Andy Golden
Former President, PRINCO · 3 appearances on the record.
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investorexecutive
Golden led the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO) as president from 1995 to 2024, overseeing the endowment's growth from roughly $3.5 billion to nearly $35 billion. He previously worked at the Yale Investments Office under David Swensen and at Duke Management Company.
49statements → 5claims → 1claims resolved → 3.86/5average certainty → 2.06/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 28said about them ↓
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 4 assertions · 5 opinions · 22 insights · 17 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Andy argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Andy Golden on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Andy Golden said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Early 2020 high-quality corporate debt dislocation offered guaranteed multiples
“There was a brief moment where there's such dislocation across high quality corporate debt that had to take precedence of like, because you were pretty much guaranteed a multiple. You didn't know what your IR would be because you didn't know the time.”
PRINCO refuses to back new managers for short-term market opportunities
“And we Have never, and can't imagine we ever would create a new relationship to seize upon an acute opportunity, because then what happens when that opportunity goes away?”
Long-term compounding manager relationships beat short-term high IRR bursts
“For relationships that can compound over a long time into something Really big, even if there's a lower nominal return to that, if you don't have that kind of reinvestment risk, you may want to choose that relationship over something that has more of a burst o…”
Allocators avoid offbeat strategies when traditional assets are cheap
“I think it's also interesting that the really kind of off the beaten path investments, like a Sports betting fund. That's interesting that you would think that I would think that what I need right now, when very traditional things are on sale, is to go far afi…”
Golden: A single volunteer directed Princeton's portfolio for decades
“And for decades, there had basically been a single volunteer who made security level decisions.”
Golden: I originally proposed a Yale-style committee governance model
“It was really unusual, and in fact, was not what I originally proposed. I said to Ed, I don't want to reinvent things when there's a good model. You know, here's a kind of Yale-like model where the major decisions, manager hires, fund re-ups, would still flow …”
Golden: Knowledgeable investment boards enable allocators to take contrarian pain
“It means that you got to be contrarian, and it means that you got to be able to do some uncomfortable things. And people who understand what you're doing will allow you greater units of discomfort, and they will also allow you to optimize that discomfort spend…”
Golden: True time horizon is enduring discomfort without changing course
“But the real horizon is not what you claim your horizon is. The real horizon is this thing that you maybe don't even discover until after the fact. It's how long Can you go with a large amount of discomfort without changing your path inappropriately?”
Golden: Managers develop bad agency habits when things go well, not badly
“People tend to develop bad habits when things are going well, in terms of separating interests with clients, not when things are going badly”
Golden: PRINCO avoids black-box and discretionary market-feel trading strategies
“It's one of the reasons why there's a bunch of strategies that we don't invest in, even though others have made a ton of money. But we know that when the bad times come, we would not be able to do anything to give us confidence to continue... You know, any bla…”
Golden: PRINCO targets 25% private equity, 25% hedge funds, 19% real assets
“If we just kind of go around the pie chart, it's 10% dedicated to domestic equity, long-only managers, six percent to other developed markets, long-ish only managers, 10% to emerging market public equity managers, 25% in the category we call independent return…”
Golden: PRINCO's top equity manager focuses on fallen angel biotech stocks
“These guys you know, who many of our closest friends invest with them do biotech stocks, fallen angel biotech stocks. So you're not just concentrating, you're concentrating on, you know, a sector that can be quite volatile, that is pretty distinctive.”
Golden: PRINCO relies almost entirely on hiring undergraduates directly from college
“But where we think the future of PRINCO is, is mostly, if not entirely, on our grow our own. And so we're hiring one to three or maybe more kids out of college, primarily Princeton, where we have some unfair recruiting advantages.”
Golden: Manager selection matters more than timing or specific strategy
“We believe that who matters a whole lot more than
When you invest, and may even matter more than what they actually do.”
Golden: Early career advice should be to follow your like, not passion
“There's a cliche about following your passion. I feel that it's true, except for I want to modify that and say, follow your like. The problem with telling someone follow your passion is it presupposes that they know what passion is, and, you know, it's almost …”
Golden: Not everything worth doing is worth doing really well
“And also, it turns out that not everything worth doing is worth doing really well. There's some, you know, you kind of want to spend your effort budget wisely. You know, there are some things where good enough is actually good enough.”
PRINCO requires every investment team member to record advance votes
“Every time we have a major decision, we move the entire investment team from the room we normally sit in to a board-like room. And everyone, even if they're in their first week, they're a twenty-year-old fresh out of college, attends that meeting and has to wr…”
Over half of Princeton's portfolio is in non-marketable investments
“About half, more than half the portfolio is in non-marketable investments, and you got already this underweight in the US, so you can only underweight so much.”
Princeton built emergency liquidity reserves outside its endowment post-GFC
“The intersection is that coming out of the global funders crisis, the university explicitly built up a little bit of reserve outside the endowment for liquidity, so that in a kind of Break glass situation, then we could defer some spending coming out of the en…”
Allocators must pace crisis deployments like a buffet line
“The analogy that We've often used in trying to describe it to ourselves, also to our managers as, hey, it's a buffet line, right? And you got a plate and you don't want to fill up your plate too early because often the lobsters at the end, they start out with …”
It is too late to build partnerships and culture during a crisis
“I think it's a reminder that by the time a crisis hits, it's too late to develop partnerships, to develop the right culture.”
Golden: Swensen helped secure a Princeton offer triple my Yale pay
“Dave Swenson, I asked for his help, and he got me an offer to come to Princeton for triple my compensation. I got my own offer to go to Duke, my alma mater, undergrad, for double, so I took the Duke job”
Golden: PRINCO concentrates independent returns across roughly 15 manager relationships
“Our opinion of the asset class is quite different, if you want to call it an asset class, opinion of, you know, the, that collection of managers is quite different from the opinion of our 15 or so relationships that we have there.”
Golden: PRINCO mandates blind pre- and post-meeting voting on all investments
“By the way, everyone walks in the room, the first thing they do is they get a ballot, and they have to say what their vote is going into the meeting, and then at the end of the meeting, they write down what their vote is, and then that piece of paper is set as…”
The other half of the tape: Andy Golden's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 23 times in 9 episodes on Capital Allocators. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 8Jen Birmingham 8Tony Yoseloff 1Margaret Chen 1Kip McDaniel 1
Statements about Andy Golden, by other people (5)
Time Horizon Is the Only Durable Risk Premium Left in Investing
“He said that all of the risk premia have been arbitraged away, except for one. He said, horizon. People just need cash sooner. And by being a long-term liquidity provider, you know, if we can be, he, I think his phrase is BLT investor, if we can be a beyond th…”
PRINCO intentionally preserves inefficient large meetings to improve organizational learning
“It is ok to be inefficient sometimes if you are more effective in the learning process. So we have huge meetings. One might say that would be much more efficient if there was just five of us. We'd probably come to the same decision. Be done with it. However, y…”
Seides: David Swensen's Yale disciples consistently outperformed peer endowments
“There is something to the structure of what Yale did and the discipline that has been proven that David has been able to teach other people. It could Seth Alexander, who I worked with, and Paul Valente at Bowdoin, and Andy Golden at Princeton, and Peter Ammon …”
Ted Seides: Allocators Are Probably Better Off Balancing Growth and Value
“You're probably better off being balanced between the two. Because if you get too far ahead of your skis and you're wrong, if you're right in the long term but you don't survive to the long term, I think as Andy Golden said on one of the shows, finish first, y…”
PRINCO Mandates Every Team Member Vote on Investments Without Abstaining
“The culmination of all of that work comes to a bull bear decision meeting, and that is just the Prinko team, and we all vote. So we have this voting dynamic, two right pound the table, two left Negative, or one and one. You have to vote, though. You can't abst…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2024 4 mentions in 1 episode
2023 14 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
Appearances (3)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa | Sep 1, 2022 | 5m |
| Andrew Golden – Navigating Princeton's Endowment Through (Another) Crisis (Capital Allocat | Apr 23, 2020 | 23m |
| Andrew Golden – Beyond the Long Term (Capital Allocators, EP.13) | Jun 26, 2017 | 56m |