had one bad vintage. I mean, it could be macro, it could be technology, timing of the technologies, et cetera. But I think more LPs valuing time diversification will hopefully avoid some of the bad behavior that we've all seen circa 2019 to 2022, where people are deploying, I don't know, every 12 months. So speaking of bad behavior and deploying every 12 months, one of the bad behaviors has been fund AUM.

Starting point is 00:15:49 And you said off camera, we believe in our data, which says that's easier to get higher returns and smaller funds. How do you think the role of data and venture investing from an LP perspective? Yeah, I'm probably going to be slightly controversial here. And there's now a significant amount of data. I think everybody has the same data set and the data shows so far that it's more likely, it's sort of a probabilistic statement, not a definitive one, that smaller funds have historically had better returns. And that could be a function of usually they go earlier. So entry prices are lower and usually they have to make better decisions, price sensitivity, and also strategy discipline.

Starting point is 00:16:32 But I want to caution, just like we talked about persistence is a problem in this asset class. You have to be conscious of the data, but I don't know that you want to make all of your decision making on the data, just like the returns are not persistent want to make all of your decision-making on the data, just like the returns are not persistent. I think it's a guide that we use, but in this climate, I'll tell you how we're underwriting in this vintage and probably the next and next, is we're probably over-indexing on the smaller sort of fund size than larger. We have about 35 managers in our book and they range from smaller funds, $25 million funds to up to 2 billion. Some of them are even larger. And going forward, we will probably index more towards, obviously depends on the stage,

Starting point is 00:17:18 but if you're a seed fund, pre-seed fund, I think less than 100 is ideal in our book. If you're a multi-stage firm that started series A, you go larger, like 300, 400 to some that we have in our book that have done quite well that are a billion and a half and two billion. You mentioned a strategy discipline. The opposite of that is strategy creep. Is there ever a place for strategy creep? Very rare. And I'll refer you back to that OpenAI example.

Starting point is 00:17:46 So we're a longtime LP in Coastal Ventures. Vinod wrote a $50 million check, their seed round. They were, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, they were the only venture capital firm that was allowed to do that. And that was off strategy for their 2018 fund to invest in a seed stage startup and such a large check. And, but Vinod had conviction. He's been thinking about that technology for a decade or more, been writing about it.

Starting point is 00:18:12 And he went back to the key investors and was transparent. And that worked out. So there is definitely scope for exceptions. But I think they only work if they're transparent about it. Jason Calacanis on episode 14 mentioned that Vinod had a 2,500x return. What makes Vinod Khosla such a great VC? What we like about Vinod is that he's very, very transparent. And he's just very blunt. And that might not be for everybody, but we happen to like the transparency.

Starting point is 00:18:45 And we also happen to like the fact that he built a great team and they have a great training program that would take you as an associate and sort of grow you within the firm and even send you to portfolio companies. And also they just have great judgment in terms of technology cycles. They take pretty hard swings. They're not shy about taking technology at risk, but they're pretty smart about not taking too much market risk. And that's why we like them. You mentioned being very transparent, being blunt. We also have somebody that I look up to, Keith Raboy.

Starting point is 00:19:16 He's an excellent investor. Tell me about Keith and what makes him special. Yeah, Keith, we know Keith. He's probably one of the best, if not the best, that I've seen that came from an operating background is pretty successful firms. And I'm just quoting Keith now, I think I've asked him what makes you a great investor. And he said his ability to meet with an entrepreneur and know very quickly, whether that entrepreneur is a top decile entrepreneur or not. He says that can't be learned. Somehow he was gifted with it and he's had a pretty good success doing that. And he would tell you that he's not the best in terms of knowing which technologies and the timing of those technologies, but he's very good at assessing people and entrepreneurs. One of the oldest discussions or arguments in VC is about

Starting point is 00:20:02 the operator versus a non-operator VC. I'm going to ask you to over-index on your own portfolio managers in favor of shining a light here. What are your views on operator versus non-operator VCs? In our portfolio, we probably have more people with operating background being successful, especially in the early stage sourcing. What about specialists versus generalists? If you look at business from a first principles basis, in theory, the specialist should have the highest returning funds, but it seems like some of the top early stage investors of all time have all been generalists. What do you think accounts for this? In our book, generalists have done better

Starting point is 00:20:39 than specialists. So we generally favor generalists, but generalists in terms of like take Coastal, for example, they would tell you they're generalists, but inside of the firm, there are people that are experts in certain areas and that's what they focus on. So at the fund level, I think generalists probably do better, especially if you look at early stage, you're underwriting founders, you're underwriting people more than the technology. So being open about not being in too narrow a box, I think is helpful. One of the potential discrepancies there is that a lot of the data is biased 10 years from before, if you look at the DPI. And in that point, the early stage was such a nascent market that you didn't have enough specialists. So I think that's one of the things that describes that. The other things is if you look at a first principles basis,

Starting point is 00:21:29 the best returning funds are the ones that the top entrepreneurs pick. I'm in the camp that believes that a great entrepreneurs, maybe Keith could pick the hundred X entrepreneurs early on, but at some stage everybody could choose them. And it's a matter of who the entrepreneur picks. I think the entrepreneur picks the VC versus the VC picking the entrepreneur. And all things being equals, entrepreneurs would rather have a specialist within a firm that's more of a generalist that could give them more branding. Especially now that we're back to sort of quote normal classic venture model where capital is not abundant and you have to like build real businesses. So I think expertise probably matters a lot more now and founders are probably choosing the VCs

Starting point is 00:22:13 versus the other way around. One interesting guest that we had, David Clark from Vencap, and he's had data going back to 1986 to 2017. I enjoyed that episode. That was pretty impressive data set that they have. Yeah, it's a very impressive data set. He has DPI, which is undebatable and hard to contradict. And one of the things that he told me in private is that there's no evidence to show that opportunity

Starting point is 00:22:37 funds do worse than kind of the vintage, the medallion funds. And the reason for that is there's some kind of canceling of the later stage with the insider advantage. The joke that I like to say is that the best way to diligence the company is to be an existing investor. How do you feel about opportunity funds? Are you negative on them? Do you see them as a necessary evil in order to get into the top funds? I don't think we've thought about those too much. We don't do too many of them. We like a single fund more because it's just an easier decision-making on our part. If you have multiple funds,

Starting point is 00:23:10 some people staple them, which I think is pointless. If you're gonna staple them, why do you need the extra burden of putting LPs through, picking the allocation and then fund administration? If you're not stapling them, then you're giving the LPs the choice. Then the other issue with that is now And then fund administration, if you're not stapling them, then you're giving the LPs the choice.

Starting point is 00:23:30 Then the other issue with that is now we have to do extra work in like portfolio construction. So I prefer, in general, I prefer strategies that are super simple, easy to understand, and easy to execute, and that don't scale. That's, to me, the strategies that we like. How about co-invest? If a fund decides not to do an opportunity fund, do you guys do co-invest first of all? We do. We do do co-invest and we're learning how to do them quicker. At the end of the day, the point of venture is you want to make sure that either an LP or GP, most of your money is in the outlier sort of set of companies, either within a fund or across the asset class. And one way to do that is if you have the resources and the interest, and this is where

Starting point is 00:24:13 I think some of my background is helpful. My background is I started as a software engineer. I have a graduate degree in computer science and I built software for a living. And I was an enterprise buyer of software. And I was an enterprise buyer of software. And then I did a fair bit of venture investing myself in companies. And then my team member, Pat, comes from a similar background. So we're able to actually go into these companies and understand the businesses once we're in a fund. And once the companies have passed some of the market risk and product risk for giving the opportunity. We like to do a bit of co-investing. We think that's one way for us to maybe tip the scales

Starting point is 00:24:50 a little bit into getting at least most or majority of our money into outliers. How do you diligence co-invest? Yeah, ideally, these are companies that are not new to us. These are companies that we know in the portfolios that we've even met the founders and spent time. And there's no getting around the fact that we're relying on our partners. This is why I think it's important to pick partners that sort of match our investment philosophy.

Starting point is 00:25:15 And so we're relying on their judgment, but in terms of our own diligence, we try to make sure that these businesses are real. We talk to their customers, just like we deal with fund. We talk to their customers just like we deal with as a fund. We talk to people in the industry about the founding team, and we'd like to make sure that the entry points are reasonable and sort of the classic buy low, sell high, I believe is the adage, but we try to be quick about it. You mentioned ideally, these are company that we know.

Starting point is 00:25:44 I'm guessing that you know them through your GPs. Tell me about your relationship with GPs. How do you gain alpha from being a good partner to GPs? And what does that look like? Most, if not all GPs that we have, this is some of this, this is the reason why we prefer smaller managers where we matter that we have pretty close relationships with our GPs. Ideal GP for me, I'll give you a name here. It's a small manager named Sean Marani. He's the solo GP at Parade Ventures. We're literally texting most days,

Starting point is 00:26:14 either discussing how the portfolios are doing, discussing potential co-investment opportunities, diligencing new funds, whether he's introducing us to new funds or we're looking at funds that we'd like to get his opinion. Another couple that I mentioned, you know, Eric Chin at Crosslink, Mark Suster at Upfront in LA. We're literally texting weekly and discussing and sometimes I'm helping their portfolio companies close deals. Recently, I helped close a pretty substantial contract with our parent company just by understanding where they're stuck and giving them advice. So that's the kind of

Starting point is 00:26:49 relationship that we like to have with our GPs. I've interviewed over 50 people, not everybody recorded and live. I've never heard of an LP closing a deal for a portfolio company. Yeah, we do that routinely. That's incredible. You mentioned your parent company, TIA Craft. You were head of VC there. What lessons were learned as head of VC at TIA Craft? And how did that guide what you do today with Churchill? The lessons that I learned from there is being close to the technology organization at TIA just really helped me understand how enterprise buyers at large Fortune 500, in this case, Fortune 50 organization works and what their challenges are and what they look for in partners and the enterprise sales process. So we're enterprise heavy in our book with our managers. And that's really gives me up. And then

Starting point is 00:27:39 I have a, I live in Dallas. So Dallas is home to probably 25 or 30 Fortune 500 organizations. And I am friendly with a lot of CIOs. To me, that helps me a lot in not only underwriting funds, but especially co-investments. And by CIOs, you mean chief information officers, correct? Correct. So different world from chief investment officers. Yes. But speaking of the community and how do you interact with other LPs?

Starting point is 00:28:07 You're obviously very collaborative. You help your GPs. How do you work with other LPs? Do you see it as a zero sum? Are there certain LPs that you interact with? Absolutely not as a zero sum. I think this is a collaborative business. I think I've learned from a lot of LPs.

Starting point is 00:28:22 One of the movements on Twitter, for example, that I've really come to respect and learn from is the OpenLP movement. I think Beezer at Sapphire, I think David at, you know, they're very generous with, you know, they've been doing this a lot longer than I have. And I'm incredibly grateful for all the information that they openly share. And we have LPs here in Dallas that I am close with that were in some of the same funds and sometimes were not. We both share managers as well as do diligence, help diligence managers that we're respectively looking at. I think both at a GP level and LP level, I think collaboration is the name of the game for this asset class. Absolutely. Chris Duvas, we were lucky enough, me and Eric, to have him as the first guest ever on the Limited Partner Podcast. And Beezer, of course, we interviewed as well. In terms of the other LPs, let's shine a light. We also had another big member of the community,

Starting point is 00:29:14 Michael Kim. He's famous for not only investing and leading, but also bringing in a lot of other LPs. Let's shine a light for other LPs that you think bring a lot to the community outside of the obvious ones. Who are some LPs that maybe don't go on camera, but are really helpful to GPs and portfolio companies? Yeah, I think it's a great question. I meant to say this at the beginning, people that I think we all should be grateful for is sort of the early endowments like Yale and Harvard or the world that to me deserve as much credit for the sort of flourishment of technology sector in the US, which I think is truly a competitive edge for our country.

Starting point is 00:29:51 And their sort of leap of faith and funding early technology companies going back to 60s and 70s, I think is really vital. And I stand on their shoulders quite a bit. And I read about them and I learn about how they've done it. In terms of sort of the current, you mentioned Michael Kim and we respect what Michael has done a lot. There's other fund of funds like Michael that we know that are super helpful. There's one that we know called Vintage Investment Partners out of Tel Aviv, Allen and Abe. We're not in the fund of funds, but we're in their

Starting point is 00:30:25 other funds and they've been super helpful in helping us discover new managers. There's other GPs that we're in that have their own sort of emerging managers program that helps us discover managers. And like I've already mentioned, the OpenLP movement. And there's some that are here in Dallas and I don't think I should mention their names, but I think they've been super helpful and vice versa. I believe it or not, have read David Swenson's book and I would love to have Matt Mendelsohn on the pod. I know that's a big reach, but maybe if he is feeling boring and wants to talk about portfolio construction, he could hit me up at any time. I have the book and it's pretty, pretty tough read. In terms of the book, do you think those principles still apply? Do you think you have to be contrarian? Do you think you have to be

Starting point is 00:31:07 the same private? And what would you update from David Swenson's book? I caution being dogmatic about various sort of methodologies and even data sets. I think we firmly believe in being humble and deserve the right to get smarter. I think those are all data points that we consider. But at the end of the day, you can't go away from the fact that you're underwriting people and their judgment and their relevance. So with all the data and all the wisdom that's available to us, we try not to forget that you're underwriting people.

Starting point is 00:31:40 And we try to remember, are they in the flow? Do they have strategy discipline? Do they have price discipline? Do they have price discipline? Can they help these companies grow and to exit? At the end of the day, it's a judgment call. That was, I guess, a trick question to see if you stayed disciplined on your own strategy. So Raja, you've been an incredible guest. You've been a personal friend since we were first connected.

Starting point is 00:32:00 And despite you not taking credit for it, you did come to the US with $400 at 23 years old and to see where you've made it this far is just emblematic and just inspiring for any immigrant, including myself and just anybody in the United States. So really appreciate you coming on the podcast. What would you like people to know about yourself, about Churchill, about anything

Starting point is 00:32:20 that you'd like to shine a light on? First of all, thank you for having me on. I feel like an imposter. I looked at the list of people that you interviewed and I don't, you know, why am I on this list? And so I really, really appreciate you for having me on and for Heather for introducing us. And in terms of what people should know about us, we are actively building our portfolio

Starting point is 00:32:40 and we like to see hundreds of managers a year and we're open for business. Thank you. And of course, a big, big thank you to Heather at Human VC for making the introduction. And thank you, Raja, for jumping on the call and look forward to meeting in Dallas or in New York. Come on down to Dallas.

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Investing Billions - E19: Raja Doddala, Head of VC at Churchill Asset Management ($47 Billion AUM) on How LP’s Should Diligence GP’s

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