Gregory Roth

When a large public pension fund dangles $900,000 in potential compensation in front of applicants, it gets a lot easier to lure top talent. That is exactly what the $51 billion Virginia Retirement System did when it announced it hired Ronald Schmitz (pictured) as its chief investment officer, replacing Charles Grant, whose contract expired in August. Schmitz is scheduled to start at the end of October. Schmitz was hired away from the $60 billion Oregon Public Employees Retirement System, where he has been chief investment officer since 2003. Prior to Oregon, Schmitz had a similar role at the Illinois State Board of Investment.

The revolving door keeps spinning for the nation’s public pension chief investment officers. The $147 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund will lose its CIO, Raudline Etienne, to the private sector, where she will join the Albright Stonebridge Group as a senior director. The Albright Stonebridge Group is a consulting firm co-founded in 2001 by President Clinton’s former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and former Sen. Warren Rudman. Eric Sumberg, a spokesman for New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, said "we wish her all the best in her new role." The comptroller's office, which oversees the fund, plans immediately to start searching for a replacement. The New York State Common Retirement Fund is the nation’s fourth-largest public pension fund.

A new survey of private equity professionals reveals that the growth and popularity of private equity has been coupled with expectations among investors for better disclosure and accountability. Topping a list of 12 factors investors looked for when choosing a private equity firm was the quality of its management team, followed immediately by the clarity of its investment philosophy. In third place was investment performance, rising in importance from 2009, when an earlier version of the poll ranked performance seventh among the 12 factors. Portfolio transparency and fee structure also ranked highly among investors. The survey of 411 investors, fund managers and advisers was compiled by SEI, a financial outsourcing solutions provider, and Greenwich Associates, a financial research and strategy firm. Forty-nine percent of respondents were from North America, 30 percent in Europe and 21 percent from Asia, Latin America and other parts of the world.

Following the best performance in 25 years for Wisconsin’s main pension fund, the State of Wisconsin Investment Board outlined long range plans to commit more than $6 billion to private equity through 2016, including $1 billion in both 2011 and 2012, rising to $1.4 billion per year in 2015 and 2016, according to a report by StepStone Group, Wisconsin’s private equity advisor. Overall, the IRR for Wisconsin’s private equity portfolio was 12.9 percent for the year through March, beating the portfolio’s 12.1 percent benchmark, according to StepStone. Private equity returns for Wisconsin represented a gain of $949 million for the year.

The boundaries keep getting blurred between private equity funds and hedge funds, as one of the world’s largest money managers, Neuberger Berman, has raised most of its $1 billion target for its new Dyal Capital Partners private equity fund, which plans to take minority stakes in prominent hedge fund firms. According to a person familiar with the fund, Dyal so far has raised more than $600 million toward its goal. Dyal began raising money in July 2010, and there is a good possibility that the fund will be able to close by the end of 2011, the person said.

The success of Google+ has caught Facebook off-guard, and with 25 million members, Google+ has just become the fastest growing Web site in history, according to Wedbush Securities. Jen Rogers of Reuters Insider interviews legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank, who says that the battle between the two sites is growing into a social-media ''arms race.''

After Comcast-Spectator agreed in July to sell the Philadelphia 76ers to a group led by Joshua Harris, an Apollo Global Management co-founder, and including David Blitzer, a Blackstone Group senior managing director, and after Tom Gores, the founder and chief executive of Platinum Equity, signed a deal in April to buy the Detroit Pistons, we got to wondering, over at sister publication Buyouts, about other participation by buyouts pros—and even firms themselves—in big-league sports. Here's what we found:

Wayne Smith, who has overseen the $5.4 billion private equity program for Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management (MassPRIM), announced plans to step down and join Pathway Capital Management, a fund-of-funds company with $23 billion under management. As senior investment officer, Smith has managed MassPRIM’s private equity assets since 2002. He joined the pension system in 2000, and reported to Chief Investment Officer Stanley Mavromates.

Virgin Green Fund, a private equity firm affiliated with Sir Richard Branson, the media and airline mogul, plans to launch a second fund, the Virgin Green Fund II LP, shortly, a person familiar with the plans told Buyouts, peHUB's sister magazine. The new fund will target $300 million and is expected to close by the end of 2011, the person said. The San Francisco and London-based growth capital firm invests mainly in renewable energy companies and enterprises that develop efficient ways to use resources. It invests primarily in North American and European firms that have already achieved a measure of growth, helping to distinguish it from the many venture capital firms that operate in the renewable energy space.

The New York City Bureau of Asset Management, which administers the city’s $119 billion pension system, is set to sell about $2 billion in private equity investments on the secondary market, according to a source not authorized to speak on the record. Such a sale, which would represent about 15 percent of the system’s $13 billion in private equity commitments, is part of a repositioning of the portfolio to reduce the number of general partners and increase the portion of top-quartile funds, the source said. News of a possible secondary sale was first reported by Bloomberg. The city's portfolio has $7 billion in invested private equity capital.