New Speaker Series Brings Leading Investors to Stanford GSB

Sarah A. Soule, Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean at Stanford Graduate School of Business, believes every student who passes through the school should graduate prepared to build, lead, and invest. This fall, a new speaker series, Leaders in Investing Presented by TA, advances that commitment.

Thanks to the generosity of a group of Stanford GSB alumni at TA Associates, some of the world’s leading investors will come to campus for Leaders in Investing, hosted by the Stanford GSB Initiative for Investing. Launched in early 2025, the Initiative aims to cultivate the next generation of investors, strengthen connections among students, alumni, and faculty, and produce innovative research that continues to catalyze the field.

Fundamental investing will be a central focus of the Leaders in Investing series. Speakers include Sir Chris Hohn of The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI); Peter Chung, MBA ’94, CEO of Summit Partners; Jody Jonsson, MBA ’90, vice chair of Capital Group; Jim Coulter, MBA ’86, founding partner, executive chair, and director of TPG; and Steve Mandel, founder and executive chairman of Lone Pine Capital. Conversations will be informal, led by practitioners, and dig into the specifics of how these investors think, work, and lead.

“Leaders in Investing is central to our mission of developing the next generation of great investment leaders,” says Peter DeMarzo, the John G. McDonald Professor of Finance and the Initiative’s faculty director. “There’s no substitute for hearing directly from people who have done this at the highest level, many of whom happen to be our own alumni, like those at TA Associates who made this series possible.”

The genesis of the series involves a familiar name: Jack McDonald, MBA ’62, PhD ’67, who died in 2018. For more than 50 years, McDonald taught Finance 321: Investment Management and Entrepreneurial Finance, a legendary course that launched the careers of many investors and created a community that spans generations.

Investing, McDonald believed, was about developing sound judgment and learning how to think through risk and opportunity, and he brought many guest speakers — including Warren Buffett — into his classroom to share their real-world perspectives. Currently taught by Steven Grenadier, the William F. Sharpe Professor of Financial Economics, and Erik Ragatz, MBA ’01, the Peter and Sally Masucci Lecturer, the course still has a long waitlist. The new speaker series will enable many more students to hear the perspectives of some of the world’s great investors, across asset classes and styles.

Leaders in Investing Presented by TA will focus specifically on the craft of investing. What would speakers want junior investors to know about their investment philosophies and how these play out in practice? Where do new ideas come from at their firms, and how are decisions made about these ideas? And how have these successful investors gone about building successful organizations?

“A key idea is to connect practitioner insights with the research questions we study,” says Amit Seru, the Steven and Roberta Denning Professor of Finance. “This unique combination of real-world experience and academic rigor is central to what we do here at Stanford GSB.”

The series began on October 13 with Peter Chung. Events are open to Stanford GSB students as well as Stanford undergraduates and faculty.

“Whatever your aspirations may be, allocating scarce resources to the highest and best use and forming judgements in an uncertain world are essential skills,” says Ragatz. “This is an incredible opportunity for all of our students to benefit from the wisdom of those with proven track records of value creation and impact.”