In 2009, Connor Teskey graduated from the University of Western Ontario and took a job originating corporate debt at a Canadian bank.
On February 3, 2026, at 38, he became CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, a firm managing more than $1 trillion across infrastructure, energy, private equity, real estate and credit.
The years in between read like a list of seats. Brookfield in 2012. London in 2016, at Brookfield Renewable. CEO of that business in 2020. President of the asset manager in 2022. Then the top job.
Fourteen years. One firm. Five different chairs. Along the way he moved from lending money, to investing it, to running an energy business, to leading the firm that manages it.
Teskey's path runs through private markets at their largest scale. Venture capital has its own versions of the story. Here are four of them.
The operator who built a fund
Taavet Hinrikus was the first employee at Skype. In 2011 he co-founded Wise, the money-transfer company that listed on the London Stock Exchange a decade later.
In 2022 he and three other European founders launched Plural with a €250 million first fund, run entirely by people who had built companies themselves. Eighteen months later, they announced a second fund of €400 million.
Teskey learned to run a business from inside one institution. Hinrikus learned it by building two companies from their first days.
The partner who started over
Sarah Guo worked on Workday's IPO at Goldman Sachs. In 2013 she joined Greylock, recruited by Aneel Bhusri, Workday's CEO and a Greylock partner. There she became the firm's youngest general partner, at 28.
In July 2022 she left. That October she launched Conviction with a $101 million fund, focused on what she called Software 3.0. She was its largest investor. In January 2025, Conviction closed a $230 million second fund.
Teskey stayed and rose inside one firm. Guo spent nine years inside one, then built her own.
The pilot
Raj Shah flew F-16s on three combat tours over Iraq and Afghanistan with the California Air National Guard. He launched two venture-backed cybersecurity companies. From 2016 to 2018 he led the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit, the office built to bring commercial technology into the military.
In 2021 he co-founded Shield Capital. Its first fund closed in 2023 at $186 million, 55% above its target, backing companies in AI, autonomy, cybersecurity and space. Today he also sits on the board of the NATO Innovation Fund.
The climb from inside
Connie Chan spent four years at the private equity firm Elevation Partners and two in product management at HP and Palm, part of it in Beijing. She joined Andreessen Horowitz in 2011.
Along the way she pushed for the firm's 2011 investment in Pinterest. "Connie really pounding the table is what led to our investment in the company," partner Jeff Jordan later said. She made the case for Lime after studying the unit economics of China's bike-sharing companies, and introduced Lyft to Didi, which went on to invest $100 million in Lyft. In 2018 she became the first general partner a16z had promoted from within.
Of the four, hers is the closest venture parallel to Teskey's: years inside one firm, then a seat at the top of it. In venture, the climb from analyst to general partner is often described as taking 10 to 15 years. Teskey's fourteen at Brookfield fall inside that range. Chan's seven fall well short of it.
Five starting points
A credit desk. A startup's first hire. An investment bank. A cockpit. A product team in Beijing.
None of these five began in venture capital. Each arrived carrying something different: credit, company-building, public markets, national security, consumer technology. Each ended up making decisions about where capital goes next, and about which founders get to build what comes after.
The paths do not line up. The seats at the end of them look much alike.
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