Investing Billions - E346: $7 Billion CIO: Why the Endowment Model is Changing
Episode Date: April 13, 2026How do you build a $7 billion portfolio that performs across decades while keeping every client aligned and every manager motivated? In this episode, I sit down with Karen Welch, Chief Investment Off...icer at Spider Management Company, to explore the evolving role of a CIO in today’s complex investment landscape. Karen shares how lessons from Stanford’s endowment shaped her approach, why the best investment edge comes from people and relationships, and how Spider leverages both to generate top-tier returns. She also unpacks how to navigate private markets, assess the illiquidity premium, and structure portfolios to balance opportunity with risk.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
So Karen, you're the CIO Spider Management, which manages roughly $7 billion.
And you came from Stanford's Endowment nine years ago.
What lessons do you take from working at Stanford's Endowment to how you're on Spider management today?
Good question that I've reflected on a little bit as I've been at Spider now for just over 10 years.
When I sit back and think about the most important lesson, it's not the skill set or the mechanics of manager selection or portfolio construction.
It's really all about people.
and both the people of our internal teams and the relationships that we build with the external managers with whom we invest.
It's actually increasingly important now in a world in which the pace of technological change is accelerating.
Information is ubiquitous.
AI can do some of the analysis and research that I and my colleagues did in the early days of our careers.
I think what's really going to differentiate the best organizations, the best portfolios, the best investors going forward,
are the people on their teams and the relationships that they build.
to invest the assets that we steward.
I heard this analogy that investment analysts will become investment orchestrators.
So they'll orchestrate and prompt the AI to do what needs to be done for the portfolio.
Does that change how you go about building your team and what you look for in terms of future team members?
It's a great question.
Some of the things that I really look for in hiring my team are consistent in this pre-end post-AI world.
I look for team members who are really intellectually curious and willing to learn. And that's even more important now, again, given the pace of technological change. I want individuals who have deep experience and expertise in particular parts of their portfolio. But I also want individuals who are real team players and can think about that portfolio holistically, just like I noted at Stanford, and contribute that bigger picture view to combining the pieces to achieve our collective objectives. But we need people who have,
have judgment who have the ability to work with technology and AI and can leverage that and then
apply judgment to making the best investment decisions. Taking a step back, what do you see the role
of a CIO? What does the CIO need to do? I'm a big sports fan. For ever athletes, I like
the analogy of a CIO to a coach. And I consider myself to be a player coach. And in that,
I think the role is a couplefold. One, it's to attract and devout.
develop the best team and team players that have different and complementary areas of expertise.
Secondly, it's to develop a real strategic game plan to generate the strongest investment
returns. But it's also a third to make game time adjustments on either offense or defense
in order to adapt to the evolving market environment and the opportunities that that creates.
I've been thinking about this topic of monitoring your portfolio and
what it really means. Obviously, you get K1s, you get statements, you're somehow updating your
information, but there's more to it. What does it mean to monitor a portfolio? What exactly are you
looking for? We want to understand what they're doing in their portfolio and why they're doing that.
And that's important not only in assessing those managers on an ongoing basis, but also leveraging
their expertise and what they're seeing on the ground in their portfolio companies to help
inform our decision-making and applying that across the portfolio. So we're certainly looking at
the data and, as I said, conduct rigorous analysis, both through our own tools as well as
utilizing technology and AI to help us now. But we are rigorously, regularly reviewing the data,
looking at performance, but really trying to understand the drivers of performance. And again,
thinking about that holistically, thinking about how a manager's performance in a given environment
impacts the overall portfolio. We're asking whether they're performing as we would expect in a given
market environment. And if not, that obviously raises questions. And so that prompts some of our
line of questioning and ongoing diligence as part of our monitoring efforts. It's all about the people.
And so understanding the people, what's going on with the investment managers and ensuring that
you have real strong alignment. I've found in my career, strongest, the successful investments are
those in which there's a really strong partnership and the managers have significant skin in the
game and alignment with our objectives. So we're all, let me say, rowing in the same direction.
And last time we chatted, you mentioned that you don't only like to play defense in terms of
figuring out what's going on in portfolio. You also like to play offense and figuring out where those
opportunities are embedded in your portfolio with the help of your managers. Give me some examples of
that. How can a CIO play offense with their managers? It's building that.
Mosaic, as you said. I think that's the right analogy and talking to enough managers and other
experts to help inform our view and assessing whether there's an opportunity to lean in, take
advantage of price dislocation, take advantage of an area where there might be strong perspective
returns. A couple cases over the past several years, one example that sticks out is in the credit
space. We really leaned into credit during and after COVID when credit spreads blew out. There were
really phenomenal opportunities in the credit space that we were hearing from our managers. We were
seeing examples on the ground. And so we allocated more to that space. We leaned in and that has been
well rewarded. That said you fast forward a couple years, spreads have compressed. There's more than
ample liquidity in the credit space in the return, first-active returns to simply aren't as compelling
as they have been. So that's been an area where we've been given the insight.
we have from our managers and trusted partners, we've been harvesting those gains and not redeploying
as actively into that area.
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One of the interesting patterns that's starting to emerge
as I talked to some of the great investors.
I had Daniel Polly from Oak Tree.
I had Tim Barrett from Texas Tech.
He's a CIO there.
And they both believe that some of the best opportunities,
investments sit below a bad headline.
So in Danielle's example,
everybody was selling software and, you know,
there was some baby in that bathwater,
meaning there were some interesting companies
that were fundamentally sound that Oak Tree was able to invest in.
In Tim Barrett's example,
he was going into arguably one of the most unloved ask classes in the world,
office space because there were certain markets and certain conditions where it made a lot of
sense. Do you find that that sometimes some of the best opportunities hide behind some of the worst
headlines? 100%. And our first CIA at the University of Richmond, Lou Mojert, is a true
contrarian at heart. And he has certainly reminded me and our team of that. So I wholeheartedly agree.
Some of the best investment opportunities are those where you really have to, you know,
grit your teeth a little bit. You need a strong stomach. But,
they can create the most rewarded outcome.
So software is a timely one.
We are very much looking at it.
We're talking to our managers, and that's an interesting case study in some of the
mixed views that we're hearing.
And so that's a key current topic that we're trying to figure out.
The endowment model, which was started by David Swenson, and really gained steam in the 2000s
and 2010s, has recently come under some pressure as DPI has changed and liquidity timelines
have changed.
what do you believe persists with the old endowment model and what do you believe needs to be evolved moving forward?
Super question. And as you noted, obviously, David Swenson is one of the pioneers of the endowment model, along with the individual.
I just mentioned, Lou Maltcher, the first CIO at Richmond and Lori Hoagland, who had been the first CEO at Stanford, was an early friend and mentor of mine in the industry.
Some of the tenants and attributes of the endowment model as they developed it are still very much valid today.
attributes including the long-term time horizon and the opportunity for endowments to benefit from a really differentiated time horizon and the ability to take long-term views.
As we just talked about, the ability to take contrarian views when others are fearful is a real key pillar of the endowment model.
Secondly, is inequity biased, which is essential in order to generate their returns that we need for our institutions to thrive over multiple generations.
You simply need to take equity risk in order to succeed in doing that.
But you also need diversification and a set of assets that is truly unique and uncorrelated to the equity markets so that we can fulfill our obligations to support our institutions.
Then the needs, regardless of the economic and market environment.
The other two pillars of the endowment model, the importance of active management and embracing the opportunity to add value through skill by investing in less efficient parts of the market.
and then the importance of alignment of interest as we touched on earlier.
When you think about it that way, the team and I really embrace the endowment model
and feel it gives the University of Richmond and our client partners the best opportunity
to succeed in generating the returns that we need to to support our institution's mission.
But that said, I think it's important to avoid a few practices that perhaps the purest followers
of the endowment model embrace and have generated criticism, rightfully,
so in my mind. And so a couple of those are, one, a real dogmatic focus on alpha and excess return.
There are parts of the market where it is just more challenging, more costly to add value over
the market. And we've certainly experienced that, particularly in the large cap U.S. public
equity market recently when the returns have been driven by a very small set of large cap
technology companies. We need to be realistic and recognize that there are parts of the market in which
we might be rewarded by just simply, by parts of the market in which passive management can play
a role in giving us exposure to the broad market.
Said another way, there may be 100, maybe 200 basis points of alpha in certain markets,
but if you're paying 2 and 20 on it, then you're, you end up in a negative position than
if you just had the index and gave up that 1 to 200 bases of gross alpha.
That's well put.
I think the two other is one is this, I think, well, diversification is important and we need
diversification to ensure that we can meet our spending needs in a range of environments.
I think there can be an over emphasis on that at the expense of looking at the investment merit
of certain investments. That is really critical to think about the prospective risk return of an
investment and not simply put it in the portfolio because the model tells you to with a
sense that an expectation that a low correlation asset will provide its worth. At the end of the day,
low correlation asset does not help us meet spending needs, does not pay for financial aid
in and of itself. And so it's really thinking about identifying, diversifying assets that can
provide the protection in the time where you really need it and or can stand on their own and
create value over a longer term time horizon. And then the third area where I think the
endowment model rightfully so has encountered some criticism. We've certainly seen headlines around
this recently are concerns around illiquidity and whether endowment model investors are
truly rewarded for giving up illiquidity and investing in private asset classes.
And that's where I think this notion of an illiquidity premium or a magic premium for
which investors are compensated for locking up capital is just simply comical.
And this nonsense that you have to look at investing in giving up liquidity in areas where
it's most rewarded.
Glad you went there because I've been thinking a lot about this topic.
Had a lot of very smart investors question whether is there still illiquidity
premium in the market. Illiquity premium is the premium return that investors are supposed to get
for being in illiquid investments like private equity venture capital and other long day investments.
I have perhaps a really dumb question, which is how would you know whether the illiquidity
premium was still there and how would you go about figuring that out? It's a great question.
The illiquidity premium comes not from simply locking up capital, but from investing with
managers that have a unique skill set and ability to create value.
And so I think it's really critical to incorporate that in your due diligence process and your
ongoing monitoring and management of these managers and portfolios.
But it often takes many years to figure that out.
And that's part of the reality with private equity and venture capital investments is
these investments have very long life cycles.
And so you need to really have access to the best managers in the asset class.
and not simply invest in the media manager.
I think the data really bears that out.
If you look at the venture capital returns over the five-year period ending in September,
the median venture manager returned 4.7%.
Well, the global public equity markets return 13.5%.
So the median manager underperform global public equities by almost nine percentage points.
There's no magic illiquidity premium there.
Fortunately, Spider's venture capital portfolio meaningfully outperformed not only the median manager, but the public equity universe as well, which just really underscores the dispersion of returns in this asset class and part of the market.
And the imperative that to generate the returns that we all want from the asset class, you have to be invested in the best managers who have the ability to invest in the best founders and really game-changing industry leading technology.
And Spider has had access to some great managers due to historically being in the asset class.
If you wanted to expand your exposure to venture or if a new family office was starting to a program today,
what would be the best practices if you're not already in these names?
It's a challenge. And I think that's where there is an advance,
where those of us who have been invested in these areas for a long period of time really benefit.
And Stanford and Spider have been invested in these asset classes for decades.
And I think the benefit of that is a couplefold.
One, it's the access that we had years ago to managers who have continued to perform very well and are top-tier manager.
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And so we have reaped the benefit of those investments.
But that's also the fact that we have been invested for a long period of time,
develop strong relationships and brands that's allowed us to access other top tier managers
and some of the newer managers that we see is the next generation of great managers.
You bring up a really interesting point, which is your manager access is not just literally
the funds you're in, but it's also the reputation you've built with the funds that you're in,
being with them through multiple lif cycles and doing all the things that good LPs do,
gives you that reputational capital to now access other top managers. It's not just literally in
those managers. Exactly. I think that's really well put. So I want you to correct my thinking. So if I was a
family office or a CIO that did not have this reputational capital and I wanted to allocate to venture,
I would essentially have three and a half option. First would be you access a fund of fund that has
access to some of these top quartal funds. Some of those funds in that fund of fund would be top portals. Some
what not. The problem with that solution is it's another fee layer on top of what today is a two and a half and
30 fee layer in the top managers. That's solution number one. Solution number two is maybe can see that
you're not able to get into the first quartile managers and target the second quartile managers,
which may be above the medium that you talked about and may have some returns. The problem with
that is that the first top core manager is really returned that much more than the second quartile.
And then the third is to build out an emerging manager program. Are those kind of the three options?
The fourth option, which I think is the worst possible option, is to try to do direct investing,
which a lot of family offices do.
A. Bothman actually talked about the statistics on that.
If you're a non-top or tal fund, you have access to a co-invest, especially in the earlier stage,
and it's not through a manager.
You are by definition adversely selected.
So the definition of adverse selection is, do you have access?
And that's obviously problematic if you're the investor.
You laid out the options quite well.
And I think the which one is best for an institution depends on their objectives, their team, their expertise, and perhaps some of their unique attributes too.
In the spirit of relationship building, there are certain institutions that have strategic capital that they can employ, perhaps, to get access to some of the best managers.
And if you are a family office with experience in, you know, a given industry that can be relevant for venture investors.
And if you have something of value that you can provide to the manager, I think that, you
can help to open doors.
You have $7 billion in capital.
How do you use your capital source as an advantage?
In what ways is it disadvantaged in the market?
I really think that the $7 billion portfolio that we manage on behalf of the University
of Richmond and our nonprofit partners is a real sweet spot.
I've been at an organization that had a much larger endowment, which certainly has its positives.
but I think in terms of balancing the ability to access almost any manager in the world,
we're large enough to get the attention and opportunity to invest with nearly every
manager and strategy on one hand.
But on the other hand, we're small enough that we can write checks that are relatively small
in capacity-constrained managers in niche strategies and write them in a size that can still
have a meaningful impact on our overall portfolio.
So I really see somewhere in this seven to ten, maybe a little bit more billion dollar range as a really optimal size from an investment perspective.
I want to double click on this concept of value ad. GPs are famous for providing value ad.
Can LPs be value added enough to get access to top quartal managers and to the most capital constrained funds?
And if so, how do they go about doing that?
In select cases, we can be value add from an expertise,
and that's, it can be really focused. But bigger picture, it's important to look for ways that we can
deepen relationships with managers by providing more than just capital. Capital is abundant,
and there's certainly a great deal of global capital chasing the same set of capacity-constrained
opportunities. And so I think it's vital to provide something else in addition to just that
capital. One example is we can work with managers who are often.
often focused on a narrow part of the market strategy, asset class, an industry, and are very
deep in that domain expertise. But they don't have the same breadth of perspective as our team has,
given our role investing across geographies, across asset classes, across industries.
And so that's where we can provide some value and some broader perspective to these managers.
For example, we spend time talking to our venture managers and understanding how they're investing in
AI, what they're seeing from the ground up. And I think that perspective and insight is helpful for us to
share with managers in our public equity portfolio and our buyout portfolio who invest in
software companies, back to some of the challenges and opportunities in software that we talked
about earlier. And we can also provide perspective around best practices in the industry and what
we see the best GPs doing from an LP perspective. And then we can also provide capital at points in
time when others aren't providing capital, when our capital and liquidity can be even more
rewarded when others are perhaps selling and fearful that we can be that contrarian source of
capital at a time when others aren't. I think both benefits the relationship and ultimately
benefits the portfolio in terms of performance. So you have one of the most unique models where
you give the same portfolio to every one of your partners, which is the people that you manage
capital for. What are the pros and cons of forcing everybody essentially into one portfolio?
model. It is a really important question, David. And as I hear that, I reflect back on a founder of the
OCOAO industry who at the time had a single portfolio approach. And in response to the question
she would answer, well, do you want me and my team focused a third on thinking about individual
customized solutions, a third of my time thinking about the best investment opportunities,
and a third of my time reporting on a customized bespoke portfolio,
or do you want the team and I to be fully 100% focus on managing a best-in-class portfolio?
So when you look at it that way,
the answer to me is pretty clear in terms of the benefits of the single portfolio approach that we take.
I think there are real key benefits for the University of Richmond and our client partners
who share a similar long-term time horizon,
similar investment objectives, and similar spending needs.
I think two, the critical benefits I would highlight are one.
Our team is fully aligned.
I would say even more so than other OCIO peers of ours
because we don't think of this as a business.
We're not focused on the revenue.
We're really focused on maximizing investment performance
for the long term to support the missions of the University of Richmond
and our nonprofit partners.
Every investment we make is we talked about these relationships,
relationships that we have with managers that span decades or the newest investment in a capacity
constrained opportunity. Each of our client partners from the University of Richmond to the
smallest get the exact same investment exposure to that. And so there are no questions about
where we had allocated a certain investment, which portfolio it makes sense in. They all benefit equally.
It's such a powerful razor because it's almost as if you're making the minimum check a large
amount for every investment as well. And the downstream consequences of that is you're so hyper-focused
on making sure every single investment is good. Sometimes human beings could be lazy in their investment
thinking they could say, well, track record's not quite there, but maybe we'll get a toehold,
we'll invest in the next fund, or maybe this is a relationship investment. And all of those could
be good investments in theory. Oftentimes these are just lazy thinking or not wanting to make a true
decision. And this razor of, okay, we're going to put this into everybody's portfolio. Everyone's
going to be exposed to it. Every single client is going to ask us why we made this investment is a
powerful lifer. It was really well put. It's a powerful razor. And I think we're better investors
for managing external capital and having to engage with incredibly talented investment committees at
some of our partners and answer the great tough questions that they ask us. There are real benefits
in terms of the scale. We talked about the size that both the University of Richmond and our
nonprofit partners benefit from the scale and benefit from the opportunity to access managers
in a meaningful way and benefit from the team's best ideas thinking.
To be clear.
And before we re-switch to the next question, I want to acknowledge that as much as I am a
fan of and proponent of the model, we recognize it's not for everybody.
If the objectives don't align, then we're simply not the right fit for that enterprise.
It's a great razor also for your partners to decide whether they want to be partners with
you and really thinking through the second order effects of investing into this model.
So it also makes sure that your clients are happy because they know what they're getting into.
Sometimes customer satisfaction could be low because they don't really know what they're signing up for.
Exactly. That's a great point.
I alluded to this and maybe a little bit flippantly, these relationship checks or these toehold checks.
But sometimes CIOs and sometimes the very great CIOs make investments that don't have to do with returns.
Is there ever a place for a CIO to make an investment that's not all about returns?
And if so, where?
That's a great question. Not that come to mind, at least not with the intent of generating returns over a long-term time horizon. If there's an area where somebody's investing in a new asset class, a new area with the intent of beginning to develop relationships and learning about that, one can envision the need to size that, the rationale for that and need to size that appropriately.
But I think particularly as we think about, and I strive to manage a relatively concentrated portfolio, and we have a high bar for getting ideas into the portfolio, I don't think there's a lot of room to compromise, which I don't think there's room at all to compromise and make investments that we don't think will be additive to generating strong, long-term investment performance.
I've had people like Professor Steve Kaplan from University of Chicago go on a podcast and say that infrastructure and real estate are just inferior as classes.
not have any money in those asset classes. Do you have any asset classes where at least today,
2026 doesn't make sense to invest in? And if so, why? Raises really interesting examples there in
real estate and infrastructure. And that's actually a case where I think the endowment model has
evolved over the years when Yale originally constructed its portfolio. And when I was at Stanford,
we had a larger allocation to private real estate strategies. The global financial crisis in 08 really
opened people's eyes to the inherent cyclicality and economic exposure in real estate.
And we realized that it was not quite the same diversifying asset as people had perhaps expected
before. And so that's an example as we talked about the evolution of the endowment model
and the need to both think about the real diversification that certain assets provide
and the benefit of illiquidity or the cost benefit of illiquidity is really key. As we think
about our real estate portfolio, we have reduced the size, raise the bar for investing in it,
and certainly raised the bar for investing in illiquid real estate strategies, and opted to take a little
bit more flexible and opportunistic approach to investing in the real asset space where we can
lean in and out of the asset class a little bit more with public investments and take
advantage of evolving opportunities. As I said that, I started thinking, well, real estate isn't
real estate infrastructure. Infrastructure isn't infrastructure today. You have these large pools of
capital are going into, for example, servers and power and nuclear that isn't like traditional
real estate, isn't like traditional infrastructure. So it's constantly evolving. Do you revisit your
portfolio based on either asset class or sub asset class? And if so, is it sometimes the tail wagging
the dog? In other words, somebody gives you the sub asset class in real estate or infrastructure
and you reassess whether to actually put more into that asset class as a second order effect
of investing in a sub asset class? Are you always looking top down?
is really important to think about the portfolio holistically and not be boxed into a real static
strategic allocation that forces or has the potential to force inferior suboptimal investment decisions.
And that's where I think we're really fortunate that we have, we still, we use a traditional
asset class model with five key asset classes and a larger number of sub asset classes,
but we are not so constrained from a governance perspective that we have to be exactly on target
and a force to making decisions that we don't think are in the best interest of the overall
portfolio.
Oftentimes when somebody's overloaded on a certain asset class, like we have the denominator
effect in venture capital, then everybody's looking at this problem.
And if everyone has the same governance, then there's an opportunity to come in and actually,
in that case, actually capture a significant illiquidity premium.
So sometimes the fragility of the model could be hurting returns, especially when you have
these dislocations in the market.
Yep.
When I think when you and I chatted earlier, you would ask if there were areas
that we just categorically wouldn't or couldn't invest in.
And I think we're fortunate from our government's perspective that there are not areas that we
just categorically have to avoid.
And so therefore, we can take advantage of opportunities that are created, as you
note by the structure.
And so we've been buyers of things on the secondary market where we see opportunities and
others are four sellers.
You mentioned your five asset class model.
And this is the same asset class you gift to everybody.
So I'm very curious, what's your model today look like?
And how does that change in the last couple of
years. What I would characterize as our midterm allocation model is we have 26% to public equities,
34% in private equity, 22% in absolute return, which is a range of hedge fund strategies and
credit, and 12% in real assets and 8% in cash and fixed income. So we talked about the
illiquidity premium, whether you're compensated for it or not and how selective I think you
need to be in it. But we really like private equity and think it plays an important role in the
portfolio. And the environment has changed dramatically over the past 10 years such that to invest
in leading companies in many industries, in AI, in space and defense, you have to invest in
the private markets. You simply don't have those leading companies available to invest in in the
public markets. And so I think the quality of the companies that we can hold in the private
markets, the fact that our private managers are holding them longer before going public have been a
couple of the factors that have led us to increase their weighting to private equity and feel comfortable
with that waiting given the opportunities we have there and the experience we've had generating
stronger returns in that part of the portfolio. If you could go back to 2001 when you had just
graduated grad school at Harvard Kennedy School and you could give yourself only one piece of timeless
advice that would either accelerate your career or help you avoid costly mistakes. What would
that one piece of advice be? One, only one. It's a timely question because I had a group of students
from the University of Richmond, some of our partner organizations in the office today.
And so I was giving them career advice.
And I actually look at it not from the perspective of how to accelerate your career or avoid a mistake.
Because I think, like Cheryl Samark has said, think of your career as a jungle gym more than
a ladder that you necessarily want to race.
I think we learn from our mistakes.
But so I think the one piece of advice, if you're limiting to me to one, is just find a
career that you absolutely love.
That being successful in any endeavor requires a lot of.
work, a lot of time, a lot of sacrifice. And I think to be successful, you really have to find
something you love. And I've been really fortunate to find a career I love, an organization I love,
where I can access and talk to the best managers, I can continually learn and develop,
and I have the ability to make an impact and help to support the missions of the University
of Richmond and our nonprofit partners. There's so many downstream consequences of that. One of the
tenants of our organization is quality is downstream of quantity. So you cannot just sit
and make a great painting, produce a great podcast, be a great investor.
You have to have enough quantity.
And the only way you get enough quantity for decades is you must love it.
You must love it on a relative basis versus the other really sharp people in your industry,
high IQ, IB leagues, all these competitors that you have.
You have to love it just that much.
It's kind of like one of the last edges from a career standpoint.
I think that was really well put.
I like that analogy, David.
I'm very curious.
What is your second best piece of advice?
My second best piece of advice is the power of to spend time networking.
I've benefited from the power of networking.
As we talked about what really differentiates the best investors, I think it is relationships.
And I think in this rapidly evolving environment, networking and building deep, meaningful
relationships is going to be really critical to success.
Can I take the contrary on that?
In the beginning of part of my career, I'm obviously a people person.
Obviously, when you say networking, you mean small dinners and curated networking.
But I found that the opposite also, the opposite axiom is also very true, which is spend
your time, this is an avalism, spend your time building something great. If you think you have two hours
a day, you could network or you could build, put all your life and effort into something really
useful, then people will find you as well. So obviously networking has value. There's all sorts of
studies. Stanford actually had the study where the power of loose affiliation. So it's not really
your best friend that gives you the career opportunities. That's your friend's teacher that you met at an
event. That also is true. But I think also spending that marginal time on building something truly
great so that you could have something to talk about. And so people know you for that thing is also
very powerful. So I've kind of gone converted from the networking standpoint to the product standpoint.
That's a really interesting perspective. And I wonder if they're a dichotomist or if one can
take elements of both and perhaps actually the importance of both, you know, vary on where you
are in your career and what you have to offer as well. There's a time to learn and there's a time to
work. And on that note, Karen, thanks so much. It's been an absolute masterclass. Really enjoyed it.
Thanks so much for spending time.
Thank you, David.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
It's great to be with you.
Take care.
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