YouSaid · the spoken record

Abigail Wattley

lines on the record: 61
first: 2026-06-22
most recent: 2026-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Just enjoy the ride. We don't have a lot of time. I'm a believer, it's all going to work out trusting the process and that things do have a way of working out. Let's enjoy what we get to do because we're really lucky to get to be here, to get to do this job. Remembering that is really important.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the recognition, the appreciation of everybody's humanity. This is a team that shows up every day and works hard when I can see them as their whole selves. They can bring their best selves to work. We can do great work together.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a quote that I have taped to my desk Life is short and we do not have much time, so make haste to be kind and be swift to love.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to practice violin every day, and you'd rather be playing outside on the playground or watching the Red Sox, learning an instrument when you're eight years old is hard. These are the life lessons that I hope they learn from it. Consistency, discipline, and breaking down a problem into its components.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hobbies are done in conjunction with my family. I have two little kids. They are Suzuki violinists. I was a violinist. One of my favorite things is getting to practice with them. It's not always fun. There are sometimes R tiers when I get to take out my violin and we get to play music together. It's special.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can be daunting to understand our mandate and to think about it in big picture terms, what we need to be able to do. Whenever I get daunted by the task at hand, the best thing for me to do is come back to, well, what is it that we can do today to work towards that goal? Showing up every day, getting to work beside a great team and making good decisions, talking everything through, double checking our work, hustling. This team is well positioned to do all of that, but it is just going to be the accumulation of hard work day in and day out that is going to lead to great results. There isn't going to be some magic bullet or asset class or manager that we're going to come across that's going to be the answer to it all. It's going to be that compounding of great work.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty simple. It's making money for the college. It's doing a great job for Williams. That is absolutely our North Star. We want to put up strong performance. We are competitive about what we're doing here. It's important to the college. We're all big believers in the mission and the work that the college is doing.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It didn't tell me intriguing questions. It was good at summarizing your style. Ted is a very conversational, very good at asking an opening question and then probing deeper. He also loves anecdotes, so the more you can give colorful examples, that makes your answers more powerful. It felt like I had a presentation coach with me.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extremely effective in helping prepare me for this conversation today. Those are the kinds of use cases that we will continue to pursue. Somebody discovered recently that it's great at suggesting off sheet references. We found some really good offsheet references by saying this is who we're doing diligence on, who in my network would you talk to? Those are examples. I don't think they're revolutionary, but we're using it and we're excited.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The obvious use case is the LLMs and their ability to help enhance our diligence processes to get up to speed more quickly on a particular sector. At a really interesting conversation recently with my LLM on what was going on in private credit, where the risks were, and how we really should be thinking about the questions we need to be talking, for example, to our biote managers about that was really helpful for me preparing me for some conversations. I'll share a funny story about preparing for the conversation with you today. I didn't have a lot of time this weekend to cram. One of the things that I was able to do was take a handful of the podcasts that you've done with other CIOs that I admire. Said to it, I'm going to be talking to Ted this week. I need your help preparing. Here's some examples of interviews he's done in the past. Can you practice an interview with me? It was.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slow finding that happy medium has been fun. And it's a project. One of our key goals and objectives for the team for this year. We have a two-day process in the summer where we set out all our goals and objectives for the year. We have multiple different working groups across the team that are focused on different themes within AI. Everybody on the team is on at least one team, if not more. We cannot leave anybody behind. We meet regularly to talk about work streams, progress, what we're learning, and what we should be trying, sharing a lot of insights. It's fun. It's interesting. It's exciting. I don't think we have the answer yet, but we're working on it.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're having so much fun thinking about this challenge. Really lucky that we have a team that is open-minded about what technology can bring to our process. So I think we're going to figure this out in a really exciting way. We are in a place of learning as much as we can. The technology is changing so quickly that in some ways it feels premature to put a big stake in the ground and make some big investment or process change when in a quarter from now the tools that are available to us could look entirely different or 10 times better. We are experimenting right now without fundamentally redoing things. Our team is eager about lots of new ideas, figuring out how do we do things that feel reasonable at the same time. I don't think we need to be quite on the bleeding edge of discovering everything that's a risk we don't need to be taking, but we cannot afford to be.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the things that we have been doing over the last few years is exploring areas of the market where we hadn't historically participated. There are talented people in so many different areas. Not being too dogmatic about what works and what doesn't work, being open-minded, that we may find things in places that historically we hadn't. And let's go revisit those. That has opened up a lot of opportunity for us. We can still use the playbook of Go Find Best in Class Managers. That has not changed. But if as part of that playbook, you say the areas in which you can do that have expanded because we're open to different kinds of strategies, that creates opportunity.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tend to lean more on the cooperative side. It's not as if we are going to block somebody out from an opportunity or they're going to block us out. We can still be meaningful at a reasonable check size. We're cognizant of the fact that we are a small team. We're seven investment people covering the global opportunity set when we can benefit from another person's perspective. We are happy to take the input, the advice. That's not a one-way street. You have to be willing to share. On the margin, we would prefer to be cooperative, learn from other people's experiences. We're competitive in that we want to produce an excellent return for Williams. And we know how that stacks up relative to our peers. We want it to look great. We also believe we can do that with some cooperation.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All over. We did this analysis a couple years ago, and I shouldn't update it at the time. Our data told us about 50% of them stay in asset management, broadly defined and 50% go on to do other amazing things, which is fantastic too. The 50% that stay are at other LPs, which is fun for us to get to network with them. Some of them are at other GPs, which again is useful and interesting to us”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our team check ins, updates, and we have a rigorous performance process, management process, all of those good practices. We try to do well by them.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opportunity to develop talent. Our first dedicated analyst program started back in 2010. We also have a winner study class we teach on campus. We also have a summer internship program that we run through the investment office. We now have over 150 students that have participated between one of our three programs, which is amazing. We like to say we eat our own cooking. We believe in young talent. We want to be part of developing people for the future. whether it's programmatically with our analysts or more broadly with more experienced members of our investment team. What we're very good about is communicating on a one-on-one basis with people. What is it that you're interested in? How can we make sure that your learning curve stays steep? If it's feeling like it's flattening, what else can we do to help make sure that we're steepening it again? I spend a lot of time with members of”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of my favorite parts of the job. We have an amazing team here, smart, dedicated, focused. It is a really interesting challenge for me to figure out how do I stay relevant to them and value add to the process. One of the things that I've come to realize that is valuable about my time is the opportunity to be able to think more broadly about the portfolio. My analogy is that it's being a snowplow getting out on the streets before everybody else is awake, making sure that the streets that you think your team is going to want to go down, you've had a chance to just check out and make sure they're clear that they can run as fast as they want to run. You're happy for them to be on those roads that you've gone around the corner. Not the same time you're running back to the rear too and making sure did everything that I thought was getting done, keep moving forward in the right direction. We value the opportunity.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the technology that we adapted within the process we could have done even faster and certainly now with AI top of mind for me because I'm trying to figure out how do we do that at the right speed. There are some changes to the portfolio that we were careful about making. There are a couple more changes to the portfolio that I'd like to make. Part of me wishes we had done it a quarter or two earlier.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you stay respectful to all of that, yet make your mark and do things your way, the tension between the two and what's the right balance? There's no right answer to that. You have to feel your way through that. I remember saying at one point to Nate, if I'm going too fast with anything, will you tell me if that's the case? He said, I don't think that's going to be the case. More likely than not, you're going to look back at where you are after three years and say, gosh, I wish I had done some of these things sooner as I'm coming up to July 1st will be three years. I'm so happy with where we sit today. Even some of the things that we have done, if we could only have done that even faster, that would have been great. It's not necessarily a mistake. You have to have some time to build your confidence. I don't know that I could have gone back and done it differently. It's okay to do things the way that you want to do them.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to say it's a mistake, it's a piece of advice that I will credit to our current investment committee chair, who's amazing Nate Sleeper. One of the things that I was wrestling with was this tension between respecting our history and understanding that part of the reason that they were interested in promoting an internal candidate was they liked what was happening. I did too. We had a”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can feel very consequential because you feel like you're establishing the expectations, the path, the process you think about things a lot, and it's exhausting. Eventually you've set the path, some of those little decisions weigh on you a lot less and you can start to focus on the big ones. Somebody can tell you that that's how it's going to be the reality of having to hold that on your shoulders is different.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that reminded me the most of was becoming a parent because it's the kind of thing where people can tell you what it's going to be like or you think you know what it's going to be like. The reality of it is still entirely different when somebody hands you a child and says this is yours. Good luck. I also felt fortunate that I knew the portfolio. I knew our committee. I knew the college and I knew the team. I still felt like, oh, wow, this is new and different. I'm impressed with people who take on this seat and don't have all of that context. It is different when at the end of the day you are the person with whom the responsibility sits. Early on, one of the things that becomes challenging, but you eventually learn to deal with is the number of decisions that come your way. Some of them are teeny tiny, some of them are really big and everything in between. Early on, even the smallest decision.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came off of zero, but it's still a modest position, it's 1% position in our portfolio, and it's meant to be that rainy day. It's not a big piece of what we do anymore. It used to be 10% of the portfolio back in fixed income heyday. So it's changed a lot. And then real assets, similarly, we no longer do funds dedicated to the extraction of oil and gas. What does it mean to manage a real assets portfolio in that context has had to change and evolve? We're still trying to figure that out. I'm a believer. I've seen that asset class work over time. It can be really diversifying for a portfolio. We are not abandoning the strategy. We have had to be thoughtful about what it means in today's context. We have a couple managers that we like. We're doing things in power, some renewable infrastructure and things of that nature, which we're really excited about. We have to keep pushing and figuring out what it means.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much, I was reflecting. I remember it was August of 2011 when the US got downgraded. I was managing an investment grade fixed income portfolio. That was my first moment of panic. Oh no, I'm probably supposed to know what this is going to mean for the portfolio. It happened on a Friday night. I remember being in the office all weekend trying to figure out what is this going to mean for our portfolio. It turns out it didn't mean much. We've been on an interesting episodic journey with investment grade fixed income. It came out of the portfolio entirely. I think in 2019, we don't take a view on interest rates. That's really important. But as one of our committee members likes to say there was a higher probability that rates were going to go up than they were going to go down. It's not having a view, it's understanding what the probabilities are. We did reintroduce it about a year ago as rates.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invested. We only maintain between one and two percent of the portfolio in cash. That's why we have to be planful about our liquidity. That's a really important advantage long term because it means that the portfolio is in the markets and working. When you have a team of 11 people, as we do here, one of the things that we can be spending time on and thinking about is liquidity and where is it going to come from and planning for it. It becomes a win-win when we make that a priority.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about it so much. This is something Colette taught us very well, which is our number one purpose for being here is to support the college, period, end of story. There's no question that that is what we need to be able to do. Not having enough liquidity is not an option. We obsess over our liquidity position, by which I mean it is one of the key topics we cover every week as part of our team meeting. We are regularly going over every line item that comes in and out of the portfolio every week. We know what the forecast is for the next 12 months for every asset class and where the dollars are going. And importantly, where the money is going to come from to support the college, we're also as part of that stress testing it regularly. We also maintain $150 million worth of lines of credit for the investment office. These are really Belt and Suspenders, but if we needed it, we would have a backup source of liquidity. Or fully invested.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For that growth component, but it has had some impact on both the allocation and then what you're expected return might be from those asset classes.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where we're fortunate to be long term investors. We can be really patient for most of those companies. We agree with our venture managers that they're still compounding whether or not they're publicly traded. They're still great companies and we're going to benefit long term from their continued growth. It has had an impact on our asset allocation. One of the things that we did do over the last few years was increase our target to buyout's inventor. There were a number of reasons for that. Part of it is in recognition of the fact that there are a lot of companies staying private for longer and they're going to compound in your private portfolio. What's also interesting about that is whether or not you're still getting venture-like returns on those investments or are they something different? As long as their equity returns were generally comfortable because most important is we want to make sure we have a significant enough weight to equity broadly defined.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do we think we have enough good assumptions in this model? The other thing I will always say is the models are guidelines. We're mindful of the fact that we are not filling buckets. The model may tell us we need to do 150 million dollars of commitments this year. But if we don't see opportunity that matches that level, we're just going to do it. We also try to think about things that the average over the next three years versus any one year's commitment budget. It's a moving target. We get to adjust it a lot. It's responsive to the market. The headline numbers are bigger. That is a question mark for us.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting and tricky because one of the things that drives that too is how much growth do you expect from the overall pool, even when we have pushed out the expectation is distributions might be further out into the future when you pair that with this is the expected growth of the pool over time, it's not as dramatic as you would think. We've seen a little bit of a decline in the ventor portfolio. The model we're working on right now is telling us we still need to be stepping up commitments and buyouts, interestingly, which is”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about it all the time as a team. We talk about it with our amazing investment committee because our portfolio is very cycle tested. We are comfortable waiting, being patient. From our perspective, there is no big headline change in how we're thinking about the role of private asset classes. Where it does change is our modeling as it relates to our commitment-paced modeling if the expectation is going to be that things may be less liquid for a little bit longer, do we need to modestly slow down commitments or think about how big those asset classes could become stress testing some of those scenarios? Big picture, we're committed to the asset classes with the caveat that we're aware that timelines could be extended and we want to be mindful about what that means from a portfolio construction perspective.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The big question is whether or not that's come back in style if volatility is back and the ability to think about things both long and short, maybe back, rates are no longer zero. So that's also helpful. We look at things net of fees. We don't think of them from a cost perspective as the fees if net of fees they justify a role in the portfolio, then we are happy to have them. And there is some really good talent. I know as a classes go in and out of style a lot, what you have to ask yourself in that context is, did all the talent leave suddenly or is this a more difficult period of time? Hedge funds is a big monolith. There's plenty of talent still. Our job is to make sure that that's what we're accessing.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've had these longstanding relationships. We have the confidence to see through cycles. We have some amazing manager names that have done well for the portfolio.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hedge funds are no longer forty percent, but they're still meaningful. Today our target allocation across our long short and absolute return portfolio is 27% in aggregate. We're a believer. They have been a very important part of our portfolio, not only for meeting that return objective that I mentioned. They do so while maintaining our liquidity, also helping us to manage volatility. When you're spending 5% of the portfolio every year, all three of those mandates do matter something that gets lost when people talk about returns. If the goal of this endowment was to just put it in a drawer and not spend from it for 10 years, you might do something differently than if you knew you had to draw 5% from it every year. In that context, hedge funds make a lot of sense. They've obviously gone through many different cycles and periods where they've done better or worse. This is where Williams is fortunate in that.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that we don't do right now that we've wondered should we do more of, for example, we don't do co invest. We don't underwrite direct investments. We're at four and a half billion. We're probably still at a scale where that's okay, but at some point in time that may be a muscle that we need to build. Another thing we talk a lot about, but we haven't done much of is participate in the secondary market, whether it's selling pieces of our existing portfolio or buying pieces of other portfolios. That takes a lot of time and work and effort and bandwidth that hasn't historically been part of our practice.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the more quantitative strategies, which were not historically represented in our portfolio, at least getting the comfort to say we should know the space. We should be smart about whether or not maybe there is something to be doing here. We complement each other well enough to be willing to go do that work.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have re underwritten the entire portfolio because you have to when you have new people coming on board and taking over responsibility for asset classes, that has been humbling. Some of these were asset classes that I might have originally built up when you look at some of these things through the eyes of another person, you do realize there are certain places where maybe you have gotten more complacent or you've let the story run a little too long. We have the making a lot of really good changes. We all come from different backgrounds, but in some ways philosophically similar backgrounds in terms of the kinds of managers we have historically gravitated to because we have such a great team here. There's safety in thinking about new things that has allowed us to look at opportunities that we might not have historically things, for example, in the market neutral space or”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have better look through transparency on the portfolio at our fingertips, which is helpful when we're thinking about exposures, what do we own, what do we not own that we should own more of. We've been able to automatically download and organize all of our data from all of our different managers. We used to have probably a person We have 350 different line items in this portfolio. You can imagine how much content gets posted to Interlinks to not be spending time on those things is valuable because that means we're spending more time reading and analyzing than just compiling.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even better, know our managers better, know what we hold. This is a culture that really embraces technology. That's been wonderful to embrace that and improve things.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spent little time previously on biotech as an opportunity set. Both of the managing directors, Julia and Paul, have a lot of experience investing in that space. That was an area where early on they were both saying we could lean in here. There's some interesting opportunities. They both had well developed lists of high quality managers that we should be speaking to. In that moment, I was the least experienced one at the table. I in some ways loved that because it was such an opportunity for our portfolio. We had to strike a balance of not doing too much too quickly and being careful. On the flip side, it's exciting when there's an area for us that we can go do good work. There's been a lot of interesting process improvements that we've been able to adapt from everybody's experiences, which has had the added benefit of helping us know our portfolio.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them from other investment offices. We understand and respect the history of the portfolio, why we've been able to generate the returns that we have over time, what's important to stay focused on. And yet we're not stagnant in the work that we're doing. And one of the things that's been very fun for me in having this team is the ability to learn from them, to draw from them the best practices that they bring to the table from the different places that they have all worked.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've been clear eyed about what our strategy is since day one, and that hasn't changed. By having an internal candidate become the CIO, we can stay laser focused on what it is that we're here to do. There was no time wasted or lost repointing the ship. That is a huge benefit. I also coming into the role knew the portfolio, especially some of our long-standing relationships, the role that they played, the value that they added, the fact that those were not going to change anytime soon, having some clear things that we weren't going to be changing was very valuable. On the flip side, there were a couple new people that joined as I became CIO. One of the things that is powerful right now about our team is that we have a lot of people that bring different experiences with.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways in which it went fast and also slow at the same time. One of my favorite preparation points, it was public that this transition was happening, probably got announced like in January or February and Colette was retiring June 30th. We went out to California. We spent close to a week together meeting all of our managers, anybody that I hadn't spent quite as much time with, particularly on the private side of the portfolio. She was making sure that she had done a careful, clean handoff that opportunity to spend that time with her now being in a place where there were questions that I could ask her that I hadn't before. Some of the anxieties that I could share with her and we could talk through some of those things was one of my favorite transition points. And there were a lot of different things we had to transition, manager relationships are so important to what we do. The care and thoughtfulness.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple different things that we will talk about with a manager when we're meeting with them and hopefully getting access to something that may be more access constrained. One is the mission that really does resonate with people. Williams is extremely generous with its financial aid program. We have no loans in our financial aid program at this point in time because of the generosity that comes from the endowment and our donors. That resonates with people. Beyond that we manage a nice size of assets at four and a half billion. We can have a meaningful position in our portfolio without overwhelming a manager, still be meaningful partners in both directions. We have an amazing team here. They are smart and thoughtful. Sometimes people just like sitting across the table from them. We show up to meetings, we're prepared, we ask careful, thoughtful questions. We want to be on the same team.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the midst of our asset allocation work right now, it's always a good opportunity to stop and reflect. I have been looking a lot at the portfolio over time, the big blocks of what we do haven't changed. There are on the margin changes that we're making every year. One of the things that has worked really well for Williams is that we've been extremely consistent in how we deploy the portfolio, what works for Williams. keeping at the center of what we do. Why is it that we're here? We're very clear-eyed about that. Our job is to earn a 5% real return to make sure that we're doing that with the appropriate level of risk that we're taking, ensuring that we have sufficient liquidity because we support nearly 60% of the operating budget for the college. Yes, those numbers have changed on the margin. The percentage of the operating budget support, for example, our goals have never”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest next step that I took was taking over our hedge fund asset classes. Those have been important asset classes for our portfolio. We've been long-term investors in hedge funds. At the time, they might have represented 40% of the portfolio because I had built a little bit of a muscle around how to learn to do something new, stepping into the complexity of long short equity and absolute return. There's some more sensitivities, how much time you're taking with managers. I had to learn to sharpen my diligence process, which was a really good evolution. It was a different network. There were new people that I needed to talk to from the LP community as well as the GP community that expanded my horizons.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would do a lot of the legwork, the sourcing, the landscaping, the networking, coming up with a short list of ideas. She always met with every single one of our managers before they went into the portfolio. She was very good whenever you put a manager in front of her. She would flip to immediately page 47 of, I don't know how she developed this instinct, but she could get to page 47 within the first five minutes and be like, this is the issue. She would come with me for those final diligence meetings. And that's where I would get a lot of feedback on. We're probably going to lean in this direction. She would, towards the end of the process, help drive the direction of where we were going. That taught me a lot.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spending a ton of time, the managers were so generous with me and the time that they gave me got me comfortable sitting in a conference room for hours upon hours constantly asking as many questions as I possibly could. They were also patient with me, that taught me a lot too. Those are some of my lessons is not being afraid to ask questions, to take their time when you need it. You're going to make some mistakes.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the biggest lessons that I learned is that you can teach people what they're supposed to do, but it's really hard to teach people what they're not supposed to do without them actually making the mistakes themselves. One of the things that I'm very grateful for was how long of a leash I had to figure out some of the mistakes. And that's maybe where I had the greatest lessons. One of them is when it's clear that there's something great, chances are good you should just go for it in this business. We don't get points for difficulty. We get points for making money. You don't necessarily have to always go find the least discovered idea. If somebody's recommending a manager to you over and over again, for example, probably worth taking that advice and at least spending a lot of time on it. The other thing is Real Assets was not a place where quite as many people were”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source