“Barrett is a rising star in the industry. He knew he wanted to be an allocator early in college and has enthusiastically pursued the career. Barrett is passionate, curious and hardworking. He dives into underwritings and projects with gusto—he is never shy to share his perspectives and what insights he’s uncovered.
When GPs and other allocators meet Barrett, they can’t believe he’s only been in the industry for a year. He’s an avid networker and is already giving back to the community through organizing LP groups in Chicago and speaking to students back at LSU. Barrett is a joy to work with and is always ready for an epic table tennis match or to promote everything Louisiana.”
—Laura Hill, CIO, Advocate Health
The CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER Editorial Team shared a dozen questions with all our NextGen nominees and asked them each to pick six to answer. Their answers informed our decision to include them as a NextGen. Below are Barrett Broussard’s answers.
CIO: What new skills do you think allocators or institutional investment teams need to be leaders in the field in the coming decade?
Broussard: The skill most allocators are racing to build right now is AI fluency, and that’s not wrong, but I think it misses the more important implication of where this is heading.
If AI accelerates the commoditization of data rooms—and I believe it will—then the analytical edge separating good allocators from great ones starts to compress. Everyone will have access to the same processed information. The spreadsheet stops being a moat. What can’t be commoditized is the ability to read people, to sit across from a manager and know whether they have the hunger, integrity and resilience to actually do what they’re telling you they’ll do. That judgment becomes the defining skill of the next decade.
Growth equity is the clearest example. The major platforms look remarkably similar on paper today. Same sector tilts, same value creation playbooks. What drives returns is whether your deal team is made up of true hustlers—whether they’re the first call a founder makes or whether they win on relationship alone. No model can underwrite this.
The allocators who lead this field won’t just be the ones who figured out AI fastest, they’ll be the ones who used the time AI freed up to get dramatically better at evaluating the people across the table.
CIO: Who in asset management (a person, not a firm) has most influenced your growth as an institutional asset manager?
Broussard: Rip Reeves, Doug Hanly, Adam Averite, Matt Freedman, Kurtay Ogunc—all Louisiana-local allocators who are heavily involved with LSU’s finance program. What they all shared was a genuine willingness to teach a kid from Baton Rouge how to think, not just what to think. The lessons weren’t textbook investing frameworks, though those came too. It was deeper than that. How to approach a problem like an allocator, rather than a siloed analyst. How to hold a view with conviction while remaining genuinely open to being wrong. How to evaluate people and organizations, not just strategies and returns.
I carry all of them with me every time I sit across from a manager or walk into an investment committee meeting. You don’t need Wall Street to raise you; you just need the right people. What makes it full circle is that I now get to work alongside most of them to help the next generation of LSU talent find their footing in the allocator world. Paying that forward is one of the things I’m most proud of outside the work itself.
CIO: What asset class or investment strategy troubles you most right now, and why?
Broussard: Venture capital keeps me up at night more than anything else in our investible universe right now, and the problem runs in both directions simultaneously.
The large, branded, multi-stage platforms have scaled their funds to a size that is fundamentally incompatible with true venture returns. When you’re deploying a $5 billion fund, you can’t generate outsized performance from a $3 million seed check. The portfolio construction shifts, the stage creep sets in, and what you’re left with is something closer to a growth equity or pre-IPO strategy wearing a venture label. The brand remains, but the return profile quietly doesn’t.
So you look to early-stage seed managers, where genuine venture returns still live, and you find a different problem entirely. The most compelling seed investors are often solo GPs or tiny teams, where the barrier to entry to start a seed fund is at an all-time low. This means LPs looking to get actual venture returns must talk to several hundreds of VCs each year to find the best, usually meaning a dedicated venture team is required. Even if you do manage to find the best, depending on the scale of your institution, the check size you’d be able to get often doesn’t warrant the time spent referencing, kissing frogs and digging through data rooms.
CIO: How can allocators insulate portfolios from growing headwinds created by wars and military conflicts, tariffs and trade shock, equity concentration risk, AI-related valuation questions and/or private market illiquidity?
Broussard: In 2008, one of the most respected endowments in the country had to sell private equity positions at a fraction of their carrying value. Not because their managers were wrong or their thesis had broken down, but because they needed cash. They were forced sellers in a moment that rewarded patient buyers. That image—a great institution, humbled not by bad judgment but by bad liquidity—has stayed with me.
It’s the lens through which I see every risk on your list. They’re all different storms, but they share one thing: They punish the unprepared and reward those with ample liquidity. Those who have capital win. Those who don’t, get burned. For LPs, liquidity is a crucial strategy. Right-size your private market exposure so your illiquid book never becomes a constraint on your flexibility and allow yourself the capacity to act when everyone else is frozen.
Venture right now forces allocators into an uncomfortable choice between two flawed options. That tension is what troubles me most.
CIO: What should be an investment trend, but isn’t (yet)?
Broussard: At a recent infrastructure conference, every conversation in the room was chasing the same things: data centers, digital infrastructure and energy transition platforms (not to mention the deals that are barely even infrastructure). Meanwhile, one manager in our portfolio has been behind the curtains buying up rate-regulated transmission and utility assets that every single one of those data centers will depend on to function.
Regulated utilities are, in my view, the most underleveraged theme in infrastructure investing today. The irony is that they are the most infrastructure assets in infrastructure. Permitted, rate-regulated, essential-service, government-backstopped returns. You cannot replicate these assets, you cannot disrupt them, and the entire country depends on them for power. The same regulatory structure that makes them feel slow and bureaucratic to most allocators is actually an extraordinary competitive moat that gets more valuable as the demand on the underlying grid accelerates. We have one manager doing this with real conviction and genuine expertise, while the larger infra platforms are just beginning to dip their toes in.
CIO: What investing decision have you made for your organization that you’re most proud of?
Broussard: Restructuring our entire real assets book is the decision I’m most proud of, mostly because it was the hardest one to make, and I had no obvious right to make it.
I came up through the private markets side. Private equity, private real assets, value-add and opportunistic strategies. That was my language. So when we started questioning whether our real assets book—a multi-billion-dollar allocation built entirely around illiquid private vehicles—was actually the right structure, I had to essentially go back to school. I spent months learning a world I hadn’t grown up in: public real asset strategies, real asset hedge funds, listed infrastructure and liquid alternatives with genuine inflation sensitivity. The whole architecture of how you achieve the same convexity in a high-inflation environment without locking up capital for a decade.
What we ultimately built was a public/private hybrid model that preserved the return objectives and inflation projection we needed, while meaningfully improving the liquidity profile and cost structure of the book. Same goals, better structure. The pride isn’t really in the outcome, though the outcome has been strong thus far. It’s in the process of recognizing that your instinct to stay in your lane can sometimes be the most expensive instinct you have.
