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 2,568 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
Sacca: We manage for return multiples, not IRR, and avoid credit lines
“I don't manage for IRR. I manage for multiples. So we don't run a line of credit, for instance. That would be a much better way to eke out another point of IRR, but that's not how I want to run the business.”
Amy Falls: Northwestern targets 8% to 10% portfolio exposure to China
“We've sort of defaulted to eight to 10% of the portfolio, which is probably underweight relative to GDP, but probably bad on when you look at market cap and percentage of total private equity. So I think we're kind of neutral, but we're not abandoning the fiel…”
Lasry: Avenue Capital is no longer comfortable investing in China
“Five years ago, we were comfortable investing in China. Today, we're not.”
Craib: Numerai does not build or know its models' underlying architectures
“We don't even build the models. Our data scientists do, and we don't even know what they built. Like, they might have used a neural network, or they might have done something else. We don't know.”
Overfunded Textron Pension Ignores LDI Strategies To Maintain Growth Focus
“So we're about a 116% funded and we still remain growth focused. We do not have an LDI focused plan.”
Rees: Dyal operates permanent capital funds with zero investor redemption rights
“We look like a private equity fund on the way in, we get commitments from investors, we call capital to do deals, but we never plan on selling a partnership or ending a partnership, and we really don't ever have a way for investors to elect to redeem. There's …”
Kirkland cycles out PE partners in their fifties to recycle equity
“Ensuring that our younger superstars are compensated properly, the way to do that is we don't have a lot of people in their sixties, let alone seventies, stay around our firm, particularly on the private equity side.
Litigation can be a little different, but c…”
Kirkland avoids political issues due to asymmetrical downside with clients and staff
“We decided that it was best to stay apolitical, stay neutral on highly politically charged topics, which, by the way, happened not to be the core of what we do. That's not what we do as a business. We decided it's asymmetrical downside, because if you get invo…”
Samuels: NEPC resists paying 2-and-20 fees for PE returns driven by leverage
“We're happy to pay two in 20 for the first two, not so much for use of leverage, but it's interesting because some GPs think about the world that way, but many just say, well, it's all alpha.”
Discovery Capital Maintained a Short China Stance Since August 2021
“Well, we think the currency in China is a great short. So it's one of our larger positions. We're short than the CNH. We do have some individual equity shorts there. We've been short China since August last year”
Dixon: a16z Crypto never joins party rounds and only leads investments
“When we invest, we don't do quote unquote party rounds. We don't put a little bit of money here and dabble. We either invest and lead and back up the truck and put all our resources behind it and roll up our sleeves or we don't invest.”
Tribune buyout underwrote a 6% revenue drop; reality was 35%
“It was a deal where we assumed that the newspaper business was shrinking. We did an underwriting, whereas instead of underwriting revenue going up, we underwrote revenue going down. We assumed the level of suppression. And that number was six percent a year. W…”
Sethi: Tribe Capital's portfolio loss ratio has always been under 5%
“And so historically, and up until this day, you know, fast forward four or five years since we started, our loss ratios have always been sub five percent.”
Wolfe: Lux Avoids Nuclear Startups Because Timelines Depend on Public Acceptance
“People that are pursuing nuclear power today, at the moment, do not count us as investors. Because I believe that the timeframes are not dependent upon the technology development. They're dependent on popular acceptance.”
Wolfe: VCs Will Never Admit Slowing Investments to Protect Deal Flow
“We will never publicly come out and say, we're slowing down our pace. Because anybody that does that is going to lose deal flow.”
Hamed: Crossbeam allocates more capital to initial rounds, less to follow-ons
“We actually have the point of view that during a market like this, we're actually loading up more of our checks into the initial round and then doing less into the follow on round, especially for our best companies.”
Grinda: Auto-signed angel legal documents to exit without reading them
“And in fact, I wouldn't even read any of the legal docs they ever sent me. I auto signed or docu signed every single doc they sent me from the investment docs all the way to the exit without even reading them.”
Grinda: FJ Labs is too diversified to ever be a 10x fund
“We will never be a 10 X fund just because we're too diversified for that. Any one fund will never be top to sell.”
Grinda: FJ Labs blindly backs previous successful founders in their next ventures
“And number three, founders we backed in the past that have done well for us, we will back them blindly in whatever they do next.”
Grinda: FJ Labs restricts VC introductions to 5th-35th percentile portfolio companies
“Now, we don't do that for all of them. We do it typically for the fifth to 35th percentile companies in the portfolio. The top five percent usually don't need us, and the bottom 50th percentile will tell them where they send, will tell them what we think they …”
CAZ Investments charges zero management fees on most of its investment offerings
“In most cases, we don't charge management fees at all. We just get paid a percentage of the profits. And if there is no profit, we don't get paid.”
Jain: Multicoin worries more about entry liquidity than exit liquidity
“While a lot of people get worried about exit liquidity, honestly, given our level of conviction in these assets, I'm more worried about entry liquidity. Will we be able to buy this at scale again?”
Sternlicht: Starwood Brooklyn Hotel Faces Severe Staffing Deficit Despite $10 Wage Hike
“I was at the, our hotel in Brooklyn last night and we have 200 and 20 people on staff and we're missing 40 people. And we're running a full hotel and we can't run the hotel. We can't do room service. Some of our, we're having job fairs and we've raised rates 1…”
Ellis: Man Group refuses fee structures taking 60% of alpha
“I firmly believe that the client needs to get the majority of the returns needs to get the majority of the alpha. And so we won't do something which while it might make a net return for the client that the client might be interested in, but where 60% of the al…”
Thoma Bravo Now Operates as a Growth Investor in SaaS
“We are really growth investors in companies where you can add significant value to your product ongoing because you have to. If not, you'll be displaced by another SaaS solution.”
Rubenstein: Carlyle pioneered the multi-product platform model in private equity
“If Carlisle was innovative in anything, it was probably the idea that we would try to create a fidelity or a T. Rowe price of private equity, which is to say, We wouldn't have one buyout fund every four years. We'd have a buyout fund, and then after we raised …”
Grantham: Foundation targets 70% allocation to early-stage venture capital
“And in our case, we can own early stage, and we are over 60%. We target 70%, early stage VC. And of that, we target up to a half in the green variety”
Vista portfolio companies deliver average customer ROI exceeding 600%
“And today, the average ROI, return on investment, of the products that we sell to our customers, so this is the customer's benefit, is over 600%.”
Alderbas: PIFSS restricts Asian allocations strictly to market-neutral funds
“In the US, it's all about execution speed and technology, and we're going to go with the startups. We're only going to go occasionally with the fundamentals that have an edge or something depreciated. Asia, we said we're going to go only with the market neutra…”
Moseley: APFC Pulled Back From GP Stakes, Favors Manager Seeding
“So because of the pricing environment, and because of the time intensity, we haven't invested a lot of time and energy in stakes recently. I view the seeding business as a challenging but more sustainable opportunity.”
Moseley: Not interested in staying at APFC without competitive resources
“If we're able to deliver those resources, which really just translate into money and focus, a larger team, a well-paid team, if we can't deliver those resources, then we won't win. And I'm not really interested in sticking around if we don't have the tools to …”
Liow: Aravt Global spends under a third of research time generating short alpha
“Us as an institution, we would spend less than a third of our time short selling less than a third. And we can sustain five to 800 basis points a short alpha by doing that because we've built up seven years of inventory.”
Sonnenshein: Grayscale relies on sister firm Genesis for all asset sourcing
“So our authorized participant and does all of our sourcing and trading for us is our sister firm called Genesis. They're a broker dealer based here in New York.”
Vanguard chose private equity over hedge funds and liquid alternatives
“We did a ton of research on liquid alternatives, hedge funds, all the different asset classes. We kept coming back to private equity as an area that we felt was enduring, that could improve our client outcomes”
Vanguard's long-term aspiration is democratizing private equity for retail investors
“If you read the press release that we put out, we're starting in the OCIO. We're starting in the QP on the high net worth side, but our long run aspiration is to democratize this asset class.”
Chamath: Building a 21st-century Berkshire has always been my ambition
“I wanted to build Berkshire And that was always my ambition.”
Social Capital allows emerging managers a 30% drawdown before intervening
“We give you a 30% drawdown before we really get involved so that you can learn the business of managing losses.”
Chamath admits his viral anti-social media Stanford speech was a mistake
“One of the biggest ones was probably my speech at Stanford. You know, I gave a speech, and it's gotten pretty famous, and I kind of threw all of social media under the bus in 2016, and a lot of what I said came to pass. But it was a huge mistake, not because I…”
Gotham Capital traditionally concentrated 80% of its portfolio in six ideas
“Well, the big picture, our portfolio six to eight ideas were traditionally 80 plus percent of our portfolio.”
Gotham hires elite quant engineers for risk balancing but bars stock selection
“We have a tech guys who are very sophisticated, you know, one guy, one Google code jam, another one's MIT chess jam. And we need those guys to balance our portfolios, but they're not picking stocks. I picked those guys because they have no idea how to pick sto…”
Wilson redeemed nearly half of WashU's endowment in his first weeks
“We put in redemptions for almost half the portfolio in the first several weeks.”
WashU turned over 80% of its legacy endowment portfolio in three years
“At this point, I think we've probably turned over. 70, 80% of the original pool, even more than 80%, actually. So the vast majority of it's been turned over and those we've kept, we've added capital to and concentrated exposures.”
Mizuno: GPIF Mandated ESG Integration and Externality Control for Active Managers
“Last year, GPF made a very clear, explicit statement to our active managers that GPF expects all our active managers to integrate ESG into their investment analysis and decision making, and also, we Choose the active managers who control the negative externali…”
Blood: Generation has avoided hydrocarbon investments for a decade on economic grounds
“So, for example, we have not owned energy businesses for a decade. We've not owned hydrocarbon businesses because we don't think they're priced properly. They haven't really priced the fact of climate change, and we think they have a significant stranded asset…”
Bob Litterman's climate risk models price carbon above $100 per ton.
“What I found when I looked into this was that the number that came out of the model, it was hard to get it down below, say, a hundred dollars a ton.”
Oxford Endowment operates without a policy portfolio, flexing equities between 45-80%
“The way our asset allocation today is we don't have a policy portfolio. We have a group of broad asset groups we call risk assets, and we have ranges around which we can move them. So we have equities, and that can be anywhere between 45 to 80% of the whole po…”
Fitzpatrick pulled prime brokerage assets from parent bank UBS in 2008
“So we were wholly owned by UBS, and we actually had prime brokerage kind of assets exposed at that point in time, and actually one of the somewhat controversial decisions I made was I pulled from a number of different prime brokers, but UBS was one of them.”
Big League Advance raised a $130M Fund II at 3-and-30 fees
“Our first one was a two and 20 and our twenty six million, our hundred and thirty million dollar fund was a three and 30. And so we actually took us five weeks to raise that. We actually raised 182, but I had to return fifty two million because there's only so…”