YouSaid · the spoken record

Doug Phillips

lines on the record: 92
first: 2020-02-24
most recent: 2020-02-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“On what we've learned, are we fully incorporating all of those things into our process? So I remember you had a surgeon on here not long ago, and he talked about pausing and making sure everybody is together and just stopping that perspective hindsight is part of that process. And I think our committee really appreciates how we do that.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you we have an extraordinary committee. We have some very well-recognized investors and leaders of financial firms. They understand the need to delegate and take a governance role rather than a hands-on operating role for investments. And also because I've been there a long time, there's a great deal of trust that's been built up between the committee and me as the chief investment officer. So integrating it, again, this process of thumbnailing and the annual report that we do for our committee, you have a copy here in front of you. We do an extensive look back on all of the decisions we've made. And now we have 20 years worth of these decisions. And we evaluate these decisions on whether they were a good decision or not. And when we go into a new investment, we have a phrase we called prospective hindsight. So we look back when we made similar decisions and we say, looking today with hindsight,”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, by the time we get to a hiring memorandum to our investment committee, so we produce probably a 12-page hiring memorandum, it has listed everything that we know about the firm, and that's the key. So there's no hiring memorandums that we produce that somehow are just going to disappear, and we're not hiring the manager. That's a very serious undertaking for us. And one of the things we've learned over the years is that in those memorandums, we actually put in something we call what could go wrong. And the things that go wrong with investments are typically not always identified in our risk section. So we look at organizational behavior and just other things that might come into play.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the recommendation, and we pick it apart and we take a devil's advocate physician. So that's a lot of fun, but I like to read those things beforehand and have my comments ready to come into the meeting. And as a team of generalists, we find that it's very helpful to get together in that way and talk about decisions.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a cycle, there's a cadence to the work. My daily activity is looking at manager materials, talking to the team. There's a weekly cycle, which is our internal investment committee meeting, which happens two to three hours every week. There is a monthly activity where we're looking at our portfolio each month, closing, and just sort of how did we do, knowing that there's latency on reporting from privates. Quarterly, there's the committee cycle, which we do, and then the annually there's our report. But then there are these biennial activity where we talk to our committee about the big asset categories and what we're thinking and seeing. So preparation for those things too that takes a little bit of time. We do a lot of writing in our office. We never present something that hasn't been thoroughly what we call group edited. We sit in one of our conference rooms, we put up a screen, and we look at every single sentence.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually the first variable is time. So it's not as if we find a firm and six months later they're in the portfolio. It takes us about a year or two to decide whether we're going to be moving ahead. One thing we do with our committee, we have a complete autonomy on hiring managers, but we don't want the committee to be surprised ever. So we thumbnail managers that we're interested in. Thumbnail is a half a page in our quarterly report and we say this is a firm that's in the pipeline for potential hiring maybe six months, a year down the road. If you know anything about the firm or you know somebody you think is better, let us know now so that when we produce the hiring memorandum, we're not going to surprise you or we're not going to surprise us. So that process has evolved over the years and there's all the things that go into actual hiring, so contract review and operational diligence and we do reference checks, particularly on any investors that have left the firm. We like to talk to them.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a point I made because you're managing the torrent, I like to call it. There is an amazing amount of information that comes from current managers and prospective managers. Tracking, getting down to the firms that you're really interested in in tracking them deeply is part of our work. So we have a system. There's a person that manages that for us. There's a certain amount of inbound inquiries that go through that get assigned to an analyst and then maybe they go up to an investment officer. But managing that torrent through a system is very important. That system also has sort of a hot button that anyone in the office can click that button on a particular piece of information, news or manager, and that goes right up to me. And that comes to me daily. So if there's something that needs my attention, I know about it right away.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's five of you traveling all over the place, and you have your portfolio to monitor. You have managers you're meeting all the time. How do you gather and keep all that information in an efficient way?”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the past few years than we have in the other category. So the other gate is replacement. So if we have a firm that we're probably not going to continue, so no re-ups, or maybe we're going to trim or leave, and we have a stable of firms that we're looking at to put in their place. So I'll augment or replace the two gates.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we're generalists, and of the five investment officers, I'm one of them, we're very, you hear that word cohesive, but we're very tight. We all work within shouting distance of each other in the office we meet once a week to talk about ideas that we've surfaced. There's no compensation if you source an interesting manager that gets put in the portfolio. What happens is our team is out meeting firms in every city they go to based on these referrals that we have, they come back and they will talk to me about it and say, I think this firm should go into our process where we have the five of us talk about opportunities. To get into process, there's two kind of gates that we use. One is it's got to be an augmenting manager. So it does something that we don't currently have in the portfolio and it's a direction that we're leaning toward. So that's an augmenting gate. And we've been hiring more augmenting managers.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say not so much on the manager's forcing. It's more on thinking about allocation and structure weights on positions, some things we haven't thought about. Occasionally, I think there are two managers that have come through that relationship that we hired that are good. But the other part of it is the second set of eyes and ears on our materials. We use them as a little bit of a shadow investment committee. So when we're writing our quarterly report, we'll have a consultant run through it and say, well, here's something you might want to think about, or maybe this is going off in a direction that's not the right way. So they're helpful. And it makes our committee meetings more effective by having that second set of eyes and ears.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started this relationship. I think it's about eight years ago with the idea that we would not be a standard client. And what that meant for us was we don't want filtering from our lead consultant to occur. We want to sit in their offices at least once a year with our entire team and rotate their asset specialists and their best thinkers through us so there's no coloring of the comment, no polishing it up to fit our needs. Because when you dig into these consultants and you look at the manager connections they've had and the experience, it's actually pretty helpful. So we think of them as an extension of our team rather than a sort of top-down consultant that sits in between an investment committee and a team. It's not how we use them at all. And there are endowments our size that absolutely turn their back on consultants and say we never want to do that because they're not helpful.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tend not to invest with large firms just at the outset. No bad feelings about any of the large buyout funds, for example.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you think about that differently from a larger firm where maybe decision making at the security level is going to be decentralized from a smaller firm where you're really investing with a person leading maybe a smaller team and making the decisions?”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of them is the way they lead the team, internally. Is this a very top down organization or is it flat and collegial and highly productive? If you've got a very strong leader at the top, sometimes that creates tension and there's defections and turnover. We do like to see a group. Obviously the leaders have to be very strong, but you want to see a productive meritocracy, I guess is the right term. Some folks say that, but they're not really doing it. The other thing we get nervous about is the firms that are always talking their own game and don't have the perspective of maybe some challenging times and are they humble about what happened in those times and did they hang together? Did their investors stay with them? So those are some of the things, Ted.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of our great leaders, David Swenson, has talked about people as the key component. For us, it is absolutely the people. Somebody is making those decisions about putting a trade on or investing in a private company or operating that company or selling that company. If you can't trust the people, it's a non-starter. That gets to be very difficult because it's a gradation of talent and capabilities in people, and most of them are really, really good. I find that by interviewing many, many firms, and I have 38 years of doing this, you tend to notice little subtle differences in the way people act, and you tend to pick up just in your diligence on firms. You tend to pick up stories from other investors. Maybe there's just a little something that's not quite right. So we really do try to find the best people that we can trust and be a long-term investor with them.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are names that we've heard spoken that we are not investing in and names that we're in that nobody else knows about just because they're small and they fit us. There's not enough capacity. But there is a convergence around certain names and some of them are longstanding 30, 40 year old firms that have had good succession planning and so we're in some of those firms.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some schools won't see us, frankly. But I think if we're open to explaining what we do, the schools that we've talked to sometimes pick up something and they say, wow, that's really interesting. And I'd like to incorporate that. And the same for us, we'll hear some things that we want to put in our process. So I think most of them are pretty open to it. But you also have to avoid groupthink. If you went around to all the endowments, larger top 20, 30 endowments in the country and spoke to them, they'd all be different. There's no uniform approach.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weight, the biggest, deepest circle is from the peers. And again, not going to conferences or looking at surveys, but just going around when I'm here in the city, visiting our friends at other endowments.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have, if you could picture a Venn diagram, I know your listeners won't be able to see this, but I have it in our annual report to our stakeholders. But our Venn diagram has four circles in the center are the managers that we are most interested in. One circle is our investment committee. They have lots of connections in the world and they bring us ideas. The other is a consultant. I won't name the consultant, but we have a firm that is well respected in the endowment and foundation world that has some sourcing capabilities that maybe they see something that we haven't seen. We use that. We also use the peer group. And what I think the fourth circle is that most downwards don't always think of is we ask firms that we're interviewing who they think are good competitors. And we meet those firms. So somewhere in the circle, the convergence or overlapping of those four circles is where we get our best ideas. Of the circles, the one that probably has the most.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have gone through that exercise a few times, the most recent one was in the GFC, and I think all investment committees had a difficult time. They were struggling with the idea of allocating capital if you have it to assets that were on sale versus saying this is an unprecedented change in our financial structure and we should be really careful in that environment. We tend not to change too much when something comes along like that. We work within allocation bands ranges, which are fairly broad for most categories. We may push if we're getting toward the bottom, we may push upward, and the same way for the top. So those are market-based as well as time-based rebalancing decisions.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do through the modeling come up with a number where there's a percentage likelihood over a five-year period that if conditions hold today that we think we can earn that. That includes alpha generation above the benchmarks, which include benchmarking against other managers in the category as well as our public benchmark. That has historically been in the 7 to 8 percent nominal range, which is not a bad return if we can achieve that going forward. We typically have a lot less volatility than our benchmark as well.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's both the peer allocations first of all, they're backward looking time frame, so you're never going to know what schools are doing going forward. We do try to understand schools by visiting in their offices and learning about them, and we welcome those visits as well. And our philosophy as it relates to peers is since we're not performance comp based, we want everyone to do well, and we're smaller than some of the larger endowments, so we're not going to take capacity if they have a manager that they like. We sometimes tag along. But generally, we are bottom-up manager sourcing allocation group. Risk plays a part of it, as I mentioned earlier, liquidity plays a part of it. The annual planning exercise looks at allocation models and ranges of returns for asset categories going forward. We use a lot of mean reversion to what we think is fair value on categories. Then that is also conveyed back through our finance folks so that they know sort of what we're thinking about.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get into that manager selection process, and before that, do you derive that ass allocation starting with looking at peers and saying, as you said, we don't want to be too different, or is it based on some risk framework?”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Total head count on manager of the rosters currently in the low sixties. It's going to stay there. That's come down from close to a hundred. And if you include wind downs and legacy side pocket things, there's probably about 110 relationships currently, but 50 or so of those are finishing.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More managers on the alternative side are more on the hedge fund and private equity side, and fewer on the public side. We think it's better to concentrate on fewer managers that have alpha generating capabilities.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are about twenty four to twenty five percent in the ground invested net asset value and private equity, including venture, which puts us about in the middle of the larger endowments. We have another twenty four, twenty five percent in what is a large category that is affectionately known as hedge funds, but it is a wide range of different strategies. If you bucketed those two main components in hedge funds, you'd find about half of it is in long short, typically long short managers with low correlation to each other, and the other half is in return generators that are very, very uncorrelated to our benchmark or anything else in the portfolio, including our long short book. Then we have a real asset program, which is real estate, oil and gas, natural resources, that is winding down. It's a little less than 10% today. Not much money going into that category. Frankly, it's been our most disappointing area. Public equities is about a third, three to 35%, roughly 10 to 10%.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The investment team, we don't recruit, we network. If we find someone that is interested in the field and has the right academic and work experiences and wants to learn and sort of evolve with us, we'll talk to them and perhaps bring them in and meet other people. That's only when we're growing and we're fully staffed now. One of the pushes I got from our board was to make sure that there were enough people in the office that if something happened to me or one or two other people that there was enough redundancy. So we've been able to find great people that have an interest in being a Rochester family reasons. They went to school there. The lifestyle of Rochester is good. We're a family-friendly office too. We really try to keep a work-life balance.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you mentioned that when you first came in, it was hard for the university to recruit someone to Rochester. I know you've had a team that's been with you for a long time. How have you gone about recruiting and maintaining your team there?”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an ongoing process. There's no perfect alignment. I do think that there has been no proof that I've ever seen that the investment team, some folks say, well, the investment team should be aligned with performance. So there should be performance compensation and deferred bonuses and carried interest and sort of that sort of thing. I haven't seen that shown. So we align ourselves with university's mission in the investment office by saying we're salaried professionals just like our faculty and our physicians. We do benchmark that against other schools when there's surveys. And we also realize that working in Rochester is a little less expensive than working in Manhattan or Boston or San Francisco. So there's a little bit of a discount for the lower cost of living in Rochester. That's how we align the team. We also align ourselves on process by being generalists. We don't have silos of expertise where there's a hedge fund or private equity group. It's a small team of five investors.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“on the investment committee, talk about what we've learned from the stakeholder view, and then bring that into an actionable plan for the following year. We also have a quarterly, of course, reviews, and we have semi-annual asset category, deep, deep evaluation. We call those comprehensive evaluations that bring out manager issues or opportunities that we see, and then we spend the next two years working on those because as a long-term investor, if you're doing this every year or a quarter or something, I think you're on a fool's errand. So changing things gradually, taking a long-term perspective in the process and keeping stakeholders posted.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Rochester, again, has some unique characteristics that influence our performance. They're not the key factor in it, but we have one of the highest revenue sources from clinical care because of our hospitals and also research. As a result of our very high growth in that area, our assets are a little smaller as it relates to the revenue stream. And that has some impact on the liquidity. So we're actually managing a liquidity informed portfolio more so than most of our peers. And informed means that we bucket liquidity and we look at the most illiquid components and model our cash flows and that sort of thing. So that's sort of an overall philosophy that we have to follow at Rochester that maybe some others are more liquid than we are and they can afford the liquid partnerships. The other part of it is we change very slowly to an asset allocation and we have a process we follow. It's not tweaked quarterly or semi-annually it's once a year where we sit with our trustees.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does that coalesce in how you approach the investment problem at Rochester as opposed to maybe what you see at some other institutions, you say peers that you're getting compared to in performance?”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The overriding philosophy here is to keep the stakeholders, this shared governance models that universities and colleges follow. You need to involve faculty and deans, alumni, trustees, the community even to be sure that they understand what the endowment is doing. It's not just this large pool of capital that some government folks feel should be taxed. It is a very important collection of many smaller funds that have been donated over hundreds of years, and that money is there forever. So just being sure that people aren't pushing for allocations to a certain manager or certain strategy that somehow is going to push us away from the norm and what's best for the university. And you'll have different views from different people, trustees like to see the performance ranked against peers and the finance folks at the university would like to see budget stability as well as growth. And the deans, I think, want to see more money for faculty.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, why don't we just dive into where you are today and you can weave the history of that and just start with what are some of the philosophies about how you go about managing the endowment that you bring to bear from your experience?”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, we don't dwell on that because it's what happened in the past is history. You learn from it, but no one that's running the university today was there when those things happened. And we're only about the future, not the past. But the allocation problems were too much concentration in venture capital when venture cycled out of favor in the seven, well, actually in the 80s. But that was a result of trying to recover from the nifty fifty high equity allocation concentrated in the 1970s. And that was an outlier allocation. One of the things that I talk about when I discuss our process and our allocation is we try to be right down the center of the fairway. Allocations, and we try to add value through picking better managers. And when you look at our allocations, you'd say, well, this is very similar to most of the bigger endowments in the country. But it was the allocation decisions made in the 70s and 80s.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“so much related to investment performance, but it's related to compounding of new money. And David Swenson has pointed this out in one of his books. But it's as much as 80% of the growth in endowments since World War II has come from the accumulation of new money. And of course, if you manage it poorly, you get poor results or you're in the headlines for some problems in the organization. Those monies So the challenge for Rochester was to kind of get back that support from the alumni, and I talked about this in my interview and the trustees were very interested in my perspective on that, and they were trying to recruit somebody to come in and help manage this program. And they couldn't find somebody. So I actually ran the development program in addition to running the investment program for about five years.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, Rochester, as you know, your brother went to school at the University of Rochester. It's a private research university and it relies on its endowment, just like every other school in the country that's private. And those publics that have foundations too, they rely on their endowments. But Rochester was a particularly interesting university for me because I knew about it when I worked at Princeton, the treasurer at the time, Carl Schaefer, was a graduate of Rochester, class of 1958. And when we benchmarked Princeton, we sort of looked at Rochester and said, well, that's a peculiar asset allocation. It had one of the largest endowments in the country in top five. And there were some problems in the 70s and 80s with performance and misallocation of capital, frankly. And it never really recovered from that. So in 2000, when I was looking at it, it still had not recovered. And one of the things I pointed out was that the growth of endowments, educational endowments in this country at private colleges and universities is not.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's back when the earth's crust was cooling. Somebody said to me, dinosaurs were still roaming the earth. The evolution of everything has been profound over the past 30, seven years that I've been involved.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The short story is on the long path. Is I worked as an analyst for a few years and literally crossed Nassau Street in Princeton where I was born and went from an analyst in a consulting group to Princeton to helping administer the endowment before Printco was started. This was 82 through 86. Back then, there was a lot of physical custody of assets and brokerage custody and that had to be coordinated. So there's a small team of people that did that and I managed that team for five years. Then we did some things like adding electronic custody and bringing in spreadsheets to do what was previously done manually. And I knew a few folks from Williams College who were managers at Princeton for the endowment. And when they were looking for somebody in 1986, Williams sounded like a great place to work, so I took that position and rose to the treasurer, spent 14 years there. And then was recruited to go to Rochester 20 years ago. And our president at the time, coincidentally, was a Williams alumnus.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My grandfather's brother, so my great uncle was the manager of a Merrill Lynch office in New Jersey. So between my father, grandfather, and great uncle, I had some early experience, and my dad and I used to watch Wall Street Week together almost every week when I was younger. So I watched Lewis Rukauser, who was terrific in all of his guests. So you're kind of a modern day Louis Rukauser, by the way.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guest on today's show is Doug Phillips, the chief investment officer of the University of Rochester Endowment, where he is overseen the school's two point six billion dollar pool of capital for twenty years. Doug's two-decade tenure at Rochester constitutes only the back half of his work in the endowment world, as he previously managed Williams College's endowment for 14 years and started his career in the early 80s at Princeton. Our conversation covers the history of Rochester's endowment, the university's broad stakeholders, asset allocation, manager sourcing, research process, investment committee, assessment of past decisions, and efforts to be a good partner to managers. We then dive into each asset class, touching on traditional equity, hedge funds, real assets, private equity, and venture capital. Please enjoy my conversation with Doug Phillips.”
2020-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Doug Phillips – Middle of the Fairway at the University of Rochester (Capital Allocators, EP.123) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source