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. “As we built out the diversification of an endowment portfolio, we started with a portfolio of ETFs and slowly layered managers in. We weren't going to take the traditional amount of equity risk in those early days because we didn't have the traditional amount of diversification. That was a hard stretch. It was 100% worth it. We built the investment process. We built the culture, even though those were hard times early on. It deepened our relationship with our board, which has turned out to be a strength of ours. There was a lot of back and forth with staff and board about how to optimize what we were doing and build trust because we got feedback. We listened to the feedback. We acted on the feedback. It benefited us going forward and building a few key advantages to our process that wouldn't have existed if we had just taken the portfolios we had inherited. When you start out that portfolio and you're looking at the world, there are probably”

    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're going to spend most of your time reviewing what's in there, slowly changing things out, and adding new stuff. Whereas if you start over and start from scratch, you get to build the institutional knowledge from day one. You get to build your culture, build your taste, build your process. One of the most important parts of a endowment management process is sourcing, which would have been muted if you were spending that time looking at the existing portfolio. So we made the choice to sell everything and start from scratch, which was a bit easier than it would be for most portfolios because there was actually no private equity at all. We weren't having to sell privates or figure out what to do with that side of the book. It was hard, though. This was a market when twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen that had just come through the energy crisis. There was an RMB scare that the R&B was being devalued. So the markets just ripped. We were underinvested.”

    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. “All endowment spending is single digit percentage. Every dollar that we earn, we have a sense of impact in everything we do. Let's dive into how you go about it. I understand there was opportunity for a whole scale change not too long after you arrived, so why don't you walk through what was going on and what happened? We manage money for six different entities at the university. Each one of those entities has its own governing body. The university had a plan to build an investment team. They actually ran an RFP to try and get everybody to pick one manager so the transition to hiring Visimka would be easy. Unfortunately, it didn't work out. It's hard to herd all those governing bodies into one box. So when we started, we had the opportunity to take over two portfolios or sell them all and start over. That was a weighty decision. What you decide at that point in time dictates what your primary use of your time is for the next two years. If you keep those”

    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. “VCU is a public university in the state of Virginia, but it plays a much more traditional role of a public education institution. It tries to serve the less traditional college student. For example, more than a third of the undergraduate student body of thirty thousand people is first gen. More than seventy percent have some kind of job while they're in school. It's a majority minority undergraduate student body, and it's predominantly in state students. It's a unique mission among the established endowment world. It gives us a lot of purpose because when you're running that kind of institution, it's not like you have a legacy of great donors that can provide a cushion to the university. Every dollar that we generate in return has a profound impact on the university's bottom line, even 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

  5. “Mutual fund land either hire a sales team or JV with an established fund. So it was time for me to move on. I was fortunate to have gotten connected with Larry Koshard. And he introduced me to Nancy Everett. He said, Nancy's building this thing down at VCU. You should go check it out. Nancy and I connected. We hit it off the rest is history. It's been a wonderful experience on so many levels. I didn't know much about the mission of VCU and getting familiar with it has been one of my favorite parts of this journey.”

    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. “In long short equity into our own prime brokerage account so we could control how much capital was at risk and how much leverage was used. It turns out that's exactly the model you would need to democratize hedge funds. Create a managed account platform and you put a forty wrapper around it and you've got a mutual fund. It was a great product for its time in one sense in that it was so much easier post GFC to find a hedge fund that was willing to do a managed account than it was pre-GFC when hedge funds were the cat's meow. It was a lot harder because it was a straight up market and there wasn't a great market for a hedged product especially in the retail world at that point. We did a good job building a business. We got a three-year track record. We got 100 million under management, but it really needed to scale at that point. There was not conviction on the team to hire a sales team, which is what you need to do.”

    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. “A little bit of a rocky path. I learned the hard way that there is a risk to having risk in your title. I was at UVimco when the GFC hit our five billion dollar endowment went to four billion as the guy with risk in his title when you lose twenty percent, sometimes somebody has to take the fall and I was that person. That was a challenging period professionally. I was fortunate to have an amazing experience afterwards that repositioned my career to get me to the path that I'm on. That's a real lesson to when you have hard times is understanding its cliche to say it when one door closes, another one opens in my experience there's nothing more true. I met this guy named Jim Dilworth who had an idea for democratizing hedge funds. One of the things I had done at Yuvimco was build a managed account platform. We transitioned a bunch of LP relationships.”

    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 came out from a quantitative background. My interest in this all was fixed income was easy because you had closed form equations that could solve the pricing. When I got to UVA, I understood how so much alpha was generated by being able to have a more creative thought process about asset pricing. This was when the tiger cubs were at the height of their powers. Being able to look at the lone pine portfolio and see how Steve Mandel and his team could see into the future about what these high quality businesses would be worth was eye-opening. It was completely different model for making money than I had understood in the past and it was so much more potent that lit a fire in me as far as thinking more creatively about investing, which fit my personal background really 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

  9. “Multistrats. I never dug into traditional long short investing. It was incredibly eye-opening experience in the interview process. It seemed like a great fit for me, the CIO at the time was Chris Brightman, who had an untraditional endowment background. He didn't come from the endowment world, so he wanted somebody to marry the traditional investing framework into the endowment model. He saw my background as being quantitative with a risk component to be helpful in that process. Turned out to be an amazing role 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

  10. “Some of it was driven by personal choice. I decided to move to Charlottesville, Virginia and was a pioneer of the remote work setup. I was still working for Putnam. I was on the portfolio management team managing a hedge fund strategy version of the global tactical asset allocation model that we ran, that particular hedge fund had been anchored by General Motors. I thought I was in a great role and I didn't want to leave. I got a call the day that I moved to Charlottesville from a recruiter for this role at UVIMCO at UVA's investor management company. I thought I'll take this interview. I'll just see what it's about. It was like lifting my head out of the weeds, which is funny to think about because I was a multi-asset class investor. It wasn't like I was just focused on an industry sector and equities, but still I had never thought about venture even though I ran a hedge fund strategy. I had never thought about all the different hedge fund strategies that were out 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

  11. “My original driver for wanting to go into fixed income was to understand what set interest rates and how interest rates drove things. That insight was driven by understanding that all cash flows are priced off of the current discount rate. That underpinning in fixed income helped me think about the cascading effect of changes in the economy to how the Fed behaved, to how interest rates were set, and then how asset prices were set. I got this intuitive grasp of the dynamics of asset pricing. Early on it was ingrained into me the flow through from what unemployment is doing into interest rates, then into equities, into currencies, and then into global markets, you quickly picked up on the fact that the U.S. always seemed to lead interest rate cycles. If you were thinking about overseas investing, you had an edge because you could”

    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. “Jobs and I ended up getting a job at Putnam Investments joining in August of 98 right before the long-term capital crisis. My initial boss there was this guy Krishna Mamani who has since went on to become CIO at Oppenheimer Funds in the fixed income group and is now CIO at Lafayette. He was a great mentor. Unfortunately I only worked with him for a short time because Putnam stubbed their toe in the long term capital crisis. They had a big reorg. The work that Krishna had me doing fell perfectly into this group called the Global Asset Allocation Group that was run by Jeff Knight. They didn't have anybody who knew fixed income. If you think about the global asset allocation group their alpha driver was this global tactical asset allocation model that they used to trade futures. They traded all the major G seven markets, both equity and fixed income. A big part of their alpha driver.”

    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. “I was too much of a contrarian. This was Henry Blodgett years. I seemed like every one of my classmates wanted to be an equity analyst like Henry Blodgett. I was like, no, I'm not going to do that. I had other great professors, though. I took an economic history class with Rick Michigan, who ended up on the FOMC during the GFC. That whole class was just studying Freeman and Schwartz's monetary history of the US, which if you're trying to understand historical parallels is a great background for investing. With that early experience of multi-asset class endowment, how do you think about what you wanted to do after business school? I stayed on the fixed income path. I still had this passion for understanding interest rates. I also thought of myself more as a quant. I liked the closed formed equations of fixed income land. You can answer the duration question and price a bond very clearly, whereas equity seemed more mysterious to me. I focused exclusively on getting fixing.”

    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. “Class history and was able to get a job there. It was a wonderful opportunity. This was early days of endowment investing. There was private equity. There was inventure and growth and buyout. I got to see everything. It was also a time when a lot of the stuff that's been outsourced wasn't outsourced. We used to get private equity distributions. I had a great mentor there named Steve Lehman who ended up working at Pew Trust for a while. He would have me trade the distribution, so I learned how to read a Bloomberg ticker. It was just an amazing experience. And I gravitated towards fixed income. A lot of that was that underpinning of what drives the market trying to understand that key drivers' interest rates, and I wanted to understand as well as I could the fixed income markets, I applied to Columbia Business School, made a huge mistake in that I did not take a single one of the value investing classes.”

    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. “This was post RTC, post 1990 recession, Wall Street was not hiring. They definitely weren't hiring a religion major. I moved to New York. I slept on a friend's couch. I started taking temp jobs. The first one was counting receipts during Christmas in the back office of Bloomingdale's with a group of twelve other temps. I somehow got a break and I got a job at Columbia being a fundraiser. They had this amazing benefit to give you tuition. So you could take classes. Wesleyan's a great school has no core curriculum. So I had not taken a math class in four years. I took calculus. I took intermediate economics. Did great in them, and realized I can do this. Part of it was to prove to myself that I could do it. Part of it was to prove to a future employer. And I got another big break, which was a job in Columbia's investment office opened up. I took my limited experience and my”

    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. “The second half of intro economics my senior year and had an amazing professor, a Richard Slotkin, he had this analogy that sparked my interest in markets. He asked this question, if Martians came down, went to Congress, and said, we'll give you fifty billion dollars in real wealth every year, but we're going to take fifty thousand lives. Would Congress take that deal? Throughout most of my life, the answer would be a clear no, I thought that was fascinating, and his answer was that's what the car industry has done. By making transportation more efficient, they've generated all this real wealth, but there are forty thousand people that die every year in car wrecks. That is not a decision that can be made politically. It's one that the markets make. I was turned on at that point. I want to understand how this works. I want to make this part of my life's work. It was a tough time to get 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

  17. “He was a religious philosopher from the 19th century. I read almost every one of his works as part of my studies. One of his books leans hard into the concept of true faith is not something that is blind. It's something where you're constantly questioning. There's a back and forth. In investing, you have to have faith that what you think you're doing, whatever you think you're buying, whatever manager that you're going to invest with is going to do well. You need to always be asking yourself, where can this go wrong? That was a central tenant of how he thought about faith. I have carried that forward with investing. The analogy dies, though, because I don't think in faith you're supposed to change your mind as much as you have to when you're investing. You're coming out of school and thinking about work. What did that look like as a religious studies major with some underpinning of microeconomics once? I got lucky in that I took.”

    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. “And wanted to be an econ major, I took micro, absolutely hated it. It was the worst experience. I pivoted hard, and we're talking really hard. I became a religion major. I hadn't had a religious upbringing growing up. I was very curious about it. Wesleyan is a great liberal arts school. I decided to take full advantage and dive in. It's pretty much been a life journey since then trying to figure out how that applies to investing. How did you pivot to religious studies? I took an intro to religion class that was a survey of all religions from Christianity to Buddhism to early religions in Mesopotamia. I was curious. I was young and thinking big thoughts, trying to understand the meaning of the world and thought I would find it there. Where I ended up really getting passionate in my religious studies was with Kierkegaard.”

    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. “Enjoy my conversation with Bruce McDonald's for joining me. It's great to be here too. Why don't you take me all the way back to the influences from your upbringing? If you believe that investing is a combination of art and science, I had a very unfair advantage. My mother was a printmaker, my father was a geophysicist. I literally am the combination of art and science. I grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, which was an idyllic college setting. My big passion was swimming. I was very competitive. I won an award because Hanover is such a small town, the newspaper came and interviewed me. This was when I was ten. There was a prize that came with it. They asked me what I was going to do with the money. I was going to invest it. Apparently it's been in my blood for a while. I went to Wesleyan University.”

    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. “Back in April on episode 497, I sat down with Randall Stutman, the executive coach behind admired leadership, who's advised more than five hundred CEOs, including some of the most respected names in asset management. Randall introduced me to Alex, an AI leadership coach's team built on forty years of proprietary research into what the best leaders actually do. For investment professionals, that means your entire team gets on-demand coaching grounded in the behaviors that drive results and build the kind of followership that retains your top talent. We use Alex and our team at Capital Allocators swears by it. Try Alex for yourself at the link in our show notes tryx dot admired leadership dot com”

    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. “Bridge line makes your day unrecognizable. That's how refreshingly different it is from legacy investment management technology. With Ridgeline's front to back AI native platform, your typical tech panes disappear. No integration headaches, no data discrepancies, and no upgrade cycles. Instead, you get real-time data flowing through everything from portfolio accounting to reporting to reconciliation, trading, compliance, and more. In the AI era, asset and wealth management firms moving to ridgeline gain a decided advantage. That's why customers call it miraculous, game changing, and an awakening. If that's not how you would describe your investment management tech, request a demo at ridgeline.ai. Capital allocators is also brought to you by admired leadership.”

    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. “A mist filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in the retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. Alpha sense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content. Over five hundred million curated documents from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back to an exact verifiable source. Because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it, and with Alpha Sense, you know exactly what that is. See it for yourself. Try a free trial at alpha hyphencents dot com slash capital. That's alphacense dot com with a hyphen in the middle slash capital. Capital allocators is also brought to you by RidgeLine.”

    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. “I'm sorry, he slowly started walking off the plane. Not a single movement in his deplaning occurred until after the person in front of him had started walking. So there you have it, my new recent pet peeve. Don't be that person who isn't ready to deboard a plane when it's your turn. It's just not that hard. And thank you for spreading the word about my most recent pet peeve, which you'll only hear by tuning in to capital allocators. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing transcript or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a minor concern.”

    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. “Hour on the tarmac. None of that was anyone's fault, but after a long flight and equally long day, you can imagine everyone was ready to go home. All the passengers queued up to depart one by one in an orderly fashion. It's actually uncanny how respectful people are when getting off planes. But there's a moment when it's your turn to get moving and on this particular flight, after eight and a half hours, the person in the row in front of me seemed oblivious to the cadence of the queue. When it was his turn, he arose, seemingly clueless, and forced everyone behind him to wait. Of course, this wasn't just a grab your bag and go. Two bags, maybe three, come down from above, then he pauses to put on his jacket, then reorganizes his bags to put a backpack on top of his wheelbag, and then without as much as”

    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. “We get going, it's travel season, partner meetings, board meetings, the capital allocator CIO summit, Omaha for Berkshire, and Milken. Across plains, trains, and automobiles, you're bound to run into a few snacks. When they're unavoidable, I try to remember Will Gadero's story of the pilot who lifted everyone's spirits by bringing families into the cockpit. But it's not always easy, which leads to my most recent pet peeve. I was on a flight with some unfortunate delays. We were scheduled to land from a cross-country journey at 11.30 p.m., but got diverted from New York to Philadelphia because of weather at just the wrong time. After a gas and ghost stop that took about an hour, we finally landed at 3 a.m. And at that time, there's only a scant crew working at hangars, so we waited another”

    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. “Liquidity to act counter cyclically during market dislocations. We explore VCU's team-based underwriting process, lessons learned from mistakes, and personal influences that shaped Bruce's investment philosophy.”

    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. “My guests on today's show is Bruce McDonald, the CEO and CIO of the Virginia Commonwealth University Investment Management Company, which runs $2.5 billion for VCU's endowment and health system. Bruce joined the university in 2015, and shortly thereafter had the opportunity to sell the portfolio and start fresh. Since being promoted to CIO in 2022, VCU has been a top decile performer with a team of just five investment professionals. Our conversation covers Bruce's unconventional path from a religion major at Wesleyan to fixed income investing at Putnam and Endowment Rolls at Columbia and UVimco before arriving at BCU. We discussed the principles of VCU's approach, including building a portfolio around secular tailwinds like India, Vietnam, gold, and artificial intelligence while maintaining abundance of”

    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. “Historically, 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. I'm Ted Sidees, and this is Capital Allocators.”

    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. “And 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. 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. 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 your 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