The Fiftyfaces Podcast

Barry Massarsky is a partner and co-practice leader - music economics andvaluation services at Citrin Cooperman,  and was the founder of Massarksy Consulting, which he sold to Citrin Cooperman early in 2022. He is credited with pioneering the economics of royalty cash flows in the early 1990s. And together with his business partner Nari Matsuura developed a model to guide banks lending to music investors. Last year Massarksy Consulting valued over 400 catalogs totaling more than $9 billion.We start with Barry's path into this somewhat esoteric area of finance, his experience studying at Cornell and how he first developed an interest in valuing music cash flows.  The rather unusual place for this to start was an internship on Capitol Hill and an anti-trust case.  Since then, his career has had ups and downs and we talk about one such "down" which required him to start again, and how he used his network to do so. We dive in then to the dynamics of the music industry today, the impact of streaming and the innovation that essentially saved the industry from cannibalization.  We speak about recent music deals, such as the valuation of prominent music catalogs and the different dynamics that is driving demand today - such as the abundant production of content. We end with paying homage to some of the extraordinary artists and leaders that Barry has worked with and distill some of their wisdom into some takeaways from the podcast. Series 2 of 2023 is kindly sponsored by Beach Point Capital Advisors, an investment manager that believes in investment beyond the traditional.  It specializes in credit investments and employs a flexible, value-oriented, risk-controlled focusing on complex and less well-followed opportunities.  You can find all of our podcasts on The Fiftyfaces Hub, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Jennifer Grancio is Chief Executive Officer at Engine No. 1,  an investment firm that identifies value creation opportunities in once in a generation systems changes the economy is now going through. She is based in the San Francisco area. She previously founded and ran her own firm advising CEOs and accelerating revenue growth. Prior to that was a Managing Director at Blackrock where she led businesses and global distribution teams for close to 20 years. She is a Board Member   of the MannKind Corporation and Ethic Investments.Our conversation starts with Jennifer's upbringing on the East Coast, her pursuit of International Relations at Stanford and how this turned her towards management consulting. We analyze the skillset that that discipline brought to her later move to the investment world. In particular management consulting involves a deep analysis of company business models, supply chains and drivers.  This ability to dissect the drivers of a business would prove to be helpful later when the focus turned to the sustainability of those drivers and ultimately the business. We move then to Engine No. 1 and its focus and dig in to many complex issues such as the future of ESG, whether the name and umbrella title is still fit for purpose, how different companies are navigating the energy transition and how collaboration and activism can work together to further this.  We also discuss the importance of Board Representation, what it means to have a climate confident or climate competent board and the likely future evolution of this branch of governance. The discussion on the integration of sustainability targets with sustainable business models is a detailed one, and we turn to whether there is a case for optimism in this area, where the stakes are high and sometimes overwhelming. Series 2 of 2023 is kindly sponsored by Beach Point Capital Advisors, an investment manager that believes in investment beyond the traditional.  It specializes in credit investments and employs a flexible, value-oriented, risk-controlled focusing on complex and less well-followed opportunities.  You can find all of our podcasts on The Fiftyfaces Hub, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Eddie Welch is an alternative asset specialist at Nuveen, a role he has held since April 2021.  He previously worked as an Associate at CIM Group, focused on real estate investing, and prior to that and his degree at Ohio State University worked in a wide variety of roles and played college football.Our conversation starts with Eddie's upbringing, the influence his grandparents had on him and the lessons he learned through youth sports, in particular football, which he pursued all of the way to college.  We hear how he did not love the sport initially, and how it taught him to persist in the face of adversity.  When an injury forced him to retire from football his life took a detour away from college into the public sector.  He worked in the prison sector for a period, first in a low security men's setting and then in a high security women's setting and we talk about the lessons that he learned from that experience - the humility, the reminder of the complexity of all people and of their potential.We turn then to his return to school to complete his degree and how that experience was as a mature student and then his entry into finance.  Eddie's story is one laced with rich experiences and insights.Series 2 of 2023 is kindly sponsored by Beach Point Capital Advisors, an investment manager that believes in investment beyond the traditional.  It specializes in credit investments and employs a flexible, value-oriented, risk-controlled focusing on complex and less well-followed opportunities.  You can find all of our podcasts on The Fiftyfaces Hub, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Between Series 1 and series 2 of 2023, we kicked off a brand new focus series – the Love Series – in celebration of love in February 2023.  This had a great response – reminding us of what made people human.  It sent one listener back to his old photo album to remind himself of his showjumping days, and others felt motivated to take up hobbies again.   Now we are back to our main series focused on investment professionals but love runs through it like a golden thread.  Love, discipline, lessons from parents.  Our guests include a former college football player, who spent time working as a prison guard before returning to university and ultimately entering the investment industry, an expert on music valuation, multiple ESG and pensions specialists and founders of fund companies - large and small.  Our Series 2 guests are:Eddie Welch, who is an alternative asset specialist at Nuveen, a role he has held since April 2021.  He previously worked as an Associate at CIM Group, focused on real estate investing, and prior to that and his degree at Ohio State University worked in a wide variety of roles and played college football, all of which we discuss in our podcast. Jennifer Grancio  is Chief Executive Office at Engine No. 1.  Engine No. 1 is an investment firm that identifies value creation opportunities in once-in-a-generation systems changes the economy is now going through. She is based in the San Francisco Area.  She previously founded and ran her own firm advising CEOs on accelerating revenue growth and prior to that was a Managing Director at Blackrock, where she led businesses and global distribution teams for close to 20 years.  She is a Board Member of the MannKind Corporation and Ethic investments. Barry Massarsky is a Partner and Co-Practice Leader, Music Economics and Valuation Services at Citrin Cooperman.  The Founder of Massarsky Consulting, which he sold to Citrin Cooperman early in 2022. He is credited with pioneering the economics of royalty cash flows in the early 1990s and together with his business partner, Nari Matsuura, developed a model to guide banks lending to music investors. Last year Massarsky Consulting valued over 300 catalogs totaling more than $6.5 billion.  Maneesha Ghiya is Managing Partner and Founder of FemHealth Ventures, a firm focused on providing investment capital to entrepreneurs focused on women’s health. Investing in healthcare since 2000, Maneesha has invested via public equities, private equities and as a hedge fund specialist.  She is a Senior Advisor to ExSight Ventures, an ophthalmology-focused venture capital fund and serves on multiple boards.   Adam Saron is Founder of Clara-Pensions, a member-first consolidator of defined benefit pension schemes. He previously ran Black Ant Investment Management, a long-biased value investor, which invested in both public equities and corporate credits. Afsaneh Beschloss is the Founder and CEO at RockCreek, an investment firm which invests across diverse sectors with a special focus on climate, affordable housing and education investments in developed, emerging and frontier markets. She is on the Board of Directors of the Global Advisory Council of the Bretton Woods Committee, a Member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds numerous other Board and Trustee roles.Kate Nevin is President and Portfolio Manager at TSWII Capital Advisors, a role she has held for over 20 years.  She is active with many industry groups (such as The Academy of Institutional Investors and Nexus) and community organizations focused on conservation and gender equality and was a Riley Diversity Fellow. She is passionate about aligning value and investing in diversity. Sarah Whitley is Chair at Future Asset, an organization which connects girls, teachers and advisors to the diversity of opportunities in asset management.  Based in Edinburgh, she was previously Head of Japanese Equities at Baillie Gifford and currently holds a number of director roles, including as External Director at Rakuten, and Chair at the Edinburgh Festival Endowment Fund. John Harney,  is a Senior Consultant with AON, where he focuses on helping pension scheme sponsors to manage pension risks and maximise potential upside.  He is based in the Oxford area.  I cam across John through mutual friends in the industry and because I was drawn in particular to his Linkedin posts that mentioned his joy in cooking and baking, which we discussed as part of the Love series as a bonus episode.  Charlotte O’Leary is Chief Executive Officer and Director of Pensions for Purpose, which exists as a bridge between asset managers, pension funds and their professional advisers, to encourage the flow of capital towards impact investment. She has had a long career in investment management, with a particular focus on pensions as well as ESG and impact investing. She is also a passionate participant in fitness competitions, which we discussed as part of the Love series as a bonus episode. Series 2 of 2023 is kindly sponsored by Beach Point Capital Advisors, an investment manager that believes in investment beyond the traditional.  It specializes in credit investments and employs a flexible, value-oriented, risk-controlled focusing on complex and less well-followed opportunities.  You can find all of our podcasts on The Fiftyfaces Hub, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  

Charlotte O’Leary is Chief Executive Officer and Director of Pensions for Purpose, which exists as a bridge between asset managers, pension funds and their professional advisers, to encourage the flow of capital towards impact investment. She has had a long career in investment management, with a particular focus on pensions as well as ESG and impact investing. She is also a passionate participant in fitness competitions - particularly those organized under the Hyrox Brand. Our conversation starts with Charlotte's upbringing, where her determination took root, and we chart her course into investing and ultimately Pensions for Purpose.  She describes the satisfaction she derives from this bridge between pension funds and their advisers and how it enables them to put their mission and purpose into action.We move then to her passion for fitness, and talk about how this arose and how pushing her own physical limits drives her and the satisfaction she gains from the improvements that she sees every time she competes. This podcast is appearing as part of our Love series but will also be re-released later in March as part of Series 2 of 2023.  

Our global Women in Tech series is an exciting collaboration between Fiftyfaces Productions and Monumental Me, an organization committed to wellness including resilience, mental fitness and strength designed to help you thrive in life and your career. It also hosts The Mindshare Podcast. In this first series of the collaboration, host Liana Slater talks to four senior female tech executives about what drove their success, how the tech industry is changing and advice they wish they had learned sooner.  Our first podcast is with Jessica Kosmowski, a Managing Principal at Deloitte, where we start by discussing the most exciting tech trends surrounding us today and Jessica reflects on how she has treated not being well represented as a senior woman in tech. We hear then from the venture capital investor Katie Jacobs Stanton. Katie is the founder and general partner of Moxxie Ventures, She talks about areas that excite her today- particularly climate tech and healthcare, and shares the tips she believes will get more women the skills they need to get funded by investors like her.  She talks about hiring talent, and the imposter syndrome that is felt universally.Our next guest, Alicin Reidy Williamson, also believes in networks.  She is the chief diversity and culture officer for Yahoo.  She describes the importance of having a personal board of directors, but also believes in the importance of strong leadership, of a very particular kind - feminist leadership. Alicin also believes in creating a culture of belonging, and she gave an example of what that means.  Our final guest in the series, Fiona McDonnell, a tech executive of Booking.com describes what it is to have full self awareness and how we can learn it. She discusses her recent book, and reflects on what it was that stopped her from bringing her whole self to work.  You can follow our series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  You can find all of our content on the Fiftyfaces Hub - fiftyfaceshub.com, and this series is featured on the Monumental Me website at www.monumentalme.com/podcast. 

In Christine's own words: "Horses form a person from within and foster the development of courage, humility, quickness of judgement, self-discipline, self-control and focus".In this latest episode of our love series we revisit one of our most popular podcast guests from 2020.  Christine Chow is a sustainability leader, who will assume the role of Head of Active Ownership and Managing Director at Credit Suisse Asset Management effective April 1, 2023.  She has been a passionate horsewoman for many years, practicing dressage as well as a range of other activities and I wanted to capture what she loves about horses and how it informs her professional life.What a rich conversation ensued - Christine not only meticulously nurtures her passion - she makes notes about the learnings and insights it provides her.  We first speak in detail about dressage, its ingredients and how to work optimally with the horse. We speak about the importance of a strong core and a light touch and the partnership with the animal that is so collaborative and satisfying.  We talk about the innate characteristics of different horses and some of their limitations and how communicating even through a different language can yield such results.  There is a natural parallel here to stewardship and engagement as a light touch but strong core conviction is so important there too.  There is a need to be iterative, responsive and to recognize limitations there too when dealing with companies, but equally to try to speak the same language.We turn then to another recent trip Christine took, on an Idaho cattle drive, where we learned about regenerative agriculture and the adaptive grazing techniques that is restoring agricultural land there. Finally we hear about a corporate initiative that Christine has worked on, in which the outside interests and passions of a group of colleagues are collated in order to promote inclusion, better team building and better mutual understanding. Not unlike this podcast series in fact.

John Harney is a senior consultant with AON where he focuses on helping pension scheme sponsors to manage pension risks and maximize potential upside. He is based in the Oxford area. I came across John through mutual friends in the industry and when I was drawn in particular to his LinkedIn posts that mentioned his joy in cooking and baking.This was initially very promising for our inaugural "Love" series, but what we discovered in our conversation was a veritable "Layer Cake" of a career. We start with John's upbringing on an organic farm in Ireland and the serendipity that brought him to studying to be an actuary. We hear about his first professional role, and the mentors that nurtured him.We move then to a new beginning of sorts - his return to university to study theology and music - both early passions for him and delve into the insights and perspective that those pursuits taught him.  He then "returned to the fold" of his pensions work, and brought with him an additional richness that that further study had afforded him.  We speak about how rare it is to have managers who truly understand and appreciate the depth that further study can bring, and how we should all seek to be that manager.We turn then to John's love of cooking and baking, and his LinkedIn post citing Nigella Lawson that drew me to him. We speak about food's power to heal, to allow one to destress and see perspective in life too - whether that be the incremental improvement that every iteration of a recipe can bring and the need to park "perfection" sometimes. John lets us in on his specialty dish - a "croaf" . . listen in and all will be revealed.Overall, this is a podcast filled with joy, wisdom and perspective, being released early as a bonus to celebrate Love in February 2022, and it will also form part of Series 2 of 2023. 

Caroline Kenyon, broadcaster and serial entrepreneur in the world of food, founder of The Food Awards Company and co-founder of the radio company Food FM.  I invited Caroline to sit down with me to talk about her love of food and how she nurtures it and cultivates it in others.We start with her upbringing in London and how she moved to study law at Cambridge but found she didn't have the mindset to work as a lawyer.  Instead her creative instincts led her to journalism and eventually editing. We talk about how her initial "cheekiness" helped her to find a break in the competitive world of journalism, and how very humble beginnings led to the a flourishing Food PR company after she moved to Lincolnshire.Caroline's career now celebrates every aspect of food - through The Food Awards Company and Food FM radio, and we hear about how we are on the cusp of a global food revolution, where the provenance of food, the importance of food and new innovation in the world of food is creating so much buzz.Caroline talks about the origins of each of these businesses, and how her experience of Covid and looking after her elderly mother saw her seeing food as a healer and a source of joy.  We hear about the innovations that are currently exciting her and how food can be a source of better mental health and better overall wellness.You can find out more about the Food Awards Company on https://www.thefoodawardscompany.co.uk creating and about FoodFM at https://foodfmradio.com

Richard Okello is CEO and Co-founder at Sango Capital, an investment firm he founded 10 years ago that has a particular focus on investing in Africa.  He previously was a principal at Makena Capital, and prior to that in a series of roles at Bridgewater Associates. He sits on several fund advisory boards, portfolio company boards as well as the boards of the African Leadership Foundation and Human Horizons Foundation.Our conversation starts with reflections on Richard's extraordinary upbringing in Uganda, where as a young boy he started arbitraging the price of chickens at 12 years old, then campaigned for and succeeded in the abolition of caning in his school.  His predisposition for adventure continued when he attended Swarthmore College in the US and took on an extra strenuous workload, and then the demands on his time were amplified when he became the legal guardian to his three young sisters, when still in his teens himself.  Juggling these extraordinary duties and his new duties as a parent led to a zealous career focus and he found a welcome home in Bridgewater Associates, which was his first foray into the world of finance of investing.We spend some time discussing the work environment there at Bridgewater, which is known for its radical candor, and learn how this was a good fit for him.  We turn then to his move into the newly founded Makena Capital, an outsourced CIO, and how this was the foundation for his interest in investing in Africa.We discuss Sango Capital then and its origins, and how the opportunity set presents in Africa and how ESG considerations are woven in from the outset. Finally we turn to his reflections on his career so far, how his faith grounds him and where he expects the opportunities to invest in Africa will lie in the years ahead.Series 1 of 2023 is brought to you with the kind support of HarbourView Equity Partners, a global investment firm focused on opportunities in the entertainment and media space. Founded by Sherrese Clarke Soares, HarbourView is a long-term investor in content with an industrial platform built to protect, optimize, and enhance the legacy of premium IP. With a vision of becoming a true stakeholder in the global value of content, HarbourView believes creators deserve a seat at the table creatively and economically, owning their narrative and maximizing value for all. https://www.harbourviewequity.com/In celebration of our partnership with HarbourView Equity Partners we have selected a separate piece of music for each of the podcasts in this series.  We hope you enjoy them.