foundations

“The foundations in the dynamic community had a lot more leverage. So you had leverage with managers. That's what made them become known as the smart money because you were doing these sort of more interesting structures and strategies. Very different than it i…”

“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 …”

“Because in a foundation, I have a mandated five percent payout. So I have to have at least 70% equity risk in this portfolio to be able to, on a long-term basis, Achieve the objective, which is to grow or maintain the real spending power of this institution.”

“An advantage a foundation has over an educational institution is the fact that no one feels like they own the capital that we have. Andrew's been dead a 108 years, and so he didn't leave anything to his heirs, and so there's no one who feels an ownership of th…”

“The turnover in our portfolios is really slow, so if you're not purposeful and deliberate about it, it's difficult for it to happen, and I also think we have really small teams, so we're always trying to have really concentrated portfolios, and so all that sta…”

“I think foundations and charitable investing is largely an outcropping of Western guilt. And the reason is because everything here has to have a name. Everything is branded. Every dollar that's given by rich people has to come with a label attached to it. …”

“Because the type of capital that an endowment runs or a foundation runs is similar compared to a pension fund or compared to a wealth advisor, they do tend to have a similar way of looking at the world. Because of the nature of the capital.”

“Many of us have credit lines in place to be able to fund the granting parts of the organizations, but you can't use credit lines to lean into a dislocation. For lots of tax reasons. If you think a dislocation is coming, you need to have cash to be able to even…”

“If you underperformed the global stock market by 20 basis points a year for the five years ending twenty-twenty-one, that was top quartile performance.”

“So you have this massive denominator effect that can occur in the foundation portfolio, which is why you see a lot of foundations holding 10, 15% less in private assets than a lot of university endowments.”

“Well, that's another interesting thing about foundations is the goal is less to outperform other foundations. We have a lot of large foundations with whom we're working pretty closely on the grant making side. Issues, climate, social justice, whatever it is. I…”

“I would say that it usually takes maybe a decade, which is good because a decade gives you time to have at least one crisis.”

“And I think at the time, foundations were a lot sleepier than endowments. Most of them did not have professional staffs.”