Hewlett Foundation

“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.”

“We're all here to generate the money so that the Hewlett Foundation can do what it does. We are not the stars of the play. We are here as the little wheel on the corner.”

“And so our pitch is, we were once in your seat. We know what it is to be in your seat. And we really believe in your ability to generate returns for us. And we are longstanding partners, and we are here to help.”

“For every manager that they want to bring into the portfolio, somebody else is leaving. I give them maybe a margin of one extra guy, but that's it. I am pretty merciless on this one.”

“I still, for the first, I would say, 10 years of being here, I still managed about 75 CEO, CFO visits a year. Of companies in the portfolio, or companies that were adjacent enough to the portfolio that would help me inform how to manage the portfolio.”

“We have a very coordinated pitch in the sense that we, if we're allowed in, every dollar you make for us goes to save the planet for women's reproductive health or for women's economic empowerment.”

“You will have a lower cost of capital, and you will have a higher exit multiple. So the incentive structure should be aligned to doing the right thing, not because it's the right thing, but because you're going to make more money.”

“What you really want in the S is to have more senior professionals, either people of color or women, but in many industries that will take decades. And so to give a score today, I don't know that it means much.”

“I think the getting better is what we should be aiming for. I mean, the point is, isn't to reward the ones that already are good. A lot of the point of our granting dollars is to improve conditions, and so I think from a philosophical perspective as part of He…”

“I'm a big believer that the people who we trust with our capital need to be pencils down and really working with the portfolio companies. We have had five to seven years of Massive amounts of capital going into buying private firms and taking companies private…”

“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…”

“It's a very high touch model, which is why we run a concentrated portfolio.”

“If you're going up and they've got a person stuck, even though you're trying to make it to the next turn around the mountain, it's your ethical responsibility to help them out, and I am 100% in that camp. We are here to manage money on behalf of institutions t…”

“If you're building from scratch, you need people who love finding new managers. The joy in their life is to meet with seven managers a day. Find really one or two, do a ton of due diligence. That gives them joy. If you put a person like that in a mature portfo…”

“It's key, and it's a great bridge to manager selection, is to separate the opportunity set. Because I think sometimes we pull together manager selection and opportunity set, and I think you have to separate those out between the GP quality, which we can get in…”

“The goal is To ask managers questions that hopefully create new thoughts, but you never want to come across like you're second guessing a manager. That's not our job. Our job is to understand them and to understand whether our strategies are aligned.”

“We have eventually bought big. We're invested in Japan.”

“We ended up starting to reduce our exposure to, for example, value managers. We thought value would just be a tougher place to be going forward.”

“When we're selecting a manager, we break apart opportunity set and manager selection. The steps are, we gain conviction on the opportunity set. Because we run as one team, one approach, Once we have an idea of the opportunity set, like at Everest, we're lookin…”

“There's a difference in cadence in decision making, even in the amount of research and analysis you do for every decision. You're calibrating that all the time. And I had perfected that for a high turnover world of direct investing. And when you move over to t…”

“This is what makes great PMs. Coherence. Their investment strategy aligns with how they think. Their emotional makeup. That's the most important thing we look for with a manager, is their alignment between their strategy and how they think.”