Insight
Galbraith: Appointing trusted friends to corporate boards improves governance
“And so, you know, some people would argue that's nepotistic, or it's not the way you're going to lead to good governance. I couldn't disagree more. I mean, because we know each other, Joel Greenblatt's on the board as well, Charlie Johnston, who had run distri…”
Assertion Partly supported
Galbraith: Success Academy achieved New York's highest test scores with $35k average family income
“We're now up to 15,000 kids, and they had the highest test scores in the entire state of New York. The average family income is 35,000 dollars a year.”
Insight
Soccer clubs gain more value investing in bench depth over superstars
“Soccer, like American football, is very much a team sport, meaning you're much better off spending incremental money on the 1514, 13th And obviously, 12th, 11th player, the people coming off the bench and the less good players than paying a ton of dough for a …”
Opinion
Galbraith: Most university boards are unwieldy and dysfunctional
“Usually university boards are a huge, b unwieldy, and c not always that functional.”
Insight
Galbraith: Endowment CIO turnover stems from disconnected university leadership
“What you tend to find, and I did a lot of this as part of my due diligence, is when you have a lack of connectivity there, you typically have turnover. Because there's not a true understanding of what's going on at the endowment level, and oftentimes it's not …”
Insight
Galbraith: Boards should never seat directors who rely on board fees
“One of the things Rich was very cognizant of in constructing his board is he didn't want anyone on the board Who needed to be on the board. In other words. To collect a check. You got it. Yeah. And I, I'm a firm believer in that.”
Opinion
Galbraith: Quant and AI data scraping is a tough arms race
“All the dough seems to be moving more towards quant, more towards artificial intelligence, more towards data scraping, all these kinds of things. And I just think that's a tough game to win. It's kind of like an arms race. And some folks can do it. I think at …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Maverick Capital's top analysts were right 55% to 60% of the time
“Our best analysts were right probably 55 or 60% of the time. Like, our real rockstar guys. And I think the lay investor doesn't really understand that. Like, there's this perception that, oh, my guy, or, you know, Whoever is right, 80 or 90% of the time, it's …”
Assertion Partly supported
Success Academy operated five top-10 NY schools despite bottom-10% wealth demographics
“Success had, I think, something like five or six of the top 10 schools in the entire state of New York last year, and the demographics of our population were
Are typically in the bottom 10% of wealth.”
Insight
Endowment investment committees should add operating CEOs alongside Wall Street professionals
“So I met with David a couple months back, and one of the interesting things he talked to me about with his investment committee was getting non-financial people involved on the committee. And I think there's huge value in that. Like, at Tufts, we have CEOs of …”
Assertion Partly supported
Galbraith: Trump tax cuts eliminated major brewery excise tax on Narragansett
“Because believe it or not, Gansett was viewed as a major brewery under the old tax laws, and so we had a huge excise tax that was actually ascribed to the company, and that's going away.”
Insight
Galbraith: Functional boards rise during crises while dysfunctional boards deteriorate
“The other observation I'd have is different boards have wildly different degrees of efficacy, and what you find is the ones that are most functional actually tend to rise in and around crises or transitions, and the more dysfunctional ones tend to do the oppos…”
Insight
Galbraith: Institutions should issue 100-year bonds at 4% interest
“Well, I thought of it as quasi equity. And if you can raise a hundred years at four percent, you damn well better do it.”
Insight
Galbraith: Large investment committees fail because members lack ownership
“What you'll find on a committee structure is large is bad, and mainly because what happens is people can feel like someone else will take care of it. There's not a sense of ownership. If there are only four, five, six of you on the committee, there's nowhere t…”
Disclosure
Galbraith: Tufts is lowering its endowment spend rate to 3.5–4.5%
“We actually took our spend rate down, which is very unusual in higher education today, and we're doing it in a gradated fashion over several years, but we're taking it down to three and a half to four and a half percent from four to five.”
Assertion Partly supported
Galbraith: Buffett turned a $5M TV station investment into a 10-bagger at Grinnell
“He put like a third of the endowment into TV stations. And he did it on a highly levered basis, so they put in, like, five million dollars of equity to make a seventy million dollar investment, and it was like a ten-bagger.”
Disclosure
Said Holdings pivots from fund managers to direct company investments
“They're actually pivoting the investment structure to become much more direct investing, and so this is an interesting dynamic. So you have a father who made all his money doing stuff, and the actual corpus of the endowment, if you will, was invested with peop…”
Opinion
Galbraith: Direct investing in compounders beats public market returns
“We actually think a way of compounding capital better will be direct investment in companies that are long-term compounders.”
Opinion
Galbraith: UK mortuaries are great, predictable businesses for permanent capital
“UK mortuaries. They're great businesses, right? And it's like one of these things where, where you know, it's actually highly regulated. It's very predictable.”
Insight
Galbraith: University boards need a 10-person executive committee to operate effectively
“So the typical university board will probably be 30 to 40 people, and then what you really need is a strong executive committee where you have about 10 people that are kind of running the corpus day to day with the administration, and then you try and get expe…”
Disclosure
Galbraith: Family office outsources financial research to analysts in India
“We were actually currently working with a group of Indian analysts where it's an outsource effort where we have very, we give them very specific marching orders.”
Insight
Galbraith: Taking any outside capital requires managing it 24/7
“The minute you take a dollar of outside money, you have to be on it 24 seven. That's just the way I feel. I mean, it's just the way I believe to do it.”
Assertion Supported
Galbraith: Value vs momentum return divergence matches dot-com bubble levels
“So if you look at the factor returns to value versus the factor returns momentum, they're about as divergent as they've been since the tech bubble.”
Insight
English football clubs are money-losing operations reliant on TV and sponsorships
“Then on top of it, we didn't fully understand that these are at their core money losing operations. The way you do make your money is through the sponsorships and the TV, so on and so forth.”
