Fairview Capital celebrates 30 years of innovation, allies and diverse talent. Here’s how it got there.

There’s a message that JoAnn Price conveys to employees as they start at Fairview Capital Partners: “Bring all of your gifts and talents to the table.”

“Now it may take some time because everyone has a different personality to be able to do that, but over time, that does happen,” she told an audience of industry peers in September. “We want people to really present and be comfortable with their talent because that’s why they’re there, and that’s why we’ve chosen them to be there.”

That drive for inclusion and belonging has helped build Fairview, co-founded by Price and Laurence Morse, into a $10.8 billion private equity and venture capital fund-of-funds manager that, in turn, is leaving a positive effect on the industry itself.

Since it founding 30 years ago in September, the minority-owned firm has sought to deploy and grow capital through co-investments, venture capitalists as well as diverse and emerging managers. Its staff, now at a total of 25, also would endure economic crises, the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning following the death of George Floyd — during which Morse said the firm “had an open door to everyone.”

“We have always been comfortable in speaking clearly about who we are, what we do and how we have done that successfully,” Price noted. “And that is very important for firms like ours to do.”

But Fairview couldn’t have come this far without the support of partners. In their first two years, the co-founders went across the country to approach primarily public pension funds, they said in a fireside during a celebratory dinner in New York.

The conversation was facilitated by Robert Greene, president and CEO of the National Association of Investment Companies, which represents diverse-owned private equity firms and hedge funds. Price served as the Washington-based trade association’s president before launching Fairview in 1994.

In an interview as she was honored in Pensions & Investments’ 2023 Influential Women in Institutional Investing program, Price described reaching the milestone year as phenomenal and amazing. To her point, she had more to celebrate aside from the firm’s anniversary.

Earlier this year, Fairview released its 10th annual report on the state of women- and minority-owned managers in private equity and venture capital. And in April, New York Life announced it bought a minority stake in the firm — an expansion from the insurer’s initial $200 million commitment in 2021, which stemmed from a conversation with a senior investment person at the Ford Foundation.

Morse and Price said progress like this paves the way for success for the firm’s next generation of leaders, including managing partner Kola Olofinboba. A self-described “retired, reformed physician” from Nigeria who obtained an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the firm almost 18 years ago after serving as an engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. He said working at Fairview “was by far the best professional decision I made in my life.”

“We have a saying at Fairview — originally coined by Larry Morse, but we’ve all adopted it — which is ‘we chose you, and you chose us,” Olofinboba said in opening remarks at the event. “You don’t get to be 30 at all as an organization without the support of a village of wonderful people,” he added.

Getting comfortable

The initial investment thesis of Fairview was to “aggregate as much capital as we possibly could to talented, diverse fundraisers” who have demonstrated their ability to work profitably with diverse people across the U.S., Morse said. Separately, he noted that they wanted a name echoing the firm’s intention and commitment to inclusivity in its investment practices.

The idea for Fairview was proposed by an industry peer to Price while she led NAIC.

Among the trade association’s members, venture capital firm Syncom Capital had traveled “all over the country looking for a man” to take on a project to launch a fund-of-funds platform for diverse managers, but there was little appeal in running a startup, Price said. Herbert Wilkins, managing general partner of Syncom, approached her with the opportunity during a 1992 meeting with the NAIC board of directors.

And while she said she loved her job, she knew the industry well and understood the particular need for diverse people in this space to raise capital. A 2021 study by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation found that diverse groups managed only 1.4% of capital within the $82 trillion asset management industry.

Price noted the opportunity was well known by professionals including Morse, who was founding principal of TSG Ventures and involved as a member of NAIC. The trade association president invited Morse to talk over lunch one day, and “literally in the middle of the conversation, I just stopped, and I said, ‘Larry would you be willing to consider being my partner?’”

Morse took six months to think about the offer, noting that he knew little about the fund-of-funds model and that he needed time to evaluate if “this thing has a legitimate shot at getting successful” before risking his career. But as he and Price got to know each other more — even visiting their churches — Morse concluded that “we should do it.”

Price said that she and Morse “had to be comfortable with getting mostly no’s” in the early days.

But support came from within NAIC — a member pointed the two co-founders to Bigler Crossroads. The Connecticut-based fund-of-funds manager helped in the early days, lent them its back office and influenced the location of Fairview’s headquarters, currently in West Hartford.

In the ensuing years, Fairview would receive commitments from pension funds, including the $3.7 billion City of Dallas Employees’ Retirement Fund, the $33 billion Los Angeles Fire & Police Pensions and the $267.7 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund.

Another investor has been the $56.8 billion Connecticut Retirement Plans & Trust Funds, which has committed $1.7 billion to the firm through March 31, according to agenda materials for a Sept. 11 meeting. The Hartford-based allocator’s portfolio had 8.4% exposure to the firm through 10 investments, including the Fairview Constitution III fund, which since its 2007 inception had an internal return rate of 17.85% and distributed to paid-in capital ratio of 2.5.

In addition to retirement funds, support has also come from people like billionaire philanthropists Steve and Connie Ballmer through a total $250 million investment to Black-owned firms in 2022. In the same year on the endowments front, the Ford Foundation and the $405.4 million Visa Foundation announced a partnership with the firm to deploy capital to its Fairview Foundations Emerging Managers Fund. The strategy invests in funds and directs co-investments backed by diverse venture capital and private equity managers.

Morse said the firm’s portfolios include emerging managers and venerable managers of long tenure, which he noted work in a dynamic space within venture capital.

“Yes, there are firms that have been in business 10, 20 (and) 30 years. But if you look over time at those firms, any number of talented people have spun out of those firms and formed emerging manager firms,” Morse said.

He noted that these firms may have not been called “emerging managers.” The term’s definition varies depending on factors such as location and asset class. Including that of Fairview’s, some definitions cap the asset size at no more than $500 million.

But emerging managers are “just new iterations, if you will, of a particular firm — in some cases, prosecuting a slightly different strategy,” Morse added. “Maybe they intuited some segment where they thought they could be dominant that others weren’t paying attention to.”

Requiring a level of grit, determination and resolve in order to survive, some who lack those qualities “will leave the playing field early” after a period of time, he said. “But those that have made up their minds that this is a business they want to be in, they’re going to do everything it takes to build an enduring franchise.”

From watching different investment professionals as they launched their own firms, Morse said he’s observed these people exhibit certain sorts of qualities, and “over time, you develop a certain measure of pattern recognition about what those things are.” And that’s helped not only in identifying who to invest in but also in developing Fairview as the firm itself in the early years.

Pushing forward, stepping back

Just as they were seeking capital for the fund-of-funds platform, Morse and Price were also building their business. “And so all the things we had to do, as we looked at the firms that we were investing in, we also had to invest in our firms and build it,” Price said.

Of the employees Fairview hires, Morse doesn’t expect them to just sit in silence. Instead, “we want to know what you think, and you have to be comfortable enough stepping out and risk saying things inside your mind,” he said.

“Sometimes, they might not come out exactly the way you intend them to come out,” Morse added. “It might not be the brightest idea that anyone’s ever heard. In time, you get comfortable speaking your mind about things and understanding that’s value.”

When the firm entered its 20th year in business, the co-founders initiated their succession plans. This has involved both promoting employees to the managing partner role, and the two co-founders beginning to “recede, step back and — at some point — remove ourselves from the platform,” Morse said.

Starting in 2015, co-founders promoted Olofinboba, who now oversees investments, business development and governance activities. “Over the next 30 years, I look forward to building on the solid foundation of the first 30,” he told P&I after the dinner.

He was joined by Alan Mattamana, who leads co-investments, and Aakar Vachhani, who is one of authors the annual report on diverse managers in private equity and venture capital. The three of them have been at Fairview for more than 15 years.

“We were charged with building a successful business, but we were also charged with building an institution that would survive beyond us,” Morse said. “We were very conscious about that from day one — that attracting the right talent and people, giving them the opportunity to grow, and the two of us stepping out of the way when necessary — being conscious of the act that at a certain point in time, it would be necessary to have the next generation step forward.”