‘Every opportunity has to earn its place’: How the Future Fund built a TPA culture that scales

Investment Magazine

The total portfolio approach has allowed Australia’s sovereign wealth fund to capture the themes that will power markets and economies for decades to come, said director of thought leadership Craig Thorburn – but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard to scale. When Thorburn joined the Future Fund as one of its first employees, the entire investment team could sit at the same desk. Twenty years later, Australia’s sovereign wealth fund has gotten a lot bigger. 

“It’s hard to scale; when you’re an organisation of 20 people, which we were, it’s easy to sit around one room, because you’re all in one room,” Thorburn told the Fiduciary Investors Symposium, hosted by Top1000funds.com in Harvard. “When you’re 360 people across two different offices, this flavour of TPA – “joined up” – is hard to scale; it’s very resource intensive,” he said. “You have a lot of meetings, because if you’re going to be collaborative, if you’re going to be inclusive, if you’re going to generate ideas and debate them openly and respectfully, there’s a lot of meetings where you have got to have these top down, bottom up contents. That’s difficult.”

The rest of this article can be found at investmentmagazine.com.au.