YouSaid · the spoken record

Bruce MacDonald

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79
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2026-04-06
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2026-04-06
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  1. “Oldest daughter, she was 14 or 15 and doing what teenage daughters do, and I got annoyed with her. She looked at me and she said, Dad, it's not about you. That has been, wow, one of the best lessons in life as a boss, to know that people have stuff going on and how they're acting to you might not have anything to do with you. The real professional one that has been most profound was I did not start building a professional network intentionally until I was forty years old. It's been such a benefit to me since then. My network now is one of my strengths. If I'd had another twenty years to build it and compound it, how valuable it would be. I used to think of networking as transactional and I've since learned it's not that at all. It's a real profound life lesson.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “You wonder about. I'm very curious about intuition. I've had experiences personally with it that have been really profound. Somebody was telling me recently there's clear voyance, but there's also something called clear cognizance, where your body becomes aware of something before your mind does. I've had a few of these experiences where I even got physically ill because I had to like make a choice. I didn't understand for even months afterwards what I was doing. It's a mystery to me. There's something obviously outside of your brain that serves some kind of reasoning function that I'm not exactly sure how it works. I'm trying to lean into it, but it's kind of like Peter Parker after he got bit by the spider where just everything's going all over the place. When I try to use my intuition, that's what it looks like. I think it's real. I think it's there and learning how to use it can be a really important and valuable skill set for an investor.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Grooming me to be a CIO. She told me to build relationships with each of the board members. Her superpower is that she hires smart people and lets them run with it, which takes an incredible amount of trust and faith. Finally she led by example in that she was fantastic about receiving feedback. It's hard to give your boss feedback and give them direct feedback. She made it so easy. It set an example for me as a leader. I want to do the same thing for my people because getting honest feedback is one of the hardest things to get the more senior you are. It was a huge impact on me.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I was good at one, bad at the other. That is a great lesson when you're looking at managers. It gives me a lens to understand whether or not they're in their sweet spot. Their skill set matches to what they're doing. That's really important. The other person who had a huge impact was Nancy Everett, who hired me here. I had been out of the endowment world for a few years, and she took a big chance on me. Even from day one, I showed up the night before my interview I had driven my daughter down to a beach vocation with a family friend. I tried to pack everything for my outfit for the interview with Nancy the next day, and I did except for shoes. So I walk into my interview in flip flops. Nancy, that's just who she is. Everything for Nancy is substance over form. It was such a perfect fit for me culturally to be with her. She spent so much time.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Said, Bruce, if you're going to take risks, you got to know how to do it. You got to open a futures account and start trading. Great lessons learned from that. I traded two assets. I traded Eurodollar futures and SMEs.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “My daughters have had a big impact because they taught me patience. I have four daughters. That's big. There have been two individuals. One is Jeff Knight at Putnam. Jeff was an incredible mentor to me. One of the things you have to have to be a successful CIO is to realize that it's not just investing. There's multiple parts of the business. You have to have relationship expertise and experience with the board. You have to have an ability to sell to managers. The mission of the university, how great investors you are, there's a lot more that goes into being an investor. Jeff gave me the opportunity to not just be on the portfolio management team at Putnam, but to also take part in pitching for business. He was having me in front of big Middle Eastern clients when I was thirty years old. I couldn't understand why he was doing that, but I was grateful for it. The other thing he did was before he put me on the portfolio management team.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Gotten into bluegrass music, and it just so happened that the guy who wrote the book on how to play the doBro, which is acoustic steel guitar, was at Wesleyan. I ended up taking Dobro lessons in the Dobro has been my passion as far as music goes. I actually went back to swimming my senior year too and had an amazing experience. One of the challenging things about living as a human is the allegory of Plato's cave. We mistake our perceptions for reality, the way our brains work, it's really hard to see the essence of things. When I play music, especially with other people, there are times when it feels like music approximates more closely than anything else getting to the essence of something. It's really liberating and sustaining experience for me.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I still swim. There's a sensory deprivation component to it all day. There's a lot of talking both to and from. It's great to have the silence that comes with it. There's a component to swimming that is meditative because it's polyrhythmic. This ties back to music. You've got your stroke rhythm that's happening. You've got your breathing rhythm that's happening. You've got your kicking rhythm. And they all have to fit together. That is when it works a very gratifying experience. I went to Wesleyan. I was recruited to swim there. When I got there, I did a season of water pull and then it was like, I don't want to swim. Wesleyan had this great program where you could take private music lessons for credit. Music is my other hobby. Always love listening to it. For three years I took jazz guitar and I got really annoyed in my fourth year I went to see my teacher and he couldn't remember my name. I was like, that's it. I'm not doing your lessons anymore.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Very helpful. We pride ourselves on being counter cyclical in a prepared mind heading into one of those environments is going to allow us to not feel as much regret and lean into the opportunity set that's in front of us.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I continue to worry about geopolitical risks. The current conflict in Iran is troubling from the perspective of our India and Vietnam exposure, so we're focused on that. I worry about the geopolitical reshuffling that's happening, the current conflict that's happening. Does that make it easier for China to invade Taiwan? That particular risk is one of a hugely cascading impact that would be felt across the portfolio because so much of the public and private markets are linked to the AI buildout. There's no part of the portfolio that wouldn't be severely impacted by that. When I like to worry, I like to worry about the big things, and that one is definitely worth worrying about. There is positioning changes we can make in our portfolio broadly in terms of equity risk. There's not a lot that you can do to protect yourself. Even getting in front of it and trying to think about your game plan in such a scenario is very important.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “All the talent tends to chase it too. I don't have statistics to back this up anecdotally. There's been a talent vacuum into private equity given the predominance of indexing in public markets and that talent vacuum into another space, there might be a lot more alpha in public markets. Even if there's not, we love the option value of liquidity, having the ability to step into those dislocations can make up for the alpha that we might be sacrificing in private markets.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's been a confirmation of some of the biases we've held. We've not done a lot in the buyout space. A lot of that was driven by, we tried to not make things too complicated and think about from a valuation perspective are the assets priced where we'll get a reasonable return from the amount of risk that we're taking. What we've seen in the biospace since we've been invested is that it's just not been true. The valuations have been extended and some of that was related to low interest rates, but even as interest rates have repriced, we haven't seen enough of a valuation retrenchment to get really excited. When we see retail money come in, I almost worry that it's be careful what you wish for private equity managers. You get a bunch of retail investors in there who don't have a great experience, it's not a great thing for the industry. That industry is very mature and super competitive. When there's that much money chasing an idea,”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Of those thoughts leaning more towards publics, more towards Coinvest are at least contrarian in the sense that more channels are leaning towards privates. People are concerned that Coinvests might get crowded out by the high net worth channel. In the private markets, how are you viewing the various bottlenecks of liquidity and the new flows that may be coming in from different pools of capital?”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “There aren't a lot of interviews with Seth Alexander out there. I found an obscure podcast that he was on. He mentioned that his team did a study similar to Elroy Dimpson's of what an endowment looked like fifty years ago and then did a thought exercise of what an endowment might look like fifty years from now. That got me thinking 50 years ago I think there were a lot more single stock holdings. It was just like an equity portfolio with a bunch of bonds, not all this illiquid stuff. Maybe we're back to the future. If you're at a larger size and you can find co-investment opportunities where you can have a lot more in a single name, that would be one way to compensate for the fact that your overall portfolio has to be larger, maybe in larger managers that are less punchy or more diversified.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “We would do differently is lean a lot heavier into co investments, direct investments. We have a fairly sizable allocation, high single digits. That's where the alpha would be when you get to that size is being able to do more concentrated single name position.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Of the big changes would be in our private portfolio because we have such a limited private allocation. We try to focus on where the most asymmetric return opportunities are. I do think our venture portfolio has many great managers in it. I don't think we've leaned hard enough into the asymmetry. We should have more managers who are at that smaller level of the fund sizes 200 million and below where their outcomes could be a fifty x or an eighty x. There's good reasons to invest with established managers. You end up paying a lot in fees for returns that might be available in public markets might be a better fit for our portfolio to just have a little bit more of that emerging manager risk or smaller fund risk because the payoff when it works can be so much greater. That's probably the biggest change we would make.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I told you today Hey Bruce, it's time to sell the entire portfolio again. Take out liquidity restraints and things like that, but you could rebuild it tomorrow. How different do you think it would be from today's portfolio?”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Do go wrong, the base of understanding was clear at the outset. One of the things we put in our memos are pre mortems, along with those primordoms we have a bunch of KPIs that we monitor. We'll share those with the manager, and there's a big faith-based trust thing going on there. They know what we're looking for. They could always game the relationship, but obviously we wouldn't be investing with managers if we thought that would happen. When it comes time to have a difficult conversation, we have a document that we can point to and say, hey, these were concerns we had when we made the investment. We're seeing the manifest. We appreciate the work that you've done for us. We are big believers in you. We're not going to be invested anymore. There'll still be hard feelings. Everybody's got some emotional attachment to their work. It's a better communication mechanism than any other one that we've come across.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “That's unfortunately something that happens. We make mistakes. We pride ourselves on trying to avoid bad investments. Sometimes there are bad investments in our portfolio. One of the things that we do with all the managers that we work with will share our memo with the managers before we invest. We'll have all the work done. We'll run it by them. We want them to fact check our work. Sometimes there's mistakes in there. The most important reason is that we want them to know that we know what they're doing. We want there to be a clear understanding that we have a clear understanding of what they do. There have been some amazing discussions we've had along those lines where we have a manager, for example, that's almost a multi-asset class mini endowment portfolio. We had to benchmark them versus high yield because they had some credit background. They called us when they got the memo and they're like, we're not a high yield manager. We're like, no, no, we get that. Those are the conversations we want to have before we invest. Because if things...”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “You're looking at a burning building inside your portfolio and you're thinking about re-underwriting and making that decision we want to lean in or maybe we made a mistake and get out, how do you go through the process?”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Opportunities. There will be indiscriminate selling and private credit. There's good reasons why many of those companies will be sold, but there will be many reasons where it's just liquidity that's driving prices down. We're excited about opportunities coming from there.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Some of it is in our own kitchen. India right now is going through a very difficult period. It's got a double whammy now of being in the crosshairs of AI because of IT services and the huge part of their economy that that sector represents. It's got the risk that it's facing from the Iran war, where it's so dependent on Middle Eastern oil and gas and fertilizer. That's a place where we're spending a lot of time to underwrite what we have, to be ready as dislocations there might increase. We have been positioning our credit portfolio to better take advantage of dislocations. We've done a fair amount of work to be well positioned for what's happening in private credit. We recently reconfigured that part of the portfolio, added a new manager, we have capacity to add there. That's where there'll be tons of interesting.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “It feels like today there's either a lot of simmering or a lot of burning across a lot of various private equity, private credits with emerging markets, US, where are you thinking about diving in to do research”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “The normal amount of research that we would do one thing we've learned is if we're going to step into a burning building, it's helpful to have lived in the neighborhood before. We've had great experiences stepping into burning buildings in our portfolio, less good experiences stepping into new burning buildings.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “There's times when we've been too clever in trying to manage overall portfolio risk through hedging. We had great insight in 2021, twenty twenty two that rates were going to go up. We put on an overlay and the way we expressed it was all wrong. It was too complicated. It would have been simpler to have no position at all and not have lost money on the hedge or just taken a short interest rate bet. Excessive complexity is one thing. One of the things that we're known for is running into burning buildings. We'd like to be counter cyclical. That's both in the market when there's opportunities. Sometimes that's with managers. There have been a couple times where we saw opportunities and managers who were down. They had had great track records up until that point. We thought they've just made a mistake. We were too quick to enter into a new relationship on a short time fuse without doing”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “We want to have a team oriented culture, organizing the team in this team based underwriting way has been the perfect alignment for how we want to manage the portfolio.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Have a strong risk culture. There's a few key components to that. One of them is the team, our board, and our relationship with our board. We couldn't take the risk we do at the strategy level or the manager level if we didn't have the board's support. The board have our back and understand what we're doing. We have a team approach that fits well into that risk culture. We do team based underwriting. There is a lead on every investment. Everybody on the team plays some kind of role in the process and everybody on the team has to meet the manager. It diffuses ownership of that idea so that folks might be incrementally willing to take more risk in those ideas. There's only one person who it all falls onto if it doesn't work and that's me. It's not their career that's at risk. There's a downside to that where we don't have a private equity person who can say this is my private portfolio.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “If we had more resources, could we be more tactical? There's alpha that we're leaving on the ground because we don't have the capacity to explore it. Buyout is another one. We do very little in buyout. That's been a windfall for us right now because we don't have to worry about private equity software. I'd love to find the next shore capital, but I'm not going to find it because it's not a research focus of ours. Another example would be the reinsurance space can be periodically really interesting after a natural catastrophe. We've spent a lot of time trying to understand that space. It's hard because we're so resource constrained. We just end up needing to focus on opportunities that are five to ten years and not things that we trade, which in the end might be the right spot for us.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Was where our size could be a real advantage was in first check venture with early stage managers. The best of those managers, the best historical fun performance has been in funds that are two hundred million and below, our check size tends to be five to ten million. We want to have a meaningful relationship with our managers. There was a real crossover between the opportunity set being the right size and our check being the right size for us to be a meaningful partner. That's been another space where our check size is the right size where we can get fit into a fund that might have scarce capacity. We're only asking for five million. It's a lot easier to fit us in. Vietnam and early stage venture are two great examples of that where it's been a real impediment is resource allocation. Most of the time, China and Latin America and crypto have not done well, but there are times when they do well.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “As far as a competitive advantage, I'd throw Vietnam out there again if you are a $20 billion endowment and need to write a $500 million check into that market. It's not possible. There are opportunities like that that are size constrained, that give us an unfair advantage. In our early days, we were too dogmatic about thinking about our size as an advantage and trying to find ways to play it. One of the mistakes that we made early on was we were inclined positively to any asset class that had a smaller total AUM base thinking that we could be early and make a lot of money. The problem is you need people to follow you. We're in a small ASEAN equity strategy. Things were cheap there. Market caps were small. Nobody has ever cared about it. Since we've invested, you can be too clever. Over time, that is one of the things we have refined. One of the early decisions we made, though.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Past experience in the endowment world before VCU was working at two of the bigger pools. VCU, like many, is a smaller size. We'd love to hear your thoughts on where you have competitive advantages and disadvantages because of size.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Finding dedicated strategies to that space. It's a space where expertise is at a premium. There are a few distinguished investors and experts in that space who can really see six to 12 months ahead of the market. That's where we've tried to focus our exposure.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “It's better to be lucky than good. We did well in the last year, but from managers we would not expect to give us dedicated AI exposure. They were managers who had a keen sense of cycles, supply and demand dynamics historically across industrials or commodities, and they saw some of the bottlenecks that were building in the memory space, for example. We've since pivoted towards trying to find AI experts who run more dedicated strategies that have unique insights and close ties to the AI community so that we can leverage their insights both inside the strategy that they run for us and beyond it in our portfolio more broadly, or even in our workflows. That has been key. It's been part of our tangential discussions with managers in the space for some time. It's been focused more recently on.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Very simply, just as an ETF. Over time we've thought about adding managers who specialize in mining stocks, and we're still exploring that area. We thought about private equity strategies in mining. We decided to keep it really simple. This ties back to our focus on liquidity. If we can get the essence of the value of that in a liquid format, we'll do it. There might be a more clever way to do it. You might want to have structured exposure using options given how volatile it can be and how episodic the returns can be. I find if you get too clever, you can outsmart yourself out of returns.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Those two goals in AI have such different duration, characteristics to them longevity, ways of getting exposure. On gold with the initiation of it being this is a nice hedge for some of our exposure in Vietnam and India, how did you go about expressing it?”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Asset that fills that gap that's created when things change like that. All that change leads to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Gold has historically been the asset that benefits from that. Yes, it's very hard to price. You have no idea what fair value is. Sometimes it gets frothy as it has recently. For us, that's another example of a secular theme that evolved that as we saw, again, the political environment change in the US, the economic environment change, the geopolitical environment change, the secular case for gold solidified as time went on. Artificial intelligence, there's a tremendous amount of potential there. That is an incredible secular tailwind that we have been studying back to our early days in 2017 when we were doing autonomous vehicle co-investments. That has been a profound secular tailwind.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “We started owning gold five or six years ago. Part of the thesis there was we have this Indian Vietnam exposure. We were worried about emerging market crises, the traditional emerging market debacle, which seems to me to be the biggest risk when you invest in India or Vietnam. Gold actually turns out to be the best hedge. The best hedge would be to be short those currencies, but those are super expensive. Gold tends to do really well as a hedge to emerging market currency risk. Initially, we held gold for that reason. As time has gone on, the case for gold as an asset has gone up on a secular basis. We're in a period now of a total and complete restructuring of the geopolitical equilibrium. We're in a period of sustained higher inflation.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Equity manager in the 1990s, your smartest move was to just not invest in Japan. It got to be so exploited, they started to create indexes that didn't have Japan because it was such an easy bet. We tried to be ahead of those dynamics. China for us was a perfect example. China became a large part of the index when we started thinking about where is that risk dollar best spent overseas and making sure it's in the best opportunities possible. One of our big advantages is we have a healthy risk culture below the portfolio level. We're happy to take manager risk or these strategy risks where we're doing a lot in Vietnam or India, but we're not taking a lot of equity risk. Our total portfolio risk is going to be at a 70, 30 traditional benchmark level. If you can pick some of these higher”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “It is a balancing act. We view it as there's a huge part of the portfolio that just needs to be generic U.S. equity risk. When we say huge part of the portfolio fifty percent or more has to be generic US equity risk, we invest on the behalf of a US institution. Their expenses are dollar based. We don't want to have too much overseas risk. It's thinking about in the global opportunity set 50% US, fifty percent rest of the world, let's be smart about what that 50% rest of the world is and tilt the portfolio that way. The way endowment portfolios work if you have long short or hedge funds, you're not 100% exposed to any market. What we are is fifty percent US, thirty percent other with the rest being manager held cash, short exposure, R cash. When I was at Putnam, if you were a smart international”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “We leaned really hard into our network to get referrals. One of the nice things about trying to invest in these secular tailwinds is you don't necessarily have to get the manager selection piece right. We like it when there's multiple ways to win in the stuff that we do. The nice thing about the secular tailwind is you ideally win on both fronts, but even if you screw up on the manager front, you've got the tailwind behind you. We also got fortunate where managers that weren't necessarily India focused but had family histories in India would connect us with people in industry there. I remember one of my first trips I got to meet the patriarch of a big real estate investing company. India is such a small world. I could ask him about two managers that we were looking at and he would know them both even though I had just met him since I was sitting face to face with him, even though he would say great things about each of them his facial expressions would be telling me something different. It's back on the ground.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Started to change dramatically. I was in India for the venture AGM bonanza that happens every spring there. It was shocking to see the evolution of the venture ecosystem there where now many of the funds we visited, sixty percent of their LPs were domestic. That was encouraging. But that was a process of our own insights and then leaning on the expertise of folks around us to pick their brains.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Rule of law is one of the big ones. India having the English legal history was key to us getting comfortable with India as an allocation. A lot of that was our first principles thinking about what makes sense. Similarly, looking at what the drivers of economic growth have been for many of these countries that are emerging, having a demographic base that is fairly young is important. That was something where we tried to do our own research, but vet it with other folks. And there were more controversial parts to the thesis that we batted around with a bunch of different people and got different opinions on and had to make our own judgment call it. One of them was this question of capital recycling, and this is common with many emerging markets. The wealth that gets generated there gets invested somewhere else. That was true still when we started investing. There was a bit of a leap of faith that that was going to change.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Some of it is first principles thinking. I read this book way back in my Putnam days called The Equity Risk Premium, Gripping Title Page Turner. One of the great things about that book was It Did This Study of the Equity Risk Premium What has been the exceptional equity return in different markets over time? It was fascinating if you went back to the eighteen seventies there were four emerging markets that were super promising that investors were jazzed up about. One was the US, one was Argentina, one was Germany, and one was Russia. Other than the US, three of those went to zero multiple times over the next hundred years. Obviously, that's a risk with any emerging market investing. What are the core drivers that allow an emerging market to retain value over time so that the capital gets the accrual of the value that comes from the economic growth?”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Not easy. There are foreign ownership restrictions on many of the best companies there with a bit of resourcefulness. We found our way to have that be our own dedicated allocation, but it is really a hybrid of trying to pull the best ideas from the smartest people around us as well as doing some of our own iterative research.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Since twenty eighteen, India has been our largest overseas allocation of any region or country. That was primarily driven by an internal iteration of our own research. We've been fortunate to work with some managers who, this is a rare skill set, can see where economic value creation over the next 10 years will be. There was an individual named David Mock who had done an amazing job at Hillhouse riding that China wave. We backed him day one when he launched his own fund composite capital. Within two years he had stopped investing in China and pivoted his portfolio hard towards Vietnam. He just said The opportunity that I see in Vietnam right now is exactly what I saw in China on a much smaller scale. That resonated. We found a way to make our own direct allocation into Vietnam.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Primarily that has come from our relationships with our managers. Some of that has also come from our own research. An example of the latter would be when we started, if you looked back on the last ten years of our peers and where overseas they had generated all the returns, it really was in China. From the beginning of the admission of China to the WTO to twenty fifteen, that was where the golden years of both the China economy investing in China. That's right when we started, and we looked back, you could see some of the political winds changing in China. You could see some of the political winds changing in the US in regards to its relationship to China. It was also clear to see that that opportunity wasn't the same as it was in 2005. We then started to think about where that opportunity might be. We spent a lot of time in India.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Endowments have done a great job of that, but in the last 10 or 15 years with the obsession of private assets, that tool has been taken out of the toolkit. We part ourselves in keeping that tool in the toolkit. We have abundant liquidity to stay in, step into dislocations either at the manager level or at the market level.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Five year history of endowments, what drove returns? One of the surprising findings of this paper was there was a real countercyclical behavior to endowments for most of their history, as asset prices became richer and more fully valued, risk asset allocations would decline when there would be a crisis or downdraft in the market. Risk asset allocations would increase. That is a really important toolkit. Market timing is a mugs game, as one of my old bosses said. Endowments have an unfair advantage in that we work with the smartest investors out there. It's not necessarily market timing when you're expert in emerging market internet companies comes to you and says my companies have never been cheaper. We are seeing opportunities we have never seen before. That to me is backing good investments.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Our portfolio probably looks a little bit different in that there's a lot of things that we've decided to not spend our time on because we believed we'd be better spent spending time elsewhere. Things like private credit, China, Latin America, Africa, we decided to keep focused on other areas of opportunity. The other real difference in our portfolio that's significant is we have less illiquidity risk. We only have about 20 to 25 percent of our portfolio in private assets. Some of that is a structural constraint that we have, which is that most of the assets that we manage are actually not true endowment assets. They're balance sheet assets. There's not a statutory constraint. He wrote a paper a few years back. One of the things he looked at was the 70s.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Some similarities, differences, competitive advantages you wanted to lean into, walk me through the design of this and how you've implemented it. What's similar from other pools and what's different? What's similar is we have equity-centric portfolio, just like any other endowment. We need to generate a 5% plus real return. You can't do that any other way than investing in equities. We use primarily outside managers those two key tenants are pretty similar. What's different are a couple of things. One is we are resource constraint. It's been a team of mainly five investors since day one. When there's just five of you, you can't do everything. You have to make a choice about things to leave out because you're leaving out a lot. You really have to be focused on picking the right things to lean into.”

    2026-04-06 · Capital Allocators · Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source