Investment process at a fund of funds

Can someone who works in FoF describe their investment process? My (cursory) understanding is you talk to managers, make notes, run the correlations between historical returns, apply some academic finance theory, and construct a portfolio of managers.

Is this really the process? Having interviewed for a lot of traditional hedge fund teams, one thing I like to figure out is whether they have a good machine for making money, good reasons for their investment process to work going forward. Strong historical returns are nice but not a sufficient condition, especially because investment processes tend to evolve over time (e.g. the Citadel today is likely not the same Citadel that lost about half in the crisis).

The job (properly done) seems to be approximately the same as what you'd do at an endowment, family office, pension fund, or even business development at a multi-manager platform (their job is to pick new PMs to bring on board and allocate capital to). How easy is it to move from one to the other?

How do you think the rigor of selecting managers at a FoF compares to that of a biz dev team at a multi-manager picking new PMs? Is there a reason the FoF business model has any reason to continue being viable, given the rise of multi-manager platforms?

 
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