Kathleen Barchick

Kathleen Barchick is one of the co-founders of Cliffwater LLC, an alternative-investment advisory and asset-management firm established in 2004. As a Senior Managing Director, she is responsible for portfolio advisory work across all of the firm's alternative investment strategies. Cliffwater advises institutional investors on alternatives and, in recent years, has become known as an asset manager in its own right through vehicles such as the Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund and the Cliffwater Enhanced Lending Fund, which invest in private/direct corporate credit.

Before helping launch Cliffwater in 2004, Barchick was a Managing Director and principal at Wilshire Associates. From 1994 to 2004 she worked as a senior consultant advising high-profile and complex public funds, corporate plans, and endowments and foundations on their investment strategy and its implementation — the core institutional-consulting discipline that Cliffwater was built around.

Her earlier career was in the U.S. defense sector. She served as an acquisition officer for the U.S. Air Force, where she was responsible for purchasing spacecraft and satellites, and as a team manager for the Department of Defense's Defense Logistics Agency, where she assessed contractor performance for U.S. Air Force radar systems.

Barchick earned a BS in Operations Research from the United States Air Force Academy and an MBA from the University of Southern California. She is a CFA charterholder and has spoken at industry events, including a CFA Society of Los Angeles session on business development companies (BDCs).

• Works at the institutional / manager level, not as an angel — the relevant "thesis" is allocating institutional capital to alternative investment strategies, not writing seed checks into startups.
• Cliffwater's core expertise is in private credit and corporate direct lending, alongside private equity, hedge funds, and real assets; Barchick's role spans portfolio advisory across all of these strategies.
• Deep specialization in BDCs (business development companies) — Cliffwater is a recognized authority on the BDC market, and Barchick has presented publicly on the topic.
• Approach is rooted in institutional consulting rigor: strategy design and implementation for public pension funds, corporate plans, and endowments/foundations.