I embedded the interview below and it's well worth watching.
Interestingly, John's father was a research scientist, his mother a pharmacist.
He earned his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Western Ontario in 1999 and went to work for Xerox corporation for ten years where he worked as a research scientist, published numerous papers and was awarded roughly 35 patents while there.
While working at Xerox as a scientist, he completed his MBA at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in 2007.
In 2008, during the GFC, he joined CPP Investments working in the Total Portfolio Management group (now Total Fund Management) before moving into Private Investments.
He went on to become Managing Director and Global Head of Principal Credit Investments in 2015 and was subsequently appointed Senior Managing Director & Global Head of Credit Investments in 2018.
In February 2021, he was appointed President & CEO of CPP Investments.
In addition to sitting at the helm of CPP Investments, John has served on the board of FCLTGlobal since 2021 and has been Chair since September 1, 2024. FCLTGlobal is a non-profit organization with a mission to focus capital on the long term to support a sustainable and prosperous economy.
He also serves on the board of SickKids, Canada’s most research-intensive hospital and the largest centre dedicated to improving children’s health in the country.
I'm sharing this with you because the leader of our largest and most important public pension fund is obviously a very smart guy but if you listen closely to the interview, you'll also realize he's humble and very down-to-earth.
In fact, the way John speaks to David Rubenstein is the exact same way he spoke with me when we met up a few years back when he was in Montreal one summer.
He reached out to me and I appreciated him taking the time to meet me.
He's a very nice guy and his background allows him to think of things very analytically and contextualize them properly.
The supertanker analogy he often refers to is spot on, CPP Investments is managing over half a trillion US dollars, it can't move on a dime.
He says they don't try to time markets but I can tell you there are some very sharp people at CPP Investments who are constantly looking at markets and trying to figure out what lies ahead.
But he's right that they take the long view and make some very big bets, like the recent Airtrunk acquisition, a A$24bn deal they did along with strategic partner Blackstone playing on a secular theme in hyperscale data centres in Asia Pacific.
He describes their sizable private equity model as a "partnership model" where they invest with the best funds in the world and co-invest alongside them on larger transactions to reduce fee drag.
Exactly one month ago, Caitlin Gubbels was promoted to Senior Managing Director & Global Head of Private Equity at CPP Investments, taking over the helm of that giant portfolio from Suyi Kim who left the organization.
In July, John appointed Priti Singh to the role of Senior Managing Director & Chief Risk Officer (CRO)and promoted Heather Tobin to the role of Senior Managing Director & Global Head of Capital Markets and Factor Investing to replace Priti. I discussed this executive shakeup here.
Clearly John is shaking things up at the executive level to bolster the organization.
In private equity, he was careful to say they do not lead deals, they invest with top GPs all over the world and co-invest alongside them on larger transactions.
When asked if they exit deals that don't go well, he said he's a big believer in active management and asks his portfolio teams to make sure their portfolio is better at the end of the year than the one they started with.
Interestingly he notes:
"I spent most of my time in Credit. This is more common in credit where we will look at something and say the opportunity cost of holding this is too high, even if you don't get your realized return on this, I can recycle this capital into something better."
He explains why they believe in the partnership model and will continue to lean into it.
Lastly, on indexing CPP to markets, FOMO and fear of missing out which John alludes to, take the time to read this comment on The Subprime AI Crisis sent to me by a senior VP at Silicon Valley who knows what is going on in the tech world.
Keep it in mind as the bubble in mega cap tech shares keeps growing bigger.
Anyway, take the time to listen to this interview, I like David Rubenstein and think he always asks good questions like "how come someone who is in charge of managing so much money doesn't have grey hair?" (made me laugh, that's the snapshot I took above).