Family Business Audiocast | Episode 48 | Roger Vincent
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R. Adam Smith: Welcome to the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn. I'm R. Adam Smith, creator of this Audiocast series as an entrepreneur, investor, founder, investment banker, and board leader the last 25 years. I'm fortunate for my many experiences within the family firm industry. A warm thank you to our live audience on LinkedIn today, and for those listening in the future, a brief comment on why I created this broadcast.
Private companies are a passion of mine. Having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs and having engaged for two decades in deals, strategic transformations, investments, and boards, with an array of fascinating family enterprises, family firms, and family offices, I founded this series to offer a useful platform for listeners to hear from veterans, academics, and leaders in the vast family firm ecosystem.
Whether you're a family business owner, building, running, or advising a family office, or just expanding your family office activities, I hope these conversations are useful and enlightening. Now it's time to turn our attention to our accomplished guest on today's episode. Today, I'm very pleased to host my friend Roger Vincent, founder and CIO of Summation Capital in New York. Roger, great to have you here today.
Roger Vincent: Thank you, Adam.
R. Adam Smith: Today we're covering your career and the uniqueness of your product, how it relates to the family office market, investors and partners, and the evolution of the alternatives market generally. Briefly on your background: Roger has over 25 years of experience across global private equity markets as an investor, advisor, and institutional allocator. He's the founder and CIO of Summation Capital, drawing on his decade-long tenure most recently leading Cornell University's endowment private equity portfolio, roughly $10 billion in size.
There, he built lasting partnerships with top-tier and emerging manager GPs alike, with experience spanning buyouts, growth equity, and venture capital, and a particular emphasis on alignment and long-term partnerships. His approach blends institutional rigor with entrepreneurial spirit, offering mission-driven organizations and family offices access to high-quality private equity with transparency, efficiency, and purpose. Ready to dig in?
Roger Vincent: Great, thanks, Adam. Wonderful to be with you.
R. Adam Smith: At Cornell, you introduced a "spirit of partnership" as part of your formal evaluation criteria for GPs — a somewhat atypical KPI. Talk about that, and how family offices might apply that mindset in selecting investment partners.
Roger Vincent: The backstory: I joined the Cornell endowment in 2012 to restructure and run the private equity portfolio. At the time, a lot of large private equity firms were going public, and there was talk that the industry was transitioning into a more institutional phase. I felt the historic, deep relationship between GPs and LPs was still essential to succeeding in the industry, so as we built our underwriting framework, I introduced what we called the "spirit of partnership" as one of our key evaluation metrics for including GPs in the portfolio.
The idea is that there's a lot of desired alignment in these relationships that isn't captured numerically or in the LPA. Since these relationships last so long, we think of it almost like entering a marriage — you want to know you'll be happy with the partnership across a variety of unpredictable circumstances. Getting to know someone deeply, feeling aligned philosophically on how you treat yourself and others — that's what makes a relationship stand the test of time.
We had GPs come to us and say, "we want to reduce our management fee, we don't need the extra income, we think it might hurt returns, and we're focused on maximizing returns" — aligned with exactly how we think. That's the kind of thing you simply can't get papered into an LPA; you only get it by partnering with people who think about things the way you do.
R. Adam Smith: Tell us about Summation.
Roger Vincent: Summation is a new type of investment vehicle. We're trying to replicate the experience a CIO of a large endowment gets from having a large, sophisticated team build a private equity portfolio — and bring that same resource and exposure to third parties who aren't at that scale but want the same return stream.
Perhaps the most distinguishing feature is our compensation structure. Like a fund of funds, we have a management fee and carry, but we keep the management fee as low as possible, and we only take carry on our alpha over a benchmark. Endowments pay their staff against an asset-class benchmark, rewarding outperformance — that keeps the team focused on what the endowment actually wants. I didn't see anyone else doing this in the market, and I felt it was critical both to keeping expenses low and to aligning incentives, so I wanted to bring that endowment-world concept to market.
R. Adam Smith: As an entrepreneur, launching a new GP platform takes courage, personal capital, and patience. Talk about that decision.
Roger Vincent: Over the couple of years I spent developing this before launching in early 2024, it went from "this is a smart idea" to something I felt genuinely passionate about — I didn't feel I could live my best life without making it a reality. Everyone in the endowment world I knew held themselves to a high performance bar, but nobody outside that world was holding themselves to the same standard. Back in the 1980s, equity data was expensive, so being compensated partly for producing it made sense — but the cost of equity data has fallen to essentially zero over 40 years, and I think it's inappropriate for allocators to still be compensated that way.
Leaving a seat at a large endowment takes real initiative — starting a new GP is not for the faint of heart, especially during what's been a fundraising recession the past couple of years. You need deep reasons beyond wanting to be your own boss — that was actually secondary for me. I noticed endowments had essentially maxed out their private equity allocations, around 30% for most large ones, even though they'd go higher if they could. Meanwhile this asset class — so critical to their returns — was still hard to access for family offices, smaller foundations, and other asset owners. I wanted to make that same high-quality, high-return exposure available to others in a simple, low-cost, aligned form. It became a passion project.
R. Adam Smith: When I started my own firm in 2002, I financed it with about $875,000 — I imagine it costs more today.
Roger Vincent: Yes, considerably more. That said, our strategy is fairly cost-effective to run. At Cornell, we generated what people called world-class returns with a small team — really just me and a rotating group of analysts fresh out of college. You can generate strong returns without a lot of resources if they're well-focused. We did need to capitalize the management company itself, since we wanted to be "institutional day one" and have sufficient resources to qualify for institutional capital right from the start.
R. Adam Smith: Can you talk about that strategic capital into the management firm itself?
Roger Vincent: We think of it as two investment streams: the portfolio, targeting 20%+ annualized returns, and the management company, which needs to be sustainable over a very long horizon. Running a good management company today costs a couple of million dollars at the low end, given regulatory oversight and reporting requirements, especially with a structure as complex as ours.
A lot of GPs make the mistake of hoarding ownership of the management company. I took a different approach, informed by exposure to some of the industry's best entrepreneurs during my time at Cornell. I wasn't concerned about being sole owner — I wanted to share it with my team, so people could build real careers and economic value here, since continuity over long periods is critical to generating great returns. I wanted this to be a "forever place," so all partners and participants in the Summation management company are full participants — including the strategic partners who helped us get off the ground.
R. Adam Smith: Having seen hundreds of funds from the institutional and fund-of-funds side, what are one or two of the most impactful lessons you've learned?
Roger Vincent: One trick I offer people underwriting GPs: I like to invest with people who think as deeply about their own business as they think about the businesses they invest in. Twenty-plus years ago, senior partners at PE firms spent enormous time thinking about the businesses they invested in, but relatively little on their own business — which led to real trouble with things like generational transitions that weren't prepared for years in advance. A great shortcut to finding good GPs is finding people who think as deeply about running their own firm as they do about the companies they back.
R. Adam Smith: Tell us about the name "Summation" and what it represents.
Roger Vincent: The name is meant to capture all the "hard things" about investing in private equity beyond manager selection, which gets most of the attention. There are four or five other things arguably just as important:
The first, least glamorous, is operations. A well-diversified private equity portfolio might have 200–300 underlying funds — an operational complexity most asset owners can't handle on their own. We provide that complexity behind a simple interface — investors get a single K-1 but the benefit of hundreds of underlying positions.
Second is vintage diversification — probably the most important principle across institutional private equity allocation, and hard even for well-run endowments to get right. In the recent downturn, institutions that had maintained good vintage diversification fared much better than those hit by the "denominator effect."
The last is unfunded liability management — a bit esoteric, but the moment you sign commitment papers for a drawdown fund, you've created a liability for yourself, and managing that is important to your overall portfolio return and success.
Summation is meant to wrap all these hard problems into the fund structure and solve them with a dedicated team, rather than leaving asset owners to handle them alone.
R. Adam Smith: Let's talk about the J-curve and how continuation funds or secondaries can offset that risk.
Roger Vincent: I like the saying — maybe a Chinese proverb — that the best time to plant a tree was yesterday, but the second-best time is today. The J-curve is one of the biggest disincentives to starting a private equity program; you may not see returns show up in financials for a couple of years, and a CIO or asset-class head might not be incentivized to do something that won't pay off within their perceived time horizon.
There's no foolproof way around it — you need real dedication to generational, multi-decade returns, and a team incentivized accordingly. I'm somewhat skeptical of secondary funds as a workaround; we didn't use them at Cornell and don't plan to at Summation. What we do use effectively is what we call "baked" or "seasoned" primary — funds that have been investing for a while but haven't closed fundraising, so you can see part of the portfolio already maturing rather than investing in a complete blind pool. Even though we only started committing capital in 2024, we have underlying exposures going back to 2022 — likely to prove a very good vintage year, given the denominator effect was in full force then.
R. Adam Smith: Your thoughts on liquidity over the next year or two, and where you want to take Summation's scale?
Roger Vincent: Liquidity has been a major topic — even some endowments struggled to maintain appropriate liquidity in illiquid assets. One underappreciated benefit of the diversified endowment approach is that it improves a portfolio's cash-flow characteristics, not just returns and risk. A well-diversified private equity portfolio — across vintage years and market segments — likely wouldn't have gone cash-flow negative even in 2022–2024. If people feel like they're not getting enough capital back relative to what's being called, that may be a sign their portfolio wasn't well diversified.
Traditionally, low-fundraising years tend to be strong-performing vintages, so we're excited to deploy capital into the past couple of vintage years and the current one. It's genuinely hard to predict exactly when distributions and the IPO market will pick back up, though we're closer to that point than we were six months ago.
R. Adam Smith: On alpha, especially from a family office perspective — what are best practices for thinking about it?
Roger Vincent: We think about alpha as performance relative to an easily accessible passive exposure with similar risk — for private equity, that's a broad liquid equity index. If you can't beat that, you could have gotten better returns with full liquidity and skipped private equity altogether.
The evidence suggests private equity offers more alpha potential than other asset classes — at the median, it outperforms liquid equity by roughly 300 basis points, more than illiquid alternatives like credit or real estate. On top of that, private equity shows the greatest dispersion of returns, so reaching the first quartile captures both the illiquidity premium and substantial manager-selection alpha — potentially many hundreds of basis points of outperformance. If you have a unique edge in underwriting real estate or credit, those are reasonable places to spend effort too, but for most investors, dedicated manager selection in private equity offers the best return on effort given that dispersion.
R. Adam Smith: On human capital and culture — what should a family office look for when evaluating a fund or manager?
Roger Vincent: Most of our clients are family offices, and we try to take a true partnership approach, acting almost as an extension of their internal staff. Having spent about half my nearly 30-year career doing direct deals and half as an allocator, I see many families under-resourcing their teams — expecting them to handle direct deals, co-investments, fund investing across multiple asset classes, and other family matters all at once. People underestimate how much time and effort each of those takes; they're not easily done well by the same team without substantial resources.
My advice: focus your internal team on direct deals and co-investments closely tied to the family's mission, and outsource the broad diversification piece — done smartly, with alignment and low fees — to a firm like ours. I have a saying: you can feed yourself by hunting, and you can feed yourself by farming, but if you try to do both at once, you may not do either well.
R. Adam Smith: Last question — what's your favorite part of the job, what gets you fired up building Summation?
Roger Vincent: It comes back to the spirit of partnership. One of the great things about private equity is that you're really investing in people and building deep relationships — not just with GPs, but with capital partners and your own team. You get to work with some of the best people in the world and see them at their best, and I love that human element of what we do.
R. Adam Smith: I'm proud of you, and I think Summation can really scale — I encourage listeners to reach out to Roger on LinkedIn. This was great, going back to our chat, happy to finally have you here.
Roger Vincent: Thanks, Adam. It's been wonderful talking about this and having you watch us take a vision and turn it into reality.
R. Adam Smith: Very exciting. This is R. Adam Smith, signing off. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Family Business Audiocast, available live on LinkedIn, YouTube, and X.
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Explore the strategic intricacies of family business success with the RAS Family Business Audiocast. Join R. Adam Smith as he delves into exclusive discussions with global leaders shaping the future of private wealth and enterprise. Each episode offers a rare glimpse into the core decisions driving prosperity in high-stakes markets. Tune in to gain expert insights and innovative strategies that empower family businesses to thrive across generations.
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