YouSaid · the spoken record

Carrie Thome

lines on the record
60
first
2020-10-19
most recent
2020-10-19
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “And it ultimately generated something like $15 million that they were then able to invest. And that grew the portfolio that ended up being the $2 to $3 billion portfolio that I was managing all these 90 years later. And if you were inside a university, you don't get the ability to build that asset base. And building that asset base allowed us to give you gifts back to the university. So every year there's a grant that Wharf gives back to Madison to support research. And it also allowed us within our portfolio to build this aspect of helping startup companies because that's a way to commercialize technology that comes off campus. So you ended up with an institutional investment office and a tech transfer office merged together in a single foundation.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Not patent technology and then seen that technology abused. So he wanted to put some protection around it. The university said it's not really our line of business. We're in the business of, as my old boss used to say, educating young minds. So nine alumni, which is where alumni research foundation comes from, threw $100 in and created this foundation back in 1925, that $900 is still on the books, is paid in capital. And you ended up with this entity that was a nonprofit to hold the technology that came off of the campus. It was quite visionary at the time. And it's probably one of the very few tech transfer offices that are still held and even held outside the university setting. Most of them are organizations within. And it offers some really nice benefits because what ended up happening was back in that day, they were able to license at first technology off to Kellogg's.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think it's become better known when I first got there. I didn't really honestly know what it was when I started either. It was a pretty quiet organization in pretty decent reason. Worf is known as the Tech Transfer Office for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And by technology transfer, they process and hold the patents on all of the inventions that come off campus. If they have university, if the university funding has any federal funding, then you are required to give any invention disclosures to the university's designated tech transfer office. And in this case, it's worth. And the thing that's pretty unique about WARF is Worf was started in 1925 before the really ever even were tech transfer offices. The university didn't want to deal with intellectual property, so nine alumni had come together to create this foundation to hold some important technology that had come off campus. And the professor that had derived this technology had seen someone.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Was no expert, but had learned enough about a single asset class that the whole idea of going multi asset class and even though the assets were one-third the size of what I had managed, it was really interesting to me. So I did make the move over there and then entered into the world that eventually led me to become a CIO.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Is that, you know, because I was thinking of interest as an interest rate on the loan because my job had been to put the loans on the apartment complexes. And so what kind of interest is carried interest? And so it makes me smile when I think about sort of how incredibly naive I was and how much I had to learn. Fell in love with the asset class and really loved doing that. And then I spent five years there. And it was because I loved what I was doing and people thought I did a good job that when they would go over to where I eventually moved to Wharf, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the director over there, Mark, would ask, who did they visit? And they would say nice things about me. And when he eventually needed to replace his associate director, he figured it was harder to teach someone private assets than the public piece of what they were doing. And that's where I made the transition then over to institutional total portfolio management. And at that point, I had learned enough.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “What I found when I got to SWIB was I had joined their private group, and at that time they had their private group. It was the private debt that was quasi-public. I'm blanking on the term. They did a private loan program, long-term loans to Wisconsin companies, and they had the private equity program there as well. And they had one analyst, and I was supposed to serve all three to four portfolio managers. Eventually, they all wanted their own analysts, and I had to pick which one I wanted to go to, which portfolio. And I chose the private equity portfolio, the venture capital and the buyouts, because it had most spoken to me and it was most similar to real estate. And maybe at the time, I was still thinking that eventually I'd like to maybe transfer over to the real estate program at SWIB. It was working there and beginning to learn and understand that industry, I can smile now because I think those first meetings every time I went to a meeting and I'd come from real estate and someone would talk about carried interest, I just was like carried interest.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Line. I had decided I either was going to go back to law school or business school, got all the way through and accepted to law schools, deferred a year, and ended up going back and getting my master's degree and was working full-time, then part-time while I did that. And after finishing that up, I was fortunate enough to experience, I don't know, I wouldn't call it fortunate at the time, but now it is. We had two downsizing. So I lived through a company that was the fastest growing company. And then we had the everybody go to a room and then half the people basically lost their jobs. And we did two of those. And I knew that at the end of the day, my job, we didn't need two analysts and someone that I had worked with at this company had called me and they were over at the pension fund. And that's how I ended up at the pension fund and how I ended up in institutional investment management because if I go back to where I started, no idea about pensions, institutional investors.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Take all of the first classes. The finance once spoke to me. So that's probably as good of an example of how I ended up where I was. I really fell in love with real estate actually. I thought it was nice. My dad was a Mason, so I kind of thought there was a nice thing to building things. And I think there is a building things about my career and what I've chosen to do went into real estate primarily, real estate finance. So that's where my two majors were in as an undergrad was real estate and finance. And went to work at a bank and underwrote mortgages and it was exceedingly boring and I just couldn't wait to get out of there. It might be for some people but for me it wasn't and I'm old enough now when I had my first job there were no computers like on everybody's desk so you were doing them manually. Ultimately ended up with a job in a commercial real estate firm and we were developing apartment complexes. At that point somewhere along the line.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Okay, listening to a podcast you did with someone before I got on here to familiar myself, the individual talked about how they always knew what they wanted to do. And I would say I was the exact opposite. I had no idea. And my whole career, I would probably classify as an accident. I grew up in a really small town. It was mostly a farming town. My parents neither of them went to college. So I didn't have great idea of where I ended up today. None of that was known to me. I had no idea about this world whatsoever. All I really knew, and I love when people have great stories about why they chose a college, I primarily chose mine because I wanted to move to a big city. And at the time, Madison seemed like a big city when you're coming from Freedom, Wisconsin. And even my selection of choosing business was because I kind of, by process of elimination, hadn't found anything else that spoke to me and I ended up in the business program.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “My guest on today's show is Carrie Tomy, the longtime former Chief Investment Officer at Wharf, or the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which is a three billion dollar pool that arose from monetizing technologies developed at the University of Wisconsin. She recently left to start a venture capital firm called NVNG, standing for Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained. Our conversation covers Carrie's Wisconsin Roots, her early experience at SWIB with the state of Wisconsin Pension Fund, and investing at Wharf over the last two decades. We discuss WARF's unique structure, technology transfer, its all-weather portfolio construction, separation of alpha and beta, and manager selection. We then turn to Carrie's new adventure, NVNG, a venture capital firm seeking to bring the benefits of entrepreneurial activities in Wisconsin.”

    2020-10-19 · Capital Allocators · Carrie Thome – Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained at WARF and beyond (Capital Allocators, EP.160) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source