Exclusive: Life After Carnegie — Alisa Mall Heads to Health Care
Alisa Mall, the former senior investment director at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, spent time considering her next career move during the pandemic. Since March, after she and her family moved to California from New York to ride out the early days of quarantine, she participated in several searches.
After nearly a dozen years at Carnegie, she had plenty of options. Mall oversaw the real estate and natural resources portfolios at the New York philanthropy. She also advanced the organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts by developing a process to evaluate managers based on their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices on the topic. Her forward-looking strategies garnered her a NextGen title from this publication just last year. And she was widely regarded as a contender for the Carnegie CIO title.
Which is why Mall stunned industry watchers in October when she and a number of other all-star deputies at the foundation left within weeks of former Carnegie CIO Kim Lew’s departure for Columbia University. Brooke Jones headed off to Bryn Mawr College as its inaugural CIO; Ken Lee took over the investment chief position at Children’s Health. Meanwhile, Mall left the allocator side of the industry altogether for a managing director position at venture capital firm Foresite Capital, which deals with health care. (Last week, former Institute for Advanced Study [IAS] CIO Mark Baumgartner started at Carnegie after beating out more than 200 candidates for the position and garnering a unanimous vote from the internal selection committee).
To hear Mall tell it, the mass exodus was unintentional, partly the consequence of a top-heavy leadership structure. Mall had been “itching” for a change, and she and her colleagues had participated in CIO searches in the past. Zoom also played a big role: Conducting job interviews over Zoom, versus scheduling in-person meetings, helped speed up the hiring process.
“I think it was unfortunate that it was all at once, but it really was kind of a coincidence,” Mall said. “I mean, I didn’t know about Brooke and Ken. Neither did Kim. And they didn’t know about me until all of us had made our decisions.”
Still, her decision to pivot to a venture capital firm was an unexpected move. Typically, those who leave the endowment and foundation world move on to other asset allocators, such as an outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) or family office. Other asset owners who made the pivot recently include former Colby College CIO Hugh O’Donnell, who moved to private equity and venture capital firm True Equity.
“It’s unusual but not unheard of,” said David Barrett, managing partner at David Barrett Partners, a recruiting firm.
For Mall, the decision was almost a “no brainer,” given her growing interest in advancements in health care. Her father is a radiologist who invested in medical devices early in his career, and she became interested in different forms of cancer treatments after watching both her father and husband go through procedures.
She was in the running for another CIO search at the time, when a real estate manager told her to contact Jim Tananbaum, the CEO and managing director at Foresite Capital.
Mall and Tananbaum have met in the past. Mall, who vice chairs the Pension Real Estate Association (PREA), met him a couple years back at a conference, where Tananbaum wowed the crowd with his insights on the future of biopharma, biotech, and health care.
“In many dimensions, Jim is, I think, a true visionary,” Mall said. “I’ve spent my career meeting with different GPs [general partners], and there are some that you meet, and right away, you just know that person has the touch. They just have that special sauce.”
After an hours-long introductory phone call, followed by a week of meetings in Los Angeles, where Tananbaum met with Mall, as well as her husband and children, Mall was presented with the job. Mall, who took a month off after Carnegie to canvass for votes in Pennsylvania for the November election, started her new position less than two weeks ago.
At Foresite Capital, Mall has been given wide latitude over her role. Her responsibilities include corporate development, long-term capital strategy, investor relations, and ESG engagement.
She said she’s excited to work in a field that can impact patient lives, with a VC company that deals with all stages of the product development life cycle. In addition, she’s looking forward to working with a diverse team that has senior female leadership, including Dorothy Margolskee, a managing director at Foresite who previously oversaw vaccine programs at Merck. Margolskee helped design several programs, including treatments such as Gardasil.
A career pivot is not the strangest thing for Mall, who used to work as an attorney at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale, where she graduated magna cum laude, and earned her law degree from Stanford. Still, the former investment director said it was her conversations with Kim Lew, whom Mall considers one of her best friends, that helped her make her decision.
“She’s just been so supportive and encouraging and really made me feel like, in some ways, it was kind of a no-brainer,” Mall said. “How many times in your adult life do you get an opportunity like this, to pivot in such a dramatic fashion in a way that’s so exciting?
“It was really a pretty incredible opportunity on multiple dimensions,” Mall said.
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