
Ecosystem Days 2023
Date and time
20 June 2023
Speakers

Alex Bangash
Co-founder, Transpose Platform

Allen Huang
Director of Investments, Michigan State University

Edward Grefenstette
CEO and CIO, The Dietrich Foundation

Elizabeth Hewitt
CIO, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Farouki Majeed
CIO, Ohio School Employees Retirement System

Fred Greear
CIO, The Carilion Clinic

Jonathan Grabel
CIO, LACERA

Joseph Boateng
CIO, Casey Family Programs

Joshua B. Stern
Managing Director - Private Investments, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Kanjun Qiu
CEO, Generally Intelligent

Ken Lee
CIO, Children's Health System of Texas

Muneeb Syed
Portfolio Manager, WKKF

Prabhu Palani
CIO, City of San Jose Retirement System

Rick Kraich
CIO, West Virginia University Foundation

Sam Masoudi
CIO, Wyoming Retirement System

Subrata Mitra
Founder & GP, Accel

Susan Slocum
CIO, Children's MN

Tom Shinner
COO, Entrepreneur First

Trang Nguyen
Co-Founder and Member of the General Partner, Transpose Platform
Attendees
Kanjun Qiu is the CEO of Generally Intelligent, an independent research company building general-purpose AI agents that be safely deployed in the real world. They’re working beyond generative AI—on agents that can code, use computers, plan strategically, or coordinate people.
Kanjun also invests in seed-stage founders as a partner at Outset Capital and a scout for Sequoia Capital. She previously ran Sourceress, backed by YC and DFJ, and scaled Dropbox from 300 to 1200 people as its first Chief of Staff.
Outside of work, Kanjun co-wrote a book on how metascience can drive improvement in the social processes of science with collaborator Michael Nielsen, and she co-organizes the Neighborhood in San Francisco—a campus for modern adult living with lively intellectual culture and best friends you can grow old with.
Kanjun strongly believes that humanity has tremendous latent potential. To this end, all her work centers around enabling greater human agency, creativity, and abundance—and the ideas, institutions, and technologies to enable that.
Joseph Boateng is the Chief Investment Officer for Casey Family Programs where he is responsible for overseeing the foundation’s $2.6 billion endowment. Previously, he was a member of the Johnson & Johnson Investment Committee, responsible for managing over $17 billion in employee benefit assets worldwide. He also spent 13 years at Xerox Corp., where he was a key member of the Trust Investment Team that managed $10 billion in assets. Joseph serves on CREF’s Board of Trustees and the investment advisory committee for the Seattle City Employees’ Retirement System. He is a member of the Board of Lumina Foundation and sits on the Africa Institutional Investor Advisory Council
Joshua B. Stern joined the investment unit of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in January 2012 as a senior investment officer. Prior to arriving at the Foundation, Josh was the director of Private Investments in the Office of Investments at Rockefeller University.
He was a director in the Higher Education and Not-for-Profit Group at Standard & Poor’s, which was part of the Public Finance Department. Over the course of his career he also worked as an investment banker, focusing on higher education institutions.
Stern received an MPA in public finance from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, an MS in non-profit management from New York University and a BA in history and sociology from Binghamton University.
Neal Graziano is a managing director for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) in Battle Creek, Michigan. In this role, he supports the foundation’s efforts to promote thriving children, working families and equitable communities.
Graziano works with the foundation’s vice president & chief investment officer and investments team – including consultants, trustees, advisors, and counsel – on investment strategy and portfolio and investment management. He invests the diversified portfolios of the Foundation and Trust to maintain its purchasing power in support of the WKKF’s mission over the long term, leading the private investments portfolio.
Prior to joining Kellogg Foundation in 2007, Graziano spent three years at Mastrapasqua Asset Management in Nashville, TN where he most recently served as the associate portfolio manager for a hedge fund and an equity strategy. Prior to this, he served as an investment analyst at William Blair & Company. During his tenure at William Blair, Graziano was the portfolio specialist for the institutional clients and led multiple research projects for the domestic equity teams.
Graziano holds a B.A. from Michigan State University and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He has earned the Chartered Financial Analyst and Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst designations and is a member of the CFA Society of West Michigan. He currently serves on fund advisory boards for several private equity and venture capital fund strategies.
In addition to his work at the Kellogg Foundation, Graziano serves as an investment committee and board member for the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, the Peoples Food Co-op, and the Kalamazoo Farmer’s Market. He is married to Sarah Curtis Graziano, resides in Kalamazoo, and has three daughters. In 2017, Graziano was named on Trusted Insight’s Top 30 LPs Investing Real Assets.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF), founded in 1930 as an independent, private foundation by breakfast cereal innovator and entrepreneur Will Keith Kellogg, is among the largest philanthropic foundations in the United States. Guided by the belief that all children should have an equal opportunity to thrive, WKKF works with communities to create conditions for vulnerable children so they can realize their full potential in school, work and life.
The Kellogg Foundation is based in Battle Creek, Michigan, and works throughout the United States and internationally, as well as with sovereign tribes. Special attention is paid to priority places where there are high concentrations of poverty and where children face significant barriers to success. WKKF priority places in the U.S. are in Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico and New Orleans; and internationally, are in Mexico and Haiti. For more information, visit www.wkkf.org.
Allen Huang is a Director of Investments for MSU. Prior to joining MSU, he was the Director of Fixed Income at the Indiana Public Retirement System (INPRS). His key responsibilities included asset allocation, investment manager selection, and portfolio management. Prior to joining INPRS in 2011, he worked at Barclays Capital and GE Capital. Allen holds an MBA from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree in finance from Northeastern University.
Alex is the managing director of Transpose Platform, an anchor fund for the most disruptive venture funds of this decade. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Trusted Insight, a machine learning–driven platform that hosts the world’s largest network of institutional investors. Prior to TI Platform, Alex managed capital for clients at premier endowments, foundations, family offices, insurance firms, sovereign wealth funds, and pension funds since 2003.
He has helped invest over $2 billion in 50 funds with a track record of investing over $1 billion in 50+ funds for institutional investors with an IRR of 30%+ and 2x NAV. He advised the first checks in Accel, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, Emergence, Y Combinator, Khosla, SaaStr, Initialized, Crystal Towers, and Baseline. Earlier in his career, Alex was an engineer and executive at AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs, and GE. Alex holds an MBA from the Wharton School (where he is a frequent guest lecturer); an M.Eng in Operation Research from Cornell; and a BS in Computer Science, English and Economics from Cornell.
Trang Nguyen co-founded Transpose Management in 2015. Trang was also a former operator and executive member of Trusted Insight, where she worked closely with engineers, ran products and pricing (such as launching the Institutional LP Ranking List, Institutional Forum, Global Institutional Summit & Events, and LP/GP Job Board), developed the very first partnerships for TI with Fortune 500 corporations with a focus on Japan and the US, and grew an institutional LP community for the platform. Trang launched multiple LP products and features on Trusted Insight to increase user engagement and scale the LP network on the platform to over 35,000+ LP members. Prior to Transpose Platform, Trang assisted in spearheading the investment initiatives and managing portfolios of both endowment and corporate money for Sutter Health. With a total AUM of $9 billion, she helped Sutter Health with asset allocation and manager selection for public and private markets. She also traded and helped run a $1B credit portfolio, including structured products and corporates. Earlier in her career, she held various finance and marketing roles at Visa, Bank of New York Mellon, and startups.
Prabhu is a veteran of the investment industry who brings over 23 years of investment experience with global investment leaders, including Barclays Global Investors, Franklin Templeton Investments, and Mellon Capital Management. He was Managing Director and Senior Investment Strategist at Mellon Capital Management, where he helped build the firm’s quantitative equity capabilities. Previously, he was an SVP and Portfolio Manager at Franklin Templeton Investment managing structured equity portfolios. He has also held fixed income portfolio management positions at BGI and NetWest Bank. He is also a former Trustee of the Federated City Employees Retirement System where he served on the Investment Committee for 6 months. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose and a volunteer with the City of Fremont Police Department.