The Ledger, every show

“There was a direct correlation to the highest ranked members of our portfolio. Those with the highest scores also had the highest diversity scores, and those were done independent of each other, and it was good to see, and it was good for us to then go back an…”

“The research has shown that the distribution in diverse and women managers is exactly the same as the distribution in the general funds without a diversity lens.”

“Linda Strumpf was the CEO of the Ford Foundation at the time, and she did not believe in alternatives at all. And she felt like anything that you can do in the private markets, you could do in the public markets without giving up liquidity.”

“They wouldn't give me any of the portfolio before I joined. They said they had signed NDAs with their managers, and so they couldn't disclose anything. So I had big picture portfolio information, but not a single manager name. So I walked into a portfolio Nove…”

“In the whole time that I've been here, and as far as I know, ever, there's only been one investment that did not get through committee”

“The Ford Foundation kept investments completely separate from the rest of the foundation. In fact, discouraged any kind of interaction. I think that when I first got there, you couldn't even email the program staff if you were on the investment staff.”

“They had a phenomenal alumni network, just all the highly successful people who are Black and Hispanic people have come out of the investment banking industry since that era. Most of them have some links to SEO.”

“Right now, the investment staff in our office is on the 32nd floor, and everybody's below, so they call us the penthouse, and that they're section eight, and like, why the investment team in the penthouse?”

“We literally had about 1.9 billion dollars in our distribution portfolio, because the Distributions were coming so fast that we literally were losing stock certificates because people were sending them in the mail. And back then the transfer agents were not ef…”

“The board in prior iterations had been a lot of captains of industry who had been the victims of hostile takeovers, and so they felt that the LBO market was unsavory, so they did not allow the Ford Foundation to invest in buyouts. But they would let them inves…”

“The concept of The foundations being really steady and reliable sources of capital was prevalent, and everybody believed that. It changed after 2008 when people were not as stable of source of capital, but at the time, every buy-out fund wanted foundations in …”

“Linda at the time didn't believe in hedge funds. The private equity portfolio was 10%. That was it.”

“I think it's gonna have to be more if we're gonna continue to outperform, because I think returns are coming down, and if returns are gonna come down, and our five percent payout is not coming down, we're just gonna have to find different ways to create alpha,…”

“Despite the fact that the Ford Foundation had a tremendous venture portfolio, because it had started investing in venture in 74, it was only 10% of the portfolio.”

“The way that they were able to increase the number of black students at HBS is by adding a new section. So no one felt threatened. We just have a brand new section. It's not like all the African-American people are in that one section. We sprinkle them through…”

“At the time, Ford managed a huge, a third of their book was managed internally, people picking stocks, and that's what they were hiring for.”