Initial conversations with family office CIOs and principals rarely reveal too much about the organizations they are running. The industry, by its own design, likes to keep things close to the vest. But Julie Lawson, the president and CIO of single-family office Wood Next, does things a little differently.
Speaking from a taxi in the city between meetings, Lawson discussed how she manages the entire organization with just a handful of others. Lawson gets by with just a part-time CFO, a head of philanthropy and a couple of philanthropy support staff, in what she referred to as a “hub-and-spoke model.” The SFO harnesses the power of outsourced services for back-office work, legal needs, credit facilities, transaction assistance, real estate, trust management, and philanthropic grants administration.
Wood Next is the family office of Anthony Wood, the British-American founder of the streaming company Roku, which reported just under 90 million regular users at the end of 2024 and has a market cap of $13.13 billion. The SFO manages Wood's philanthropy, the WoodNext Foundation, to deploy funding to areas such as scientific research, mental health, nature conservation, disaster recovery, and economic opportunity. Wood takes a philanthropic approach to his own wealth, opting to dedicate a significant portion of it to charitable concerns.
That doesn’t mean the work is any less demanding. By her own admission, Lawson runs nearly everything for Wood. When he decided he wanted to set up a family office, he sought her out specifically to manage both his taxable funds in an endowment-type model and his charitable portfolios. His philanthropic grants are managed by the head of philanthropy. She has since built out his portfolio with real estate, natural resources, hedge funds, and tax-harvesting strategies, as well as passive ETFs, long-only equity, and short-duration fixed income.
Lawson said that Wood wants the family office to be as efficient and streamlined as possible because he values a modern approach rather than a traditional one.
“We tick the boxes he wants us to tick and nothing else; we don’t do direct deals and a lot of family offices thrive on that. It is a different model and you need less bandwidth if you are doing less PE rollups and the like,” she said. “Really, we just keep it simple. We have a lot of tax-block harvesting, a lot of rolling Treasury bills, and barbell that with illiquid private equity and real estate. We avoid ove- complicating the process: you need fewer people if you’re keeping it simple.”
But as the saying goes, it takes a village — even for a unit as agile as Wood Next. Lawson launched and manages an informal “kitchen cabinet” network of CIOs of portfolio managers from sectors such as real estate, venture capital, and hedge funds that convenes on a regular basis to source and exchange ideas and best practices. This approach allows her to learn about areas she had no prior experience in and deploy capital to opportunities as and when they arise.
“In this role, I am fortunate that I don’t have to rate every single fund that exists in the world. I can simply seek out the best in class and build out portfolios that have different risk-return profiles,” she said.
It hasn’t all been easy. Roku stock — which obviously plays a crucial role in the portfolio — rose dramatically during the pandemic before falling just as quickly from July 2021, causing a lot of portfolio challenges along the way. Managing the position size during this time was tricky, but subsequent performance has been strong and Lawson says her decision to stick to her asset allocation strategy has paid off.
Lawson is one of our five nominees for the Family Office Investor of the Year award (part of the Allocators’ Choice Awards).
