Grantham: Endowment boards struggle to manage giant egos of wealthy PE and VC donors
Jeremy Grantham · Jeremy Grantham – Bubbles, Value Investing, and the Long Game at GMO (EP.493) · Mar 23, 2026 · at 56:42
Jeremy Grantham (co-founder of GMO) discusses governance friction and committee dynamics inside institutional college endowments with Ted Seides.
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“Many committees are a nearly impossible task where, particularly in the endowment business, colleges, because rich graduates who've made big donations, Would love to sit on the board. They are treated with kid gloves because they're wonderfully good at making money at private equity or venture capital or hedge funds does not mean that they know everything about everything. But it makes it, for the relatively lowly paid hired guns, it's an impossibly difficult job to try and manage these giant egos.”
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