The Ledger
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Lenehan: Wallace Foundation relies primarily on pre-existing relationships for manager commitments
“I would say the vast majority of the things that we put on the books here at Wallace have been relationships that I've had either at Rockefeller or Wintergren or any of the other organizations in which I'm affiliated with.”
Staff are not evaluated on whether sourced deals make the portfolio
“No one's going to get graded on whether or not their idea made it in the portfolio. At the end of the day, we all make that decision.”
Lenehan: Investment memos should distill impactful points, not document all diligence
“One of the things that, that I had to train folks at Rockefeller when they came from other jobs, they put everything and anything into the memo. And I said, let's just distill this down. We're not going to put all the work that we did, you know, quite the oppo…”
Wallace Foundation re-underwrites incumbent manager re-ups identically to new managers
“We re-underwrite any commitment to capital, whether it's to a new manager or to an incumbent the same way, but really have to be thoughtful.”
Wallace Foundation committee voted to decarbonize portfolio in 2021
“We actually made a decision last year at the committee to decarbonize the portfolio.”
Time is the only controllable variable for institutional allocators
“Not every email, I hate to say this, not every email deserves a response. And so you got to be very picky. It's a broader idea that you got to be very picky with how you spend your time. That is the one thing I can say that we can control in this crazy world i…”
Lenehan: Fully exit unwanted positions immediately rather than dollar-cost averaging
“It was a good lesson learned. It was like, look, if you figured it out that you don't want that position, then you don't have to dollar cost, just get out and move on to bigger amount of things.”
Lenehan: Wallace Foundation avoids being a first mover in new asset classes
“When it's something that's brand new, we don't ever want to be the first mover. Here at Wallace.”
Ford: Private equity leadership succession must be a multi-year transition
“In investing, and in particular, maybe in private equity, but I think beyond private equity, some of these transitions should be fairly long-term, and the reason being is that something like the Wallace Foundation, you entrust your capital to us for a decade, …”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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%.”
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.”
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.”