David Swensen, every mention
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every year anyone Ted Seides 293Charlie Ellis 43Alan Forman 31Tim Sullivan 19Kimberly Sargent 19Kip McDaniel 17Ben Inker 15Cameron Passmore 13Anne Martin 12Patrick O'Shaughnessy 11
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where David Swensen comes up
Ted Seides – Insights on investing and podcasting (Capital Allocators, EP.269)
- ▶ 8:11 Hayden Brain Um, I did some research before the call and I read that you began your career in 1992 under the tutelage of David Swenson at the Yale University Investments Office. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:44 Ted Seides And at the time, David had written his seminal work pioneering portfolio management in 2000. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:34 Ted Seides David Swenson first articulated, particularly for institutions, this idea that, that successful investing for institutions demands non-institutional behavior.
- ▶ 45:02 Ted Seides David Swenson was a guy who literally came into the office every day wearing the hat of someone who's investing for a hundred years.
- ▶ 57:44 Ted Seides Um, there are a few, uh, I guess, I guess I'd go back to the earliest one that I remember, which was the, the, the celebration that David gave me when I was leaving the investment office. 2 times in the scene
Sarah Samuels – Framework and Rigor at NEPC (Capital Allocators, EP.264)
- ▶ 43:20 Sarah Samuels When you think about the David Swenson model, people think it's this recipe that you can replicate by just throwing ingredients into a bucket and throwing them into an asset allocation model, and you're going to get the same results. 2 times in the scene
Ashvin Chhabra – The Aspirational Investor (Capital Allocators, EP.260)
- ▶ 38:45 Ashvin Chhabra I think that what doesn't work is, I'm not clear that the entire ecosystem of the Swenson model that had become so super institutionalized really works any longer. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 46:03 Ashvin Chhabra Now, so I went back and I said, let me understand Swenson's framework through the lens of the wealth allocation framework. 4 times in the scene
Steve Drobny – Where the World is Going at Clocktower Group (Manager Meeting, 30)
- ▶ 19:15 Paula Volent Before we leave the macro side, I want to talk to, in 2016, I invited you to an endowment conference, and you did a presentation on Portfolio Management four point O for endowments, where three point O is David Swenson's, the Yale model,… 3 times in the scene
Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235)
- ▶ 48:30 Joelle Kayden Boy, the only person I remember doing that was David Swenson.
Chris Douvos – The LP's Perspective from Ahoy Capital, Venture is Eating the Investment World 2 (Capital Allocators, EP.230)
- ▶ 46:17 Chris Douvos So I've got a pair of Davids, and one was close, the other was, you know, sometimes people say just one thing that changes your life, and that one's David Swenson. 5 times in the scene
Paula Volent – Star Endowment Manager's Next Act at Rockefeller University (Capital Allocators, EP.219)
- ▶ 11:31 Paula Volent And I met with David, and I said, I want to work with you. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:46 Ted Seides What were the formative lessons you took from what you learned from David into that seat at Bowdoin? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 33:04 Paula Volent One of the things David taught me, and Charlie Ellis taught me this too, is good rebalancing.
- ▶ 40:11 Paula Volent David and Stan obviously have had huge impact.
Friends Reunion – Five Allocators Riff on Investing (Capital Allocators, EP.215)
- ▶ 17:53 Ted Seides To the old days of Swenson that you won't touch anything that's a public company GP or a fund run by a public company because of that conflict of interest or their separate interest from yours?
- ▶ 1:00:56 Casey Whalen Well, David Swenson, obviously, and what a super sad year, um, with everything else going on, both, and actually I didn't say professionally and personally, um, 3 times in the scene
Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198)
- ▶ 18:00 Alex Rodriguez And if we went to the Yale endowment, if I met with you and, and your former boss who passed just a few weeks ago to be seriously.
Charley Ellis – The Magic of David Swensen (Capital Allocators, EP.197)
- ▶ 4:50 Ted Seides With the recent passing of David Swenson, we decided to sit down and reminisce about David in a conversational tribute to the investor, man, and leader we both so greatly admired. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:31 Ted Seides I know David was near and dear to both of our hearts, and there are very few people that were in as close to his inner circle for as long as you, so I'm just excited to reminisce and talk about him. 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:43 Charlie Ellis Meetings go from nine in the morning to noon, and because you live in the New Haven area, you and I might get together once or twice, but he never gave me fair warning how demanding the work was and how hard it was. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:16 Charlie Ellis With David leading the discussion and looking for holes and soft spots and weaknesses and imperfections. 11 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:17 Ted Seides So when you step back from the committee and look at that work, I know you knew well how David ran the office and the people on the team. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:38 Ted Seides How would you describe his leadership style after you've canvassed the world with so many leaders in asset management? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:41 Charlie Ellis So David Swenson's the most highly regarded investment professional in the world. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:26 Charlie Ellis He's very demanding, and he gets the very best basketball players he can find and makes them stellar beyond imagination what they could have become with anybody else as their coach, and David did the same thing. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:18 Ted Seides That have had both the duration and the success that David had at Yale. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 33:05 Ted Seides How was David and the team able to manage through all of the challenges that everyone else faces in staying put with a manager? 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:56 Ted Seides One of the things I recall so well and learned so much from in my time working with David was that all the time he seemed to have a whole bunch of, call them small innovations or views of something subtle inside a manager or a market, or… 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 40:10 Ted Seides One of the things that I think about now and going forward that we no longer have David, anything you read over the last couple of weeks of what's been written about him, 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 51:53 Ted Seides So with all of this money and all of this competition, I have to ask this hypothetical question that we don't know the answer to, which is if David stepped into a new seat tomorrow, and we were so fortunate to have him back, that had,… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 52:39 Ted Seides By reflecting a little on David's legacy. 7 times in the scene
Brian Bares – Qualitative Concentration at BCM (Capital Allocators, EP.191)
- ▶ 12:47 Brian Bares Reading every single book in the investing section of Barnes and Noble, I came across the David Swenson book, Pioneering Portfolio Management, which is very seminal in the background because it sort of was like a cookbook for me on what… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:23 Brian Bares And that was where the Swenson book came in. 2 times in the scene
Ted with Jenny Heller – Compounding Knowledge and Relationships (Capital Allocators, EP.185)
- ▶ 34:55 Ted Seides Then there's a section of investment frameworks, which are my way of thinking about is what happens to the CIO seat after David Swenson. 2 times in the scene
Ted with Patrick O'Shaughnessy – Lessons from the World's Elite Money Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.184)
- ▶ 15:49 Ted Seides So that inevitably happens because that's sort of the nature of business conversations, but you do hear things like when Scott Malpass talked about bringing people to Notre Dame for football games, and that's certainly something Dave…
- ▶ 26:14 Patrick O'Shaughnessy It kind of goes against all the Swenson training, all the Buffett training, all the things that I think a lot of professional allocators came up on are being violated in front of us. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 54:50 Ted Seides The second would be Dave Swenson, my first boss and mentor in the business. 3 times in the scene
Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174)
- ▶ 48:08 Colette Chilton They read David Swenson's book.
Ben Inker – Value Investing at GMO (First Meeting, EP.17)
Christie Hamilton – Tweeting on Allocation at Children's Health (Capital Allocators, EP.124)
- ▶ 18:55 Christy Hamilton David Swinson would call it absolute return.
Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123)
- ▶ 7:59 Doug Phillips And David Swenson has pointed this out in one of his books, but it's as much as 80% of the growth in endowments since World War II has come from this accumulation of new money.
- ▶ 21:17 Doug Phillips Well, one of our great leaders, David Swenson, has talked about people as the key component.
Ted Seides – A Rational Reminder (Capital Allocators, EP.121)
- ▶ 5:27 Cameron Passmore Yeah, and then he was trained under David Swenson, the legendary manager at Yale, so impressive.
- ▶ 7:30 Cameron Passmore So you started your career working with David Swenson, who was famous for managing the Yale Endowment. 12 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:59 Ted Seides If you were breaking it down, and I'd even use the framework I just mentioned about with David.
Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114)
- ▶ 4:34 Ted Seides And a fortuitous connection with David Swenson.
- ▶ 10:26 Anne Martin He got the Yale rowing job, and so we moved to New Haven, and I left my private equity job, and then I met David.
- ▶ 12:38 Anne Martin They got assigned to a team, and the coach was David Swenson. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 40:36 Anne Martin Well, I'd say one of the things I really learned from David is like the quality of the people. 4 times in the scene
Steve Rattner – Overseeing Michael Bloomberg's Family Office (Capital Allocators, EP.113)
- ▶ 18:16 Steve Rattner Been a colleague of David Swenson's at Lehman Brothers. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:01 Steve Rattner And so ultimately, as David Swenson has taught us all, it does come down a lot to the people, and whether you just have that feeling that these people in the long run are going to turn out to be great investors and not get caught up in the…
Ted Seides – Interviewing and Manager Meetings (Capital Allocators, EP.94)
- ▶ 7:12 Ted Seides And then my junior year of college, I took a big survey class that David Swenson taught at Yale. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:26 Ted Seides There's no better process that I've seen in my career than what David and Dean Takahashi put together at Yale.
- ▶ 36:54 Ted Seides I would start with David Swenson, who was really my mentor in the formative part of my career, and he's a gifted educator as well as investor. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 48:45 Ted Seides I was hoping it would be him or David Swenson, who also respectfully declined.
Chris Ailman – CalSTRS' Venerable CIO (Capital Allocators, EP.86)
- ▶ 52:16 Chris Ailman It might work at Harvard, might work for David Swenson at Yale, but does it work for our size and our governmental structure and rules?
Mark Baumgartner – Luck, Risk and Uncertainty at the Institute for Advanced Study (Capital Allocators, EP.77)
- ▶ 14:50 Mark Baumgartner Jack started at the Weyerhaeuser Pension Fund in 1985, the same year that Dave Swenson started at Yale.
Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64)
- ▶ 13:08 Ted Seides Dave Swenson, in our business, wrote his seminal work in 2000, and all the sudden, people in the investment world started investing in alternatives, because that's what Yale was doing, and it was working.
Charley Ellis - Indexing and Its Alternatives (EP.62)
- ▶ 50:07 Charlie Ellis You and I both have tremendous admiration for David Swenson at Yale. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 53:15 Ted Seides On the other hand, structurally, and David had said, it's sort of the purest form of capitalism because all of these behavioral issues disappear if you give your money somebody for 10 years and let them go buy businesses and fix them up.
Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52)
Steven Galbraith – In the Boardroom (Capital Allocators, EP.48)
- ▶ 19:54 Steve Galbraith At Yale, David reports into Solovey, and so some of that may just be because of his status and what he's done, but I do think it matters. 2 times in the scene
It's Not About the Money (Capital Allocators, EP.45)
- ▶ 5:29 Khe Hy You worked for one of the legends of investing, David Swenson. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:57 Ted Seides And so I decided to go back into the kind of work I was doing at Yale, and had an offer to go back to Yale at the time, and didn't, ended up in a sort of backing into an entrepreneurial situation, which all of a sudden everyone wanted to… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 55:20 Ted Seides My, my, my old boss, Dave Swenson, who is just a remarkable and brilliant man, gave, he doesn't speak publicly that much, but he gave a speech earlier this week, and one of the things he got asked about artificial intelligence, and one of…
Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44)
- ▶ 17:36 Wayne Wicker Folks that, Ted, you know, and David Swenson, who was there from Yale.
Bill Spitz – Seasoned Commodore (Capital Allocators, EP.37)
- ▶ 5:07 Ted Seides Looking back, and you started managing Vanderbilt Endowment in 1985, which happens to be a banner year for those who really know, mostly because you started at Vanderbilt, and secondarily because it happens to be the same year Dave Swenson… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:19 Ted Seides Because in 1985, you couldn't read Dave Swenson's book that he wrote 15 years later. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:43 Bill Spitz You know, Dave Swenson has said, and I agree with him, that the ultimate form of capitalism is private equity, and I really agree with that, because, you know, you have a long time horizon, you're not beholden to quarterly numbers, and you…
- ▶ 30:09 Bill Spitz I heard an interview recently with Dave Swenson, and he said manager selection is about people, people, people, and I agree with him a hundred percent.
Michael Mauboussin – Active Challenges, Rational Decisions and Team Dynamics (Capital Allocators, EP.36)
- ▶ 51:56 Ted Seides And on the investment management side, the Scott Malpasses, Andy Goldens, Dave Swenson's of the world can try things with no career risk that someone who's two, three, four years in a new seat couldn't possibly risk.
Margaret Chen – Leadership and Outsourcing the Investment Office (Capital Allocators, EP.35)
- ▶ 21:02 Margaret Chen You don't get the Andy Goldens, you know, you don't get the David Swenson's like that, that they're, they're like the outliers now, where they used to be the norm.
- ▶ 47:17 Margaret Chen The fact that, you know, David Swenson or Scott Mopass were hired in their twenties and early thirties, that won't happen today again, but that's what forced folks to say, you know what?
Deep Dive into Hedge Funds (Capital Allocators, EP.34)
- ▶ 9:40 Ted Seides Uh, be the one person that Dave Swenson kind of hired from my class, uh, to go work with him at the Yale Endowment. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:58 Patrick O'Shaughnessy In Yale and Swenson's favor. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:01 Ted Seides And I think that's consistent with how David views the world, which is he doesn't want to invest in an investment organization that has outside ownership.
- ▶ 32:46 Ted Seides And so just that simple part of what's a hedge fund, oh, that's something we want, in part thanks to Dave Swenson's book, and sort of the, the stamp of approval that he and CalPERS, when they invested in hedge funds for the first time in…
- ▶ 42:51 Ted Seides About 10 years ago, I saw Dave Swenson give a speech, and someone had said to him very appropriately, your benchmark for this asset class is, let's call it five percent real. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 58:41 Ted Seides There is something to the structure of what Yale did and the discipline that has been proven that David has been able to, to teach other people.
Meredith Jenkins – A Path to Trinity (Capital Allocators, EP.31)
- ▶ 14:22 Meredith Jenkins So I, when I was coming out of school, I was very focused on finding something in this, in the endowment and foundation world, and so I did a ton of networking, and was lucky enough through some of that networking to, to be connected with… 2 times in the scene
Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27)
- ▶ 9:43 Ellen Ellison Fiona was an investor also, so I do think there's something really good in the big genes, but Jeremy was very tough on me, but I realized that I liked this notion of seeing a portfolio holistically, and I didn't have the pieces in my…
- ▶ 46:17 Ellen Ellison I do think that whether you're talking about Scott Malpass, Eric Lumberg, or Dave Swenson, you
Kip McDaniel – CIO Whisperer (Capital Allocators, EP.20)
- ▶ 16:45 Kip McDaniel You know, David Swenson, clearly the most influential allocator of our time. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:22 Kip McDaniel David Swenson runs thirty billion dollars and has been there for 30 years. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 38:45 Kip McDaniel Your alumni are more likely to give their money because they want David Swenson managing it, that there's an argument to be made there.
- ▶ 43:23 Kip McDaniel And David Swenson would say the same thing. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 49:07 Kip McDaniel Those are the people who's going to be successful, and not the people who just try to emulate a David Swenson, because that, even David Swenson would say, that's, you're going to get shot in the foot at some point trying that. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 49:26 Ted Seides And certainly when David wrote his seminal work in whatever it was, 2000, the U.S. endowment model became kind of the new, new thing.
- ▶ 1:01:00 Kip McDaniel And then it's not, it's not so much success on an individual level, but the industry needs more David Swenson's. 3 times in the scene
Thomas DeLong – Authentic Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.18)
- ▶ 35:48 Tom DeLong And I remember, Ted, as a student, I remember being connected with Yale, and I want to say, is it Dave, uh, who's the guy, who's the money manager there? 4 times in the scene
Thomas Russo – Buy and Hold...and Then What (Capital Allocators, EP.16)
- ▶ 32:59 Ted Seides There's an interesting parallel, both in what Warren Buffett does and, you know, my first mentor, Dave Swenson, where both have talked at times about a systematic bias to hold on, and maybe you hear Warren talk about Dexter Shoe Company… 3 times in the scene
Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14)
- ▶ 20:00 Ted Seides I was economics and political science, which Dave Swenson asked me in my interview.
- ▶ 1:05:05 Chris Douvos Swenson's book.
Andrew Golden – Beyond the Long Term (Capital Allocators, EP.13)
- ▶ 4:24 Ted Seides Andy came to PRINCO from Duke management company where he was an investment director and received his formative training in the business working for David Swenson at the Yale University investments office.
Charley Ellis – Multiple Ways to Win (Capital Allocators, EP.08)
- ▶ 8:06 Ted Seides I was still a young pup working for David Swenson. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:31 Ted Seides So I want to take that lens and apply it to some of your thoughts on active investing, and the reason is that as opposed to some of the other luminaries that are talking about the difference between active and passive, Jack Bogle, even…
- ▶ 45:27 Ted Seides So let's turn to the third example, one near and dear to both of our hearts, the Yale University Endowment and Dave Swenson, and it should be even that much harder, given that Yale's approach is investing in managers.
- ▶ 52:31 Ted Seides David wasn't fired. 3 times in the scene