Jen Birmingham
Managing Director, PRINCO · 1 appearance on the record.
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Jenn Birmingham leads finance and operations as a Managing Director at PRINCO, the investment office managing Princeton University's endowment. Prior to joining PRINCO in 2010, she was a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank Asset Management, serving as Global CFO of DB Advisors and Deutsche Insurance Asset Management.
25statements → 5claims → 1claims resolved → 3.88/5average certainty → 1.72/5average debate potential →
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 3 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 4 assertions · 3 opinions · 7 insights · 10 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 3 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 Jen argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Everything Jen Birmingham said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Birmingham: Career acceleration and deep learning require in-person office work
“I think junior staff members, what they don't appreciate is that, yes, you've been productive, but do you want to catapult your career? Do you want to learn as much as possible? Do you want to be the best XYZ ever? That is going to require you to have some in-…”
Birmingham: Remote work will decrease over the next five years
“I think certain fields will get back to what it used to be. I don't think everyone's going to now be hybrid. I don't think the new norm is remote work as much as it is now. Andy always does this to me. If you were going to make a bet that in five years it woul…”
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…”
Birmingham: Overhearing and butting into conversations drives learning at PRINCO
“Overhearing conversations is a big part of our learning and culture. Someone hearing something and then interrupting or butting in is actually what we want people to do.”
PRINCO's board delegates full investment approval authority to internal team
“So one of the great parts of the governance is that the PRINCO board doesn't approve investments. PRINCO has the ability to invest without constraint as it relates to the board.”
Birmingham: PRINCO uses only external legal counsel to enforce team ownership
“It's another reason why we actually do not have internal legal counsel. We use external only, and the reason for that is that the investment person, as well as the ops team, has to play quarterback.”
PRINCO operations team monitors legacy PE managers instead of investment staff
“We still had a lot of managers on our books that had market value, but that we weren't re-upping with their next fund, and so because the operations team understood, dealt with these managers so frequently, They are actually the people who are attending the AG…”
Birmingham: Excel is a calculation engine, not a database
“Many folks might still be in the Excel world where you use Excel as a database, but Excel is actually a calculation engine. It's not supposed to be a database.”
Birmingham: PRINCO feeds data to its custodian rather than relying on it
“We do have a custodian, which is technically our books and records, but it's really The shadow book, because we enter all the data into our system, and then we feed that to our custodian.”
Birmingham: PE CFOs should receive portfolio data independently from boards
“I think it's a best practice and a very cool thing if the CFO Of the private equity gets the data in a different way, because then when they meet, they should be speaking the same language. And sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the CFO will get different informati…”
Birmingham: PRINCO had zero documentation for benchmarking when she joined
“One of the first things that I did when I came here was force the analyst to document. There was no documentation for anything. I forced them to document the benchmarking.”
PRINCO quickly sells in-kind stock distributions in 90% of cases
“A manager distributes a public company securities to us. We then have the view in nine out of 10 cases that we typically sell pretty quickly.”
Birmingham: AI in operations is useful for data capture, not autonomous action
“I'm going to use it loosely because I'm not convinced it's AI the way they're promoting it, but there are certain automations of reading data that can be used by the ops team. We'll call it AI, but using AI to read K-ones, using AI to read capital calls, but m…”
Birmingham: Emerging managers must plan infrastructure five years ahead
“Plan for zero plus five. Don't plan for today. Plan for five years ahead, because infrastructure needs are not going to decrease. They are going to increase.”
Birmingham: Emerging managers should buy best-of-breed rather than build in-house
“And also, don't build in-house. I always say, buy the best of breed of something and work from that.”
Birmingham: Top 11 endowments gather annually for operational peer benchmarking
“It's about 11 of the biggest endowments, and it's all of the people that hold positions like me, and basically we have a day where we just talk about what are the five most important things going on in your organization.”
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…”
Birmingham: PRINCO reviews every financial statement and conducts annual debt surveys
“We do read every single financial and we do call out those types of items into files and systems so that it is available. But we come at it at different ways. The investment team also does a debt survey every single year with our managers.”
PRINCO modifies diversity diligence to focus on manager recruiting pipelines
“We modified it to actually really gauge not only where managers stand in terms of their diversity, but also what we call the faucet, because that's where we feel the biggest impact's going to be.”
Princeton's endowment covers over 65% of the university's operating budget
“Over 60% of our students are on financial aid, which is no loan, and then also the endowment provides over 65% of the budget”
Birmingham: ILPA is the premier operational resource for fund managers
“I'm gonna say ILPA, just because it has everything that we want and ask for, and it's an easily digestible format for these managers. It helps them not only with their reporting, but also with how they arrange their data.”
PRINCO emphasizes deep deliberation over Wall Street's rapid execution culture
“At Deutsche it was, this is what we gotta do, go get it done. Whereas when I came here it was, whoa, let's talk about it, let's be thoughtful about the paths we're gonna take, let's talk through those, Let's talk about the risks. What are the pros and cons? An…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Jenn Birmingham – Organizational Alpha at PRINCO (EP. 336) | Sep 4, 2023 | 48m |