Joshua Berkowitz says his venture portfolio is "a mess by design" rather than "diversified."
1. Swimming with Allocators: SWA’s Best of 2025 (Part 1) revisits three clips from season three and frames them as the show’s year-end countdown.
2. Alexa Benz and Ernest Steff host the episode, and Ernest Steff introduces Joshua Berkowitz, Kevin Russell, Rodland, and Jason Howard as the people behind the highlighted segments.
3. The episode asks what ideas from 2025 were most listened to and why those conversations mattered for allocators, GPs, and family offices.
4. Joshua Berkowitz says his family office portfolio is "a mess by design" rather than simply "diversified" or "opportunistic."
5. He says the key question is whether a GP is going to make money, not whether the manager fits a preferred box for stage, geography, or sector.
6. Berkowitz gives examples like secondaries and employee buybacks to show how broad his venture strategy can be.
7. He says turning off the traditional box-checking exercise produces funds that are genuinely different from one another.
8. Kevin Russell says many experienced people cannot give a simple answer about how to build relationships or prove value in venture.
9. Rodland says he is deliberately trying to connect networks that do not intersect and uses his experience at Albright Stonebridge as an example.
10. Kevin Russell says people should be intentional about cultivating networks early and should be willing to ask for coffee, advice, and introductions.
11. Kevin Russell says 70% of all capital raised in 2024 went to 30 firms, which he argues does not match how talent is distributed.
12. Rodland says the concentration problem is structural and ties it to LP resource constraints rather than a failure by individual venture firms.
13. Rodland says many LPs have a knee-jerk negative reaction to fund-to-funds because of what happened in the GFC and the Madoff era.
14. He argues some LPs should pay for outside execution when they do not have the resources to do the work themselves.
15. Kevin Russell says the future of venture capital is a wider representation of talent and founders, not a single technology that changes everything.
16. He adds that the "ship" analogy matters because who comes onto the ship changes the outcome, not just the technology on board.
17. Jason Howard says New Catalyst Strategic Partners looks for managers with natural linkages to existing platforms, especially buyout and growth equity firms.
18. He explains that LPs and GPs are facing more competition, slower distributions, and longer monitoring periods, which changes how they evaluate managers.
19. The episode uses an interview-and-clip format with direct, practical answers, and Ernest Steff gives multiple short introductions and takeaways.
20. Allocators, emerging managers, and GPs interested in networks, concentration, and GP seeding would likely get the most value; listeners wanting a tightly produced narrative arc may skip it.
