Yale

“Three years ago, before the current unpleasantness and the venture capital green business, we were number zero on the Cambridge Associates database, which is their code for number one. On a ten-year basis, we were beating Harvard and Yale and Princeton with ou…”

“There's an amazing study done at Yale where they found that people who have positive views about aging at age 30 live seven and a half years longer. Now, to put that in perspective, Cody, seven and a half years longer, that is more than the effect of exercise,…”

“The DeepMind researchers in collaboration with Yale released a twenty seven billion parameter foundational model for single cell analysis. I'm not even going to try to name it. It's called C to S scale in shorthand. It's built on Google's open source gamma fam…”

“There's a lot of, in the news, right, you know and almost like Harvard and Yale having these significant liquidity challenges, you know, because of, Whatever political environment that we may be in, and so, which means that they are trying to offload a lot of …”

“It took us about nine months longer than we anticipated to get through all of the clinical validation because What we realized halfway through was we could validate the method that Yale did, and we could validate it in a commercial setting, but the method wasn…”

“Yale was already an investor with some of the preeminent firms in Silicon Valley and Boston. Sequoia, Kleiner, Perkins, Mayfield, people like that.”

“So we made a list of 15 different firms, went out and met all of them. Within five years, we were investors with virtually all of those firms, and most of them did fabulously well for us in the nineties and many since then, and some of them are still in our po…”

“That's playing out in real time in larger firms that Yale has worked with, and we're not always sure that that's going to be a successful evolution in the long run.”

“He was 33 years old at the time, and he'd been in the job for probably two and a half years, so it was a pretty gutsy thing for him to do. We wound up having to do some things to mollify the chairman, which David wasn't exactly thrilled by, but we mostly got w…”

“They'd have funds where 90% of the companies they invested in were profitable deals.”

“One of our venture capitalists had a famous quote, our winners we sell for 20 times our money, and our losers we sell for three times our money. And it was true.”

“We had some spectacularly bad funds in the late nineties that we committed to, but their predecessors More than paid for what we lost in that period of time.”

“We had a firm that we worked with. We were in their first two institutional funds in the early 2000 period. They were both spectacularly successful. When they raised their third institutional fund, they set out to raise a fund that was seven and a half times t…”

“There certainly weren't instances where we were an investor with somebody, pulled the plug, and then got back on board. That was often just too hard.”

“Whereas we want to make a huge amount of money in China, as China opened up as an investment opportunity, but a lot of that happened because of our relationship with Lei Zhang, who founded Hill House, and he happened to go to Yale's business school, and he hap…”

“People read the book and see all the success Yale has had in the private equity world, in the hedge fund world, in places where manager selection is really by far the most important factor in success.”

“Early days at Yale, we were targeting market value as a percentage. And so when you're in a bubble, it tells you to over allocate at the top and under allocate when you're in the bottom. So we changed that to grow every client's portfolio by their expected ret…”

“Yale Has announced that they're in the market looking to sell six billion dollars of private equity.”

“Although we see in the market that Yale and Harvard are selling, this is not their first sale. It's just actually a return to them selling.”

“Yale are reportedly selling a reported about a six billion dollar pool of different assets in a secondary sale.”

“Intellectually, as I said, this would be like if Vanguard said, you know, we've been thinking active management is the way to go.”

“In this talk at Yale, he recommends a few books. And one of them is this book that I've heard that he makes people at Citadel or strongly recommends people at Citadel read. It's called, it's really hard to find. It's out of print. It's called hardball. Are you…”

“You should be risk seeking at this point in your life. So keep in mind, Ken started Citadel right out of college. This is a great moment to think about pursuing opportunities that have the maximal personal interest. You should go for it right here and right no…”

“It was a big achievement in a way for them to, for students to get into, you know, elite colleges like Yale or Harvard or Stanford. But they're completely lost once they're there.”

“The number of degrees awarded, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, probably hasn't changed very much since the 19 fifties.”

“Online courses, even for the best courses taught by professors like Barry Nelpov, who's from Yale, they have low engagement. They may be better than the average, but like you're talking, 90% of students drop out of a course who start one, and so it's a massive…”

“In retrospect, we should have pulled the plug, like, maybe taken the device out and said, hey, listen, sorry, like, you see the numbers going down. We really love to support you, but we also have a business to run.”

“She published a paper that was false. Like, her whole claim to fame is this paper about Amazon. And the data in the Amazon, the data she used in the paper at Yale was false.”

“Stanford had Club Nexus. Columbia had CU Community. Yale had Yale Station.”

“Yale will be deluged by inbound interest, most of which will be of lesser quality than Yale has reviewed historically.”

“Yale provides cover for more institutions to create similar programs and for those with existing programs to continue.”

“Spinouts of top investment managers may find Yale an attractive partner, especially knowing that Yale does not ask for economics in the newly formed business.”

“Those trade-offs are more attractive than the asks from most other sources of startup capital.”

“On the investment side, most CIOs will embrace the opportunity to wait and see which managers Yale supports in size. They're happy to outsource wading through large fields of chaff and see if Yale finds wheat.”

“As many of the fellowship managers return to the market and struggle without Yale's backing, Yale may find it more difficult to be seen as an emerging manager allocator of choice.”

“Well, Yale says that Ozempic costs less than five dollars a month to manufacture, And yet we're getting charged a thousand dollars a month for this drug. While the exact same product can be bought in Canada for a 155 dollars a month and 59 dollars a month in G…”

“After Yale beat Harvard, We got an order from Harvard for the oars.”

“There's now more administrators at Yale than there are students, and almost as many at Harvard”

“The largest one, Stanford, Harvard, Yale. I mean, these things are on the order of 30, 40, fifty billion dollars.”

“There are multiple large institutions too that have been identified in public, Stanford and Yale, that now have more administrative staff than they have students.”

“A lot of these huge pools of capital you're talking about, especially international, their annual returns are terrible. They're not at the Harvard or Yale or Stanford level. They're not buying like swaths of forests in Scandinavia and weird assets and only inv…”

“I think second is confidence when not to be interesting. I think certain institutions, Yale, MIT, have the resources to always be interesting. Everything they do is interesting. But for something without resources, without that access, maybe the answer is an E…”

“The high-end universities, some places like Stanford, Yale, and so forth, they now have more administrators than they have students. Right. And so, I don't know if Stanford, I forget these exact numbers. It's something like 12,000 students and like 13,000 admi…”

“Those first principles for a pool like Yale, with very long duration assets, with very minimal spending needs, were to have an equity bias, because those spending needs, while minimal on a year-to-year basis, are high. Needs to spend at roughly five percent re…”

“There are more, ah, students from families in the top one percent of the income scale than the entire bottom 60%”

“And in most cases, Yale was doing the lion's share of the legal work on behalf of the investor group.”

“And believe it or not, we paid fourteen million dollars for a 50% interest in a Fifth Avenue asset, which is mind-boggling these days.”

“When they agreed to sell the deal for, I think, forty-seven million in the mid-nineties, Yale stepped up and matched the offer. So we're in the deal for sixty million bucks, and it was almost a 500,000 square foot asset.”

“We ripped off the front of the building and expanded it, and Yale probably made a hundred million dollars on the redevelopment.”

“They wanted to open up their first Apple store in our building, and we were very close to wrapping up a deal with someone else. We spoke to Steve Jobs, and he explained his vision for the business, which, to be honest, is exactly what turned out to be the case…”

“David Swenson was a first principles investor, and he looked at the real estate business in the eighties and said, this doesn't make any sense. And he thought that the fee-based nature of the business, there was no alignment of interest. There was lots of sepa…”

“And it's funny, because we went to all these very impressive Yale professors and asked them, how do we create a portfolio? How do we Find the efficient frontier, all these economists like Ibbotson and Stephen Ross and people like that, and they just said, find…”

“Investors following David Swenson too often miss the mark in their interpretation of his theory. Like children playing the game telephone, they listen to other voices and echo beliefs with shakier foundations than Yale's.”

“We brought on a world-class researcher who was actually on the faculty at Yale as one of our other You know, very early team members. She was actually the fourth person to join SPRIG, and her first role was reviewing.”

“I remember seeing some analysis that suggested that half of the value that Yale had added over time relative to peer endowments was from asset allocation and half was manager selection.”

“We'd seen this funny dynamic where, you know, we talked about how we started it at Harvard, and then we'd launch at Yale, and then all the people at Harvard would be like, oh, come on, like them? And then it's like at every step along the way, you go from Yale…”

“Part of me thinks the technologized model is going to empower them to be even better at the Yale model. Why? Because you're just going to have much more confidence in how your GPs draw and return capital.”

“And it was a private partnership. I would say, of the 35 partners, 20 of them probably went to Princeton. And the rest of them probably went to Yale or Harvard.”

“You know, I was a Yale O five graduate and in my graduating year, Yale graduated 10 CS majors in a class of 1200 kids.”

“There was a, there's an infamous mailing list, email mailing list at MIT called the jobs list that was run by a faculty member in the computer science department. And it ended up being a place where Harvard and Yale business school students would basically sen…”