Disclosure
Rockefeller targets 15 to 20 public managers at 3-5% NAV each
“Of the folks that are on the public side, we think between three and five percent per each manager of NAV makes sense. So that on average, that might give us, you know, 15 to 20 managers on the public side.”
Disclosure
Rockefeller limits sector-specialist private equity managers to 1-2% of the portfolio
“We think it's okay to have groups like that, but we don't want them to have too much because if they're a sector that is out of favor, could be out of favor for a decade, and we kind of want folks that can make money at any time period, but there's a role in t…”
Assertion Supported
Information technology venture capital has outperformed healthcare venture over 30 years
“A student of venture capital going back, you know, 2030 years would say, you can have, you know, IT and healthcare, and IT won. There are times where healthcare does fine, and in the last couple years, it's actually done great, but for the most part, on the wh…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Commonfund found every top-quartile manager has raised non-top-quartile funds
“One of the research that I did at Common Fund that I participated in, we found out that even the top quartile best managers of all time will have at least a fund in their history that is not top quartile.”
Opinion
Greylock's extreme LP transparency and partnership culture are rare in venture
“When you look at how they got there, and they do meetings twice a year, they used to do meetings four times a year, and the level of transparency and the level of disclosure and how they think of the world as a partnership, not only with their portfolio compan…”
What-if
Wallace Foundation survived by divesting Reader's Digest stock before bankruptcy
“Had he not done that, and we were still in the public company stock of Reader's Digest, it went bankrupt in the 2000. And so yet another case study of the beauty of diversifying.”
Disclosure
Wallace Foundation raised private markets allocation target to 35%
“And so from an asset allocation perspective, we increased our exposure to privates from 25% to 35%.”
Disclosure
Wallace Foundation secured full allocations from targeted private funds
“I had estimated that maybe of all the ones that we wanted to go after ourselves, we might get half of those in terms of allocation, and we might get half the number that we asked for. We batted a thousand, we got everybody we were looking for, and we got the n…”
Disclosure
Wallace's inherited Treasury position dropped 15% in Q1 2021
“And when I got that, the ten-year treasury rate was 90 basis points, and this was January of 2021. And I said, okay, I got plenty of bigger fish to fry. Let me just kind of Put this one on hold for a little bit, and had my first IC meeting at the end of Februa…”
Disclosure
Lenehan: Wallace plans to trim long-only equities to fund private investments
“Over time, I think we'll start to trim a little bit from the long only side to help feed the increase in the privates as they start to come out, because a lot of it's very liquid.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Secondary bids for legacy oil and gas funds hit 60 cents
“We looked at the secondary market pricing for the partnership interest that we had. And even back then the prices were 60 cents on the dollar.”
Assertion Supported
Rockefeller withdrew an extra year of spending for historical scientist lawsuits
“Rockefeller had a very unfortunate circumstance with one of their scientists, and there were a lot of lawsuits that came through. That we had to basically take an extra year's worth of spend out of the endowment at Rockefeller to help pay for a lot of these la…”
Disclosure
Lenehan: Wallace Foundation allocates roughly 15% of portfolio to Asia
“We have about 15% of the portfolio, public and private, in Asia. And we'll just, I'll start with China first. So it's, and of that, half of it is in China, half is elsewhere in Asia, which I actually think is a good number.”
Disclosure
Wallace Foundation is deliberately seeking non-tech private equity managers
“Most of who we have incumbent managers are heavy tech, if not all tech. Everybody's doing tech these days. Everybody has a tech group, but most of these groups that we have and that I inherited are solely tech, so we've been Looking for decidedly non-tech.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Lenehan: Half of US foundations maintain credit lines
“When we did our research, about half of the foundations in the country have credit lines, half don't.”
Disclosure
Wallace Foundation secured a $50M credit line for liquidity cushion
“So we're two billion dollars in AUM, our five percent Target is roughly a hundred million dollars. So half of that, fifty million dollars is what we took out.”
Disclosure
Some Wallace Foundation growth managers fell 50% from market peaks
“Some of our managers were down 10, 15% so far in 20, 22, that's a big number, and some of them are down 50% from their peaks.”
Disclosure
Lenehan: Wallace Foundation has no dedicated crypto funds but has Coinbase-invested managers
“So we don't have any dedicated crypto funds, but we have a couple, not all, but a couple of venture managers who were early investors in Coinbase.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wallace Foundation receives one pitch per day for new crypto funds
“We're getting a solicitation a day about a brand new crypto fund from some incumbent managers, from brand new managers, folks spinning out.”
Assertion Supported
Vista Equity Partners launched with a single captive investor, bypassing traditional fundraising
“They had just been around for a little bit, and they had one investor who provided all the capital. And so there wasn't fundraising involved. They actually had captive sources of money, which I thought was always a good thing.”
Assertion Supported
Rockefeller University's endowment earnings fund one-third of its annual operating budget
“Earnings from the endowment support about a third of our operating budget Every year.”
Assertion Supported
Rockefeller University operates on 'negative tuition' by paying students stipends
“Nobody pays tuition. Quite the opposite. We actually, if you want to be technical, we have negative tuition. We actually pay people. They're heavily recruited and they're paid stipends to attend Rockefeller.”
Disclosure
Rockefeller University increased its private market target allocation to 22%
“One of the things we did most recently at this February, getting back to your question about the February meeting, we increased our allocation of privates incrementally. So we went from, you know, originally it was five, 15%, then it was at 20% the last severa…”
Disclosure
Rockefeller University allocated over 10% of its endowment NAV to venture capital
“At the time, I think it was over 10% of our total NAV of the entire endowment was in venture. And of that, over half of it was healthcare, D.C.”
