The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Marshall: Private equity managers must halt deals and focus on operations
“I'm a big believer that the people who we trust with our capital need to be pencils down and really working with the portfolio companies. We have had five to seven years of Massive amounts of capital going into buying private firms and taking companies private…”
Marshall: ESG improvement yields lower capital costs and higher exit multiples
“You will have a lower cost of capital, and you will have a higher exit multiple. So the incentive structure should be aligned to doing the right thing, not because it's the right thing, but because you're going to make more money.”
Marshall: Current ESG social scores mean little due to slow industry demographics
“What you really want in the S is to have more senior professionals, either people of color or women, but in many industries that will take decades. And so to give a score today, I don't know that it means much.”
Laboy: Allocators should never second-guess managers during due diligence
“The goal is To ask managers questions that hopefully create new thoughts, but you never want to come across like you're second guessing a manager. That's not our job. Our job is to understand them and to understand whether our strategies are aligned.”
Laboy: Hewlett Foundation reduced value manager exposure during the COVID pandemic
“We ended up starting to reduce our exposure to, for example, value managers. We thought value would just be a tougher place to be going forward.”
Laboy: Hewlett separates evaluating macro opportunity sets from specific manager selection
“When we're selecting a manager, we break apart opportunity set and manager selection. The steps are, we gain conviction on the opportunity set. Because we run as one team, one approach, Once we have an idea of the opportunity set, like at Everest, we're lookin…”
Laboy: Direct investors in LP roles must recalibrate their decision cadence
“There's a difference in cadence in decision making, even in the amount of research and analysis you do for every decision. You're calibrating that all the time. And I had perfected that for a high turnover world of direct investing. And when you move over to t…”
Laboy: Top portfolio managers show coherence between strategy and emotional makeup
“This is what makes great PMs. Coherence. Their investment strategy aligns with how they think. Their emotional makeup. That's the most important thing we look for with a manager, is their alignment between their strategy and how they think.”
Marshall: Institutional allocators have an ethical duty to assist peer LPs
“If you're going up and they've got a person stuck, even though you're trying to make it to the next turn around the mountain, it's your ethical responsibility to help them out, and I am 100% in that camp. We are here to manage money on behalf of institutions t…”
Marshall: Allocator teams must match the portfolio's lifecycle stage
“If you're building from scratch, you need people who love finding new managers. The joy in their life is to meet with seven managers a day. Find really one or two, do a ton of due diligence. That gives them joy. If you put a person like that in a mature portfo…”
Marshall: Allocators must separate opportunity set analysis from manager selection
“It's key, and it's a great bridge to manager selection, is to separate the opportunity set. Because I think sometimes we pull together manager selection and opportunity set, and I think you have to separate those out between the GP quality, which we can get in…”
Sargent: Foundation investors prioritize principles over outperforming peer institutions
“Well, that's another interesting thing about foundations is the goal is less to outperform other foundations. We have a lot of large foundations with whom we're working pretty closely on the grant making side. Issues, climate, social justice, whatever it is. I…”
Marshall: Hewlett prioritizes ESG improvers over already-good companies
“I think the getting better is what we should be aiming for. I mean, the point is, isn't to reward the ones that already are good. A lot of the point of our granting dollars is to improve conditions, and so I think from a philosophical perspective as part of He…”
Marshall: Foundation investment teams are enabling utilities, not the stars
“We're all here to generate the money so that the Hewlett Foundation can do what it does. We are not the stars of the play. We are here as the little wheel on the corner.”
Marshall: Hewlett enforces strict one-in, one-out manager policy
“For every manager that they want to bring into the portfolio, somebody else is leaving. I give them maybe a margin of one extra guy, but that's it. I am pretty merciless on this one.”
Many major foundations remain below their 2007 peak values due to illiquidity
“That fight for cash Left some of them still permanently impaired. Some of those foundations still have not gotten back to their 2007 high watermark.”
Laboy: The Hewlett Foundation made a major allocation to Japanese equities
“We have eventually bought big. We're invested in Japan.”
Marshall: Hewlett runs a concentrated portfolio to support high-touch GP partnerships
“It's a very high touch model, which is why we run a concentrated portfolio.”
Marshall: Hewlett pitches managers as empathetic former direct investors
“And so our pitch is, we were once in your seat. We know what it is to be in your seat. And we really believe in your ability to generate returns for us. And we are longstanding partners, and we are here to help.”
Marshall: Hewlett pitches managers on funding planet and women's empowerment
“We have a very coordinated pitch in the sense that we, if we're allowed in, every dollar you make for us goes to save the planet for women's reproductive health or for women's economic empowerment.”
Ana Marshall conducted about 75 CEO and CFO visits annually at Hewlett
“I still, for the first, I would say, 10 years of being here, I still managed about 75 CEO, CFO visits a year. Of companies in the portfolio, or companies that were adjacent enough to the portfolio that would help me inform how to manage the portfolio.”