Ken Frier

Ken Frier is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) with more than 30 years of experience as an institutional investor. Over his career he has served as Chief Investment Officer of four major institutions — The Walt Disney Company, Hewlett-Packard Company, Stanford Management Company, and the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust — overseeing portfolios that reached as much as $60 billion in aggregate. He was hired by Stanford Management Company in August 2010 to oversee the university's then-$14+ billion endowment and financial assets, but departed the role after less than a year, in mid-2011, in a widely reported sudden split.

After his institutional CIO roles, Frier moved to the wealth-management side. He was affiliated with Atlas Capital Advisors in San Francisco before joining SECOR Asset Management in January 2017, where he became a partner and co-head of SECOR's new San Francisco Bay Area office alongside Gretchen Tai. The two brought a global equity strategy they had developed and managed over the prior two years, and were tasked with spearheading SECOR's West Coast expansion and Asian business development. He remained at SECOR (a firm managing roughly $41 billion) through April 2021.

In May 2021 Frier returned to Atlas Capital Advisors LLC as Chief Investment Officer, the role he holds today. Atlas Capital Advisors is a fiduciary, evidence-based, research-driven registered investment advisor founded in 2003 and led by Managing Partner Jonathan E. Tunney. Frier also holds a range of advisory and governance positions: a Trustee Advisory Board seat at AIF Global (since July 2020), membership on the Investment Advisory Group of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (through June 2023), and a seat on the Board of Directors' Investment Committee at El Camino Health (since March 2023).

Frier earned a BS in Mathematical Science, with honors, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also an active professional speaker on institutional investing and asset allocation.

• Downside protection first. His stated institutional philosophy: *"One of the keys to being an excellent allocator is about avoiding big losses, so we have developed capabilities to help investors avoid the downside."*
• Evidence-based, research-driven allocation. At Atlas Capital Advisors he practices disciplined, multi-asset portfolio management grounded in research rather than speculation.
• Real-return orientation. At SECOR he focused on helping corporate pension plans struggling to achieve real (inflation-adjusted) returns of roughly 5%.
• Stage/check-size note: The source database lists him as a seed-stage angel, but no self-stated startup thesis, check size, or target company profile could be verified from primary sources; these are intentionally omitted rather than guessed.