Kim Lew
President & CEO, Columbia Investment Management Company · 5 appearances on the record.
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investorexecutiveLinkedIn ↗finance.columbia.edu/content/columbia-investment-management-company ↗
Kim Lew directs the endowment portfolio of Columbia University across public equities, private equity, and venture capital. She previously spent over a decade at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, serving as Vice President and Chief Investment Officer, following more than ten years managing portfolios at the Ford Foundation.
61statements → 16claims → 5claims resolved → 40%fully supported → 3.9/5average certainty → 2.18/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 10said about them ↓
2 supported 2 partly supported 1 contradicted 11 not checkable as stated how the 16 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 15 assertions · 6 opinions · 25 insights · 14 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 16 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 11 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 Kim argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Their most notable contradicted claim
Harvard Business School historically increased Black enrollment by adding a new section
“The way that they were able to increase the number of black students at HBS is by adding a new section. So no one felt threatened. We just have a brand new section. It's not like all the African-American people are in that one section. We sprinkle them through…”
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 Kim Lew on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Kim Lew said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Lew: I only give negative feedback to high-potential people and let others fail
“And when I don't like somebody, I don't say anything. Hey, just go and fail. I don't care. It does come down to that. And because it's painful, right? It's not comfortable to give people negative feedback. So I really only do it to the people who I care about …”
Liu: Legal documents do not protect limited partners when investments fail
“We spent a lot of time really thinking about how a manager would treat you when things went wrong, because the documents don't protect you. Ellen talked a lot about that. We have to know that they'll make the right decision when something goes wrong.”
Screening talent using elite sports like lacrosse inherently disadvantages diverse candidates
“Well, if that's your bias, you are going to disadvantage people of color. Let's just instead think about what Someone being on the lacrosse team tells you about them, and is there another proxy for that? That is more applicable for a person of color, or a pers…”
Diversifying large asset managers creates more impact than funding emerging ones
“I'm actually Of the belief that the bigger impact will be on getting the large firms to be more diverse. That has a bigger overall impact than funding diverse managers. Although I think the more bang for the buck is finding these new diverse managers to suppor…”
Carnegie found a direct correlation between manager performance and diversity scores
“There was a direct correlation to the highest ranked members of our portfolio. Those with the highest scores also had the highest diversity scores, and those were done independent of each other, and it was good to see, and it was good for us to then go back an…”
Research shows diverse manager return distribution exactly matches general funds
“The research has shown that the distribution in diverse and women managers is exactly the same as the distribution in the general funds without a diversity lens.”
High fundraising hurdles should make funded diverse managers perform better
“Arguably, they should be better because it's so hard for a diverse talent to get capital. If you do, chances are you're good, right? Like you may not be great, but you probably weed out all the average because there's not a lot of rich dads who give their dive…”
Lew: Outsized investment returns come from new perspectives unearthing untapped inefficiencies
“The best returns comes with out of the box thinking. These large firms are already seeped in how they do things. They have an established playbook. They will continue to execute on that playbook. Hard to compete with them on the playbook they have established.…”
Lew: Fund terms always favor GPs, making character alignment essential
“The terms are always gonna, in some way, favor the GP, so you just have to align yourself with a GP who you think in the crisis is going to do the right thing.”
Lew: Dead donors give foundations a structural advantage over university endowments
“An advantage a foundation has over an educational institution is the fact that no one feels like they own the capital that we have. Andrew's been dead a 108 years, and so he didn't leave anything to his heirs, and so there's no one who feels an ownership of th…”
Lew: Pension long bond demand keeps interest rates lower for longer
“Oh no, that, those rates are going to be low for a long time, because that demand for that long bond is so high, and so when I'm thinking about rates rising, and people kept saying it was going to happen, it was going to happen, and I was like, it's going to h…”
Liu: Former Ford Foundation CIO Linda Strumpf completely rejected alternative investments
“Linda Strumpf was the CEO of the Ford Foundation at the time, and she did not believe in alternatives at all. And she felt like anything that you can do in the private markets, you could do in the public markets without giving up liquidity.”
Liu: A co-CIO structure places a promotion ceiling on the investment team
“We were concerned about the co-CIO structure, not because we were concerned about each other, but we knew it put a ceiling on the rest of the team. That when Elisa came and expressed interest in being deputy CIO, we knew that wasn't possible. It's not possible…”
Liu: Chief investment officers stay too long and portfolios need refreshing
“I knew that one of the big problems with CIOs is they stay too long. And I do think portfolios need refresh.”
Liu: Columbia withheld its endowment manager names until my first day
“They wouldn't give me any of the portfolio before I joined. They said they had signed NDAs with their managers, and so they couldn't disclose anything. So I had big picture portfolio information, but not a single manager name. So I walked into a portfolio Nove…”
Lew: Positive Asian stereotypes provided early access and advantages
“I'm also painfully aware that the positive stereotypes of being Asian also helped us In those environments, like it gave us access to a lot of things, or people assumed, like they assumed I was good at math for some reason, and so when I was good at math, peop…”
Carnegie deliberately hired an Asian man to diversify a female-heavy team
“And honestly, we started with trying to add a man. Because our team was so heavily women, and I said that in a conference one day, because Ken Lee was the hire, and he's a, obviously a man, and he's an Asian man, and at a conference, I said he was our diversit…”
Lew: Scarcity mindset is the biggest barrier to diversity in finance
“I think it's the perception that the pie is shrinking. It's the biggest obstacle, right? Like it's really hard to For people to think outside of themselves when they feel threatened. If you think as a person in a position of power, if you think that in order f…”
Lew: Managers should own self-interest instead of feigning LP alignment
“I think my biggest investment pet peeve is one, when you have a conversation with a manager about alignment,
And they try to pretend that they either don't understand it or that they are aligned.
You know when you're not aligned.
You know when you're propos…”
Lew: Allocators cannot succeed without manager access, despite having elite talent
“You can be, have the best people of the world. If you don't have access, then you cannot be successful, and I think that's an access advantage that we have, and the people are the second advantage”
Carnegie's investment committee rejected only one investment during Lew's tenure
“In the whole time that I've been here, and as far as I know, ever, there's only been one investment that did not get through committee”
Lew: Investors cannot remain invested in Argentina over long market cycles
“And do we think that you can stay invested in Argentina over long cycles? No. We're going to have to eventually take our money out of that.”
Liu: Ford Foundation prohibited investment staff from emailing program staff
“The Ford Foundation kept investments completely separate from the rest of the foundation. In fact, discouraged any kind of interaction. I think that when I first got there, you couldn't even email the program staff if you were on the investment staff.”
Liu: Extensive investment memos reveal whether allocators truly understand risk
“The point that Elisa just made about the length of our memos, you just can't overstate that. And at the time it feels like, oh my God, we have to write this long memo. But this is how you really figured out if you understood the risk of what was going on. And …”
The other half of the tape: Kim Lew's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 9 times in 8 episodes on Capital Allocators. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 6Meredith Jenkins 2Gary Sernovitz 1
Statements about Kim Lew, by other people (1)
Jenkins: Carnegie's co-CIO structure built in a senior devil's advocate
“Then the other person between Kim and I would be the secondary. And so the secondary's role was a built-in devil's advocate. And so the secondary, you know, anytime anything new or re-up or we were just sort of re-examining a manager for some reason, the secon…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 5 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Gary Sernovitz - Inside the CIO Seat (EP.357)
- Seth Klarman – Timeless Value Investing (EP.328)
- Ravi Viswanathan – Venture Secondaries and Growth Capital at NewView (EP.327)
- Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320)
- Adam Shapiro – Post-Breeding Grounds for Rising Stars and Families (Capital Allocators, EP.319)
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
Appearances (5)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) | Apr 1, 2024 | 17m |
| Stefan Kaluzny – Sycamore Partners [Manager Meetings, EP.16] | Oct 21, 2021 | 10m |
| Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 2: Kim Lew – The Opportunity and Challenge (Capital Allocato | Aug 17, 2020 | 38m |
| Neal Triplett and Kim Lew – Issues of Management at Duke and Carnegie (Capital Allocators, | Dec 16, 2019 | 17m |
| Kim Lew – The Carnegie Way (Capital Allocators, EP.52) | May 14, 2018 | 56m |