A donor researcher hunts for three things on one person: capacity (the wealth to give), affinity (a real tie to Duke), and propensity (a habit of giving). Each fact lives in a different filing. The graph is what joins them onto a single person — and returns the list in one query instead of a researcher's month.
The graph walks it directly — Duke University → 2,013 alumni, a live traversal of the
studied_at edge — and filtered to leaders of $1B+ firms it returns 82 names. The top, by the
assets they steward (a direct capacity proxy):
| Alum | Role | Firm | Firm AUM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Andrew Holmberg | Partner, Chief Solutions Officer | Corient Private Wealth | $165B |
| Richard Potocki | MD, Head of US Distribution | Van Eck Associates | $126B |
| Jennifer N. Ray | Partner, Head of Wealth Strategies | BBR Partners | $36B |
| Dmitri Mirovitski | Partner, Deputy CIO | HBK Investments | $36B |
| Wayne Wilbanks, CFA | Executive Managing Director | Clearstead Advisors | $34B |
| Douglas K. Bratton | Founder & Exec MD | Crestline Management | $22.5B |
| Maneesh Modi | Portfolio Manager | ArrowMark Holdings | $21B |
| Gregory Baecher | Partner (ex-Warburg Pincus) | Arctos Partners | $18B |
…and 74 more. Every row is a Duke alum, sourced from their own SEC-filed bio, joined to their firm's regulatory AUM. Assembling this by hand is weeks of work; the graph does it in a query.
Take the founder highlighted above. Here's everything the graph puts on his card — capacity, affinity, and career, each from a different source, joined onto one person:
A founder with a Duke MBA running a $22.5B firm is a textbook principal-gift prospect. The graph surfaced the Duke tie and the capacity in the same result — no manual cross-reference.
The best time to approach a major donor is when they've just turned equity into cash. The graph watches Form-144 filings — legal notice that an insider is about to sell — in real time. Recent large filers (illustrating the signal; cross-referencing these against your alumni pool is the play):
When a name in your Duke pool files a 144, the researcher gets a signal — this alum is liquid right now. That timing is worth more than any wealth-screen score.
Take a name everyone knows: Grant Hill — Duke '94, Basketball Hall of Fame — who now sits on public-company boards. The graph walks his board seats, then walks each board to who else sits on it. In two hops, a prospect becomes a connection map:
Every one of those is a boardroom relationship — a real, warm path. If a
gift officer is cultivating Grant Hill, the graph just named the people in the room with him. And if any of
them connects back to Duke, that's your introducer. This is a 2-hop traversal
(prospect → board → co-directors) — the difference between a prospect list and a
strategy.
Every fact here lives in a separate place — an SEC bio, a firm's AUM filing, a Form 144. The power isn't any
one of them; it's that the graph resolves them all to one person and lets you query the
intersection: capacity × affinity × propensity. A prospect-research team does this by hand, over
weeks, for a handful of names. The graph does it across millions of people, in a query — and keeps watching.