Why $48 billion Viking Global is focused on its talent pipeline

Viking Global’s Andreas Halvorsen has led the Tiger Cub for a quarter of a century.

Viking Global — the $48 billion Tiger Cub launched in 1999 — has had to replace talented people many times throughout its 25 years of existence.

Billionaire CEO Andreas Halvorsen is the only one of Viking’s three cofounders still managing the firm, as David Ott has been in an advisory role since 2010 and Brian Olson left the firm years before that. Chief investment officers have come and gone, many leaving to start their own funds, such as Dan Sundheim and Ben Jacobs.

Ning Jin will be the latest senior employee to depart. At the end of the month, the outgoing CIO will leave the firm he’s called home for 17 years.

The manager’s talent pipeline though is as strong as ever, the firm told investors at the end of the first quarter, in part because of a change Viking made to its recruiting and development practices four years ago.

A person close to the manager told B-17 that the manager decided to be “proactive instead of reactive” in hiring analysts for its investing teams. Some hires have been earlier in their career, this person said, as the buy side has started hiring younger employees. Viking traditionally had hired analysts after they’d spent two years in banking and another two in private equity.

The firm told investors that five of its 10 current portfolio managers were promoted from senior analyst positions in the last four years. Matt Sharp was promoted in the first quarter after joining Viking as a senior analyst in Suvretta Capital in 2022, for example, and new CIO Justin Walsh was an intern for Viking before returning to the firm as a senior analyst after business school.

“Our multi-year effort to expand coverage of our investible universe, which involved enhancing our recruiting practices and modifying our compensation structure to better promote talent development, has borne fruit,” the firm wrote in its first-quarter letter.

Viking’s PMs are paid, partially, on the performance of their positions in the book, but now the idea generation and career development of the analysts underneath them are a part of their compensation, the person close to Viking said. That compensation change incentivizes portfolio managers to think about more than just returns, the person added.

The number of analysts under a single PM varies based on what sectors they are covering, but the average PM typically has five analysts reporting to them. The person close to the firm said that underneath Walsh, portfolio manager Previn Mankodi has been promoted to deputy CIO, and Scott Zinober and Hani Sabbagh have each been bumped up to senior portfolio manager.

While Viking doesn’t plan to increase its total number of PMs — which has historically been around the current number of 10 — the additional analysts underneath each PM give them more “horsepower,” the person close to the firm said, allowing them to cover more of what Viking terms its “investible universe.”

According to the letter, public companies that fall into this threshold have a market capitalization of at least $2 billion and more than $50 million of trade volume per day, not including China A-shares. The firm stated that roughly 1,400 companies match this description, and the manager does not limit itself to solely US-based companies — the letter states that the firm has exposure to 15 countries other than the US, including India, France, and Korea.

The manager is up 8.1% through July after a drop of 0.1% last month. The firm returned 13.9% in 2023.