Along the way, we touch on Jean's progression from an administrative assistant to a managing partner, the healthcare team's investment philosophy and process, a day in her work life, and topical issues active versus passive, public and private investing, and large and small firms. Please enjoy my conversation with Jean Hines. Jean, thanks so much for doing this.

Glad to be here. So we're

going to try to tell your story and the Wellington story. How did first get interested in investing?

So I went to Wellesley College and in my junior year I took a very famous class at the time, a sociology class called sociology and work. And so as part of that class we had to get an internship. And so I found my way to a local stockbroker in Boston and had an internship for that semester. And that is what got me interested in the stock market. My parents are immigrants and my father's a bricklayer and my mother's a homemaker. I didn't even know what a stock was really until the crash of 1987 when I was at Wellesley. So when I first got that internship, I really liked the internship. didn't like the stock broken calling part of it, but I knew at the end of that, that I wanted to know why stocks went up and down. And so that's how I found my way to looking for jobs after I graduated and found my way to Wellington.

And your first job here was what?

So I was an administrative assistant in the research department. So I've been in the research department my entire career, 28 years here at Wellington. And back when I there were just a little over 300 employees and Wellington had started hiring more people in the early 1990s. And they started hiring people with college degrees to be administrative assistant, knowing that I'd be doing some research assistant work and modeling. But also the reason I came to Wellington is because the headhunter said this is a special place and you should take this job even if it doesn't have the title. What

was Wellington like back then? He said 300 people, how big in assets?

The assets in 1991 were about 50 billion. As I said, a little over 300 people. We were all on three floors at 75 State Street, which is another from where we are now. And so, departments were intermixed. So you had fixed income and trading and research and client service all on a few floors. It was kind of all hands on deck. Everyone helped to do everything. And

what was thought of as special?

culture. And when I think about describing what I did and my culture, the culture of Wellington to my friends who were in many different companies around the country, it was a very humanistic place. It was a very merit -based organization. And just really, when I think about Wellington, it's a collection of very smart, driven people. And that's true in and it was definitely true in 1991.

You used the word humanistic which is not something often associated with the asset management industry. What does that mean here? It

means that we care about people. So, you know, you're gonna spend hours and hours in a day and a week and a year and over years here in working where you're gonna be spending your lives with people And so you want to have an environment where people care about each other, where the expectations are high. So that doesn't mean we're humanistic people that has low expectations. We have high expectations. That's why the partnership and the merit -based part of our organization is so important. it's also a recognition that people's lives aren't linear. Sicknesses happen and pregnancies happen and family emergencies happen and so I would say that part of it is what I think about when I think about humanistic. It's that we want people to thrive here and we want this to be their family too.

So you started as an administrative assistant. What was the initial progression that to, let's take the next steps along the way?

Just as a little bit of background, one of the things I did as an administrative assistant is do the morning meeting notes. We have a morning meeting that's been in place for over 60 years, and so I did the morning meeting notes once a week, and I did them in my own way. So that is what got noticed at Wellington. What was

your way?

I think it was a way that I was really interested in stocks. And so I think my notes were sort of more accurate about the discussion that was happening. They were more complete than other notes that were taking place. And so that's what got me noticed. And at the end of 1992, early 1993, I started working with Ed Owens, who's been my mentor for 20 years. And he was starting to expand his responsibilities away from just research. And he needed someone to work with him. And they wanted him to hire someone from the outside and more senior. And he decided, well, we know Gene can write. So I moved over to work with him. Still as an administrative assistant, but from early 1993 on, I went to every company meeting with him. That was a time when there was a lot of company creation in biotech, and I started working with him in terms of all his coverage. So writing about the pharmaceutical companies, writing about the biotech companies, and over this period of time, I from being the writer to being more of the analyst. And so the progression was a few years after that becoming a research assistant. We didn't have a title of a research assistant back in 1994 when they created that title, becoming a global industry analyst a year or two later. I would say when I think about the decade of 90s, it was really learning to become an analyst and learning how to be a researcher and what mattered. And I had the luxury of working with one of the best investors in the world and learning under him.