David Brief

David R. Brief is a Partner, Senior Managing Director, and Head of OCIO at Angeles Investment Advisors, a Santa Monica–based investment firm offering outsourced chief investment officer and wealth-advisory services to institutions and families. He joined Angeles in 2018 to work with the firm's OCIO clients, was named a Partner alongside an expansion of the firm's private-markets capability (announced January 2022), and in June 2023 was appointed to the newly created role of Head of OCIO. Industry profiles credit him with roughly 32 years of institutional investment experience and describe him as a vocal advocate for the merits of outsourced investment management among nonprofits.

Brief is best known for the institutional program he built before Angeles. In 2002 he established the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago's internal Investment Office and served as its Chief Investment Officer for about 15 years. Under his leadership the endowment grew from a roughly $350 million internal investment program into an approximately $1.1 billion pool that managed assets on behalf of several dozen other nonprofit organizations — effectively an in-house OCIO model that foreshadowed his current work. This is the source of the "juf.org" contact details in the stub record; the Jewish United Fund (JUF) is the fundraising arm of the Jewish Federation of Chicago.

Earlier in his career, Brief spent eleven years as an investment consultant at three Chicago-based firms: Ibbotson Associates (now part of Morningstar, Inc.), Ennis Knupp + Associates (now part of Aon), and Capital Resource Advisors (now part of Segal Marco Advisors). A native of New Jersey, he earned a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University and an MBA with honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and he is a CFA® charterholder.

• Operates as an institutional allocator / OCIO, not a venture investor — he builds and manages diversified portfolios for endowments, foundations, and nonprofits rather than writing checks into startups.
• Invests across the full opportunity set: public equities, fixed income, and private markets (private equity, hedge funds, real assets), with rigorous manager due diligence as a core discipline.
• A persistent advocate for the outsourced investment model: his pitch is that mid-sized nonprofits gain access to better managers, governance, and private-markets exposure by outsourcing the CIO function rather than running a small internal staff.
• Emphasizes due diligence rigor in private markets — he has publicly discussed (with Angeles' Director of Private Markets, Evie Raikh) how the firm navigates manager selection and the "intricacies" of private-market investing.
• Values long-horizon, mission-aligned institutional capital — his track record is defined by compounding a nonprofit endowment more than 3x over 15 years while taking on assets for peer organizations.