Williams College

“I mean, we saw the same thing with our private equity portfolio where our target's nine percent, and it was well above that when buyouts were doing well, and now it's venture's turn.”

“It's just over 60.”

“We didn't get upside down in the last financial crisis and have to borrow because we couldn't get money in our portfolio, and that's just really important to Williams.”

“And I tell people that that's the secret sauce of the Williams Investment Program, is we have these alums who are on these committees, and they love helping us, and they don't have an ax to grind. They're not trying to sell us something, or it's like you can c…”

“Well, it was more than 30%.”

“They say something to you like, run, don't walk to this manager, and you do, and that is not necessarily a good thing to do. I mentioned earlier that we have sort of a slow, careful process for adding new managers and getting to know them, and sometimes when y…”

“It takes us about a year between the time we meet someone and recommend putting them into the portfolio.”

“Maybe 10 or 15.”

“Joe Rice's good friend was John Canning. So we were in like the earliest CDNR and Madison Dearborn funds.”

“All your friends are doing it, And you say, this doesn't feel right to me. But all the cool kids are doing this, so we're gonna do this. And that's never a good strategy.”

“You know, when I started, the pool was 1.5 billion, and now it's three billion over 14 years, and we've tried to keep the number of managers the same as when I started.”

“These kids come out and they learn how to think critically and write and make an argument and put a mosaic of things together, and that's what investing is, right? So I keep telling these guys, you are the most well-suited for investing or investment managemen…”

“The private part of the portfolio is about a third of the portfolio, I want to say.”

“You know, all of our value add is in manager selection. It's not in calling the market or anything like that. When we do the attribution work, it's all manager selection.”

“Andreas Halvorsen was part of the committee that started this portfolio, and there are a lot of Williams people who have worked at Tiger or Tiger family firms, and so what that means for our portfolio today is there's kind of this fundamental bottom-up kind of…”

“So the chair of that committee was Bill Simon, is famous for almost being the Republican governor of California. He's a wonderful person and a dear friend. So he chaired that and then people on the committee were like Andreas Halverson and Paul Singer and just…”

“We've done a lot of investing with first-time funds, or a day one investor, about a third of our portfolio. When I went back and looked, it's, you know, we were in fund one, or invested with somebody who started, so a lot of times the track record isn't really…”

“Paul was an incredible committee member and served for a long time, and he's not an alum. He has two sons who went to Williams, which is how he got involved and was an incredible non-alum volunteer.”

“So our target allocation is six percent. Our current allocation is like Three times that.”

“We do like 500 meetings a year between our current and potential managers, and we only will add a small handful of new managers every year.”

“Whereas at Williams, we support over 50% of the operating budget, so it's incredibly important, but there are like people I knew who retired and were relying on what we did every day.”

“We did one thing that was innovative, I thought, and saved us a lot of money and headaches is we moved away from a custodian and hired an administrator, which at the time we did it, nobody had done that in the endowment world, and not very many people have don…”

“We have almost 40% of our portfolio in hedge funds”

“What's important for us is understanding what our managers do and being able to explain it to the investment committee. So I've always sort of felt like if I can't explain to these guys what we're doing and why something went wrong, then I shouldn't be in this…”

“Another thing we talk a lot about, but we haven't done much of, is participate in the secondary market, whether it's selling pieces of our existing portfolio or buying pieces of other portfolios.”

“We also maintain a hundred and fifty million dollars worth of lines of credit for the investment office.”

“Things that we don't do right now that we've wondered, should we do more of? For example, we don't do co-invest. We don't underwrite direct investments. We're at four and a half billion.”

“From our perspective, there is no big headline change in how we're thinking about the role of private asset classes. Where it does change is our modeling as it relates to our commitment pace modeling. If the expectation is going to be that things may be less l…”

“In this business, we don't get points for difficulty. We get points for making money. You don't necessarily have to always go find the least discovered idea. If somebody's recommending a manager to you over and over again, for example, probably worth taking th…”

“We used to have probably a person and a half worth of people time doing that work. We have 350 different line items in this portfolio.”

“Similarly, we no longer do funds dedicated to the extraction of oil and gas.”

“We have re-underwritten the entire portfolio because you have to when you have new people coming on board and taking over responsibility for asset classes.”

“We're fully invested. We only maintain between one and two percent Of the portfolio in cash.”

“Somebody discovered recently that it's great at suggesting off-sheet references. We found some really good off-sheet references by saying this is who we're doing diligence on. Who in my network would you talk to?”

“We have multiple different working groups across the team that are focused on different themes within AI. Everybody on the team is on at least one team, if not more.”

“We did reintroduce it about a year ago as rates came off of zero, but it's still a modest position. It's one percent position in our portfolio, and it's meant to be that rainy day. It's not a big piece of what we do anymore. It used to be 10% of the portfolio …”

“For most of those companies, we agree with our venture managers that they're still compounding. Whether or not they're publicly traded, they're still great companies, and we're going to benefit long-term from their continued growth.”

“Early on, even the smallest decision can feel very consequential, because you feel like you're establishing the expectations, the path, the process. You think about things a lot, and it's exhausting. Eventually, you've set the path, Some of those little decisi…”

“One of the things that we did do over the last few years was increase our target to buyouts and venture.”

“Our job is to earn a five percent real return to make sure that we're doing that with the appropriate level of risk that we're taking, ensuring that we have sufficient liquidity because we support nearly 60% of the operating budget for the college.”

“The technology is changing so quickly that in some ways it feels premature to put a big stake in the ground and make some big investment or process change when in a quarter from now, The tools that are available to us could look entirely different or 10 times …”

“Today, our target allocation across our long, short, and absolute return portfolio is 27% in aggregate.”