January 2025 Recap

Product Update - Customized Landing Page

Before we dive into the January recap, we have an exciting product update to share. Last week, we launched a brand new landing page designed to make tracking the managers our users care about even easier. Now, when users log in to OWL, they see a personalized feed featuring updates for the managers they follow. This new feed will surface key updates, including:

• Stock transactions

• Team changes

• Fund updates (e.g., capital raised, new funds launched)

OWL tracks over 12,000 managers across asset classes, and in the coming months, we’ll be adding even more data and functionality to this feed, including the ability to follow allocators and track their investments and team changes.

If you’re looking for a better way to track fund managers, reach out to learn more! We’d love to show you what we’ve built at Old Well Labs to help allocators find and monitor managers.

January 2025 Recap

Brazil, Tech, and Growth-focused funds led the way in January, while India, Biotech, and most international markets (except Brazil) underperformed:

Several tech-focused managers (Long Walk, Kora, CAS, Octahedron) and Brazil-based funds (Atmos, Squadra, Tarpon, 3G Radar) were among the top performers. One standout performer in January was Newlands, the family office of Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp. In 2021, Koum began hiring a small team - including Michael Abramson and several Sequoia alums who first connected with him when Sequoia invested in WhatsApp.

Today, Newlands manages a disclosed public equity portfolio worth nearly $18 billion, with billion-dollar-plus positions in Meta, Amazon, Tesla, DoorDash, Robinhood, and Alphabet. While most tech-focused managers have benefited from the post-2022 market environment, Newlands' disclosed long positions have outperformed both well-known tech funds and the Nasdaq - despite not owning Nvidia:

Beyond these public investments, little is known about Newlands. A Forbes article from last year (preview available here) offers some insight. Koum also oversees a foundation with $2.3 billion in assets (as of YE 2023), which lists Newlands as an affiliated entity. The foundation’s filings reveal minority investments in 31 private companies and 9 private equity funds.

A more detailed version of this newsletter is sent to OWL customers, including more detail on individual managers’ performance in January. If you’d like more info, reach out for a demo!

Other News & Events

• GEM announces Matt Bank as next CIO

• NY State Pension goes all in on co-investments

• Interview with Baylor’s Investment Team

• Santa Clara names new CIO

• FT article on short sellers

• Podcast with founder of Lead Edge Capital

• Johns Hopkins hires Mike Barry at new CIO

• Bloomberg article on large hedge funds returning capital

About Old Well Labs

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

Disclaimers

Returns represent the return on invested capital of publicly disclosed long positions, as calculated by OWL. Actual returns may vary based on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) undisclosed positions, short exposure, non-equity holdings, cash holdings, and lagged disclosure of positions.

This newsletter and the material on the Old Well Labs platform are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, manager, or strategy. Old Well Labs shall not be liable for any investment gain or loss that may occur from the use of this material. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or used in any publication without express written permission from Old Well Labs.