The Ledger, every show

“There are going to be a lot of doctors and dentists who are pretty disappointed 10 years from now with the net returns that they're getting from their financial advisor plowing their capital into private equity. Gross returns might be fine, but between the fee…”

“Buyout firms routinely paying 20 plus times EBITDA for quality businesses, but businesses that probably should not trade at that high valuation. Doing that in a world where interest rates were zero, and there was a lot of money being pumped into the economy by…”

“It's going to be very difficult for private equity, broadly defined venture and buyout and related stuff to be the single defining alpha creating strategy for institutional investors the way that it's been over the last 3540 years.”

“I'm sure there will be times in the future where we have venture booms again, but the odds of systematically finding firms that are Consistently producing 20% plus returns and the occasional 80% returning fund. It's going to be very, very hard for that to happ…”

“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.”

“One thing I never liked was we would have buyout firms come to us and talk about Oh, we're going to get all this leverage from the Small Business Administration. That's going to allow us to goose the returns and do all this clever stuff. To me, that was always…”

“Some of those deals didn't wind up working out very well, and RJR proved to be a very mediocre deal for KER.”

“There was a time, probably in the early nineties, where people stopped talking about EBIT multiples, earnings before interest in taxes, and started talking about EBITDA multiples, heading in depreciation and amortization. I think they hoped nobody would notice…”

“Some of the original GP secondaries came out of that world. That's how that whole phenomenon started, that you had these zombie funds in the 2000 ten-ish era, where it was clear that there was no way for the GP to earn a carry, but There needed to be some kind…”

“It was one and three quarter billion when I started and over forty billion when I left.”

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

“Some of the firms that verticalized 10 or 12 years ago are now creating sub verticals. The industrial team is not the industrial team anymore. There's the aerospace team, and the packaging team, and whatever else.”

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

“Pretty much all of the venture firms we worked with, if in 1995, they were managing a two hundred million dollar fund. By 1999, they were managing a billion dollar fund. And then they were investing the billion dollar fund in nine months, which again, proved t…”

“When David Swenson got the job in 1985, there were no articles in the Wall Street Journal about him getting a job at Yale Endowment.”