About AIF

 

AIF is an educational thought leadership forum or think tank. It promotes the use of alternative investment tools and strategies by institutional investors to achieve their investment objectives. To that end, it brings together the world's leading investment minds with the owners of its largest pools of capital for a free exchange of investment ideas and information. It strives to be an objective investor resource that mixes theoretical study with practical application.   

• Alternative investments are defined by AIF to be all investments other than "traditional" long-only investment strategies applied to publicly traded equities and fixed income investments, and cash and cash equivalents.  They include: direct and indirect investments in private equity (including buyout and venture capital); hedge funds; real estate; infrastructure; managed futures; and commodities and other real assets.
• Institutional investors are defined by AIF to be the ultimate owners of all large pools of capital (generally greater than than $2 billion in assets) worldwide that make alternative investments, including: public, corporate and union pension plans; endowments; foundations; insurance companies; sovereign wealth funds; outsourced investment offices; and family offices.

AIF understands that alternative investment allocations do not occur in a vacuum; rather, they are made in the context of the overall portfolio. AIF starts with a discussion of overall portfolio construction and rebalancing, including the use of asset allocation modeling and risk management tools, and then drills down to the different "asset classes" and investment strategies that may be utilized by investors to achieve their objectives (recognizing that similar investors by size or types can have very different objectives and desired means of achieving them).


AIF focuses on the communication and discussion of investment ideas, not on the reporting of industry news.  It does so by structuring and facilitating discussion forums in which leading alternative investments professionals and investors exchange views and information. Through these forums, AIF:

• Exposes investors to a broader range of investment ideas.
  
  
• Furthers best practices among investors by aiding in their strategic planning, asset allocation, manager selection, and risk management processes.
  
  
• Enables investors to monitor what their peers are doing.
  
  
• Educates investors through an online library of research and reading materials that are recommended by AIF's Academic Advisory Board.

Founder

Brant K. Maller

• Partner and Leader of Alternative Investments and Real Estate Private Equity Teams at the Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP law firm.
• Ranked as one of the world's leading Private Equity-Investment Funds lawyers by Chambers Global rating service.
• Member, New York State Common Retirement Fund, Real Estate/Private Equity Investment Committee (REAC), Co-Chair, Policy and Process Committee and Chair, Process Subcommittee.
• Member, California State Controller's Advisory Council on Investments.
• Finance Chair and Executive Committee Member, New York State Democratic Committee.
• Founder, New York State Democratic Committee Business Roundtable.
• Chairman, Harvard Kennedy School New York Alumni Association.
• MCRP-JD, Harvard University-Boston University, 1982.
• BA, cum laude with Distinction, University of Pennsylvania, 1978.

Advisory Board Chair

Josh Lerner

Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Finance and the Entrepreneurial Management Areas. He graduated from Yale College with a Special Divisional Major that combined physics with the history of technology. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy, at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill.  He then earned a Ph.D. from Harvard's Economics Department.  

Much of his research focuses on the structure and role of venture capital and private equity organizations.  (This research is collected in three books, The Venture Capital Cycle, The Money of Invention, and the recent Boulevard of Broken Dreams.)  He also examines policies towards intellectual property protection, particularly patents, and how they impact firm strategies in high technology industries.  (The research is discussed in the book Innovation and Its Discontents.)  He founded, raised funding for, and organizes two groups at the National Bureau of Economic Research: Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy.  He is a member of a number of other NBER groups and serves as co-editor of their publication, Innovation Policy and the Economy.  

In the 1993-94 academic year, he introduced an elective course for second-year MBAs on private equity finance.  In recent years, “Venture Capital and Private Equity” has consistently been one of the largest elective courses at Harvard Business School.  (The course materials are collected in Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Casebook, now in its fourth edition, and the forthcoming textbook  Private Equity, Venture Capital, and the Financing of Entrepreneurship.)  He also teaches a doctoral course on entrepreneurship and in the Owners-Presidents-Managers Program, and organizes an annual executive course on private equity in Boston and Beijing.  He has led an international team of scholars in a multi-year study of the economic impact of private equity for the World Economic Forum. He is the winner of the 2010 Global Entrepreneurship Research Award.