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Ellen S. Futter

lines on the record: 84
first: 2024-04-01
most recent: 2024-04-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And governance issues are so important and so many institutions have dysfunctional, quirky governance that does not serve them well. Our investment committee was far from perfect, but they had our back. They're thoughtful people. They came to every meeting, prepared. You cannot ask for more than that. They empowered us to take risks. They backed us when we were doing some pretty out of favor things. And we had long tenures. I could go on and on and on, but Carnegie was just a fantastic place to work. And I didn't fully appreciate it until I was in some other situations.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've all said what I deeply feel and appreciate, but I want to pivot to another thought about what I appreciate about Carnegie, which I did not fully appreciate until I left. And I threw both my work at Edge Hill Endowment Partners where we managed endowments for institutions with much smaller asset bases and serving on investment committee. I learned to appreciate the governance at Carnegie. And if you have captive capital and you have good governance, it is nirvana.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Echo everything that was said and really to be contrarian, we were encouraged to do that, which is scary. But it was encouraged and embraced. And that has stuck with me. And then the other thing is not just encourage taking chances in the portfolio, but taking chances on people in the way that really Ellen took a chance on me. So as I look at the team now that I'm assembling, there are some unexpected backgrounds. And it's really part of my takeaway from the teaching of Ellen's legacy of you can get incredible people from all corners of the world. And so have a broader view of what's out there rather than just somebody who's come up in the ENF ranks.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ellen taught us. Like I said, she made investments in things that I think people stopped and were like, I can't believe you guys are investing in this. But they were small enough. And then as conviction grew, we gave them more capital and more capital. And I think that's how you learn to take risk. And I think we were taught how to take risks.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's not accidental that there are all these CIOs for exactly that reason. I think the hardest thing about becoming a CIO is that it can be lonely and you can be paralyzed by the fear of getting it wrong. But we got to practice that for years of someone encouraging you to take risks. Ellen is a phenomenal mentor. She went to bat for us. She argued for us. She put our needs ahead of her own often. We learned that's how you lead. I don't think it's accidental. I think we created cultures where we gave people permission to make decisions and we gave them permission to not always be successful. You don't have to get it all right. You just have to mostly get it right. And anything you get wrong, we can fix. If you make investments in the right size so that it doesn't overwhelm your portfolio, you can undo them. We learned that. And I think that was a lesson that.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say my biggest takeaway, and it's an appreciation the rope and just the trust of that was really motivating. And so it's something I try to apply to how I manage people as well, just to sort of do this work and come back to me, but run with this. And actually, Kim, you've articulated when you started working for Betty Fagan. And she said, there's nothing you're going to do that we can't fix. So take risks. Go out there. Start going. And Ellen did that for me. And I think Vartan did that for us. And so I am hugely appreciative of.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do really work hard at investing and working closely with the people that work with me. And I think that the greatest thing that you can do is help people be their best selves and bring out the best in people. But I wouldn't say that it was explicit. I think when you're either lucky enough or smart enough or both to hire great people, they're going to flourish. So I think it's a combination of probably some luck and some deliberate effort on my part. And then I would say at the corporation, we all had this great sense of mission. I think people that work in the endowment and foundation space have a really strong set of shared values. We care a lot about these institutions. And so it's very natural if you're a”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then adapt it to this totally different environment that has major cash inflows all the time. We have none of the same problems. We have totally opposite problems. It's reminiscent of Ellen showing up at Carnegie and being like, I have days where I am like, oh my God. I don't even know how to think about this. So it's really been an exercise of calling every smart person I know and saying how would you think about this? What do I think about what they said and then synthesizing all that? The thing about family offices is, and this is like an adage in the family office world, you've seen one family office, you've seen one family office. They're all different. And so there are not things that I can directly overlay from an endowment or a foundation or a family because we have our own unique set of issues related to our pools of capital. So it makes it super exciting. And all I can do is just grab every nugget of wisdom and best practices that I can apply from.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A team of generalists because I wanted people to be making relative value decisions all the time. What I'm seeing naturally over time is people do gravitate towards their specialties and it just happens. And it's funny because when I started, I don't have a formal investment committee. It's not quarterly. It's whenever we have something, puts them in together. When I started, I was like, we're going to keep it lean and mean. I don't want to be bogged down in bureaucracy. Now we are processing memos between there are probably eight to twelve pages and i'm now having everybody on the team read them and i'm adopting all these things that i learned from working at carnegie because i realized they were best practices and they are applicable and we should be doing them if we're going to be doing the type of really deep and thorough work that we all did together but it is really trying to thread the needle of what is the best that i can take from what we all had at carney”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High on that list, and everybody gave me advice of you got to get your investment policy statement. And so I collected a bunch of investment policy statements. I tried really hard and I was trying to craft it. And at some point, like a light bulb went off in my head. And we do have an investment policy statement, both for the family office and the foundation. But when it's one person whose capital it is, you can have a statement and it can have parameters, but it's a fluid exercise. And this is a living breathing person who has a opinions and is in the markets every day and also watching his Bloomberg screens. And so RIPS is about as broad and general as it could be. And it's basically don't lose money. So there were things that just don't transfer from an institution. And then there are other things that I have really tried to do. So in contrast to Carnegie, I had to build a team and I decided in the beginning I want.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is such a wildly different environment than a foundation or an endowment that there are some learnings that are directly transferable, some that are adjacent, and some that are like totally irrelevant. In this role, I'm the chief investment officer for Michael Dell's family office as well as his foundation. He is alive. He's brilliant. He's around. He's engaged. Unlike Vartan, he really likes investing and is very curious. So when I started, I came in and I did a presentation at the end of my first week of what my initial plan was. And part of it was to do a listening tour, to go meet with as many CIOs as I could, particularly those that had large single stock positions in their portfolio, which was like Hewlett, Gordon and Betty Moore in the beginning had Intel. So I tried to find as many of those as I could. And then I went and talked to all the CIOs that I knew and trusted, these three women being very”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew that it was a priority to keep the team intact, but I also knew that the way they were structured and how they did things was not a way that I could keep. Ellen managed us. She gave us a lot of authority and a lot of ability to express our own opinions and disagree. They disagreed a lot and they had a lot of really strong opinions, but they didn't take responsibility for the ultimate decision because that wasn't the role that was set up for them. So now I was asking them to be a very different organization than they had been before. I think the biggest thing was trying to change a culture because I wanted to give back to a culture that was much closer to what we had at Carnegie because I loved it and it was not what was there.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing that I started with, and I think was partially because we were in a pandemic, was just being on a listening tour. Everything about it was so different. I look back on this now and think, I can't believe I took this job without information, but they wouldn't give me any of the portfolio before I joined. They said they had signed NDAs with their managers, and so they couldn't disclose anything. So I had big picture portfolio information, but not a single manager name. So I walked in to a portfolio November 2nd that I had seen for the first time on November 2nd and there were two managers that overlapped. That's it. Columbia had such a different philosophy on how they managed assets that it literally, there was nothing that was similar. I didn't know these names. And it was in COVID. So I couldn't know these names.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went from having a team of nine people, including the ops team, to 30 and lots of complexity around that because the non-investment team was bigger than the investment team, which was not the case at Carnegie. It was a new muscle to build. And so it's been interesting to do that too”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I felt like Carnegie had done this amazing thing for me. I couldn't leave them in the lurk. At Lisa stayed, she was supposed to leave earlier, but agreed to stay. So everybody jumped in and was like, okay, since those two are leaving, this group rallied and stayed and pushed it over the finish lines just to make sure that this place that we love, this institution that had done so much for all of us, we didn't want to leave it without proper stewardship for a while. It was a tough decision, but the right decision. The interesting thing about Columbia, which is not an experience I'd have had before, was I was inheriting a team. And that was very new to go into a situation where you really are not involved in the hiring of a single person on the team. And I think that was the biggest growth moment for me because even though Columbia is much bigger and they manage the portfolio in a very different way, the portfolio management wasn't the intimidating thing. It was the fact that I”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They gave me the job, and obviously I said yes, I got the team together on a Zoom call to announce. And the faces were like, it was shock. And then both Ken and Brooks said, I need to get on your calendar. I announced on Monday, I spoke to both of them Tuesday and Wednesday and they announced that they were leaving as well. So then I couldn't leave when I thought I was going to leave. I thought that I was going to take some time and spend some time with my girls and stuff. So I stayed till October 30th and I started November 2nd, Columbia.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was going on with the rest of the team? The only person that I knew was looking was Elisa because she had shared with me what was going on with her. But I didn't realize that everybody else because you could interview just like I did over Zoom and not have to go anyplace. It got to the end. I still wasn't 100% sure I wanted to job, but the competitive instinct kicked.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They first came to me with the Columbia job, I said I wasn't interested. I loved Carnegie. No place is perfect, but I felt supported. I felt like my opinion mattered in the senior leadership space. I really felt like Vartan was a mentor and coach to me and a father figure to all of us in real meaningful ways. And so I wasn't necessarily looking to leave, although I knew that one of the big problems with CIOs is they stay too long. And I do think portfolios need refresh and I knew that I had a team of such quality talent that if I didn't leave, they were going to leave at some point. And so I was just like not interested. And then the headhunter was like, you should at least talk to them. I just, I can't believe you would not take this interview. If you're not going to take this, what are you going to take? That's literally what he said. And I was like, all right, I'll do the interview. And so in the middle of the interview process, COVID happened and I didn't realize.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years and five months at Ford Foundation and 13 years and seven months Carnegie. So this is one more year. It takes me longer to figure it out. It takes L to figure it out.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So creative. Lisa came up with so many really interesting ways to bring in more diverse managers and bring the community into Carnegie. She had also been on the team that did the renovation of the Carnegie space, which was super interesting. But once it was rebuilt, we could do all sorts of activities at Carnegie and she spearheaded so many of those things. We hosted.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was probably just in my own evolution. Relationship with Talked about That I wasn't privy to when Kim and Meredith had each had each other. So I learned About what Kim was going through. A sounding board, she would come into my office. I got exposure to personnel issues and larger Issues”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institution, and we really, I think, grew in stature. People really thought of us as people who were engaged. And so when Meredith Leffey was just like, okay, so who's taking what piece? Who's getting more responsibility? What does each of the people want to do? I think it was just the oxygen the team needed to grow and offer themselves a little bit more ability to think about what the CIO job is once Meredith left. It was like everybody got to see what the CIO job was. We really opened komonoed everything about the job giving them space to decide if it was really something they wanted to do.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was not going to now do my job and Meredith's job. I think the other thing that was a blessing, this point that Ellen taught us that we should be out there and be public, we were small but mighty at Carnegie. We punched above our weight because we were thought of, I think, as thought leaders. We were like, we're not going to be able to influence managers by our size. It has to be because they think we're smart. So how do you show people you're smart? You serve on panels. You ask good questions in meetings. You become engaged and offer advice to managers. And so I knew that this was going on and I couldn't do all of that. So that made everybody else have the responsibilities. When Marathon and I were coz, we got to join many more boards than we would have if we had just been alone. We got to serve on a lot more panels than we would have if we were just alone. And that sort of elevated Carnegie. It was for the benefit both of us and of the.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A ceiling on the rest of the team that when Alisa came and expressed interest in being Deputy CAO, we knew that wasn't possible. It's not possible to have co-CIOs and a deputy CIO. It just made it really challenging for anybody else on the team to grow. And so the blessing of Meredith finding this new passion, something that she felt really strongly about going to do was that it gave a lot of oxygen to the rest of the team to grow in responsibilities because now I couldn't be at all the meetings that Meredith used to go to. People thought we shared a job. We didn't share a job. We had to.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was like, you don't cry at work, but I cry at work. And I was just like, you're what? So it was a hard decision, but it was very different. Every single person who was on that team, we had been involved in the hiring. So we chose every single person that worked at Carnegie. It wasn't like I had to get to know this team. I had hired this team. We already had a system in place. We were concerned about the co-CIO structure, not because we were concerned about each other, but we knew it put.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's been a combination of both, actually. It definitely was going back to like working for a startup. Our first hire came on in June of 2016. Portfolio was invested. So we spent a ton of time meeting the managers and thinking about, okay, where are we right now? But because the real estate at Trinity is so significant, I was also spending a significant amount of time on that. I've got to be right next to the people that I'm hiring doing a lot of this stuff and a decent amount of my time is taken up with this real estate.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the same way that we had primary and secondary at the team, actually Kim Meredith had primary and secondary. So they divided the portfolio between them. I ended up working more with Meredith, but I just had a lot more autonomy and independence because I had more years of experience. So I was making many more decisions independently that I would then share with the team. The portfolio had also matured. The two other managing directors at the time, Ken Lee and Brooke Jones, would probably say the same thing over our portfolios, we had a lot of autonomy and influence over the portfolios for which we were responsible. And we had junior people on the team that we were now working with. They were supporting us. And that was new for me because under Ellen's leadership, I didn't have that. So that was a change.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will say though, I had a breakfast with Ellen on the verge of her leaving. I was like, I want to be a CIO. I want to be a CIO. I want to be a CIO. And she was like, Meredith, there's a lot of not investing that goes into being a CIO. And I still to this day remember God, truer words. I think we did a really good job of constructing something that allowed us to work together and have partnership. It would not have worked, I think, if we didn't come to it as such good friends. And I trusted Meredith so much. I had complete faith that she wasn't trying to do anything wrong. I hope she had that same faith in me. We could manage together because we had this experience with Ellen beforehand where we had built trust. We had built a lot of trust. We knew exactly each other's investment philosophy. We had a very shared investment philosophy. It was very much grounded in the way.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just in case we had to go back and be managing directors, we needed to still have our foot in the manager selection space. And so we thought about that too. And I think one thing that Ellen didn't do for us that I try really hard to do now is to show people exactly what we did. Because I remember a lot of times we'd be like, what is Ellen doing? We're doing all this stuff. Where is she?”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was at Yale for 12 years and seven months, and I was at Carnegie for 12 years and seven months. With Carnegie, we got the portfolio through the financial crisis really well. And I had a great team to succeed me. That is the greatest thing that any CIO can do is to have bench strength for people that can take over seamlessly. So I just felt that the time was right. And I was ready to try something different. And I didn't know at the time what it was. But I thought, you know what? I'm not going to commute for a year. I'm going to tend my garden and walk my dogs and play tennis and figure out what my next chapter is knowing that Carnegie was just in a great place. And it did work out very well.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was not linear. I went this other direction. I learned a ton. And then I actually went to Kim in January of 22. And I said, please put me in your budget for January of 23. I want to come to Columbia. And she said, I'm already holding a place for you, but I need to tell you, I think you're playing small. And I said, let's really generous of you, but I love working with you. And I'd be delighted to be in that role. And then surely thereafter this happened.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a gift to me because I felt that I suddenly had a parachute on my back and I could take this crazy jump. And it's just such a testament to all three of them of the way that they really develop and encourage the people that work for them to go explore the world with no judgment. I think there's a lot of bosses that you could not say. So I had Hunter called me about this call. Kim even helped me prep like a couple times.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she talked with me about how she was seeing or she had seen in this next chapter of her life and career. If it's not amazing, you'll come back. You now will have a more well-rounded background. Nobody can say you're just a real assets person because now you will have been an early stage venture and life sciences. And you have a job with me, wherever I go. And she was not yet at Columbia.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So she didn't want people on the team who were de facto staying. She wanted to be a conscious decision of I am choosing to stay here. So I took a number of calls. I did a number of CIO interviews. I think there were three that I was the first runner up and didn't get. And over time it got demoralizing. And so when an opportunity came to me in deep COVID to join something totally left field, a biotech life sciences firm, I went to Kim and I was like, is this crazy? And she, to her great credit, said, you've been itchy for several years. You've been a little bored. If you do this, and it's amazing, wonderful, then you'll have this amazing new career. And I called Ellen too. And Ellen said, actually, I called that everybody at this table. Ellen said, Alisa, the world is so much bigger than just ENF.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That could happen. As my tenure increased at the foundation and the portfolio became totally mature, there wasn't that much that we could do from an investing perspective. And so I started to have questions of like, do I even want to stay in this? And I remember being very antsy. By that point, Meredith had left to go join Trinity, and Kim was the sole CIO. And Kim and I have always had a very open, honest, amazing relationship and friendship and mentorship. And I would just go talk to her and I'd be like, what should I do with my life? Do I want to be a CIO? And I will say one thing that Kim did that was always extraordinary was, and this is, I think, an extension of Ellen and Meredith's leadership, encouraging everybody to be public in the industry. Kim encouraged our team to take every call from headhunter. She said, you should know what you're worth and you should know what else is out there. And you should every day be making a choice to stay here.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Initially, a Carnegie once I dove in, I viewed my path very much as linear. And when Ellen left, I lobbied for myself for a promotion because suddenly my responsibility got a lot bigger because the team was smaller. We later added people, but we were at this very lean moment. And I kept marching up that ladder. And I remember at one point, I went to Kim and Meredith and I said, I'd like to be made at some point Deputy CIO. They were very thoughtful, but they were like, there's two of us. And shortly thereafter, we brought on some additional peers at my level. And then there was just no way”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some ways it was part of that, but also it was an opportunity outside of that to give people new experience and help them develop skills. Felt you were extremely encouraging. Go sit on panels, go to this conference and be involved on the advisory committee. Raise your profile in the larger industry and very supportive as well of raising our profiles in the larger industry, which there's an element that is also career development.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Block and still proving ourselves, I think, in the early days. But it was very explicit effort on my part. And then I think when Meredith and Kim took over the portfolio, you still had to keep it very top of mind. It's so critical.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does ask you how you thought about your team members growth as professionals in the organization? How did you think about promotion? How did you think about what roles people would play as they stayed with you? That's always the challenge. You and I believe so much in promoting people on the team and helping people develop and grow and giving them more responsibility. I have to say it's a struggle with a small team. We started out without any hierarchy or ways of promoting people. So I did really have to go to bat every time I wanted to promote people and also increase their compensation commensurate with their experience because that doesn't really happen in a foundation so smoothly and we were still the new kids on the”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the team. There were almost these two phases there's this phase where your hair is on fire, you're building the portfolio, you're in a crisis, and then there's this mature phase where there's more structure and you have to figure out what's happening.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to say something about our governance because we had a very supportive investment committee and the committee at the time, and maybe they still do, they had to approve every investment recommendation, which is not today a best practice. But what I liked about that is that I think it helped us take more risk. Why are you going into Brazil in 2005 when everybody hates Brazil, but it's super cheap? They understood our thought process, our rationale. They bought into it. And then three years later, they're not going to say, why did you make this stupid investment? So we did things that were early, things that were out of favor, and we were able to do them in reasonable size so that they did move the portfolio. And the committee knew what we were doing and why. And that is a benefit of having the committee approve. There are some disadvantages as well.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes back to the identifying talent. We were focused first back to the earlier comments on the people and the talent and the teams versus checking boxes on length of track record and exposures. Ellen invested with one manager who I think he had $5 million and he was operating out of his bedroom. Texas value small cap value.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of managers could fit into three different asset classes and a lot of institutions don't invest with managers unless they fit into a nice, neat bucket. And we didn't have to worry about that. We would always find a place in the portfolio for a talented manager.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we had a lot of it But when Meredith and I became the CIOs, we probably had more privates because that was our area of expertise. So asset allocation gravitates to what creates good manager selection. It will definitely tilt to whatever the CIO feels most comfortable with.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You did have the team sit around a table once, and you said, I want each of you to think about a few blank sheet of paper. How would you design the asset allocation? And we all went to our respective corners and thought about it for like a day. And we came back. And essentially we all had modifications to our asset allocation. But by and large, if you broke out equity and diversifiers, we were pretty much in line. We made tweaks on the margins, but it was a very good exercise. CIO can't manage another CIO's portfolio because you really do gravitate to your strengths. If someone looked at Ellen's portfolio, it had way more real estate than other people's portfolios had because she had comfort and in tremendous amount of skill in that asset class.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you know that when you have a living and breathing portfolio, it changes very little on the margin. And when we made asset allocation changes, they were typically increments of two and a half percent one way or another, in some ways asset allocation is over glamorized. If you're an investor with a long time horizon, you're going to have a portfolio that's dominated by equities one way or another. And it can be public equity, it can be private equity, it can be hedge funds. You're going to have a little fixed income for your safety and anchor to windwards. I think this is heresy to a lot of people, but I just think it's not that complicated. And you're picking managers that are going to make great risk adjusted returns. You don't worry about volatility of any single manager because when you put them all together, guess what? The volatility is pretty low. A lot of it has to do with”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years. It was great culturally. It was probably one of the most important cultural elements of the team, but also we grew it as investors because we weren't going to those trips to make it. On those trips to decide what conditions needed to exist for us.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that is the key question for every CIO because at least my philosophy is that I'm ultimately responsible for what's in the portfolio. The buck stops with me. But you've got great people. You want to empower them. You want to let them run and let them know that they have a lot of autonomy and authority. So I guess the way I handled it was if somebody came to me and said, I really like this manager, I would try to meet with them early so that you don't go do a lot of work for no good purpose so that there are no surprises. I think by the time something got to a memo stage, there were very few things that didn't get through at that point because we all knew the portfolio. We all knew that manager and the rationale for putting it in the portfolio. But yeah, it's a real tension. And I don't think it... Ever quite goes away.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ellen, ultimately, the buck is going to stop with you as the CIO. How do you balance wanting to impart your experience and judgment on a manager selection decision compared to allowing the team to have rope and have their impact on the portfolio that ultimately you're responsible for?”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was To this process Feel Just constantly learning. So it just was what was so Everyone's reading on these memos, everyone's making comments and learning. How do you actually make a decision? The asset class head ultimately Who did hedge funds didn't agree with it and Ellen didn't agree with it so Said, it made you Conclusions, and I think that Ellen Gay. Think that was Team”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source