YouSaid · the spoken record

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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“We were all apprenticing every meeting because I would look at somebody else's comments and I was like, oh, I didn't even think about that. But that's a good point. You were constantly learning.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mailing day was a team sport. And we would do a checklist and you'd have to check off that you read that memo and whatever you changes you made and everybody had different strengths. Some people were really good at proofing. Some people were like, okay, this doesn't make sense to me. You need to draw that out. And having all those voices in the room really thinking about a manager from their own perspective, because we all came from different places. So now here we are with our background saying, I read this memo, I don't get this, or I do get this. Memos, letters, everything, all paper. And it would come in and you were the first person who did it, then you would put everyone's initials on it. You'd read it. You'd make your marks. You'd put stuff in the margins and correct stuff. And then you would cross your initials off and you would take it to the next person. And then they would do it. And so you could see everyone's comments. And so it was like a manual.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally, everything was different that Elisa just made about the length of our memos, you just can't overstate that. And at the time, it feels like, oh my God, we have to write this long memo. But this is how you really figured out if you understood the risk of what was going on. And I think that people lose sight of the fact that there's value in documenting what your thought process were. And I think that we spent a lot of time really thinking about how a manager would treat you when things went wrong because the documents don't protect you. Ellen talked a lot about that. We have to know that they'll make the right decision when something goes wrong. Every single person on the team read every memo.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is how you need to learn the portfolio. And so I read them all. And the section on Team was as much a part of the memo as the track record, case studies on actual investments, and general strategy thesis and risk. It's the team section was a huge chunk. And that was really my introduction to manager selection and realizing that at the end of the day, so much of people business and it is so much about, as Ellen said, their passions, their judgment, who they are as people. I learned from watching.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really through apprenticeship. I mean, in the beginning, went with Ellen, Meredith, or Kim to kind of everything. A few instances, actually my first day on the job at Carnegie was at a manager meeting in Atlanta. So I showed up. I took the MERDA to the meeting. I didn't know one person. I walk in. It's like all these ENF people and the GP. I didn't really know what I was supposed to do. But really watching the way that initially Ellen and Kim and then Meredith when she came back engaged with managers and everything Ellen just described, like we had lots of dinners and just spent a lot of time trying to get to know the managers as people, all the things about their strategy, obviously, had to make sense. But we would write these extensive investment committee memos. And my first couple of months at Carnegie, Ellen basically gave me a huge stack of memos. She said, get to know the portfolio.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing for you when the chips are down. That to me is the gold standard. But I have to give Ellen credit on the hiring of staff piece. I have in many ways modeled myself after you in that as I've built my team here, tried to identify talent and under optimized on experience in the ENF world and over indexed on what I perceive to be raw talent, which is how I think you did it. It's a lot more work and it's a lot more time and you did it multiple times.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we all know that it's a very nuanced process, and you spend a lot of time with people not in the office. And I think one of the downsides today interviewing and vetting managers is that you come to the manager's office, you're walked into a conference room, sitting by yourself, they come into that conference room, they control the environment totally. And back then it was a lot more fluid. And we tried to spend time with people on the road in their office, going to visit properties, having dinner with them so you can see how they behave after they've had a couple of cocktails or how they treat the wait staff or just all those nuanced things. But I think at the end of the day, it's their passion and it's really understanding in your heart if you think they're going to do the right thing.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first job out of college was assistant director of admissions at Hamilton College, and I interviewed tons of kids in high school and Hamilton College is exactly in the center of New York State. So it's really far from everywhere. We had a lot of talented kids from the Adirondacks who probably had never traveled more than 25 miles from home, who lived in a tiny rural town and we call them North Country Nuggets because they were these really talented kids who just hadn't had that opportunity to flourish the way a kid from New York City or Boston or somewhere. So I really learned to appreciate people who had a lot of inherent smarts and you knew they were on the ball and with a little bit of encouragement. They would just explode.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also think that people have different skills, and Ellen's skills, which was clear in the way she chose managers, was that she could see talent in people. Maybe they don't have a whole long background of being an ENF or a long background as being a real estate manager. But she could see talent and she knew what was important to be successful. And I think that when you are good at choosing people, you don't need to manage them the same way you need to manage people when they need to be developed. I think she started with good raw material. I think a lot of people struggle with that. They're not able to figure out what's necessary to be. Maybe like we were talking earlier about when we did board books.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ellen was describing all that too. Like, I wouldn't sell yourself short. I worked for you for a long time. I thought you were a great manager. There's maybe an element as well of what the size of the team was. So the team had gotten a lot bigger. So when we were small, I didn't feel like I was undermanaged. It was two of us, or maybe it went up to five. So we were just in and out of each other's offices all the time and talking about stuff. So there wasn't as much management that needed to be done. But when you have more people, it does. And I think there's also an element of the maturity of the portfolio because when it's all hands on deck, it's all hands on deck and you're doing the whole portfolio. And once you've got a mature portfolio, you've got to prioritize the opportunities that come in and you got to figure out who's going to chase it down and how you're actually going to decide whether you do it or not because you can't do everything. So then you do need processes more. We were definitely at the point where we needed it. It was just different points in our history. I don't know that I would say one was better or worse.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So tough, but it's really valuable. At that point, Staffing and our conversations and our structure did. And I think that was a good thing because we were a little bit bigger. We had a bigger asset base.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working very independently. Going off, traveling, doing their own thing. And I don't think really managing organizations is a skill set that many CIOs. About back then, I think our industry. Very undeveloped in that way It was maybe in 2009 that I hired an executive coach. I had never had any. Train”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think every CIO is driven by their investment. And trying to fit everything in between the investment. Meetings. When you have a really small team, I think it does foster communication. I really believe in a specialist model where individuals do lead a particular asset class because I think that the network that you bring, the sourcing capability, Relationships within a hedge fund community or a venture community or the real estate. Really matter in terms of But having said that, all these assets and strategies inform each other, and we do want to think about these relative opportunities. How we can learn from each other. But having a small team meant that we could sit down together. And I will say that I evolved as a manager and a lot of Both endowment and foundation staffs are academic. They're very People are.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dissimilar, and I just stepped into this role where I really had no idea what I was doing. And so I didn't know what I was getting into, but the world was on fire. Our portfolio had declined dramatically in AUM and liquidity was at a total premium and we had like none of it. And so we were kind of in crisis mode and it was in hindsight the best time to step in because that first 18 months was so incredibly formative for me because it was all hands on deck find liquidity. Who are we firing? What are we selling on the secondary market? What should we be shifting? And it was a real baptism by fire.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I step into this portfolio that she has crafted together, curated over years of relationships. I don't know any of these people. And a big part of my job was the real asset piece. It was to really grow that portfolio. And I truly thought oil and gas came from the pump at the gas station.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when I joined, one, I'm forever grateful to Ellen for this incredible opportunity. Meredith was in Hong Kong, so we had not yet met, but I'd heard a lot about her. Kim interviewed me. And before I joined, Kim called me up separately and she said, I want to make sure you understand what you're getting into. She was like, it's really entrepreneurial. You're going to get a lot of rope, but don't hang yourself, basically. And everything she said was true. So Ellen hired me to oversee real assets, which if you know anything about Ellen's background, Ellen was like the queen of real estate. And when I told my boss at Tishman that Ellen Schumann had offered me a job, he said, when the Warren Buffett of the ENF World calls, you answer.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Estate as an asset class, but that was the beginning and the end of what I knew. So I came in to interview with Ellen and I'll never forget, and you probably don't even remember this, this was 08 and distributions had just totally stopped. She showed me this chart of the private portfolio of what should be a self-funding portfolio with Capital Calls matching distributions. And the chart was wildly out of whack because calls had continued and distributions had dried up. And I remember her talking about it and me trying to understand furiously like what is she talking about?”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As now a CIO myself, I would have said, no way, impossible. Really had no idea what I was getting into. I'd started my career in enterprise software, then I went to law school, and then I became a real estate lawyer, and then I was at Tishman Spire. I was doing legal documents in the run-up to the financial crisis, which if you remember was really, real estate driven. So I saw the things that everybody in hindsight talked about in terms of flaws and documentation. And then I was at a huge owner-operator developer in this period of just insanity around pricing and acquisition frenzy. And I had met Niles Bryant at a real estate industry event. We'd become friendly. And he called me one day out of the blue. And it was in that time at Tishman that I learned about this whole LPGP ENF world, which I was not even aware of. And I thought, well, that looks really cool. Maybe I want to be on the other side of this table. And Niles called me one day. He said, I'm moving to California to take a job at the Gordon Bedby Morph.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listening to you guys, and my head is exploding, reliving some of these memories in that if you told me in 2008 when you first made me the offer, Ellen, Carnegie was in the middle of the hiring freeze because it was the depths of the financial crisis. So, you made me an offer, but you were like, We can't actually make you an offer because we can't bring anybody on. That I would be sitting here in this room.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The time it was probably 10, 11 billion to Carnegie that was three. They were like, What are you doing? That sounds crazy to me. But Alan said, I'll teach you how to be a CIO, and you're not going to learn that at the Ford Foundation. And I was like, I'm sold. So that's how I showed up.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment team within the institutions were very different. The Ford Foundation kept investments completely separate from the rest of the foundation. In fact, discouraged any kind of interaction. I think that when I first got there, you couldn't even email the program staff if you were on investment staff. Conversely, you get to Carnegie and you are absolutely apart of the institution. You live and breathe the mission as a part of the investment team. So everything about it was different. So when Meredith made a decision to go to Hong Kong and become our special advisor to Hong Kong, she came to me and she was like, Ellen is hiring. She says she's hiring Alice. But if you're willing to come speak to her, I bet you she talked to you. I had met with Ellen before. I knew that she was an amazing investor. So we started talking. And we started meeting. And eventually she did say, okay, I'll make this a director role if you're willing to come over. And at the time, a lot of people were like, you're going from the Ford Foundation, which was massive.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Linda Strump was the CEO of the Ford Foundation at the time, and she did not believe in alternatives at all. And she felt like anything that you can do in the private markets you could do in the public markets without giving up liquidity. And so despite the fact that the Ford Foundation had a tremendous venture portfolio because it had started investing in venture in 74, it was only 10% of the portfolio. So that was one big thing. I think another big thing was that it was a very siloed approach to investing. There was a public team. There was a private team. There was the in-house stock selectors. There were the manager selectors. And there was never a team meeting that created a certain tension in an organization when people are doing very different things and not coming together around the shared mission. I think both how the portfolio was structured and how the team was managed was very different. I think in addition to that, the role of the”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arguably, I joined the industry before everybody here did. I started in'94 at the Ford Foundation and I met Meredith fairly early because I changed from doing public equities to doing private equities when Meredith joined Carnegie. And so we became fast friends and stayed up with each other and learned the private business together. And I think that had a lot to do with it. And I remember at the time thinking that the way the Ford Foundation managed money was The antithesis of the way Carnegie managed Manny. And they were just philosophically opposed to each other. And I loved watching what they were doing versus what we were doing.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was just so thrilled to have this opportunity to do what I had already identified as my dream job. And so then to be there as she was getting started and have the opportunity to learn the portfolio just a step behind her. And she said, we were really thinly staffed. There was me and one other person. So there were three of us in those early days. So we were all doing everything. So you got to know what all the managers were doing and sit in on all those meetings and then think about, okay, we're going to build out the private equity portfolio. How are we going to do that? what new stuff do we want to do and what managers does ellen know from her background and what managers do i maybe have connections with from business school it was just great to be both at the manager level and doing all that work but then also getting to sit beside ellen while she was thinking more about how do we build out everything we do here”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was just thrilled to have the opportunity. We were in class together looking for a job in the ENF world is not just throwing your resume in the pile and getting interviews with everybody else. So I had been networking, doing phone calls, trying to find whatever way I could into the industry. Ended up getting connected to Ellen.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then he said something that was so critical he said, but Ellen, I will go to every single investment committee because I want the board to know this is important. And so he did do that. And he supported us tremendously as we evolved fairly slowly. Building the team, really thinking through how we were going to grow and what kind of skill sets we wanted to bring on board.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I started, I'd say both Vartan Gregorian, our president, and I wanted to grow the team slowly. It's disruptive to hire investment professionals at an Elmosinary institution when you're the high-paid help. You're a new group. I think we agreed to go slowly. Vartan was incredibly supportive, however. He had been a university president at Brown. He had been the provost at Penn, and so he had a university. Appreciation, unlike, I think a lot of other foundation presidents of the importance of stewarding your financial assets, he really got it. But it's funny, he wasn't interested in it. So one day I asked Vartan, how interested are you in investments? And he looked at me and he said, I'm not interested.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you get off to a good start in those early years, whether it's lucky move to the right place at the right time, what does that do for your ability to grow into the objectives that you want for the portfolio?”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carnegie Corporation, its legacy, its mission to strengthen democracy, support education. You really felt that. I was all by myself. Meredith didn't come along until the summer. And I really had to figure out what to do. My mantra was, what am I not going to do? Because you can't do everything. And that's really how I started to triage.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I have to say it was an incredible opportunity to come into and manage a pool of assets that were $1.6 billion and they had never had an investment team. And I think at the time foundations were a lot sleepier than endowments. Most of them did not have professional staffs. And I can't say that I had a vision where I came from. There was the way of doing things at the Yale Investment Office. Frankly, Yale would never have invested with. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about all new kinds of strategies and managers. And it was also a great opportunity to work for an institution with a great mission.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, let's kick this off. Thank you all for joining me. It's going to be so much fun. Alan, let's start with you. So 25 years ago, you leave Yale, you come to Carnegie, first CIO at Carnegie. What was your vision of what you wanted to build?”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before we get going, I want to share an important announcement with you that comes with deep gratitude and humility. Decided to hang up the microphone and end what's been an incredible run as a podcaster after this week's show. It's a move I've started considering very recently and felt like it was just time. Time for what, you may ask, well, just in time to release this episode on April Fool's Day. No, I'm not retiring from this incredible gift of your time you've given me now or anytime soon. But it's the closest I could come to playing a little April Fool's joke on you personally right here as I remind you to spread the word about capital allocators. Please enjoy my conversation with Ellen, Meredith, Kim, and Elisa about Carnegie Corporation of New York.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today's show is the first in an ongoing miniseries discussing reading grounds, organizations that have developed and spawned future industry leaders. We'll cover both allocators and managers to see what we can learn about developing talent. In the first episode of the miniseries, we discuss Carnegie Corporation of New York. Ellen Schuman became Carnegie's first CIO in 1999 after working for David Swenson at Yale. Over her dozen-year tenure and that of Meredith Jenkins and Kim Liu for the next dozen, an incredible eighth of the 17 investment professionals that walked in the door have become CIOs, and the rest appear either on their way or found their passion as leaders in complementary roles or outside the industry. Those who became sitting CIOs are Meredith at Carnegie and Trinity Wall Street, Kim,”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hello, I'm Ted Sides, and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can join our mailing list and access premium content at capital allocators.com.”
2024-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Training Grounds – Carnegie Corporation of New York (EP.377) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source