Wesleyan University

“There's lots of opportunities, so it's, I think it's okay, and I don't have any facts to prove this, but I think the bias is probably in our favor on that one.”

“There was one person there with some institutional memory. There were a lot of Excel spreadsheets with our historical performance, none of which I was certain didn't have fat finger errors in them. And there was a portfolio with 26 managers in it. And there wa…”

“We have a much larger public equity portfolio than Yale does, and we probably always will.”

“People aren't clear about what they're doing. They can't really articulate it for you. If it's a complex area, they can't put it in terms that you understand. Too much jargon. Math. Can't do math in their heads. Things like that.”

“Well, I think one thing we've done is gotten rid of the target for oil and gas, which doesn't mean we can't do it. We can, and we have some managers we really like that we think hit the hurdle, but they have to compete against the rest of portfolio, and they h…”

“We are not price negotiators. I spent a lot of time at Yale Working on LPAs and negotiating terms, we were going to be a price taker. So it was sort of a take it or leave it decision when we found managers we liked rather than, I mean, and yes, we like to say …”

“I don't really have to like the person, but I have to respect them enough, and I have to be able to have a conversation with them, and they have to be interesting enough and articulate enough to help me get inside their mind.”

“We had about two hundred million dollars of debt outstanding at the university when I came on a five hundred million dollar endowment pool. So we knew we could not generate liquidity by going back out to the capital market. So we had to generate all our liquid…”

“So right off the bat, we said, look, we're not going to do any mining. We're not going to do any real estate outside of the US. We're not going to go to these parts of the world. It doesn't matter if that's in the index. We're just not doing it.”

“There was a period of time, four years or five years, we went to Brazil a ton, and we ended up with no managers there.”

“In China, for example, we're seeing some really interesting managers, but if you go back eight years ago, I think they were fewer and farther between, and we settled a couple times to get the exposure and to get some learning under our belt, and, you know, in …”

“I think we're somewhere around 60 managers across the entire endowment, and there are five of us.”

“One of the ways we do that is we don't go to any conferences. Another way we do that is we don't meet with any firms that are trying to sell us, you know, factor risk or smart beta or any of those things”

“So when I started, it was about 35% we set as a ceiling, and now it's up to 42%. But we've had to do that gradually over time, and at a billion, we've got more room to do that.”

“But I would rather have a high confidence, 12% return than a really not high confidence, 16% return or 17% return.”

“Because venture has such a long feedback loop, that you're going to be on the third fund before you really even know, and that gets back to, like, how are you going to size if you do decide to do some emerging manager? How do you size it so that you're not, wh…”

“If you don't want to go to dinner with them, I often tell my group this now, if you don't want to go to dinner with them, let's not invest with them. Because you're not really investing for the good times, you're investing for the really terrible times when yo…”