Ford Foundation

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“That fight for cash Left some of them still permanently impaired. Some of those foundations still have not gotten back to their 2007 high watermark.”

“And then what we did over the next five years was to shift that portfolio more toward an endowment like portfolio. We built out the investment team there. We shifted probably eight of the ten billion at that point into different strategies or different manager…”

“If you have forward foundation commitments, that is effectively leverage in your portfolio.”

“I think we did over the very long run, but most of that was by having more equities than the average foundation in a period when equities went up tremendously.”

“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.”

“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 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.”