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Anne Martin

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70
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2019-12-02
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2019-12-02
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  1. “I would say I wasn't looking. I was perfectly happy there. The story of Wesleyan is one that goes back to 1929 for my family. The call didn't even come from a headhunter. It came from my uncle who attended in 1961 and had been on the board. He was emeritus at the time. But he called and said, look, we're going to open up this search. Would you have any interest? I really hope you would consider it. And so my great uncle attended in 29. My uncle was 61. My sister was 88. My brother was 82. I had cousins that were 88 and 90, and my niece just graduated in 17. So I've had almost 100 years of history with the school. I knew at the time it was super small 500 million. There were certainly a lot of reasons not to do it.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Bombastic is sort of the opposite of that. So it just doesn't work very well with us. We're much more interested in people who are super serious about what they're doing can explain, I don't really have to like the person, but I have to respect them enough and I have to be able to have a conversation with them. And they have to be interesting enough and articulate enough to help me get inside their mind.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Probably, but it doesn't again, the world is very big, there's lots of opportunities. So I think it's okay. And I don't have any facts to prove this, but I think the bias is probably in our favor on that one. Why is somebody bombastic? Why are they touting something? Why do they want to be in the headlines? I mean, that says something about their personality as opposed to, you know, I'm a rower. So what does that mean? Like you are never in the spotlight. Nobody comes to your races. Why are you doing it? And it's the hardest sport in the world. The ratio of working out time to actual racing time is the poorest that I can think of across any sport, except maybe swimming. But people are very serious. It's known as the grindstone. They care a lot.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Do you balance that concept with the idea that we all have a tendency to like things that are familiar? So do you end up surrounding your manager roster with certain personality type as opposed to, oh, maybe there's a great hedge fund manager who's bombastic. And you might not want to have dinner with them, but you can verify he's actually a good person. He's just not your type of person.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, independence is obviously a huge one. The economics accruing to the investment professionals that are hard at work every day is a huge one. The focus on returns for our managers rather than on asset gathering, having an appropriate size for the opportunity set, those are really first principles. I would say something over time that maybe isn't quite as obvious is that everybody I think eventually gets to and something I really underscored at Yale over and over again is the quality of the people that you're investing behind. If you don't want to go to dinner with them, I often tell my group this now. If you don't want to go to dinner with them, let's not invest with them because you're not really investing for the good times. You're investing for the really terrible times when you're going to have to be in the trenches together. And so how are these people going to treat you then? How honest are they going to be with you? How much of a frank conversation can you have? And if the chemistry is not right, then you're not.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Tim Sullivan used to say this thing, which has really stuck with me, and I repeat it often, which is you don't have to do every good deal. Just every deal that you do has to be good. And so you have to be not afraid to miss something good. So you're really playing the odds here. You want to have a very high hit record and it's okay if you let one go by. It's okay when you filter to say, okay, I'm going to have these first principles of this has outside ownership in the GP, forget it. Or there's been a lot of turnover in this firm. It's going to be too hard to underwrite. There's that kind of filtering that can go on up front where you can just eliminate a lot of things.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The first thing is how high the bar is. It is super high and how high you have to keep it. I was just shocked at how many investment opportunities there are. I mean, until you're in that world, and especially at a place like Yale where everybody wants to at least have a meeting, I don't know that you can really comprehend the number of opportunities that you have to sort through. So that's pretty nutty.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I'm sure my perspective was additive, but I mean, the Yale people are obviously so well versed in what they're doing. I do think the perspective of having lived in Silicon Valley, having worked with these companies, having seen the distortions that can be created along the way, what's helpful in sorting through stuff that comes over the transom or interpreting if a manager is in your conference room and you're saying tell me about these five deals and you know to ask, were you the lead? Were you the lead? Were you the lead? No, no, no. And you start to realize, okay, this manager has fallen from a place where they were setting the terms and they were going to be the first phone call from the entrepreneur to tagging along with other people. Do we really want to invest with this firm? So I'd say there were a few things, but it's hard to remember that far. Yeah.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, interesting. I think so the banking part informed the ability to look at the actual portfolio and understand sort of the quality of the underlying companies and why people were investing in them The other piece being inside a partnership is a great education about how difficult partnerships are. And one of the things we care a lot about an investment management is longevity of the team you're investing behind, the stability of that team, their ability to mentor other people, their ability to share economics over time. When you're in one of these firms, I think you viscerally learn how difficult that is. These are really tough balancing acts. Finding the right chemistry between these partners is really important and not always easy to find. So maybe that allowed me to ask the harder questions about tell me about your culture, your organization, the economics that had I not been in that position of private equity, I wouldn't have known to ask.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “David and I got to be friends when I decided I was going to go back to work. I just started talking to him about what's available in Connecticut, what should I think about. And he said, why don't you come in and work here? I said, I don't know if it's a fit. He didn't know whether it was a fit. As you probably know, it's very unusual for Yale to hire somebody laterally. And I didn't know anything about what they did, honestly. And that was probably one of the things David liked about me. I didn't come in with preconceived notions. So I started as a consultant. And after several months, they offered me a full-time job. I started actually in natural resources. I did a lot of discovery work in the world of mining to see if there was something interesting to do in mining. And I managed the oil and gas portfolio. Over time started to take on more and more in venture capital and some private equity with Tim Sullivan. And that was great. That felt much more familiar to me. I often joke that I worked on the two parts of portfolio with the most entrepreneurial people in the world. If you think silicon,”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Originally, I came in as a consultant, and only because when we moved to the East Coast for John's job, I took about 18 months off, I had twin boys at that point that were seven years old, and I was trying to get them situated in school. There was just a lot of change. We had moved to Princeton for one year while John coached his team. We moved back to San Francisco. We moved to New Haven. And so that was the right thing to do. I signed them up for Little League. They got assigned to a team, and the coach was David Swenson. So that's how we met. And so my kids played baseball.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And then the other thing that really helped me was because I was in emerging growth technology, there was a whole network of people that I knew from my nine years in San Francisco that were venture capitalists, growth equity investors, CEOs. And that provided a really nice database for me when underwriting new venture positions for Yale. There were people I could call who I felt would give me a very candid view of people we were trying to underwrite. So those are a couple things that were super helpful.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, so interestingly, there's a lot of stuff you have to leave behind when you enter investment management from investment banking. I mean, the first thing you have to leave behind is your transactional mindset. Because when you're in investment banking, it's all about the next deal, your fee generating, and that's how you get paid. So doing the next deal is sort of what you live for. When you get to investment management, it's sort of about doing the right deal at the right time with the right level of thoughtfulness. So you have to leave a lot of that behind. On the other hand, what you bring with you is a much deeper knowledge of the capital markets than many people in investment management. I think there's a greater understanding of how does equity formation work over the life of a company, what makes something attractive. When you're a banker, you know, you're constantly sifting through companies, thinking about, well, I am underwriting this, and I am putting my firm's name on this. What makes a good company? And so you bring some.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So I went to a private equity firm after that called Rosewood Capital. I was there for three years, but in the meantime, my husband had gotten the itch he had been the freshman rowing coach at Stanford and then coached at a high school in San Francisco. And in 2000, he was invited to be one of the coaches for the Olympic team. He's also a two-time Olympian, 88 and 92. And he ended up coaching the silver medal pair in 2000, which forced us to move to the East Coast. After that, for one year, so he could train. So I was working for this private equity firm while I was on the East Coast. It was impossible. So after that, when we moved back, he really wanted to coach at a higher level. He got the Yale rowing job until we moved to New Haven. And I left my private equity job, and then I met David. So that's how I got to investment management.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Kind of a terrible time in tech recession especially. There wasn't a lot to do the first couple years, but I worked with a great group. I started out in semiconductors, disk drives, moved to some software, and then a partner and I spun off to do the new media group. And we started this thing called New Media. And that became the basis for the internet practice there. So that started in like 94, 95 with Broderbahn and Electronic Arts and quickly moved into the internet. So I was involved with the Amazon IPO, the eBay IPO. We represented Zip2, which was Elon Musk's first company that nobody knows about. We sold that to Compaq. So there was a lot of really interesting deals then. Alex Brown was sold in 99 and I left a week later. That wasn't my plan to work for a big German bank.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So, I've done four years of consulting or three years of consulting, which was great, but I knew I didn't want to be a consultant. I had met my future husband in rowing. He was moving to the West Coast to take the Stanford freshman rowing job as a coach. And so I moved out there, worked for another consulting firm for a year and then went to Stanford Business School. So I graduated in 91. I went right to Alex Brown, which was my first introduction to finance. Over my summer at business school, I actually worked for Microsoft. I really wanted to see what it would be like to be inside a company that did something. And let's see, it was probably all of 6,000 or 9,000 people then. And I thought it was huge. I just thought, I feel like a cog in the machinery here. This is a great company, but I don't want to work here. So I ended up going to this small investment bank called Alex Brown, which focused on emerging growth companies. I was in the technology practice in San Francisco. This is 1991. People who are old will remember it was actually...”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So let's see, that was my senior year. I instantly got the bug. I was convinced I could make the Olympic team someday. And so I left college without a job, or at least without a real job. I moved to Boston so I could train and met this terrific community of rowers, one of whom worked in consulting and said, you should go and interview at my consulting firm. That was a great fit. They hired me. And so I spent four or five years in Boston between 83 and 88 growing training and working at this consulting firm in strategic development. So it was a kind of a balancing act, but it worked out great. It's not something you could do today, but it worked for me then. And I made the 88 team. So I was on the national team from 85 to 88.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Ready to call it a day, and one of my roommates on my hallway was a rower said, You ought to come out and see the sport. And I went to Smith. We had this beautiful little pond called Paradise Pond. I met the coach. He said, go down to the pond and just do the recreational wary rowing of a big, very stable boat around this tiny little pond. And I instantly fell in love with it. It was the middle of the spring. The crew was already in session. And this could never happen today. But the coach would take me out on the Connecticut River, which is really fast and furious in the spring. And I'd be in this little single or double with him and I learned to row that way. So I went out for crew the next year. I did my junior year abroad in Paris, but came back my senior year and rode, and we had a new coach. She had been on the national team, Kathy Keeler. She was actually married to the Harvard coach, Harry Parker. I didn't even know rowing was an Olympics board or world championship sport. And she encouraged me to go to the national team testing. And I did.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So I think certain people just are born with a certain energy level. Nobody told me I had to become a rower. But when I was eight years old, I joined a local swimming club and I loved it. And I was one of those kids that couldn't be happier except swimming, you know, back and forth over a black line in the pool for hours. So somehow I just always had that gene, I guess. And when I got to college, I actually swam my freshman year and my event was a 400 IM, which is the most painful event on the planet. And I actually did pretty well. I qualified for the Division III championships. And I told the coach I'm not going. And he said, you're not going to the national championships. And I said, to you, it's the national championships for me is just a 400 I am, another painful event. So I ended up going skiing with my family instead. So I was burned out and swimming as so many swimmers get. By the time I was 18, I was...”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “My guest on today's show is Ann Martin, the chief investment officer for Wesleyan University, where she manages the school's one billion dollar endowment. Anne's career started in the tech world and shifted to endowment management at Yale's famed investments office. She took over at Wesleyan a decade ago as one of a handful of Yale investment alums serving other institutions. Our conversation covers Anne's path from competitive rower to the tech world and a fortuitous connection with David Swenson. We cover the transferable skills from private equity to endowment management, key lessons learned at Yale, experience taking on a startup at Wesleyan, application of knowledge to a smaller pool of capital, development of a team and a portfolio, perspectives on natural resources and venture capital, and Wesleyan's competitive advantage as an allocate.”

    2019-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source