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 61 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
Lew: I only give negative feedback to high-potential people and let others fail
“And when I don't like somebody, I don't say anything. Hey, just go and fail. I don't care. It does come down to that. And because it's painful, right? It's not comfortable to give people negative feedback. So I really only do it to the people who I care about …”
Liu: Legal documents do not protect limited partners when investments fail
“We spent a lot of time really thinking about how a manager would treat you when things went wrong, because the documents don't protect you. Ellen talked a lot about that. We have to know that they'll make the right decision when something goes wrong.”
Screening talent using elite sports like lacrosse inherently disadvantages diverse candidates
“Well, if that's your bias, you are going to disadvantage people of color. Let's just instead think about what Someone being on the lacrosse team tells you about them, and is there another proxy for that? That is more applicable for a person of color, or a pers…”
Diversifying large asset managers creates more impact than funding emerging ones
“I'm actually Of the belief that the bigger impact will be on getting the large firms to be more diverse. That has a bigger overall impact than funding diverse managers. Although I think the more bang for the buck is finding these new diverse managers to suppor…”
Carnegie found a direct correlation between manager performance and diversity scores
“There was a direct correlation to the highest ranked members of our portfolio. Those with the highest scores also had the highest diversity scores, and those were done independent of each other, and it was good to see, and it was good for us to then go back an…”
Research shows diverse manager return distribution exactly matches general funds
“The research has shown that the distribution in diverse and women managers is exactly the same as the distribution in the general funds without a diversity lens.”
High fundraising hurdles should make funded diverse managers perform better
“Arguably, they should be better because it's so hard for a diverse talent to get capital. If you do, chances are you're good, right? Like you may not be great, but you probably weed out all the average because there's not a lot of rich dads who give their dive…”
Lew: Outsized investment returns come from new perspectives unearthing untapped inefficiencies
“The best returns comes with out of the box thinking. These large firms are already seeped in how they do things. They have an established playbook. They will continue to execute on that playbook. Hard to compete with them on the playbook they have established.…”
Lew: Fund terms always favor GPs, making character alignment essential
“The terms are always gonna, in some way, favor the GP, so you just have to align yourself with a GP who you think in the crisis is going to do the right thing.”
Lew: Dead donors give foundations a structural advantage over university endowments
“An advantage a foundation has over an educational institution is the fact that no one feels like they own the capital that we have. Andrew's been dead a 108 years, and so he didn't leave anything to his heirs, and so there's no one who feels an ownership of th…”
Lew: Pension long bond demand keeps interest rates lower for longer
“Oh no, that, those rates are going to be low for a long time, because that demand for that long bond is so high, and so when I'm thinking about rates rising, and people kept saying it was going to happen, it was going to happen, and I was like, it's going to h…”
Liu: Former Ford Foundation CIO Linda Strumpf completely rejected alternative investments
“Linda Strumpf was the CEO of the Ford Foundation at the time, and she did not believe in alternatives at all. And she felt like anything that you can do in the private markets, you could do in the public markets without giving up liquidity.”
Liu: A co-CIO structure places a promotion ceiling on the investment team
“We were concerned about the co-CIO structure, not because we were concerned about each other, but we knew it put a ceiling on the rest of the team. That when Elisa came and expressed interest in being deputy CIO, we knew that wasn't possible. It's not possible…”
Liu: Chief investment officers stay too long and portfolios need refreshing
“I knew that one of the big problems with CIOs is they stay too long. And I do think portfolios need refresh.”
Liu: Columbia withheld its endowment manager names until my first day
“They wouldn't give me any of the portfolio before I joined. They said they had signed NDAs with their managers, and so they couldn't disclose anything. So I had big picture portfolio information, but not a single manager name. So I walked into a portfolio Nove…”
Lew: Positive Asian stereotypes provided early access and advantages
“I'm also painfully aware that the positive stereotypes of being Asian also helped us In those environments, like it gave us access to a lot of things, or people assumed, like they assumed I was good at math for some reason, and so when I was good at math, peop…”
Carnegie deliberately hired an Asian man to diversify a female-heavy team
“And honestly, we started with trying to add a man. Because our team was so heavily women, and I said that in a conference one day, because Ken Lee was the hire, and he's a, obviously a man, and he's an Asian man, and at a conference, I said he was our diversit…”
Lew: Scarcity mindset is the biggest barrier to diversity in finance
“I think it's the perception that the pie is shrinking. It's the biggest obstacle, right? Like it's really hard to For people to think outside of themselves when they feel threatened. If you think as a person in a position of power, if you think that in order f…”
Lew: Managers should own self-interest instead of feigning LP alignment
“I think my biggest investment pet peeve is one, when you have a conversation with a manager about alignment,
And they try to pretend that they either don't understand it or that they are aligned.
You know when you're not aligned.
You know when you're propos…”
Lew: Allocators cannot succeed without manager access, despite having elite talent
“You can be, have the best people of the world. If you don't have access, then you cannot be successful, and I think that's an access advantage that we have, and the people are the second advantage”
Carnegie's investment committee rejected only one investment during Lew's tenure
“In the whole time that I've been here, and as far as I know, ever, there's only been one investment that did not get through committee”
Lew: Investors cannot remain invested in Argentina over long market cycles
“And do we think that you can stay invested in Argentina over long cycles? No. We're going to have to eventually take our money out of that.”
Liu: Ford Foundation prohibited investment staff from emailing program staff
“The Ford Foundation kept investments completely separate from the rest of the foundation. In fact, discouraged any kind of interaction. I think that when I first got there, you couldn't even email the program staff if you were on the investment staff.”
Liu: Extensive investment memos reveal whether allocators truly understand risk
“The point that Elisa just made about the length of our memos, you just can't overstate that. And at the time it feels like, oh my God, we have to write this long memo. But this is how you really figured out if you understood the risk of what was going on. And …”
Liu: International research trips should evaluate macroeconomic conditions, not specific deals
“We grew as investors because we weren't going to those trips to make investments. We were going on those trips to decide what conditions needed to exist for us to make investments.”
Liu: CIOs cannot manage inherited portfolios because allocation reflects personal strengths
“A CIO can't manage another CIO's portfolio because you really do gravitate to your strengths.”
Liu: Smaller allocators must influence managers through thought leadership, not size
“We're not going to be able to influence managers by our size. It has to be because they think we're smart. So how do you show people you're smart? You serve on panels, you ask good questions in meetings, you become engaged and offer advice to managers.”
Liu: Harvard Business School prepares students for executive roles 30 years out
“And that's one of the complaints I've always had about business school, HBS in general. They teach you how to do the job you're going to have 30 years from now, not the job when you first come out of school.”
Lew: Alienation and Self-Doubt Severely Hinder Class Participation at HBS
“It's really hard to do well at HBS if you don't speak up in class. If you have so much self doubt and you are always wondering about whether someone is perceiving you as not belonging there or less than, it's much harder to speak up than it is when you feel li…”
Kim Lew: Understanding diverse perspectives gives investors an edge
“There is going to be advantages to those who take the time to understand that not everybody thinks like you. Not everybody has your same shared experience, and so the reaction to this thing is not going to be the same. And so you can leverage that to make good…”
Lew: Slow turnover and concentrated portfolios hinder foundation manager diversity
“The turnover in our portfolios is really slow, so if you're not purposeful and deliberate about it, it's difficult for it to happen, and I also think we have really small teams, so we're always trying to have really concentrated portfolios, and so all that sta…”
Carnegie evaluates asset manager diversity using a one-to-three scoring system
“We only score, it's one, two, or three. So it's sort of a blunt instrument. So I don't want to imply that it's not. One is you have diversity in your team. You have either ownership, decision-making of women and underrepresented minorities in your leadership. …”
Carnegie expects all portfolio managers to achieve a diversity score of two
“We don't want anybody in the portfolio not to be at least a two over all the different metrics, but it's about being better.”
Lew: Diverse fund challenges stem from sourcing and business-building, not investment ability
“I do think there's a sourcing issue, and there's a business building issue, but I don't think there's an investment issue.”
Lew: The biggest opportunity for diverse perspectives is in illiquid alternatives
“That said, probably the biggest bang for the buck is in alternatives. It's probably in illiquid asset classes. It's in people who think differently about venture or private equity and Even probably real estate on some level.”
Lew: Bank and PE analyst programs remain critical for diverse networks
“It's still important for people to have programs that cultivate diverse talent at investment banks, at commercial banks, at private equity firms as analysts. I mean, that's still hugely important because that's where the networks come from.”
Lew: Most successful Black and Hispanic bankers have links to SEO
“They had a phenomenal alumni network, just all the highly successful people who are Black and Hispanic people have come out of the investment banking industry since that era. Most of them have some links to SEO.”
Investment mistakes often stem from expecting flawed managers to eventually change
“I think every one of my investment bad mistakes are things where there was something about it that wasn't quite right, but I thought they just need to be shown the way and they will change that thing.
People only change when they want to change.
You can't ma…”
Lew: Carnegie conducts triennial whole-team research trips without predefined theses
“So the Carnegie team does team trips every three years. Whole team goes, and the idea is we don't necessarily have a fully developed thesis before we go. That's why everybody goes, and everybody can ask questions, and the assumption is that it perhaps isn't so…”
Lew: The Carnegie investment team's 32nd-floor penthouse sparks internal staff tension
“Right now, the investment staff in our office is on the 32nd floor, and everybody's below, so they call us the penthouse, and that they're section eight, and like, why the investment team in the penthouse?”
Lew: Ford liquidated $1.8B in tech distributions right before dot-com crash
“We literally had about 1.9 billion dollars in our distribution portfolio,
because the
Distributions were coming so fast that we literally were losing stock certificates because people were sending them in the mail.
And back then the transfer agents were not ef…”
Ford Foundation barred buyout investing due to board anti-takeover bias
“The board in prior iterations had been a lot of captains of industry who had been the victims of hostile takeovers, and so they felt that the LBO market was unsavory, so they did not allow the Ford Foundation to invest in buyouts.
But they would let them inves…”
Lew: Endowments lost sourcing leverage as manager capital options expanded
“The foundations in the dynamic community had a lot more leverage. So you had leverage with managers. That's what made them become known as the smart money because you were doing these sort of more interesting structures and strategies. Very different than it i…”
Lew: Foundations lost their reputation for capital stability after 2008
“The concept of The foundations being really steady and reliable sources of capital was prevalent, and everybody believed that. It changed after 2008 when people were not as stable of source of capital, but at the time, every buy-out fund wanted foundations in …”
Ford Foundation under Linda Strump held no hedge funds, capped PE
“Linda at the time didn't believe in hedge funds. The private equity portfolio was 10%. That was it.”
Carnegie Co-CIOs divided asset classes to maintain future solo CIO marketability
“One, we each had to be managing a full diverse portfolio so that when we went out to interview for jobs later on, We could say we had played the role of a CIO managing a cross asset class. So it wasn't a, you do publics and I do privates, or you do illiquids, …”
Carnegie's $10M Peruvian fund commitment highlights scale advantage over Yale
“We did a manager that had a twenty million dollar fund, and we did 10 of it. We can do that. Yale can't do that. It doesn't make sense. I mean, they could do it. They have the skills to do it, but it's not a good use of their time”
Declining returns will force endowments toward more idiosyncratic alpha investments
“I think it's gonna have to be more if we're gonna continue to outperform, because I think returns are coming down, and if returns are gonna come down, and our five percent payout is not coming down, we're just gonna have to find different ways to create alpha,…”