NY ALT Episode 115
By Sarah Kuhns, Aug 14, 2026
Building the Team Behind the Returns: Talent and Operating Decisions That Institutionalize a Firm ($1B–$5B)
Scaling from $1 billion to $5 billion is not a capital story. It is a people story and an operating story.
Most managers assume institutionalization arrives with AUM. This panel argues the opposite: the dollars are not the variable, complexity is. Product proliferation, a more demanding LP base, and an expanding regulatory surface turn the shortcuts you survived at $300 million into redemption triggers at $3 billion. Three operators who have built a firm from the inside, spun one out from scratch, and placed the talent that holds it all together break down how to institutionalize a hedge fund before an allocator finds the gap for you: what to build in-house versus outsource, when to hire versus develop, and how to pass hedge fund operational due diligence without overbuilding.
Featured Guests
Chris Lillis
Leads Arootah’s Talent Solutions practice
Chris Lillis leads Arootah’s Talent Solutions practice, partnering with alternative investment firms to design and execute high-impact recruiting strategies. He brings deep experience placing senior talent across asset management, investment banking, and quantitative finance, with prior leadership roles at Jackson Lucas, PJT Partners, Two Sigma, and UBS. Chris is known for aligning hiring decisions with firmwide strategy, growth objectives, and long-term performance.
David Bradley
Chief Operating Officer of Hawk Ridge Capital Management
David Bradley, CFA, CAIA has served as the Chief Operating Officer of Hawk Ridge Capital Management since November 2013. Earlier in his career, David was COO/CFO/CCO for 8 years at Sirius Advisors LLC, an SEC and California registered investment firm which managed $500 million in health care equities for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and later ran a long/short equity hedge fund. David graduated from Claremont McKenna College.
E. Kurt Kim
President & COO of Arootah Talent Solutions
E. Kurt Kim is President & COO of Arootah Talent Solutions, where he leads strategy development, execution of growth initiatives, and firmwide operations. Over more than 25 years, he has played a central role in building and operating a multi-strategy credit hedge fund complex and a FINRA-registered broker-dealer, and has founded and successfully exited an award-winning fintech platform.
This diverse, hands-on experience gives Kurt a rare, end-to-end perspective across entrepreneurship and institutional operations. He is known for pairing a founder’s mindset with disciplined operating rigor to help alternative investment firms scale responsibly and deliver sustained long-term performance.
Yulia Perruzzi, CPA, CFA
Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Almitas Capital
An SEC-registered investment manager based in Santa Monica with $800m+ in AUM. Earlier in her career, Yulia was COO, CFO, and CCO of Caden Capital Partners, a spin-out from MSD Partners, and also served as CFO, CCO, and Managing Director at Sepio Capital ($5b+ AUM). She began in fund operations in controller roles at Partner Fund Management ($5b+ AUM) and Bridger Capital ($2b AUM)
Key Insights From This Episode
Institutional is a test, not a threshold.
All three panelists converged on the same single question: would this process survive the person who runs it walking out the door? Headcount is not the answer, and neither is AUM. As Chris Lillis put it, a firm is institutional when the org chart actually describes something real.
Complexity is the variable, not the dollars.
Being one deep in a key seat is a footnote at $300 million and a potential redemption trigger at $3 billion. Size correlates with institutionalization, but product proliferation, LP sophistication and regulatory surface area are what actually force the build.
Should you hire a controller or a CFO first?
Yulia Perruzzi's answer is controller, provided the person is seasoned enough to set up provider relationships and assess risk, because you can then grow them into the CFO seat. David Bradley sequenced differently and went to compliance first, using an outsourced group he described as a little army of subcontrollers for the recurring accounting work, then hired a controller six months later. The disagreement is the point: the answer depends on your structure, not on the title.
Beware the hero hire. The bench usually breaks one layer below the C-suite.
The instinct to import the most senior executive from the largest brand feels safe, but the best executive cannot succeed inside an operating model that is not ready for them. Define why the role exists and what decisions it owns before running a search, because founders rarely outgrow their people, they outgrow the structure their people work inside.
What should a hedge fund never outsource?
Control over cash movement and final sign-off on the books, plus the CCO function past a certain AUM if you want institutional diligence groups to take you seriously. Everything else is a question of accountability rather than location: treat providers as an extension of the team, but keep someone inside the firm who owns the program and can answer for it.
What do allocators actually test in operational due diligence?
Consistency and rationale, far more than documentation. The fastest way to damage a meeting is to have three functions tell the same story three different ways, and as Yulia Perruzzi observed, wasted money is almost always spent on what is visible rather than what is load-bearing. A policy library nobody in the firm can describe demonstrates the absence of real controls rather than their presence.
Access the Full Conversation
This is the operating playbook that rarely gets written down, because the people who know it are too busy running the firms. Across a full hour, the panel works through the decisions that determine whether the next $4 billion arrives with the infrastructure to hold it: when to use a fractional CFO at a hedge fund to build a capability versus when it is simply a way to defer a decision, how to develop a first-time manager without dropping the boulder, the questions allocators ask that nobody prepares for, and how to have the hardest conversation of all, the one with the person already on your payroll who may or may not grow into the seat you need next.
Access the full audio and download the custom insights deck, a distilled reference you can bring straight into your next partner meeting, ODD prep session, or hiring committee. For CFOs, COOs, CCOs, allocators and founders operating in the $500 million to $5 billion band, this is the conversation to have before your next diligence meeting rather than after it.
Soundbites Worth Saving
“Would this process survive the person who runs it walking out of the door?”
— Yulia Perruzzi
“If we found you the perfect candidate today, who inside your organization is going to be disappointed?”
— Chris Lillis
“So many of these things are kind of like Indiana Jones trying to steal the idol with the bag of sand. You have to transition things nice and slowly. If you do it wrong, the big boulder comes and squashes you.”
— David S. Bradley
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