Interdisciplinary Skills: Interviewing – The Art of the Interview

I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. For the second year, our summer series will share some of the best episodes of the past, curated from our favorites and yours. You can pull down many of the great ones on our Spotify playlists. This series pushes them to your regular listening feed. Our 2026 summer series focuses on improving the investment process. Over the next six weeks, we'll share 10 gems from interdisciplinary skill sets that will help you level up your investing across decision making, interviewing, storytelling, negotiations, and habit formation. This week's summer series

Yes. It was. I think, Ted, the idea was you're the ultimate interviewer, so why don't we interview the interviewer about interviewing? So why don't we cut this into two pieces? I think one is kind of the why of your background story of how you got this thing started. And then I think we can shift into the how of you've been doing this a long time. I'd love to help you unpack what the lessons learned are that may be useful to your listeners. As on a regular basis, we are all interviewing people. We are speaking on panels. We are giving presentations. And I think the thought was there may be som

The truth is I did not find the podcast. The podcast found me. It was a serendipitous series of events after I had spent twenty something years investing at Yale and direct investing and then hedge fund funds at protege partners, and when I left, I didn't know exactly what I was going to do, and I had a bunch of consulting projects, I had written my first book that was about startup hedge funds, and I was on a couple podcasts, And it sort of demystified, oh, this is just like two people sitting down talking to a microphone. I woke up one day and said, well, I have some time because I don't hav

So in a way, you were interviewing people off the air to map out this chapter and in so doing that kind of evolved into this business.

Yeah, that's the way of framing it for sure.

How did you prepare when you first got it started? Because when you make that shift into, I'm now going to move from informal to formal, I'm now going to really focus on this. How did you approach the preparation for diving into this?

Well, to take a quick step back to that, my frame of reference was interviewing managers. And I had done that who knows how many times, I'm sure it was thousands over the years. And when I thought about this style of interview, my first instinct was it was the same thing. So I would prepare by reading information, having a sense of what I wanted to ask. My first couple interviews, I said, I know how to interview people. I'm going to lay out a list of questions that are the best questions you can possibly imagine. And then I'm going to go in and I'm going to ask and it's going be great. And I r

Interesting. So over time you've honed this formula. So if you step back, how would you describe the components of the formula?

Just like in my manager research days, you do as much work as you can in advance. For the podcast, there's reading, there's listening, there's watching videos, trying to learn everything I can about the guest ahead of time. I conduct a prep call with each guest, lasts about a half hour. After the call, I create a prep document and that's the document I'm going to bring into the interview with me. And that's the place where I had to find my own style. There's no right way to do this. David Rubenstein, when he does his interviews, prepares very detailed questions, spends a lot of time understand