Amherst College

“An important result of that is that you tend to invest with generalists because we do not know what the market is going to look like in 10 years. We need these people to be building investment processes and have diverse enough interests that they can thrive ac…”

“I have no control over private marks. The one thing that I do have control over is my commitment. Amounts. And oh, by the way, that's what gets me into trouble in times of crisis. The private NAV doesn't get me into trouble in times of crisis. It doesn't matte…”

“So we have less than 40 managers in the portfolio. Half of our assets are in our top 10 managers.”

“I think biotech is a really interesting place to be investing in the public markets right now.”

“We have some very meaningful holes in the portfolio when you look at us compared to peers, one of which is real estate. We have very little private credit to speak of. We don't have any global emerging markets managers. There are all sorts of things that we do…”

“For us, our benchmarks are much longer term than that, and they're the 7030 and the peer median.”

“Half of our portfolio is public, half is private. Of the private portfolio, we have a lot in venture and growth.”

“I started five years ago, and maybe this is just a really good example of the long-term nature of the way that we do things. I've exited nothing that we have put in.”

“Feeling like the committee has your back and that you have the runway to actually figure out what you want to do is incredibly helpful. And again, is analogous to what we were just talking about with managers. This is the entire investment world. You need to f…”

“AMRS' 10, 20, and 30 year return has been about 10% compound annualized over that period of time.”

“They did have a more traditional policy portfolio that was written down in paper, but in actuality, the way that they had managed the portfolio over time was a much more bottom-up, flexible framework.”

“That's why we hold four to five percent of our portfolios in cash. That's a really important feature, but through this entire time period, our portfolio has been cash flow positive, and I think that's a function of incredibly high-quality managers that have co…”

“We do maybe one to two new managers a year. Some years we will do none. We did none in 2023.”

“A lot of the conversation comes into competition for capital within illiquids, because we are basically at the max that we can be in terms of unfunded capital.”

“Doing very nichey things is generally not something that we're doing. We're trying to get those interesting kinds of investments through more generalist broad managers because we want to keep the manager concentration so high.”

“Our unfunded, just as an example today, is 12% to support a 50% NAV. It's extremely low. We have a very mature private portfolio. We're not trying to grow our private portfolio.”

“Venture is incredibly cyclical. There are going to be times when our venture NAV really spikes, and we just had that, and then it's going to come back down. I am in absolutely no position to trade our venture NAV. No one is. So that's not what I'm going to do.…”

“Some of the best performing ones are ones that had absolutely awful periods, because those awful periods catalyzed an incredible renewal of the organization. And if you can stick with managers through that, it's so extremely powerful”