Episode 101: Meet Rob Morier: From Wall Street Exec to Podcasting Entrepreneur to Venture Capital Professor

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Stacy and Rob Morier met over 25 years ago at Julius Baer Investment Management, long before podcasting, LinkedIn, and fund manager personal brands were even a thing.

Fast forward to today, and Rob’s resume reads like an adventure novel. He’s done it all. From Wall Street, to teaching the next generation about all things VC as a Professor at Drexel University, he knows a thing or two about how asset managers can go from scrappy startups to stable, growth-ready firms.

In this Episode, Rob and Stacy dig into: 

• Rob’s backstory – how a history major with dreams of being a teacher ended up on Wall Street

• Lessons learned at a boutique firm with $1.6 billion AUM that grew to $76 billion

• Rob’s “middle innings” specialty: helping emerging managers bridge the gap from scrappy to institutional

• Why being able to “ride the bike while building it” matters for emerging managers

• What he learned about developing resilience and a founder’s mindset through researching teenage lifeguards 

• How raw, hard conversations with his mom behind the mic led him to host the Dakota Live! podcast

This is a conversation about growth, grit, and the power of coming home to yourself. Tune in and meet Rob! 

More About Rob Morier:

Rob Morier is a professor at Drexel University, where he teaches courses on venture capital, early-stage finance, and private markets. With 25 years in business development and investor relations, he’s passionate about empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs and investors.

His research explores environmental factors in ocean lifeguarding and entrepreneurship, studying how lifeguard training fosters resilience, leadership, and decision-making. His work, based in Wildwood Crest, NJ, has been featured in Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange, Financial Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Outside academia, Rob co-founded Twelve Pound Productions LLC and hosts the Dakota Live! Podcast, where he interviews leading investors and shares insights on business and leadership. He also advises asset managers on fundraising strategies, leveraging his experience raising billions in assets.

Rob lives in Philadelphia with his family and enjoys rowing, running, and biking.

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TRANSCRIPT

Below is an AI-generated transcript and therefore it may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Stacy Havener: One of my favorite things about being a podcast host, introducing my podcast audience, friends to my real life friends, and today's podcast is just that. Meet my friend and former colleague Rob Morrie. Rob and I crossed paths at Julius Barr Investment Management over 25 years ago and reconnected the last few years through some next chapter parts of his story.

[00:00:28] Stacy Havener: Rob is a talented business development and asset management exec. He's also an incredible podcast entrepreneur and host of the Dakota Live podcast. Wait, there's more. He's also a professor at Drexel University specializing in venture capital, early stage finance and private market due diligence, and he mentors entrepreneurs and conducts research on entrepreneurial mindset and risk management, drawing insights from his experience as an ocean [00:01:00] lifeguard in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey.

[00:01:03] Stacy Havener: So yeah, insert me wondering what I've been up to lately. Lots to unpack here on how our journeys take twists and turns, but often end with us coming home. Let's dive in. Meet my inspiring, awesome friend, Rob. Hey, my name is Stacey Haner. I'm obsessed with startups, stories, and sales. Storytelling has fueled my success as a female founder in the Toughest Boys Club, wall Street.

[00:01:36] Stacy Havener: I've raised over 8 billion that has led to 30 billion in follow on assets for investment boutiques, you could say against the odds. Yeah, understatement. I share stories of the people behind the portfolios while teaching you how to use story to shape outcomes. It's real talk here. Money, authenticity, growth, setbacks, sales and [00:02:00] marketing are all topics we discuss.

[00:02:02] Stacy Havener: Think of this as the capital raising class you wish you had in college mixed with happy hour. Pull up a seat, grab your notebook, and get ready to be inspired and challenged while you learn. This is the Billion Dollar Backstory podcast.

[00:02:25] Stacy Havener: Rob, welcome to the Billion Dollar Backstory Podcast Studio. I think this is, well, all the episodes are special, but this one is special on a couple levels. The really interesting bit for me is that we've known each other for decades. Long

[00:02:40] Rob Morier: time.

[00:02:40] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:02:40] Rob Morier: Decades. Yeah, decades, but more than 20 years.

[00:02:43] Stacy Havener : Okay, so this is a chance for us to invite friends of the podcast and my friends in to meet you.

[00:02:51] Stacy Havener : Thank you for being here.

[00:02:52] Rob Morier: Thank you so much. I am honored to be here. Stacey, thank you for inviting me to your podcast. I can't wait to have a conversation.

[00:02:58] Stacy Havener : Okay. So we are [00:03:00] gonna go decades back then. We can go even more than that because I want you to talk about your backstory and I'm gonna have you go back as far as you want.

[00:03:10] Stacy Havener : But I always sort of give you this little question, which is, did you always know that this is what you wanted to do? Like, did you always envision that you would be in finance?

[00:03:20] Rob Morier: Uh, absolutely not. I had no idea whatsoever if you would've even told me, you know what? The asset management industry is, what it looked like.

[00:03:29] Rob Morier: Even my first interview at Julius Bear. Yeah, which is where we started to overlap. I remember the first time I went in for that interview and I was 24, 25 years old, and they handed me a pitch book and they asked me what I thought of it, did I have any recommendations? And I knew so little about the industry that the only thing I could comment on was the colors.

[00:03:47] Rob Morier: So I, I was like, well, I'm not sure about your colors. They look a little,

[00:03:52] Stacy Havener : this blue is a H blue, H two blue. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:55] Rob Morier: I was like, what is, you know, is this how you spell bear? Is there another way to spell bear? Like I, I [00:04:00] knew nothing. Um, and I definitely didn't know anything way, way back in the day. I was actually a history major.

[00:04:05] Rob Morier: I studied, oh, I studied history at the University of Vermont. I ended up at the University of Vermont from Wildwood Crest, New Jersey and Wildwood, New Jersey, which is where I'm from. So I'm from the Jersey Shore. I grew up on the beach and my family has been down there for forever. So leaving was a big deal.

[00:04:23] Rob Morier: I ended up leaving to go to the University of Vermont. I did a little bit of a stint, um, and as you know, in Newport, Rhode Island, did the St. George's School. Then part of that also was at Wildwood High School. So when I went to the University of Vermont, I studied history and I thought I was gonna be a teacher because that's what most people where I grew up, uh, in, do you know, they become teachers, they work in the summer and then they teach in the winter.

[00:04:47] Rob Morier: Okay. So they call it beach and teach. So you could teach and teach beach and teach. Got it. Yeah. It's a, it's a very big thing where I grew up and, uh, I thought I was gonna be a, you know, a beach and teach person, but I, I actually, I went [00:05:00] abroad. I studied abroad my junior year and I went for the entire year.

[00:05:04] Rob Morier: It was an awesome experience. I went to this obscure little school in London called, uh, SOAs, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and I just fell in love with everything international. So I was looking for any way, shape or form to get overseas again. So I ended up going to China. I went and did an internship in China and that was amazing.

[00:05:25] Rob Morier: And then I came back and I was like, well, how do I do this again? At that time, you know, it was, it was a little tough. I had to get some kind of job, you know, to pursue loans and figure out life next. So I ended up at a firm called Greenwich Associates. And Greenwich Associates, which is now Coalition Greenwich is a well known, yeah.

[00:05:43] Rob Morier: Market research firm. So I started actually in market research at Charlie Ellis's firm. Charlie Ellis is a very yes, famous Wall Street guy. He wrote, uh, winning the Losers Game and a number of other books. So I learned a lot in three years that I was there. But I learned all about the industry. I didn't know anything about it to your [00:06:00] original question.

[00:06:00] Rob Morier: In fact, I remember when I was interviewing for the job, my resume was so soft. I mean, other than this one internship, I, you know, I had a CPR certification, that was one of my skills. And because I had been a lifeguard, an ocean lifeguard for so long, I didn't wanna say I was a lifeguard. So I called myself an open water technician.

[00:06:20] Rob Morier: So I was really, like, I was, I was not, I. I mean, there's a marketer

[00:06:25] Stacy Havener : in there somewhere around. I

[00:06:26] Rob Morier: was, I definitely was good with words. I mean, I think, I think from the beginning, because probably the most important thing about where I grew up is I grew up in a service economy. So, you know, you grew up basically serving customers, serving tourists, and you know, my first job really was when I was 10 years old and I was picking up trash on the beach and you know, I was working under the table until I was 16.

[00:06:49] Rob Morier: And then, you know, and it wasn't just one job. Kids down there, you know, worked anywhere from two to four jobs a summer. Some of them carry them into the winter. And it does not matter how much money you have. It [00:07:00] doesn't matter how big or successful your business is or your family. So that was definitely like, you know, being able to talk to people from all walks of life was something, I think everybody who grew up down there was able to carry that forward.

[00:07:12] Rob Morier: So it really shaped who I was. Amazing. It shaped the ability. Amazing to be able to, you know, be funny and spin words and

[00:07:19] Stacy Havener : Yeah. Think on your feet.

[00:07:21] Rob Morier: Yeah. Yeah. And just recognize that, you know. Everybody. What we always used to say in Wildwood is that everybody deserves vacation. So, oh, everybody who's there, you know, regardless of who they are or where they're from or what they've done, it doesn't matter.

[00:07:35] Rob Morier: They're there now and they're there to enjoy themselves. So let's try to make the experience as best as possible. I

[00:07:41] Stacy Havener : love that. Okay, so you sort of like haphazardly end up at Greenwich Associates. I mean, Azar place to land. What a place to land.

[00:07:50] Rob Morier: I had a, somebody I graduated from college with work there.

[00:07:53] Stacy Havener : Yeah. Okay. So now you're there. So then, so how do you, do you go to Julius Bear next? Like how do you end up I did, yeah. I went to [00:08:00] Julius

[00:08:00] Rob Morier: Bar next. Um, I remember I, I received a call from, uh, a guy who I was working with at the time who knew this other person named Barney Walker. Uhhuh, uh, Barney, who we both know very well was a, a, a seasoned salesperson who was working at Julius Fair for a few years.

[00:08:15] Rob Morier: They needed a client service associate slash sales associate, basically like someone to do everything.

[00:08:21] Stacy Havener : Yeah. Um,

[00:08:22] Rob Morier: I think I was the 18th or 19th hire at, at Julius Bayer Investment Management. So I was one of the, you know, the first employees and, and it was a very similar thing. Like I, I didn't know really what they did or how they did it.

[00:08:35] Rob Morier: In fact, I remember Julius Bearer didn't have the, the best reputation in North America. Yeah. They were basically the Swiss private bank. Yeah. Had like none,

[00:08:41] Stacy Havener : no reputation. They

[00:08:42] Rob Morier: had none. Yeah. I remember I told one of the partners at Greenwich Associates that I was taking this job at Julius Bearer, and he looked at me, used this German guy, I'll never forget it.

[00:08:49] Rob Morier: He was this thick German accent and he told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life. I was like, I'm like, what? I'm like, I'm 24. I was like, how big a. How big of a mistake can this actually be? [00:09:00] Yeah.

[00:09:00] Stacy Havener : And actually it was an amazing place to work.

[00:09:03] Rob Morier: It was, yeah. And I ended up, I ended up staying there for, you know, when it was all said and done.

[00:09:07] Rob Morier: I was there for almost 12 years and I did, I, I joke around, I did take a sabbatical. I left directly in the middle of that 12 year stint, uh, to go to Goldman Sachs Asset Management. I was recruited, uh, as a, you know, as an experienced hire, as they call 'em there. And it was great experience. 'cause I was, I was immediately kind of plopped into this, you know, sales client service, you know, product specialist role at Goldman.

[00:09:31] Rob Morier: So it was the first time I had access to all of these other strategies, all of these other products. It just happened to coincide with the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. But I was, I was really lucky. I was not there terribly long. I, I received a call back from Julius Bearer's, chief Investment Officer at the time.

[00:09:49] Rob Morier: His name is 'cause Richard Pell. And Richard called and, and asked me if I'd be interested in coming back. And he didn't have the job immediately, but. He wanted to know at one point if I'd be interested in [00:10:00] building out Julius Bear's, European and non North business. Amazing. Yep. So that's how I ended up at Julia Spare.

[00:10:07] Stacy Havener : And so I wanna pull this thread more when we get into the conversation. I wanna finish out on your backstory though, because you're kind of like the Dosis guy

[00:10:17] seems hot.

[00:10:19] Rob Morier: That's interesting. Most interesting man in a while. No, I think you already had the most interesting, you had Ben Benesh on the show. Oh, so I am, yeah.

[00:10:25] Rob Morier: You guys

[00:10:26] Stacy Havener : are similar. I think

[00:10:27] Rob Morier: he is, uh, he is by far more interesting than me and he's got the accent to prove. Oh

[00:10:31] Stacy Havener : gosh. Okay. So Julia Spare when you started. Same for me was a boutique, like literally it was, I think the fund had 17 million million dollars in it when I started. And it was an incredible experience.

[00:10:43] Stacy Havener : And so, but then when you left, I mean, what did they tap out at? Like 60 billion or something?

[00:10:48] Rob Morier: 76. 76. Yeah. So I, when I started. There was 1.6 billion and mostly, um, a sub advisory mutual fund and one or [00:11:00] two Canadian institutional clients. They actually, as I was walking in the door, they won their first US institutional account.

[00:11:07] Rob Morier: So, you know, it's so funny you said it that way because I, I was thinking about this conversation in Yeah. And one of the things I guess I didn't recognize or or appreciate is that effectively I've been working for emerging managers since the very beginning of my career.

[00:11:20] Stacy Havener : Exactly.

[00:11:21] Rob Morier: So that's all I've done.

[00:11:22] Rob Morier: I just had been at a couple of them that truly emerged. Yeah. Uh, you know, and became in, in, in Julius Bear's case actually iPod. Yes. And, you know, and became a publicly traded company. So yeah, it was a boutique and it was owned and operated like a boutique. Yes. The same advice that you give to emerging managers now.

[00:11:40] Rob Morier: I mean, you know, the, the chief investment officer was changing the toner and the copy machine and, you know, and I was, I had absolutely no business, uh, you know, going by myself. To an institutional sale in Portland, Oregon. You know, literally with a script that I was just memorizing for 24 hours before I got there.

[00:11:59] Rob Morier: I [00:12:00] didn't even have a credit card. I love system. I didn't have a credit card. I love, that's how young I was. I had not, I think I had a credit card maybe for a heartbeat in college, but when I left college and credit cards, so I was, I had like no way to pay for this trip, but I didn't wanna tell anybody. I couldn't admit it.

[00:12:15] Rob Morier: Like I couldn't tell anybody. It's like, what if you tell somebody you don't have a credit card? I'm like, you know, that's how little did

[00:12:19] Stacy Havener : I have your card?

[00:12:21] Rob Morier: I did. So I, Sarah Moradian, I love her. Saw out Moradian who worked there as well, put the trip on her credit card and then I was so worried to spend any money.

[00:12:30] Rob Morier: It's that I stayed on the couch of a friend of mine in San Francisco and then, uh, took a connecting flight to Portland. It's amazing. It was just amazing. It was just so emerging, so boutique.

[00:12:41] Stacy Havener : It's, but like, these are the stories, and I'm glad we're talking about this because anybody who's involved with a startup of any kind.

[00:12:50] Stacy Havener : But certainly we have the management space. I mean, it is like, it's like ramen noodles in the beginning For real. Yeah. And you're just trying to figure it out. [00:13:00] Everybody's doing everything, but the memories you make during that time of building together, that connects you and unites you forever. Yeah.

[00:13:09] Yeah.

[00:13:10] And so

[00:13:10] Stacy Havener : what experience for you to, you know, and I feel grateful to have been a part of it too, but like that is such an amazing ride and it's not the only time you've done that. So after Julius spare, you've gone to other emerging managers and helped them. So talk a little bit about that.

[00:13:27] Rob Morier: I have, yeah.

[00:13:28] Rob Morier: Thank you for asking. So Richard LP fulfill his promise. He, uh, sent me overseas. I, from the ground up started and opened their London office. So I was building out London, Europe. I was going down to the Middle East. I was going out to Asia from there. And I did that for several years. I. But the other side of the Julious Bear story is that, you know, um, managing growth, and we, we know this well, particularly when you're talking about venture capital and early stage venture capital and these companies that are going through pre-seed, seed and then, you know, on up, [00:14:00] it's really difficult to manage that growth and sustain that growth.

[00:14:03] Rob Morier: So unfortunately, they did not sustain the growth successfully. And the writing was on the wall when I was sitting in this office in London. So about the same time, you know, it would look like things were, we were gonna be sold to our competitor. I received a call from a hedge fund based in New York that also had offices in Tokyo and Hong Kong called Indi Capital.

[00:14:23] Rob Morier: It was, uh, co-founded by, uh, David Coit and Sheldon Kasowitz, uh, who came outta Soros Fund Management in the late nineties and early two thousands. And they were the, the Asia guys. And at that point, I, I had been living overseas. I, you know, as I'd started Red in my career.

[00:14:40] Yeah,

[00:14:41] Rob Morier: really from that junior year abroad.

[00:14:43] Rob Morier: Was just to better understand international markets as best as possible and, and be there and immerse myself in, in them as best as I could. So it was a great opportunity. I would go back to New York and then I would essentially help them build out what was initially their long only business. [00:15:00] So at that time there were, this is 2012, 2013, lots of long short managers that were really starting to introduce long, only, a long only business into their quiver of, of opportunities.

[00:15:13] Rob Morier: And they were also trying to grow all of these other long short strategies, emerging market equities, Asia, ex Japan. So I ended up spending several years there and doing just that. And, and we had a lot of success as well. They, they continued to have a lot of success. They just celebrated their 25th year anniversary.

[00:15:28] Rob Morier: Oh my gosh. Yeah. It was really a great place for me to, to cut my teeth in hedge funds.

[00:15:33] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:15:33] Rob Morier: At that point we really hadn't done too much at long short, uh, we'd done private markets at Julius Bear and I had done Summit Goldman and lots of fixed income. But not, you know, a lot of traditional long short equity.

[00:15:45] Rob Morier: So it was great. I was, you know, thrown into the fire and it was, it was more of a true of an institutionalization, I guess Yes. Of the strategy. Like how do you tell this story to, you know, to an institutional investor that just [00:16:00] candidly invest more than, than on pedigree, you know? Yes. It's, it's great that they came outta Soros or it's great that someone came outta the Tigers or Viking or Yep.

[00:16:09] Rob Morier: You know, name, name the fun. But that only goes so far. It lasts

[00:16:12] Stacy Havener : for like three years. Exactly. You got that story. Yeah. And you gotta evolve it.

[00:16:16] Rob Morier: Exactly. So for them, it lasted about, you know, six to seven years at that point. Okay,

[00:16:20] Stacy Havener : good. Yep. And

[00:16:21] Rob Morier: then they, and then they had, they had flattened, you know, the a UM flattened.

[00:16:24] Rob Morier: And so that's really what I did more than anything. You know, I helped bring in the head of risk management, helped bring in client service, you know, RFP, uh, investment, all of those things that you need to start to do the basic blocking and tackling of an institutional

[00:16:39] Stacy Havener : Yeah. Uh,

[00:16:40] Rob Morier: sales cycle. It was, it was successful.

[00:16:42] Rob Morier: It was, it was great. I was, I loved it. I, I had a great time while I was there. Um, I, I wasn't sure if it was gonna be forever. Uh, you know, I was in New York and I was starting to rethink New York in a lot of different ways, but that was the, the next kinda iteration I did, I did do a, a quick stop at a firm called [00:17:00] ClearBridge.

[00:17:00] Rob Morier: And that was exclusively because of the person who, who recruited me. Uh, Lori McAvoy. You've ever come across her? Yes. She's wonderful. I just fell in love with her. I just thought she was such a smart, institutional salesperson and she essentially needed a deputy, somebody to work, you know, alongside her and helped build out all of these other areas that they hadn't.

[00:17:20] Rob Morier: So that was not, that's the only time I haven't worked for like, that, that, and Goldman were the only time I hadn't worked for a real, kind of emerging, emerging

[00:17:27] Stacy Havener : manager. Yeah.

[00:17:28] Rob Morier: But I, Lori left not too long after I left and I ended up going to. Another emerging manager for this time to build out a North American business on behalf of a European company, so a European Oh,

[00:17:40] Stacy Havener : okay.

[00:17:40] Stacy Havener : So opposite direction.

[00:17:42] Rob Morier: Opposite direction. So I, I had met this firm, it was an emerging market debt firm, uh, based in Denmark. I had met them on the conference circuit when I was covering the Nordics. Uh, truth be told, Julia Spearer was thinking about acquiring them. So I was hoping

[00:17:58] Stacy Havener : Oh, very interesting.

[00:17:59] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:17:59] Rob Morier: Yeah. One of [00:18:00] my, um, one of my covert jobs at Julius Spearer when I was in Europe was I was actually seeking out talent. So I was looking Oh, cool. For, I was looking for boutiques for us to either stake or, or I was choir outright. So I was, I was at the, you know, early days of GP staking and GP seating.

[00:18:16] Rob Morier: Yeah. Um, and they were actually the manager that we were thinking about staking, or at least trying to acquire. Anyway, that ended up being a great experience. They were acquired. I ended up leaving and coming down to Philadelphia, and that's, that's really where I, I think the. A big chapter in my, like personal and professional life, you know, changed over, uh, personally I was divorced.

[00:18:37] Rob Morier: I was coming out of a divorce, so I wanted to be closer to home and to be in Philadelphia, which is where all my family was. And then professionally, I had an opportunity to join a firm called Experience, which is a very well known emerging manager, multi-strategy boutique. And, and they were building out a $4 billion business they wanted to take to 10.

[00:18:59] Rob Morier: And [00:19:00] we were acquiring other asset managers. So they wanted somebody who had that experience, which I had, I had had in, in Europe. So what's it like to build out and bring on these other emerging managers and scale them, you know, through an institutional distribution, you know, sales cycle? So I did that as well and I loved it.

[00:19:20] Rob Morier: We took the firm from four to 12 billion. Amazing. And it was, yeah, it was, it was awesome. It was a great experience. Uh, you know, people aren't familiar with exponent. Uh, your fund managers particularly who tune in, you know, they're a must call. Yeah. If you are on the East Coast, without a doubt, particularly in Philadelphia, you know, Adam Chopin, uh, Tina Williams is the CIO.

[00:19:42] Rob Morier: Mm-hmm. Just incredibly, incredibly smart allocators, really early stage, you know, they take that at true, you know, it's not marketing rhetoric, true private equity approach to how they think about investing in these early stage managers. So that was another great experience. But I'm, I am such a [00:20:00] glutton for punishment when it comes to, uh, boutiques and, you know, just that I feel

[00:20:04] Stacy Havener : seen,

[00:20:05] Rob Morier: oh my God, it's so hard for me to stop.

[00:20:08] Rob Morier: I know. So I, I had to, you know, we took it from four to 12, I think by the time we left, we were closer to 14, and I, and I got a call, you know, from my firm. That was same deal. They had two strategies back to the long only equities again, but they were doing some interesting co-investments, uh, taking some, some publics to private privates to public.

[00:20:30] Rob Morier: Um, and, you know, it was, it was sexy, truth be told. Yeah. It was, uh, it was based in Denver, Colorado. I'd be splitting my time. Initially I was thinking about moving to Denver and the, the firm ended up getting acquired, but, um, it was, you know, Denver to Philadelphia. So I, you know, I was, I've got lots of these saying Stacy, I would, don't apologize.

[00:20:48] Rob Morier: I was gonna be a real surf and turf guy. So, okay. So Turf Beach,

[00:20:52] Stacy Havener : teach Now we're surf and turf. Okay. It Teach

[00:20:54] Rob Morier: Now Surf and Turf, not surf.

[00:20:56] Stacy Havener : And

[00:20:56] Rob Morier: so I thought I'd be a surf and turf guy, but you know, [00:21:00] as the fund managers know who listen in and the allocators really know Yeah. Is that it's, it's really, it's, it's so difficult to launch and scale these emerging boutiques.

[00:21:10] Rob Morier: And the parent company that was sitting in Australia had an opportunity to sell most of their business. Yeah. And they did. And when that happened. As a lot of asset managers who listen in, also know, um, there are quite a few allocators who just really won't Yeah. Look at a publicly traded manager or when there's that type of significant change in ownership.

[00:21:30] Rob Morier: Yes. You know, within a year, two years, maybe even three years, you know, you're, you're just, you're just gonna be, you know, in a holding pattern.

[00:21:37] Stacy Havener : Yeah. I agree. I wanna pause on, because we're now, we're gonna take a turn into a very different chapter of your story. Yes. But before we leave the asset management chapter, you know, as you're talking, I'm like, gosh, you have a very interesting slot.

[00:21:53] Stacy Havener : Like the white space that you were stepping into is sort of like series A, series [00:22:00] B equivalent, right? Mm-hmm. They've already passed seed and venture. The managers have started to scale, but they're not really like, they're just starting a hockey stick.

[00:22:09] Yes.

[00:22:10] Stacy Havener : That's an interesting pivot point for them to go from kind of scrappy, gritty startup to mm-hmm.

[00:22:19] Stacy Havener : As you said, like really institutional quality. And if you think about that time, what's the most difficult bit for them in that transition? Like, is it changing the narrative? 'cause you certainly have to do that, or is it like behind the scenes stuff that has to be put in place or some combination of all those things?

[00:22:37] Rob Morier: That's a great question. And you know, to your original point, I, I couldn't agree more if I had to, and I've done this a couple times, I kind of categorize my specialty, you know, putting it in, in baseball terms instead of uc terms. Yeah. I'm, I'm kind of a second through, I'm a middle inning pitch. Yeah. You know, you so second through fifth inning, um, you know, if the starter just isn't doing the job, I'll be brought in the second inning and then carry [00:23:00] them through to the closer or the closers.

[00:23:02] Rob Morier: So it is a combination of things. I would say first and foremost, it's an operations job. Yeah. So what, what happens more often than not is that they'll, they'll bring on firms that size and at that point in their inflection or growth will bring on a chief operating officer, but they may not necessarily be as familiar as what it takes to scale up a business.

[00:23:24] Rob Morier: Yeah. For the second through fifth innings. So you have to do a lot of things and it's, it's really kinda simple stuff. It could be insurance, you know, what kind of insurance are you carrying? It's your RFPs, your DV qs. So it's not so much like your client service. Yeah. Even your IR or your BD at that point.

[00:23:39] Rob Morier: It's just do you have the tools to be able to go forward and start riding the bike while you're building it?

[00:23:47] Stacy Havener : Yeah. That's not easy.

[00:23:48] Rob Morier: It's not easy. So you're, you're doing both, you know not to, we're on video. Yeah. So you're holding the handlebar and you're fixing the wheel and. And then you're like, oh, this wheel doesn't work.

[00:23:57] Rob Morier: So we, instead of Eves suite, maybe we should have actually done this. Or [00:24:00] Yeah, the cr m's not great, let's upgrade it to Salesforce.

[00:24:03] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:24:03] Rob Morier: So all of those things operationally tend to happen first and foremost.

[00:24:06] Stacy Havener : Like the backstage stuff.

[00:24:08] Rob Morier: The backstage stuff. Exactly. Yeah. And then they get on stage and now they have to tell their story.

[00:24:14] Rob Morier: And up until that point, the only people that they've told the story to are mostly what I, you would consider friends and family.

[00:24:21] Yeah.

[00:24:21] Rob Morier: You know, so they're closest networks for, for the most part. Yep. Um, it might be the odd family office, or it might be the odd institutional client, or maybe there's that one consultant who's supporting them, but it's having to retell the story in a way that is, um, it's easy to follow.

[00:24:40] Rob Morier: Mm-hmm. And then I, I say this all the time, it's, it's easy to tell again. Yeah, like a

[00:24:45] Stacy Havener : repeat. Same thing, like the repeatability. You need that in the story, not just in your process.

[00:24:50] Rob Morier: Exactly. Because more often than not, and you know this really well, but more often than not, the person that you're telling the story to for the first time, even the second time, is not gonna be the decision maker.

[00:24:59] Rob Morier: Right. [00:25:00] They're, they're important. They're critical to the process. So I actually, I spend a lot of time interviewing people in that, you know, kind of two to 10 year experience range, not because they're the key decision maker, because they're so critical in doing all of the work. And what they need from you is a story that can be repeated to their boss or repeated to their team.

[00:25:21] Rob Morier: Yes, thank

[00:25:21] Stacy Havener : you.

[00:25:22] Rob Morier: And they need all of those check boxes because they're new, they're early stage in their career. So if they present someone, you know, to, to the CIO and, and it does not have one of those, you know, core tenants of a business, and it could be anything, a risk management system, a, a trade management system, you know?

[00:25:41] Rob Morier: Mm-hmm. It doesn't really matter.

[00:25:43] Stacy Havener : A compliance officer.

[00:25:45] Rob Morier: A compliance officer or an outsource compliance officer, whatever, job one, somebody. Exactly. And, and I think that's what, to me, you know, those were like the, the two components. And then the third thing, which is more behavioral mm-hmm. Is, is patience.

[00:25:59] Rob Morier: Yeah. Is [00:26:00] that it requires a ton of patience. And at that point, you know, particularly with hedge funds and, and private markets, whether it's a capital call or it's a fundraise, things at that point moved very quickly. You know, things moved pretty quickly. Like, look, we're trying to raise, we're gonna launch fund one, or we've got this hedge fund, we're at $50 million.

[00:26:19] Rob Morier: We're trying to fill the, the next 50 million in the friends and family share class, so we're, we'd like to take it to market. And then a year goes by, or 18 months go by. Yeah. And, and then the, the person who was responsible for that fundraising is under a lot of pressure.

[00:26:36] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:26:37] Rob Morier: So, yeah, I, I tried to balance that as best as possible.

[00:26:40] Rob Morier: You know, I wasn't, I wasn't perfect, but. I think, you know, going back to those roots of just, you know, kind of just having a knack, an understanding of what people need and, and then having a knack and an understanding as to how a business works. You know, I grew up in a small business landscape.

[00:26:55] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:26:56] Rob Morier: Um, and I think all of those things are super important in that, in that time [00:27:00] period.

[00:27:00] Stacy Havener : Absolutely. And I wanna talk about the consultants. 'cause I mean, there's this really interesting phenomenon that happens, and I know you've seen this where, let's say a talented breakaway, they're leaving a big shop.

[00:27:17] Mm-hmm. And

[00:27:17] Stacy Havener : their recency bias is saying, oh, you know, my clients at Big Shop are these consultants and these really big institutional allocators and asset owners.

[00:27:27] Stacy Havener : And so when I set up my new firm, I'm gonna just call them first.

[00:27:31] Mm-hmm.

[00:27:32] Stacy Havener : And they really like, I mean, it's genuine 'cause they're like, I, I only get a little sliver. Of assets from these very big allocators Yep. Or these consultants, it's gonna change everything for me. Mm-hmm. And the harsh truth of it is that's not gonna happen.

[00:27:50] Stacy Havener : And at what point, like when is it the right time? Right. You gotta do the friendlies and the early adopters and all. Mm-hmm. Like when is the [00:28:00] right time to be reaching out to these big, kind of like the bulge bracket consultants because they like, they need a certain profile.

[00:28:07] Rob Morier: Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question.

[00:28:09] Rob Morier: Um, I think the cheap answer is there is no right time. Okay. You should just be reaching out really from the beginning, because whenever you start, this is my opinion. Okay. Is that no matter what happens,

[00:28:22] Stacy Havener : yes. You

[00:28:23] Rob Morier: have to have a starting point at some point. Like you Okay. You know, with Mercer for example, you know it's gonna take.

[00:28:31] Rob Morier: Years potentially to get that by rating or with Callan it's gonna take years.

[00:28:36] Stacy Havener : I mean, for real, like,

[00:28:37] Rob Morier: yeah. So my advice has always been don't ignore them. You know, because they, they will be important. At some point. They will be important.

[00:28:44] Stacy Havener : But the expectation

[00:28:46] Rob Morier: Yeah. And the expectation, and, and that's the hardest part for, I think, for sales professionals, is that managing those expectations is very difficult because a lot of salespeople, particularly kind of at my age range and a little older [00:29:00] Yeah.

[00:29:00] Rob Morier: They grew up in firms that, that Mercer and Callen and, yes. And, you know, the Wilshire really drove their business. So, you know, in some ways they've hung their hats on on that success. And they'll go into a new shop and they'll say, okay, I hear, I know caller, I know, yeah. This person, I know that person.

[00:29:18] Rob Morier: Let's, let's go and get it. And then a year goes by and two years go by and it doesn't work. So I, I think it's, it's two things. I think it's one, managing expectations internally. Mm-hmm. So having those conversations, which can be really difficult. I just had this conversation with somebody very recently.

[00:29:34] Rob Morier: Okay. I'm not professional salesperson anymore, so it's very easy for me to give them candid, the real talk. Yeah, the real talk, you know, which is, you know, your, your story's not working or they're, they're not gonna buy you. Or, Hey, you know, I got some feedback from that meeting and it was rough. Yeah. It was rough.

[00:29:51] Rob Morier: And, and here's what was rough about it, you know? So it's, it's constructive.

[00:29:55] Yes. But

[00:29:56] Rob Morier: it's still raw, you know, it's, it's raw feedback. Yeah. And a lot of people are [00:30:00] reluctant to do that. And I'm just, just hearing anecdotally from friends who still do it because, 'cause your job's at State. I, and what if you have somebody who's sensitive or self-esteem is struggling or whatever the case is, it's hard to do that.

[00:30:13] Rob Morier: And I, I was lucky I learned that lesson early. Uh, Julius Bear, I remember it so well. I took a fund manager overseas, uh, to the Nordic market and they, we had a, we had a good chance, but he had a rough meeting.

[00:30:27] Mm-hmm.

[00:30:28] Rob Morier: Immediately after the meeting, I probably did what I'm advising people not to do, which is I told 'em it was a good meeting.

[00:30:34] Rob Morier: Yeah, it was good. You know, we're good. Oh, no, because I knew we were, because I knew we were, we were going that direction, like were moving. Was it a consultant?

[00:30:40] Stacy Havener : A consultant on the meeting or it was a direct

[00:30:42] Rob Morier: No, it was a direct. Okay. It was a direct, so I knew it was, I, but I knew we were gonna get this mandate.

[00:30:47] Rob Morier: Okay. So we were, we had a good shot at it, but it was still like a, not a great meeting. There were some new players in the room for the first time and, and he was just, he was nervous. Yeah. And I went back to the [00:31:00] offices and, and somebody in the C-suite asked me how the meeting went and I said, you know, it was a little rough because, you know, I think he was a little nervous and, you know, it didn't go exactly how we wanted, but we're still moving forward.

[00:31:09] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:31:10] Rob Morier: Well, of course the C-Suite talked to that.

[00:31:12] Stacy Havener : Oh, geez.

[00:31:13] Rob Morier: Portfolio manager. And then, you know, the first thing to the, the portfolio manager's credit is that, you know, and I was pretty young, so I, I, I was lucky. I, I started my career early on, so I wasn't even 30, you know, at this point. And he called me and he said, um, you know, I'm just gonna tell you this once, you know, don't ever tell me I did good or did well and there's something else there.

[00:31:33] Rob Morier: Don't ever do that again. Yeah. He's like, just tell me, because now I thought I had a good meeting. So I took that really personally, I felt that's

[00:31:40] Stacy Havener : really a tough lesson, but a good advice. It was a tough lesson.

[00:31:43] Rob Morier: Well, I mean, I, you know, I I, we don't learn in the good times, you know?

[00:31:46] Stacy Havener : Oh, yeah, right.

[00:31:47] Rob Morier: We, we learn for the bad times.

[00:31:48] Rob Morier: So it was a hard beating and it taught me to really think about, you know, how I come out of those meetings after the fact and Yeah. And I never did it again. And, and now it's like, of course you're a little bit more liberated if you're not, you're not tied to [00:32:00] one shot. But managing expectat expectations is so, so important.

[00:32:04] Rob Morier: And then prioritizing, like, really, that's the big thing, understanding, because there's only

[00:32:09] Stacy Havener : so much time.

[00:32:10] Rob Morier: There is, and it's, and you know, people, you know, the allocators in particular, they don't know how they do it. You know, they're, they're so busy, uh, they, they get so many emails, so many calls. So how do you find your path through their inbox?

[00:32:26] Rob Morier: Uh, it's, it's really challenging. So

[00:32:28] yeah,

[00:32:29] Rob Morier: to your original question, it's like we can't ignore the, the large consultants consult. Yeah, but they're, they're not going to be your first tickets. No. You know, they're just not. Um, so you, you go to the tier twos and the tier threes, and then of course that world has changed so much because, you know, there were 120 consultants, you know, back in Julie's Bears Day, you know, 2000, yeah.

[00:32:49] Rob Morier: The Prime 10 through 12, you know, now there are 60 to 80,

[00:32:52] Stacy Havener : is that right? Wow. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Consolidate. They've consolidated or they've consolidated. Consolidated.

[00:32:58] Rob Morier: And some have shut down. Yeah. But they've [00:33:00] consolidated. So now you've got half as many consultants as you did 10 years ago. Yep. But you've got twice as many outsourced CIOs and Oh, interesting.

[00:33:10] Rob Morier: And as a result, you, you've had this huge shift of, um, you know, discretionary versus non-discretionary. So the approach has also changed in the last 10 years because when you're dealing with an outsourced CIO it, it is, it's a different type of conversation in, in a lot of ways. Because, because that's

[00:33:27] Stacy Havener : discretionary.

[00:33:29] Rob Morier: It's discretionary. Usually the teams are smaller. Um, usually the clients are smaller. Okay. So they, they can be more nimble or they can take on more risk, you know, so if it's a foundation, an endowment, a family office, they have a longer term time horizon.

[00:33:43] Mm-hmm.

[00:33:43] Rob Morier: So you just, you know, you need to take a different approach.

[00:33:46] Rob Morier: So the consultant versus the outsource CIO sales processes has also changed things, and

[00:33:52] Stacy Havener : that's super interesting.

[00:33:54] Rob Morier: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:55] Stacy Havener : So I think we should Okay. Great advice. And I'm glad that we got to the [00:34:00] place of sort of saying, look, you gotta prioritize the consultants because if you come out of the gates thinking that they're gonna write you a very small allocation, it's gonna mean everything to you.

[00:34:08] Stacy Havener : And it's like nothing for them. It's just you're gonna be spinning your wheels. Yeah. And probably not getting the actual dollars. Um, I,

[00:34:17] Rob Morier: I think so. For the most part. Yes. Yeah, for the most

[00:34:18] Stacy Havener : part. Okay. So, so after you, I'm not gonna say you left asset management 'cause you're still here.

[00:34:24] Mm-hmm.

[00:34:24] Stacy Havener : But you take a bit of a pivot, which leads to why you have all this current deep, extensive knowledge of what's happening in the allocator space.

[00:34:35] Stacy Havener : So talk a little bit about what's happening in Rob's world now.

[00:34:38] Rob Morier: Well, so I, I left the industry, uh, which was about three years ago, actually three years ago this month. And, you know, I, I, I felt like more than anything I needed to take a break because I was, I, I, it's like, almost like I, you know, it's like an asset allocator.

[00:34:52] Rob Morier: I felt like I was picking kind of the wrong partners, you know? I was maybe too early on I needed to, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I [00:35:00] compare everything to dating. So yeah. Maybe I need somebody more mature, you know, maybe, maybe I should be dating older. So I was doing like this, like tangential soul searching.

[00:35:11] Rob Morier: That's actually what that summer was gonna be. I, you know, I've been lucky in my career. I was able to take a summer off and I went home. That's so nice. I went home, I went home to help out my mom with her business. She wanted to launch a podcast to benefit her coaching. She's an executive coach. And that ended up basically creating this whole world that I'm, I'm now living in.

[00:35:33] Rob Morier: Uh, it was a podcast that, it was with my mom and I uhhuh we would talk, uh, once a week. Uh, she was a coach, so she was coaching me. She's coaching her. Love it. Her 40 plus year old son who, you know, was divorced and unemployed, if you know, like Parker, you needed

[00:35:48] Stacy Havener : a coach mom. So I needed a coach.

[00:35:50] Rob Morier: I needed a lot more than that.

[00:35:52] Rob Morier: I, I probably needed a lobotomy, but I was really, you know, I was, I needed some family. Um, and we, we [00:36:00] decided that we were gonna, you know, which is we, we weren't. Listening to podcasts and thinking about what we were gonna talk about both. We decided we were gonna be the things that are talked about now all the time.

[00:36:09] Rob Morier: We were gonna be authentic. We were gonna be real. Yeah. We were gonna talk about what our lives were about, and we were gonna talk about things that we had never talked about together. You know, my mother came out as a, as a gay woman when I was, uh, in my early teens. We never really discussed it.

[00:36:23] Wow. Was a

[00:36:24] Rob Morier: recovering alcoholic.

[00:36:26] Mm-hmm. Um,

[00:36:26] Rob Morier: she's been sober for nearly 30 years now, but we never talked about it. You know, I, wow. I went through a difficult divorce. We never talked about it. Yeah. So we did that. So we were having these kind of conversations and it, and it kind of caught fire. It mainly caught fire because of where I grew up.

[00:36:41] Rob Morier: We were down in the Wildwood and the largest, um, the largest employer in South Jersey. Uh, a private employer is a tourism company, and we were doing some work. They were actually our first sponsor. So I called them and I asked them that they would sponsor this podcast, and they said yes to our, our disbelief.

[00:36:59] Rob Morier: And what [00:37:00] we didn't know at the time was that every tourist who had been, you know, on the boardwalk and on their rides and stayed in their hotels, um, they had an email distribution list that was, I think upwards of 700,000 or something like that. Oh my

[00:37:12] Stacy Havener : gosh.

[00:37:13] Rob Morier: So they, they put it out no, to their distribution list.

[00:37:15] Rob Morier: So we ended up having, you know, it was nice. We started getting paid and we started making some money. We started a business and then we were like, well, let's interview other people. Let's interview people who are not us. I mean, there's always so much that people really care about me. And I mean, and they were, at that point we were throwing around everything, Stacy.

[00:37:33] Rob Morier: We were like, okay, you should do, uh, maybe my mom can find my next girlfriend and you can like date, like you can set me up. It's like a reality

[00:37:41] show. Oh,

[00:37:41] Rob Morier: it was to, well, some, that's a whole different story, but. The company who was sponsoring us was actually interested in, in doing that. No. They were like, oh yeah, yeah.

[00:37:50] Rob Morier: Like was gonna be like a bachelor in Wildwood. Oh my

[00:37:52] Stacy Havener : God. This is, and uh,

[00:37:54] Rob Morier: it was called, I'm telling you

[00:37:55] Stacy Havener : Doss man, right here. Yeah,

[00:37:56] Rob Morier: yeah, yeah. We had a name for it. It was called, um, it was called Mother Knows Best. [00:38:00]

[00:38:00] Stacy Havener : It's brilliant.

[00:38:01] Rob Morier: And Mom Wood set me up. Anyway, thank God it did not happen. But what ended up happening is I ended up interviewing two people who became very important in my life.

[00:38:10] Rob Morier: The first of which is, is someone we've known for a long time. I came there. Her name is Dr. Barry Kin. Uh, Barry is a professor here at Drexel University, and I did exactly this over years. I just told her all these stories about, you know, the war stories, you know? Yeah. The, the, the paper cuts. Yeah. And she teaches, she teaches business ethics.

[00:38:29] Rob Morier: Oh my. So she, my gosh, she was just like, what? You know, because all they teach at school is, you know, they teach, you know, they teach Enron. They that now they teachs case studies, hypothetical studies, all the basics, you know, but they. Drexel was an experiential college, and they hired practitioners. So she, she encouraged me to apply to be an adjunct.

[00:38:50] Rob Morier: And because this business, this, this podcast media company was taking off, I was also invited to be an entrepreneur in residence in our venture capital [00:39:00] incubator here on campus, which is actually where I'm sitting right now, uh, in a conference room or breakout room. They don't call 'em conference rooms if you Oh yeah.

[00:39:06] Rob Morier: No breakout. No ones, no. Yeah, that's way cooler. Cooler. A you're way cooler. Come on. So I broke, I broke out to do this podcast.

[00:39:12] Stacy Havener : Yeah. Good.

[00:39:13] Rob Morier: So, uh, that was a very important conversation that ended up reading into a, a full-time long first. So I'm a fulltime professor now at Drexel, and I teach all of their VC and private markets coursework, which has been just the coolest thing ever.

[00:39:27] Rob Morier: And then the second interview I did as part of that podcast with my mom was with someone who you just did a podcast with, that's Keith Costan, the CEO and Founder of Dakota. He had written a book not too long before I, I had started the podcast. About, you know, just knowing your audience, understanding millennials and the next generation of buyers and, you know, and I've always been a big reader, so I read it and I was interested in it.

[00:39:51] Rob Morier: I knew Dakota, I knew the product, but I just interviewed him on the desk at the same desk. I do these podcasts now. And that ended up turning into a conversation [00:40:00] of essentially me pitching him. I just said, you know, I know you do this show, but you know, maybe if, if you need someone to do the podcast for you, we have this company, um, we're working with other podcasts.

[00:40:10] Rob Morier: We we could do that for you. And it was funny, he's, you know, he's, he's a, he's a salesperson, you know, he's total, he's a total salesperson. He knows, he iss written a, literally written a book on it. And, um, and you know, of course in the presentation book, I had all the nice slides and, but I had, I had five or six slides of, of guests, like these would be a guests that I, I thought I could get on the show.

[00:40:34] Rob Morier: And he looked at those guests and he said, you know, you can get these people. And I said, yeah, yeah. You know, I've, I've known these people a long time. I can definitely, I think, I think they'll do it. And you know, he said yes. Right there. I was first and only meeting. He said, yep, it's yours. Uh, the funny story is that as I was walking out, everything I had done up until that point had been audio or on my iPhone, like, you know, like the role style podcasting.

[00:40:55] Rob Morier: So literally as I was walking out the door, he's like, oh, Rob, one more thing. He's like, you can do [00:41:00] video, right? I was like, oh yeah, yeah. We can do video. Yeah, we can do video. No problem. Whenever you need.

[00:41:04] And you're like, and

[00:41:04] Rob Morier: I like left the building. I called my mom. I was like, mom, uh, we have to do video. We have to buy all this equipment.

[00:41:11] Rob Morier: And so I went back to this campus. I have this job now. So I, I walk in the first kid I see, I go, do you know how to do video editing? And he goes, yeah. He goes, in fact, I know somebody too, who's really good at it. And that's a young, young guy named Sasha Cole. And he's been basically my chief operat Fantastic operating officer's.

[00:41:30] Rob Morier: Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. For over three years now. And you know, it's a, it's a VC story. I, I, I should have been more honest, I recognized in that moment, but listen, but I was so excited. Well, and I knew I'd figure it out. I knew I could figure it out. That's

[00:41:42] Stacy Havener : what, that's it. That's it. Because listen, you went with it.

[00:41:45] Stacy Havener : There's, there's so many lessons in this. Like, do you ever teach this story to your students? 'cause you should.

[00:41:51] Rob Morier: I did when I first started. Yeah. And funny enough, when gee comes, he's come twice to the classroom. Yeah. In the last three years. Does he talk about it? He brings the story up both times. Yeah. Both times.

[00:41:59] Rob Morier: So [00:42:00] bring the story up. So it is, you know, it's knowing your limits. That's the first thing I usually say. I, I would not have lied, you know, I wouldn't have said outright like, I can do this, don't worry, I've got this covered. But I knew that I had just done something, which I was really prouder. I had just started a business.

[00:42:16] Rob Morier: I'd never done that before. I had just launched a podcast. I had never done that before. I just closed a major sponsor. I'd never done that before. All in this transition period. And, and then I had just become a professor. You know, all of these things. Look, I can

[00:42:28] Stacy Havener : basically do anything right now. Yeah.

[00:42:30] Rob Morier: I mean, I really felt that way.

[00:42:31] Rob Morier: I mean, I was like, I, I was like, I

[00:42:32] Stacy Havener : mean, I could just, just tell me I'm doing it. I'm an astronaut. I

[00:42:34] Rob Morier: actually go back to school.

[00:42:36] Stacy Havener : Don't

[00:42:37] Rob Morier: go to go to the moon. I was really like, so anyway, but yeah. Limits. That's amazing.

[00:42:43] Stacy Havener : Mm-hmm. Your limits. Know your limits, but don't be afraid to just like, figure it out. Like, you know, everything's figureoutable.

[00:42:50] Stacy Havener : You already had the business. This is a different twist, but, so like, you're smart. You, you know, you and your mom had it. You found these people done.

[00:42:59] Yeah. So

[00:42:59] Stacy Havener : [00:43:00] now you have this podcast where you're interviewing allocators. It's fantastic.

[00:43:04] Rob Morier: Thank you. Um,

[00:43:04] Stacy Havener : tell people how they can find it if they wanna tune in.

[00:43:08] Rob Morier: Yeah. Uh, so it's, it's called the Dakota Live Podcast. It's hosted by Dakota and sponsored by Dakota. I'm the host. If they're interested in, in finding us, uh, you can go to Dakota's website and dakota.com. We're also available on YouTube. So if you prefer to watch, you know, instead of listen. And then we're on the normal audio podcast channels.

[00:43:27] Rob Morier: We, we release weekly. Um, we, we were talking about this, I'm a bit of a, um, an Ironman when it comes to these podcasts. I do this weekly. Uh, so I've been doing this now for three years. We'll take some breaks now and again, and we'll do some RERE releases, but we try to do a new episode every week. So the goal was, when I first pitched it to me was that a lot of the podcasts that were out there were around the process.

[00:43:51] Rob Morier: You know, so what's the pro? And, and you do this, you know, incredibly well, and, and so does Dakota, the process of selling, right? Mm-hmm. How do you structure your story? How [00:44:00] do you structure your book? Mm-hmm. How do you present yourself? How do you follow up? How do you prepare? And, and I thought so many people had that, so well covered, yourself included.

[00:44:08] Rob Morier: But what I felt was missing was more about people. So what, what about the people behind the process? Like, who are they? Who is the allocator? Like the allocators? Yes. Yes. And the hook was, which is what I basically kind of told Dee, was that everybody goes to conferences. We all go to conferences. We sit and we really kind of wait for that allocator panel.

[00:44:27] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:44:27] Rob Morier: And you get four to six minutes of each person, maybe, you know, maybe, and let's say you get a meeting with one of those individuals. Um, I, I, I completely agree with you. I, I think they should be doing the most, most of the talking, you know, I think you say 70% of the talking. Yeah. But the reality is what ends up happening more often than not is that you're in the deck and you are not hearing about them.

[00:44:51] Rob Morier: Who they are Yeah. And what they do. So I wanted to create a forum for salespeople, and it really is for sale. It was, I should say, really [00:45:00] exclusively for salespeople in the beginning, which is I just wanted to make their job easier. Yeah. I knew how hard it was. I know it's difficult to ask a personal question of somebody, like, how did you end up in the industry?

[00:45:10] Yeah.

[00:45:11] Rob Morier: Um, or why did you choose this job? You know, why, why a public pension fund instead of. You know, an endowment or a family office. So I wanted to ask those questions. So that's how I structured the podcast. And, you know, next thing we knew, it was less and less still the same volume of fund managers mm-hmm.

[00:45:30] Rob Morier: Listening in. But all of a sudden it was allocators listening in

[00:45:33] Stacy Havener : to, and allocators wanted to listen to their peers.

[00:45:35] Rob Morier: They were listening to their peers.

[00:45:37] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:45:37] Rob Morier: And then it became students, and then it became educators, and then it became just people who were Wow. Kinda interested in the industry. So I think, um, lucky for me that that was not quite there.

[00:45:49] Rob Morier: You know, it wasn't belief formed, you know, Ted Sese and Somes of these other folks that have been out there for a long time and they do it really well. But, you know, they, they do like kinda what we do. You know, you [00:46:00] ask a couple questions in the beginning and you ask a couple questions in the end, and then the middle is about me.

[00:46:04] Rob Morier: You know, it's about the host. Yeah. The person presenting the strategy. And I, I wanted to flip that.

[00:46:10] Yeah. You

[00:46:10] Rob Morier: know, I wanted to be about them. And frankly, I, I talk very little. I I joke around actually, with all of our guests. I'll say, you know, this is not a podcast. You know, this is really an interview. It's an opportunity for me to get to know you.

[00:46:24] Rob Morier: Mm-hmm. In fact, no one's ever asked me a question. Only one person has ever asked me a question. And that's Matt DeAngelo, my colleague here at Drex University, who's the deputy CIO. And he asked me if I was in therapy in the third podcast I ever, I ever had. And I was like, yeah, I, yeah, I am. I was like, thank you for asking me.

[00:46:43] Rob Morier: Now my audience knows my stuff.

[00:46:47] Stacy Havener : Yeah. Well, my authenticity on blast. Good job. Yeah. So good job. Yeah.

[00:46:50] Rob Morier: Well, so why did he ask that? Yeah, he asked that. 'cause I wanted to know what was important to him, you know, what causes were important to him. And he, you know, uh, November and men's mental health [00:47:00] and, uh, you know, getting, um, you know, prostate screens.

[00:47:02] Rob Morier: Yeah. And, and colonoscopies for men was very important to him. And, and mental health was a, is a big component of that. Yeah. And most men. Ask that question, and most men won't answer that question honestly. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of how it started and I love it. And then you started hear Yeah. You started hearing all these stories about people.

[00:47:21] Rob Morier: So, you know, the, and that's the, the lesson I think for your, your salespeople who tune in is that when people start talking, they, they usually don't stop. You know, they'll, they'll keep going and they'll, they'll start to reveal things to you. And it doesn't need to to be whether they're in therapy. And it doesn't need to be the backstory, the real personal side.

[00:47:39] Rob Morier: Yeah. But you know, you might learn, uh, somebody's an immigrant or the grandparents were immigrants, and that's a big defining moment in their story.

[00:47:47] Yes.

[00:47:48] Rob Morier: And you're, the person across table was like, wow. You know, my grandmother was from Shela, then came over here on a boat into Philadelphia and Wow. I mean that's, you know, I know that, you know, in her [00:48:00] house, I used to have to, I.

[00:48:02] Rob Morier: Count the number of forks in the drawer, because if one was missing, you know, it's like she would count forks like it was crazy immigrants don like, you know, depression, era thinking. Yeah,

[00:48:13] Stacy Havener : absolutely.

[00:48:14] Rob Morier: And then all of a sudden you're connecting with that person. And that's, that's the connection. It's not, that's the biggest thing.

[00:48:19] Rob Morier: It's not the returns, it's not your strategy. That's right. It's not the type of credit you invest in, in a private credit strategy. So that, that was a big lesson. So I, I hope it helps.

[00:48:27] Stacy Havener : Well, I, I love that and I, I want people to hear that loud and clear, because I think podcasts like yours allow us, when we hear someone else's story, it helps us get in touch with our own, right.

[00:48:41] Stacy Havener : Because we're inspired by, by the fact that A, they're just showing up authentically and doing the thing, and we're like, oh, okay. Yeah. So they're doing it. So it's like someone's gotta go first kind of vibes. There's a real opportunity if, if I'm in sales and I'm listening to your podcast, I am looking [00:49:00] for those moments like you just described, of where real connection can happen between people.

[00:49:05] Stacy Havener : Not like professional, like real people, people connection. Because that's true in any industry. Even this one that people do business with people and we lose that. As I'm talking to you, look at what's on my wrist.

[00:49:18] Rob Morier: Yeah. All the wrist. Yeah. I see. Is it from your daughter? Yeah, yeah,

[00:49:23] Stacy Havener : yeah. And I'm like, so like this is the thing now I don't do video podcast, but like I have these beaded Yeah.

[00:49:29] Stacy Havener : Bracelets on in this conversation with you. And it's because my daughter said to me this morning like, mom, why don't you wear your bracelets on when you do your recordings? And I was like, I will. But it's those moments, right? You're a dad of two girls. We talk about that stuff like this is how you connect as people.

[00:49:48] Stacy Havener : And I think that's such a key lesson.

[00:49:51] Rob Morier: Yeah, I, I agree and I think what I want it to do, 'cause we're usually one of the questions I get from listeners is, well, how do you do that? How do I extract that [00:50:00] information from somebody? And what I usually say, it's usually only, it's one or two like, good questions.

[00:50:07] Rob Morier: You know, these questions are so important. I mean, the, the entire venture capital industry, particularly early stage, you can see is all predicated around questions. Yeah. What questions do you ask these people to understand? If they have the founder, you know, skillset. Yeah. And that, and the growth mindset and that they can really withstand some difficult times.

[00:50:31] Rob Morier: So I think for me, I, I hope that, you know, listeners kind of hear the pattern of the questions that I ask. And when I ask them and, and how you ask them, you know. You don't ask them while you're looking at your presentation, and you don't ask them while you're looking at your watch or your phone, you know, you.

[00:50:48] Rob Morier: But these are things that people forget, you know? It seems like common sense, but, you know, we're all so in the moment, and we said this before we started recording, is we're also nervous. We're

[00:50:58] Stacy Havener : nervous, you know, I know we're

[00:50:59] Rob Morier: nervous. [00:51:00] So, you know, even the, the, you know, I, I, I think that nervousness also creates maybe a sense of kind of like self involvement, you know?

[00:51:08] Rob Morier: Yes. You're just like involved in your own mind and your own thoughts and like, okay, what do I need to say next? And I have to make sure, you know, my sales person told me to hit these three buttons. I gotta make sure I hit those. Yeah. You're in

[00:51:18] Stacy Havener : your head. I think this is, so, this is great advice. I was talking to an allocator friend this morning and I was saying, you know, okay, let's just, let's be real like salespeople are.

[00:51:28] Stacy Havener : There's not that many great salespeople out there. So if you're an allocator, you're definitely gonna have to sit through. The bulk of your meetings are probably gonna be pretty freaking painful. But on the flip side, if we put ourselves in the shoes of the salesperson and for sure the fund manager Yeah.

[00:51:45] Stacy Havener : We're also nervous. Yeah. Especially if you're going into like a really big allocator mm-hmm. For the first time. Yes. You've got your fund manager with you who you totally wanna impress.

[00:51:56] Yep.

[00:51:57] Stacy Havener : And you go in and you're living in your head. [00:52:00] And what happens to us when we do that, or when we try to like recall things that we tried to memorize is it is just a, it's like a total cluster fuck.

[00:52:08] Stacy Havener : We can't, like when the reality is if we didn't do that, we would run the meeting very well. You know, there's just like, we put so much of this pressure on ourselves.

[00:52:20] Rob Morier: Yeah, I agree. And I think you can eliminate that pressure, at least some of that pressure by good preparation. Yes. Um, you know, if you prepare in advance, you get a good sense of who the person is.

[00:52:31] Rob Morier: And it's, it's not just looking at their LinkedIn profile or check their website. You know, I, it's funny, I don't see this a lot, and it's funny, you, you know, the allocators are all doing reference checks on you

[00:52:42] Stacy Havener : a hundred percent. Well,

[00:52:42] Rob Morier: you, you should do the same thing. Yeah. You know, do reference checks on that back channel check.

[00:52:46] Rob Morier: Yeah. Just check who they are, you know, find out what managers are in their lineup. Yeah. You know, somebody who works there, what are they like, you know, are they demanding? Are they, are they top on fees? Two is really the decision maker. Yes. You know, so I, I've always, I've always [00:53:00] just loved, and that, that's what I ended up teaching is I've always loved the due diligence process.

[00:53:04] Rob Morier: I was just fascinated by it. I liked understanding it. I liked documenting it. I liked seeing how different allocators applied, different tactics. Yep. And I think that's what was helpful for me in growing relationships over my career. I was just, I was always very interested in what they did. So, you know, I think that that note taking could also be applied to your own preparation for meeting.

[00:53:25] Rob Morier: Just make a call. You know, most of that information is out there in some way, shape, or form. And if it's not you, you can, you know, it's, it's not terribly hard to uncover these days. A good database, you know, like Dakota or, yeah. Dakota's

[00:53:37] Stacy Havener : fantastic for this. Yeah,

[00:53:39] Rob Morier: we're a good podcast.

[00:53:40] Stacy Havener : Yeah, I love that. Okay, so before we, I have some questions for you at the end.

[00:53:44] Stacy Havener : Yeah. But before we go there, we have to come back to the lifeguard thing,

[00:53:47] Rob Morier: which, yeah. I'm a lifeguard because I feel

[00:53:49] Stacy Havener : like, are you now, like, do you think you're a beach and teach now? Is that basically like, no,

[00:53:52] Rob Morier: I don't think so. I think I'd, let me tell you, I am doing, so I told somebody I am in physical therapy before I have been injured [00:54:00] because in order to do this job at this age, uh, somebody called it prehab instead of rehab.

[00:54:05] Rob Morier: Oh. Oh my gosh. I'm in, I'm in prehab.

[00:54:07] Stacy Havener : All right, so talk about it. So, 'cause you're working on, you've done some research, a book is in the, in the works, and I wanna come back to the lifeguarding bit. So tell us what you're working on.

[00:54:17] Rob Morier: Yeah, thank you. Um, so as part of my, my role here at Jackson University as a clinical professor, I also do research, but it tends to be research that's focused on more experiential topics.

[00:54:28] Rob Morier: So one of the things that I was always fascinated with was this concept of how you teach the founder mindset. Mm-hmm. How do you teach the growth mindset? And you always hear a couple of things. One, it's like, okay, you study, you read, you know, it's, it's experience as you get into college and then into your first roles out of school or it's childhood.

[00:54:47] Rob Morier: You know, it's, it's at the very beginning. It's, it's formative and that's where you need to spend the most time. But I've known people at both ends and I've known people where that's not been the answer at all. So I was really trying to think about [00:55:00] where people really do formulate these mindsets that allow them to be able to manage a conflict, uh, relatively naturally, or at least a place where they can get the reps to Yeah.

[00:55:11] Rob Morier: Manage a conflict or, you know, work independently and be resilient to something very challenging. So like everything in the last three years, I went home, I went back to my home and I thought about, I. I, I thought I developed those skills and, and for me, where I developed them was on the Wildwood Crest Beach Patrol in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey.

[00:55:33] Rob Morier: You know, I, I worked among a lot of teachers, I worked among, you know, a lot of students, a lot of athletes, a lot of men and women. And I had all of these incredible experiences. And the people who have been leading that beach are the same people, uh, who have been leading it for more than 16 years. Wow. So this continuity of leadership was there, which was a good baseline to be able to understand whether what they were putting forward, you know, was what was causing it, [00:56:00] or was it, you know, something else.

[00:56:02] Rob Morier: So anyway, so I ended up doing a research study on, on being an ocean lifeguard and what that meant for 15, 16, and 17 year olds. And the first summer I did it, it was just interviews, you know, hundreds of interviews of lifeguards, former lifeguards, public safety officials, but I was having a really difficult time connecting

[00:56:20] Stacy Havener : Okay.

[00:56:20] Rob Morier: With. 15, 16, and 17 year olds, like, who wants to talk to a guy with a white beard? And, you know, even if I'm from the area, it didn't matter. Like, you know, I, when I would walk up to them, I might as well, you know, had the shingles. Like it was so bad. Like he just did not wanna talk to me. So I was like, what do I do?

[00:56:39] Rob Morier: I remember talking to a friend, I was like, why is you? He's like, you know, and my, one of my best friends who I co-teach this course with, now, his name's Terry McGovern, and he goes, you gotta come back. You gotta come back. You gotta sit on the stand. Oh my gosh. He's like, it's gonna be, my gosh. That's how, and he's, he's a fourth grade elementary school teacher, so he has a, a very good sense of these things, particularly with younger people.

[00:56:58] Rob Morier: So I ended up [00:57:00] requalifying last summer for the first time, which meant I needed to, you know, do the pool swim, the ocean swim, the, the sprint, you know, the half mile sprint. Oh my gosh. And I, you know, I made it last summer, but I was like, all right, you know, this summer I, I'm a year older, I'm so decrepit, but.

[00:57:16] Rob Morier: So I, I knew I did, I ended up doing survey. I ended up doing a survey and I wrote a, a relatively extensive paper on it. 'cause the findings, you know, the findings ended up supporting my thesis, which was, uh, the headline is don't ignore the, the, the summer jobs, you know, those summer jobs, those jobs you think that you need to be ignoring to go get that internship or to fill out the resume.

[00:57:44] Rob Morier: You know what, whatever it looks like, those jobs are actually the most critical foundationally to who you're going to be as an employee going forward. And over 80% of the respondents, you know, said that they came out of the beach as better leaders. You know, 60% [00:58:00] of them felt like that they were running independent operations.

[00:58:03] Rob Morier: So they had a founder mindset because the first time That's so cool. They were left on the stand alone. It was the number one cause of anxiety nearly, I

[00:58:12] bet.

[00:58:13] Rob Morier: Nearly 80% felt an most anxious being left alone, but the same percentage felt that it was that experience which made them better leaders. So, you know, being thrown into the deep end is really important, but it's very different when it's light and death and you're protecting people's lives.

[00:58:30] Rob Morier: So these 16 and 17 year olds have all this responsibility. So I, I ended up, I, I had my first paper peer reviewed and published and, uh, it was, it was really exciting. And then we built a course around it because the, the research was, was pretty compelling. So the courses running right now, which really teaches it, it actually is a consulting course.

[00:58:50] Rob Morier: So we're analyzing the beach patrol, we're analyzing city government. We're analyzing the customers and doing a, you know, kind of a consultant project. That's the capstone. But what [00:59:00] they're learning throughout the course are those VC founder growth skills, that mindset. And, um, yeah, it's the best thing I've ever done.

[00:59:08] Rob Morier: I've, I've been so happy. It's

[00:59:09] Stacy Havener : unreal. It's so full circle though, even though it's not beach and teach the way that you originally learned that phrase, you kind of are. Yes. I mean, let's be real. Yeah. Like, yeah, you're on the beach, literally, you're a professor, which is a, a version of a teacher. Yes. And I think it's just like the perfect full circle for you.

[00:59:33] Stacy Havener : Yeah.

[00:59:33] Rob Morier: I thank you. You know, I've never been happier. I, it's been great to, to see all of the work that these people had. I've known my whole life. I mean, I'm, yeah, multi-generation down in Wild Repress, so I don't know a time when I had to know most of these men and women, so to put them up on what is now, you know, kind of a national, you know Yeah.

[00:59:53] Rob Morier: In a national spotlight International. In some cases I was. I had a, uh, an op-ed published in the Financial [01:00:00] Times. That's amazing about all of this. Amazing. And it really is a special place, and it's, there are special skills that are taught, so I, I think a lot of those can be translated and taken off the beach into a classroom, into a boardroom, into a workshop, into a podcast.

[01:00:13] Stacy Havener : That's so awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna ask you these questions and, and mostly because I can't wait to get to this one because I wonder what you're gonna say. All right. We're gonna start with this. What book inspires you? It does not have to be a business book, by the way.

[01:00:27] Rob Morier: Oh, okay. Good. Full disclosure, I'm not a business book reader.

[01:00:31] Stacy Havener : Okay, good. Because it's more interesting when it's non-business book.

[01:00:35] Rob Morier: Yeah. Um, I love the classics. I would say that Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is like romance books and, uh, I love her character. She is, uh, fiercely independent and she grows over the course of the story and, you know, she grows and becomes stronger and.

[01:00:54] Rob Morier: She's ultimately able to face, you know, Mr. Rochester. Yeah. After his life has gone the other way. [01:01:00] So I, I just love that. What

[01:01:01] Stacy Havener : a great nod. I can't even believe you said that. That's epic. Never been said before. Okay. So here's the one, I wonder where you're gonna say what place inspires you? What's your happy place?

[01:01:15] Rob Morier: Well, a place like with people is always with my kids. Yeah. It's always gonna be with my daughters, but the place that inspires me the most is actually being in boat, on the water, and mow being in a boat. I love rowing. I love being in the ocean boats. When I'm out there, you can't wear air budds, you know?

[01:01:30] Rob Morier: So you're, you're completely in tune with Yeah. Your body, uh, the mechanics of your body, you know, that, that function. I love that idea of like how to do the perfect stroke. And then did you row in college? I did. I was a rower in college. I rode at the University of Run, and I row now, I'm a rower now, so I, I just love being on the water.

[01:01:49] Rob Morier: I, I'm definitely a water bug. Are you Pisces? I'm a Scorpio. I'm a Scorpio. Interesting. So, yeah. Yeah. Like

[01:01:56] Stacy Havener : you have a lot of water, lot of water. Water. So big for [01:02:00] you. It's really interesting.

[01:02:01] Rob Morier: Yeah, it's very, it's, it's always has been too. I've always lived near the, even

[01:02:05] Stacy Havener : Newport,

[01:02:06] Rob Morier: Newport, uh, you know, Wildwood Crest, New York City.

[01:02:09] Rob Morier: I lived in Battery Park on the water. Um,

[01:02:11] yeah.

[01:02:12] Rob Morier: Even London, you know, I was spending a lot of time, you know, in and around the water, the rivers. So we was, yeah, it's always been a big part of my life. Uh, I love the mountains too. I, I definitely surf and surf like that, but, 'cause I went to school in Vermont, but uh, yeah.

[01:02:25] Rob Morier: Yeah. Being on the water is my place.

[01:02:27] Stacy Havener : That's so great. Okay. I mean, I don't even know how you're gonna answer this one 'cause you're already the Dochy guy. You're already a multihyphenate here. I mean, what profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt, I should say, what profession other than all the ones you already are doing, would you like to attempt?

[01:02:43] Rob Morier: Well, you know, I, I would never be able to do it. I, yeah, I think it taste a different but. I'm teaching a course right now called Funding for Impacts, and we've taken a nonprofit, one nonprofit that becomes the case study for the entire 10 weeks. Okay. The group is called Hope for HIE, and HIE [01:03:00] is basically a diagnosis after a newborn has gone through a neonatal brain injury.

[01:03:06] Rob Morier: This is very specific, but I ended up teaching that particular foundation because I serendipitously met a pediatric neurologist, uh, named Dr. Danielle Barber, and I did not know much about pediatric neurology, but what she does is just absolutely amazing. Wow. Like be a pediatric neurologist, I would. I don't even think I, I could or would wanna be one, but I would love to just shadow her all day, every day for the rest of her career.

[01:03:33] Rob Morier: She's just a, she's just really just a special person.

[01:03:36] Stacy Havener : Oh, that's amazing. Well, as somebody who has a daughter who sees a pediatric neurologist, I will be a plus 1000 on how special those people are. They're so special. Yeah, they really are. It's really amazing.

[01:03:49] Yeah.

[01:03:50] Stacy Havener : Okay. Flip side, what profession would you not like to do?

[01:03:54] Rob Morier: Oh, oh my God.

[01:03:55] Stacy Havener : I mean, is there one I, I feel like you're like, no, I'll do anything.

[01:03:59] Rob Morier: You know, I [01:04:00] wouldn't wanna be a divorce lawyer.

[01:04:04] Rob Morier: You know, it's ugly. I'm sorry, God, to all the divorce lawyers who may be listening in, but

[01:04:11] Stacy Havener : yeah, I don't know that that's a huge demographic for me, but, okay. I

[01:04:14] Rob Morier: hope not, but man, they, they do get in the way.

[01:04:17] Stacy Havener : Oh my goodness. Amazing answer. All right, well, I don't know. Again, these questions are so interesting for you.

[01:04:24] Stacy Havener : What do you want people to say about you after you've retired slash left the industry?

[01:04:30] Rob Morier: Maybe? No, I miss him. Gosh,

[01:04:35] Stacy Havener : I'm glad we don't have to say that yet.

[01:04:37] Rob Morier: Yeah. Thank you for saying though. I appreciate that.

[01:04:40] Stacy Havener : You are a really special person. Well, thank you. A special part of this community and this industry, and it's been an honor to have you in the podcast studio today.

[01:04:50] Stacy Havener : Rob, thank you so much.

[01:04:51] Rob Morier: Thank you, Stacy. It's been an honor to be here. I really appreciate you asking me and um, you're doing great things as well for the industry, so thank you so much.

[01:04:58] Stacy Havener: Well, thank you. This [01:05:00] podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

[01:05:05] Stacy Havener: The information is not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation of any of the funds, services, or products, or to adopt any investment strategy. Investment values may fluctuate and past performance is not a guide to future performance. All opinions expressed by guests on the show are solely their own opinion and do not necessarily reflect those at their firm.

[01:05:25] Stacy Havener: Manager's appearance on the show does not constitute an endorsement by Stacey Haven or Haven or Capital Partners.

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