Northwestern University

“But you look at, kind of, what Princeton and Yale and, you know, Northwestern's ten billion dollars, Stanford's twenty billion dollars, you know, these guys continue to put up great numbers At very large sizes, we always thought size was the enemy of performan…”

“We actually have a lot of it relative to our peers.”

“Now I think that world is changing, so right now I think access is less of an issue.”

“We've sort of defaulted to eight to 10% of the portfolio, which is probably underweight relative to GDP, but probably bad on when you look at market cap and percentage of total private equity. So I think we're kind of neutral, but we're not abandoning the fiel…”

“The notion of don't sow what you can't reap, because the amount of waste that happens because you just can't get to the crop, it's very hard. It all comes at one time. So just a lot about not setting yourself up for failure, because you can't keep track of it,…”

“It's really easy to know what to do when you own an asset class. Each person runs their little business, and the CIO just makes sure that everybody's doing a good job running their business and sets the big picture. I think you lose some cross-thinking and cro…”

“I have been offered in various situations, you know, you don't have to bring managers to the committee anymore. Just do what you think. I always say no, because I don't actually think I'm going to get to the right answer by myself.”

“We ran an exercise looking at all of our managers divided not by asset class, but simply by the liquidity terms, not even including private equity, but just the public managers who had annual or longer locks, who had quarterly locks, and who allowed monthly li…”

“One of the things we do when we do committee meetings, we have an on-deck section, which is these are some managers that we're just starting the process on. So if you have a thought, let me know now. That's really intended to invite them into the conversation …”

“We were underweight private equity. So we are using this moment to think about where is the best place to add.”

“So the way we're trying to create a comparable kind of discipline is to actually assign managers. So everybody has a manager roster. It maps roughly to the old asset classes, but not entirely. And then each manager has a partner. So there's two people on every…”

“Unfortunately, there are other parts of the portfolio that are not returning capital, and I'm not speaking about venture, but natural resources and real estate, which probably we would have expected would have returned a little bit more capital. That's been a …”

“I definitely think you got to go to their offices. This idea that people come and sit in your conference room, that's fine, and I'm happy to host people here in Evanston, but I really like to walk around and sense what the vibe is.”

“And then we've sort of beginning to adopt a slot concept, like we're trying to have a more or less set number of managers. It won't be precise. And then always for every manager, we want to keep track of three or four alternatives.”

“We're looking at it. We didn't have a lot of that in the portfolio, and I feel like we're at a point in the cycle where I think it could be making sense.”