OMERS: Success Going Direct

Canadian pension OMERS is its own GP – and this applies to venture investing as well. For the past year-and-a-half, John Ruffolo, CEO of OMERS Ventures (the venture capital arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System) has run a program that directly invests the pension fund’s capital in early and growth-stage situations. In an exclusive interview, Ruffolo gives an update on how the DIY project has gone so for, and tells why “we constantly get questions from other sovereign wealth and pension funds to understand how is it that [we’ve] actually been able to really become a direct asset manager.”