How I Invest with David Weisburd
E138: Do Relationships Drive Financial Returns? w/Jeremy Heer
14 Feb 2025
In this episode of How I Invest, I speak with Jeremy Heer, Managing Director at the University of Illinois Foundation, about the art of networking, the power of super connectors, and the evolving landscape of institutional investing. Jeremy shares his insights on building relationships that drive investment success, the importance of strategic networking, and how attending conferences with intent can create game-changing opportunities. He also dives into the future of nuclear energy, the role of generalist investors in discovering new asset classes, and the long-term value of investment engagement.
Full Episode
What makes a super connector a super connector? A large network of interesting people, broad knowledge of who's who across a given industry, a given vertical, a given subject matter, and really just the ability to make connections and bring people together and the willingness to do that.
Super connectors are these unique unicorns that are connected to thousands, if not tens of thousands of individuals. What special skills do they have and what view of the world do they have?
They're able to maintain relationships across a large number of people and to connect with them on some level. They usually have very good recall of names, faces, places. The sort of things, if you're talking to someone and you talk to them a year later, I remember a year ago we talked about X, how did that come out?
You have a very unique role and one of your responsibilities is to be one contact point away from anybody in the world. Tell me about that.
All investment offices kind of have this stream of inbound activity. You're getting calls, emails, and all that all the time. And we do have a bunch of that too. But we think in order to really set up ourselves up for kind of top decile returns, we need to be able to source and reference all kinds of things across the entire universe of investing.
So that could be other, it could be managers, it could be other LPs, it could be brokers, service providers, bankers, Founders, CEOs, academics, government officials, whatever it takes, right? The whole idea is to be able to talk to experts, talk to people, and gain information across places that we might otherwise be able to get it.
And there's also a University of Illinois aspect to the engagement part. There are something like 900,000 active Illinois alumni out there across the system. And we like to engage that ecosystem. A lot of your role involves building relationships with super connectors. What are super connectors?
I love the term. I don't know if I coined that term, but I do use it when I talk about this. And I think it's really important to know those types of people. I think a super connector is they're actually people that kind of thrive on making connections. They tend to have very large networks and very broad networks, and they are willing to make and take introductions.
And I think that having a few of those people in your network, if your job is to be a networker and to be externally focused, is absolutely essential. There are a few folks that I consider to be super connectors. I've kind of modeled the term after a few of them. And they tend to have very large networks. And you'll often hear them described as everybody knows this person.
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