E444: President of NEPC on Picking Fund Managers, Venture Capital, and AI Risk

NEPC's president says institutional outperformance stems from governance and long-tenured leadership resisting peer benchmarking, not manager selection alone.

• Peer risk over returns: McCusker says even sophisticated LPs chase relative ranking versus peers—"show me the incentives, I'll show you the behavior"—creating short-termism that long-horizon capital (NEPC's ~$2T AUA) can exploit.
• CIO tenure matters: Despite a well-known pension study showing average CIO tenure of 6.1 years—less than one PE/VC vintage cycle—NEPC's best-performing clients have long-tenured CIOs and stable investment committees.

Themes, sentiment and reasons are AI-written paraphrases, checked so they never quote an episode. They may contain errors. Not investment advice. Episodes remain the property of their creators.