Stanford LTI, Board Member

Harrison Shaw, Board Member of Stanford Long-Term Investing Initiative

Stanford Long-Term Investing Initiative is a Stanford University research initiative dedicated to studying and improving how the world’s largest long-horizon investors deploy capital on behalf of future generations.

The initiative focuses on pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, and other asset owners with multi-decade mandates—institutions whose decisions shape global capital markets and directly impact retirement outcomes for millions of people.

Harrison Shaw’s Motivation for Board Involvement

Harrison Shaw, CEO and Founder of SheltonAI, serves on the board in alignment with the Stanford Long-Term Investing Initiative’s mission to strengthen long-term investment decision-making for beneficiary outcomes.

Harrison’s motivation is grounded in direct institutional experience. Through years of working with some of the world’s largest pension funds and sovereign wealth institutions, he has seen how governance design, valuation integrity, fee oversight, and data quality materially influence retirement outcomes—often more than short-term market performance.

His board involvement is driven by three core convictions:

Pension outcomes are determined upstream
The most important decisions affecting pensioners occur at the governance and infrastructure level—well before capital is deployed or returns are reported.
Technology must reinforce fiduciary governance
Advanced analytics and AI only create durable value when they are designed to support boards, auditors, regulators, and long-term stewards of capital.
Research must be grounded in institutional reality
Stanford Long-Term Investing provides a rare environment where academic rigor is informed by how large asset owners actually operate. Harrison contributes practitioner insight to help ensure research translates into implementable, real-world frameworks.

Harrison’s broader goal—to help improve outcomes for 100 million pensioners globally by 2026—closely aligns with the initiative’s focus on strengthening the systems that govern long-horizon capital.

Mission

The Stanford Long-Term Investing Initiative exists to analyze, understand, and augment the investment decisions of long-term institutional investors.

Its research emphasizes governance, organizational design, data, and technology frameworks that allow institutions to better achieve long-term objectives while contributing to broader societal needs. With long-term investors collectively representing well over $100 trillion in global assets, the initiative treats long-horizon capital as foundational to modern economies.

Research Focus Areas

Stanford Long-Term Investing centers its work on core themes drawn from its published research agenda:

Institutional Governance & Design
Board structure, investment committees, and organizational models that support long-term decision-making.
Technology & Data Enablement
The role of analytics, data infrastructure, and emerging technologies in improving oversight and accountability.
Portfolio Resilience
Managing uncertainty, sustainability, and risk across full market cycles.
New Models of Long-Term Investing
Developing and testing frameworks designed explicitly for multi-decade capital deployment.

Why Stanford Long-Term Investing Matters

Most pension beneficiaries never see the decisions that shape their retirement security. Stanford Long-Term Investing focuses on improving those decisions at the source—by strengthening governance, data, and institutional design at the asset-owner level.

By influencing how the world’s most important long-term investors think and operate, the initiative contributes to more resilient financial systems and better outcomes for future generations.

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From the journal

SheltonAI, Chief Executive Officer

Michael Stell

January 18, 2026

8 min

SheltonAI, Chief Executive Officer

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