
Ecosystem Days 2023
Speakers

Alex Bangash
Co-founder, Transpose Platform

Allen Huang
Director of Investments, Michigan State University

Alexandra Yudkoff
Investment Officer - Private Markets, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Edward Grefenstette
CEO and CIO, The Dietrich Foundation

Elizabeth Hewitt
CIO, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Farouki Majeed
CIO, Ohio School Employees Retirement System

Jonathan Grabel
CIO, LACERA

Garry Tan
CEO, Y Combinator

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

Tom Shinner
COO, Entrepreneur First

Trang Nguyen
Co-Founder and Member of the General Partner, Transpose Platform
Attendees
Elizabeth Hewitt joined the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2015 as Chief Investment Officer and Senior Vice President. As Chief Investment Officer, Hewitt is responsible for managing the Foundation’s endowment, including asset allocation strategy, fund manager selection, risk analysis, portfolio performance evaluation, and liquidity management. Prior to joining the Foundation, Hewitt was Managing Director of Public Investments at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation where she selected and monitored investments with managers, helped set asset allocation policy, and contributed to overall portfolio management. Earlier in her career, Hewitt was a Senior Vice President for Lazard Asset Management (2001-2006), a Hedge Fund Analyst for The Torrey Funds (1999-2001), and a Wealth Management Associate for the U.S. Trust Corporation (1998-1999). She holds an MA from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is also a member of the Investment Committee for The Madeira School, McLean VA.
Ed Grefenstette serves as the President, CEO and CIO of The Dietrich Foundation.
Ed has unconventional thinking about risk return, his portfolio 55% VC and 33% in China VC.
Fred joined Carilion Clinic, a Virginia-based healthcare system, in 2015 to lead its investment function, overseeing $3 billion across operating capital and defined benefit pension assets. Previously, he worked at Huntington Ingalls Industries with oversight responsibility for hedge fund and fixed income pension investments and as a generalist at The Pension Boards-United Church of Christ. Prior to moving to the plan sponsor side of investment management, he held different roles at Cohen & Steers and Lord Abbett. He has a Master of Business Administration degree in finance from Vanderbilt University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Denison University and is a CFA charterholder.
Fred joined Carilion Clinic, a Virginia-based healthcare system, in 2015 to lead its investment function, overseeing $3 billion across operating capital and defined benefit pension assets. Previously, he worked at Huntington Ingalls Industries with oversight responsibility for hedge fund and fixed income pension investments and as a generalist at The Pension Boards-United Church of Christ. Prior to moving to the plan sponsor side of investment management, he held different roles at Cohen & Steers and Lord Abbett. He has a Master of Business Administration degree in finance from Vanderbilt University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Denison University and is a CFA charterholder.
Mr. Grabel manages the multibillion-dollar defined benefit pension fund on behalf of LACERA’s active and retired members. He also oversees the investments for the LACERA-administered healthcare benefits program.
Prior to LACERA, Mr. Grabel was the CIO for New Mexico PERA, where he oversaw the investments for the agency’s $15 billion defined benefit fund and the associated PERA SmartSave deferred compensation plan. Previously, he was a general partner at a private equity firm focused on growth-stage investments in technology, networking industries, and digital communications. Earlier in his career, Mr. Grabel was an investment banker and licensed CPA (inactive). He received his Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Muneeb Syed is a Senior Portfolio Manager for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Investment Office (KFIO), the team responsible for strategically investing the diversified portfolio to maintain its purchasing power in support of W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s mission over the long term. He is a member of the Private Investments team, where his primary responsibilities are to source, diligence, monitor, and invest in managers across the venture capital, growth equity and private equity portfolio.
Muneeb received his MBA from Kellogg School of Management, and his BA from New York University. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation from the CFA Institute and is a member of the CFA Society of San Francisco. Muneeb was born in Pakistan, raised in New York, and now lives in San Jose, California with his wife. Muneeb is a diehard sports fan, especially of his frequently struggling New York teams.
Ken Lee is the Chief Investment Officer of Children’s Health System of Texas. Based in Dallas, Mr. Lee is responsible for overseeing the System’s investable assets, including those of the Children’s Medical Center Foundation.
Prior to joining Children’s Health, Mr. Lee was a Managing Director in the Investments department at Carnegie Corporation of New York. At Carnegie, Mr. Lee led a range of investments, including global equities and absolute return strategies in the public markets, as well as venture capital and growth equity partnerships in the private markets.
Mr. Lee previously served as a senior investment professional in the New York and London offices of Fauchier Partners, which managed hedge fund investment programs on behalf of pensions, endowments, single family offices and government entities outside of the United States. In the past, Mr. Lee was an investment professional at Horsley Bridge Partners, a private equity fund-of-funds manager, in San Francisco and London. Mr. Lee began his career at Robertson Stephens, a boutique investment bank in San Francisco focused on growth companies.
Mr. Lee serves on the board of trustees of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the finance committee of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Mr. Lee holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA from Yale College, where he studied both Economics and East Asian Studies, with a focus on the History of Art. He is married and has one daughter.
Richard (Rick) Kraich, CFA has been the Chief Investment Officer at the West Virginia University Foundation since 2010, currently managing over $2.5 billion in assets. Rick has 30 years of investment management experience including serving as the CIO of Homrich Berg, a private wealth manager; Senior Director of Private Markets for the Georgia Tech Foundation; and 13 years with BellSouth pension investments. Rick has a Bachelor of Industrial Engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Florida. Rick also serves on the Investment Committee for the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation in Pittsburgh.
Sam Masoudi has 27 years of financial industry experience. He has been the CIO for the Wyoming Retirement System since 2013. Prior to that, he served as a Managing Director of Tulane University’s endowment fund for five years. He was a founder and portfolio manager for eight years at the hedge fund Silver Peak.
Sam’s other investment experience includes three years at Veronis Suhler Stevenson (private equity fund) as a director, and four years as an assistant vice president in real estate investment banking at PaineWebber and Kidder Peabody, two New York based investment banks.
Sam received his B.S. in Finance and Investing from Babson College. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA)
Subrata Mitra joined Accel in 2008.
Subrata is an entrepreneur turned VC, and joined Accel when Erasmic Venture Fund (a firm that he co-founded) rebranded to become part of Accel.
Subrata was the first investor in CasaOne, Curefit, Flipkart (substantially acquired by Walmart), Juspay, Moglix, Money View, Mu-Sigma, Myntra (acquired by Flipkart), Scripbox, Virident (acquired by Western Digital), WIBMO (acquired by PayU), and several other category leaders.
Prior to Erasmic, Subrata was the Managing Director of India operations for Tavant Technologies, Inc. Tavant was acquired by a U.S.-based mortgage solutions company in 2004. Previously, Subrata was the founder of Firewhite, Inc., which was acquired by Ubiquio, Inc., and later merged into Mobile Planet.
Subrata studied Computer Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and subsequently received his M.S. from UDel, and Ph.D. from Urbana.
Farouki Majeed joined SERS as CIO in July 2012. Mr. Majeed came to SERS of Ohio from CalPERS, where he served as Senior Investment Officer – Asset Allocation and Risk management. Previously, Mr. Majeed was the inaugural CIO of the Abu Dhabi Retirement Pensions and Benefits Fund of the United Arab Emirates; Deputy Director, Investments, Ohio PERS; CIO Orange County Employees Retirement System; and Investment Officer of the Minneapolis Employees Retirement Fund. Majeed began his finance career in 1980 with the National Development Bank of Sri Lanka, and worked in the Asia Division of Bank of America.
Tom Shinner is Chief Operating Officer of Entrepreneur First (www.joinef.com), which brings together extraordinary people to found technology startups in Bangalore, Berlin, Paris, London and North America.
EF has helped more than 3,000 people build more than 600 companies currently worth more than $10 billion. Before EF, Tom spent seven years in the UK Civil Service, serving on the main board of two departments – as Director of Strategy at the Department for Education, and as the director at DExEU
coordinating the UK’s domestic policy and technical implementation of Brexit across government. Tom started his career at McKinsey & Company, serving in the London and Middle East offices, and in 2010 he co-founded a thriving Free School in South London.
Garry is a designer/engineer turned early-stage investor. He was a partner at Y Combinator for nearly five years, advising and funding over 600 companies and more than a thousand founders. He co-founded the YC-backed blog platform Posterous (Top 200 Quantcast site, acquired by Twitter in 2012). Before that, he was employee #10 at Palantir, where he was a founding member of the engineering team for Palantir’s financial analysis product, and also designed Palantir’s logo. He has a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford.
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.
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.