YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Wallace

lines on the record: 64
first: 2025-08-27
most recent: 2025-08-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And so that bottom up thinking is really important for young people to pay attention to. I think some young people try to get a CV built and they end up making decisions top-down more than listening to what they really enjoy and where the people that they respect and from whom they're learning something, that type of singles is really very, very important to pay attention to.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that kind of that, and the same thing happened when they said come to Stanford, and I knew that the mission was going to be important, but I also knew that the people were going to be in me. I was going to learn a lot”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'll tell you one short story and that may be helpful to young listeners. When I was graduating from Yale, so for me, I was in my mid-30s at this point, I had an offer to go to Harvard Business School. I've been accepted at Harvard Business School. And David Swenson came and said, well, look, you can go to Harvard Business School or you can stay and work here full time in the investments office and give it a try. And if you don't like it, I'll help you. I think you're going to learn more here. And you'll enjoy it more. And if you don't like it after a few years, I'll help you find something else. And so, you know, I think if you were building a resume, you might well have 25 years ago, you might well have said, well, you know, maybe Harvard Business School is more important for my CV. But I listened to what David was telling me and I adored the people I was working with. David Swenson and Dean Takahashi, this right-hand man. And I said, that's the right thing for me.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it's such an interesting time to be a young person, and the world is so dynamic and challenging. And I think the technology we see emerging is going to and AI and other areas is going to offer a lot of opportunity young people and also a lot of challenge. One of the things I often think about that I feel like I've benefited from in my career is I've listened to the bottom-up singles more than I have sort of top-down kind of strategic goal. So, you know, the reason I was a valid answer was because I loved ballet. It wasn't a sensible economic move for, you know, for a teenage boy in Virginia to want to become a classical ballet dancer. But I loved it and I did it and I did it for 16 years and I found it massively rewarding. The reason I do endowment management is because I love it. I love the people. I love the process. I love the mission.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not well, probably, I think, is the answer. I mean, I actually have three children, they're all grown now, and my wife and I try to spend as much time with them as we can. I don't have a lot of, you know, I read a lot, but I don't do, I'm not, I don't have a lot of hobbies outside of family and work. So that's really, I think, maybe families and families the way that I best relax.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In supporting that work. And so that's massively motivating to me. And then I love, I just love coming in every day and working with my colleagues, working with our partners around the world who are fascinating and incredibly talented and such a joy to learn from. And so it's a fantastic investment job.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first few years were so hard, Nikolai. I mean, we were changing so much in terms of the office, the team, the way we worked, the portfolio, massive, massive changes to the portfolio. We had to work on the governance around the investments office. The first few years were so hard. And we knew that we wouldn't see the results of them for five or ten years. So now we're starting to see the really positive effects of that early work. And so that's very motivating because I'm really enjoying getting to see the benefit, you know, the result of that effort. I'm very motivated by the mission at Stanford. And I talked about it a moment ago. And I'm a deep believer that Stanford is one of the points of light in the world doing work that the world needs to be done, that we should care about. And I'm very proud of the...”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't carry this analogy too far, but I grew up with three brothers. The four of us were born within five years. We were very close. We love each other. We were very supportive. We had a wonderful young life. But we were also intensely competitive. And I think that's sort of what I think of for the small teams that I run. I want that kind of, I want it to feel a little bit like a family, but also to have a lot of energy and a lot of drive and a fair amount of competitive spirit. And so that's what I think of when I think of my own leadership style. That's what I want to create. And that's what has worked for me for 21 years.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you get great people and you give them opportunities to grow and they're hugely individually motivated, but also they're team players, the leadership challenge gets a lot easier because to some extent most of the work is done for you just by creating that fact pattern, that initial condition. You just want to be able to work well together. They grow, they listen, they learn. You listen to them. You grow, you learn from them. You have fun doing it together. And so I've always kind of felt like that managing, I've never managed a big team. I've always managed several dozen people. And I felt like I need to kind of treat them like.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's helped me a lot. And I don't think it's anything unique to ballet. I think anytime you want to succeed at something that's very challenging in any walk of life, it requires a lot of discipline. And that's true for investment management. I do think one of the, I've reflected on this. And I think one of the things that valet and long-term investment management have in common is you're always working for something that's years away. Every day you walk into the ballet studio. You're working on your technique. It takes years and years and years before it pays off. When you're investing endowment capital for Stanford, you walk in every day. You're doing work and you don't, and it's going to pay off five or ten years later. That's how long it takes in this type of investment that we generally do. And so that kind of willingness to do the work and stay focused, even though the”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“32 and not 18. And while I was all three of my children were born while I was an undergraduate at Yale, we didn't have a whole lot of money, so I had two part-time jobs, one of which was teaching ballet to the kids in New Haven, Connecticut, and the other of which was working as an intern in the Yale Investments Office. I just applied. And it was an ad in the student newspaper, still had newspapers at that time. And I applied and they accepted me. And that's really how I learned about investment management, how I learned about endowment management.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And genius hits a target no one else can see. Borishnikov was so far ahead of his time as a male classical dancer. He was truly a genius. So to work with him and he picked me out of the court to fill in for him when he got hurt one time at the world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to work with great dancers and great choreographers. That was a journey that for 16 years just completely I found completely wonderful and very immersive. We were talking about the importance of kind of passion and intensity and focus. Those were things I really enjoyed about classical ballet. Then I got a little bit old. I was 32. My wife and I were expecting our first child. I kind of knew that it was time for me to, you know, start to think about career change. So I decided that was the right time to go to college. So I ended up going to Yale as a freshman. I was a normal freshman except I was.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did he stopped doing classical ballets? So, I mean, he, first of all, even into his late 30s, which is very, a very advanced age for an elite male classical ballet dancer, he was still quite a beautiful, I mean, very capable, incredible male technique, even in his late 30s. But he started to really change the types of roles he was doing. And by the time he was in his 40s, he was no longer really doing the real bravoroclassical ballets anymore. It's just not possible to do it. But he continued dancing in other types of dance until I think he may still, he's in his 70s. I think he's still doing a little bit. He was an absolute genius. What's a great quote that somebody said that talent hits a target no one else can hit?”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dance to work closely with Barishnikoff and great choreographers like Mark Morris and Agnes DeMille and Jerry Robbins and even Martha Graham was still active at that point.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I just immediately kind of fell in love with ballet and the physical challenge of it. And then I thought, well, you know, look, I'm really enjoying this. Maybe I should see if I can have some success as a professional dancer. So I graduated from high school a little bit early. I turned professional at 17. And my deal with myself was, let me try it for a year and see how it goes. And if it doesn't work out, I'll go to college. The backup plan was always go to college. I always knew that eventually I would go to college. But those early years are too important as a classical ballot answer to go to college. You have to really turn professional when you're young. So I turn professional 17 and I kind of think of it as 16 one-year decisions to keep dancing. And I ended up Bristikov ended up hiring me in New York City and Meric Malley Theater. I had a tremendous, it was a lovely time in America.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it sounds strange to people when I talk about it, but to me, of course, it was very natural and sort of evolved and seemed very organic. But I did sort of fall in love with classical ballet when I was about 13. And I had seen me calberishnikov, in my opinion, the greatest male dancer of the 20th century perform live in Washington DC where I grew up. And I just couldn't believe that anybody could do what he was doing on state. The athleticism of it was captivating to me at that. That time. And so I ended up going to a ballet class in suburbia, Washington, D.C. I was the only boy. I was 13 surrounded by about 15, 13-year-old girls. And I told that story to David Swenson in my first interview for him at the Yale Investments Office. And he said, stop, stop, stop. That was your first and most important lesson in supply and demand.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use machine learning models and methodology to isolate 50, 50 of the thousands or millions of possible genetic variations. And then they went in and looked at each one of those 50. The humans went in and analyzed each and they found the one that was causing the seizures and they were able to make a genetic correction and save the infant's life. That whole process took eight hours. So that type of work is, and as an example of what Of what Stanford can do. Obviously, technology is like semiconductors, a lot of them were developed at Stanford. That was the beginning of Silicon Valley back in the 50s and 60s and 70s. Google started at Stanford. So tremendous companies have been started and grown and fostered at the university.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are dozens of examples in healthcare, in innovative research into life-saving healthcare. We had a, I heard the story of this kind of combines medicine and AI a little bit. I think it was a six-year-old infant who had a genetic disorder come to the hospital at Stanford. And the medical school at Stanford works with the Stanford Hospital, but faculty goes back and forth between the hospital and the medical school. And this baby was having seizures. There was quite a serious situation. And within eight hours, the staff at the hospital faculty of the School of Medicine had sequenced the baby's genome, had isolated a million possible genetic variations that were likely, one of them was responsible for the seizures and used A”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To US customers and global customers. And so that innovation model really, I think, has led the world in innovation for 80 years. It's been a very, very successful model and it has accrued, in my opinion, at least to the benefit of the United States and the world. And so I am passionate about the role of research universities. It's a good model and it's worked extremely well.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Front of the federal government wins that contract. We do the research. That's usually basic research that we're doing, basic science. And then when we've researched it, we publish it. And that publication is for anybody. I mean, it's completely wide open for people to see the results of their taxpayer money at work. And then private companies come, take the results of that basic research, and build interesting technologies on top of it and build interesting companies that provide valuable goods and services.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So it's a model that the United States really has followed since the end of World War II. And it's reasonably straightforward. The United States federal government receives taxpayer funds and they have priorities for national innovation, areas of research that are strategic priorities for the United States. So what they do at the taxpayer funds is they put that money out for competitive bids from research universities, Stanford obviously included, but dozens of others. And we compete with our peers, with our tremendous and excellent peers for that research money on any particular thing, healthcare issue, research into cancer or research into some engineering problem. And the person who puts the most competitive proposal in”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operate. But the nature of the political reality between Washington and Beijing and as a U.S. nonprofit institution governed by the rules of the United States, of course, the way that that relationship is evolving has made China much less accessible for us. I think the opportunity sets as rich as ever, but for Stanford, it's not. And so that's one example of where we may we have to change the way we work with our partners because our ability to access that opportunity set has changed.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When they lose discipline, when they outgrow their opportunity set, when their motivation fades, when we've made a mistake, we do sometimes, hopefully not too often, but we do sometimes make mistakes initially and our work is somehow incomplete or we don't understand something. And then sometimes this happens less often, but sometimes the opportunity set goes away. Or our ability to access the opportunity set changes. So, for instance, a real-time example is China. We've made a tremendous amount of money for Stanford investing in public and private opportunities in China. And it's a fantastically interesting and wildly inefficient market, both public and private, which is a great initial condition for us and our partners.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't calculated it. We had that huge portfolio turnover, so we had 300 partners. We put 265 of them into liquidation. We kept 35 of the original 300. We've added another 50. So we're 10 years in now, but that's not long enough for me to give you the right answer. But if I look over my whole 20-year career as a CIO, I think the average tenure would be 12 or 12 plus years for a partner, maybe closer to 15.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you see it in any field of endeavor that just requires a tremendous amount of focus to succeed, which is most You see it in athletics, you see it in the arts, as you said, you certainly see it, you see it in investment.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the constant growth, they love the constant learning and the variety of information they need to process as an investor. They want to be an excellent investor and the money comes along if they do that great, but they don't focus on the money. The asset gatherers focus on the money. That's a different thing. That's not being an excellent investor. That's building a great asset management business. But if you're a great investor, you're consumed by what you're doing. And that often can look like someone's a little bit on the spectrum, I suppose.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not capable of defining it precisely. But there's an intensity and a focus for the great investors, it's not about how much money they make at all. They're generally not motivated by their personal wealth, which is strange to say, but it's very often true. They're motivated by their passion for investment. They love the intellectual challenge of it. They love the...”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was how deeply, and not only deeply, but how clearly he thought about things because he did all the work. He saw an enormous amount of work, but he was able to synthesize the two or three or four things that really, really, really mattered. And he weighted those two or three or four things appropriately in his final investment analysis. And it's very hard to do that.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we were in London, we went to see him, and he had just left Perry, and it was more than an hour. It was probably three hours. And we just did all the things I described a moment ago. We talked about his work and his philosophy and how he thought about businesses. And, you know, he wasn't as fully formed a thinker as he is now, but the key element of how he understands investment opportunities, how he processes risk in return, how he thinks about quality businesses. That was clear in, I think it was 2003. I think he launched TCI in 2004. So we spent six or nine months with him before he even took our capital or anyone's capital. We were the first investor. And it's just, I don't know. It was just how he thought.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. And he's so fantastic on so many different levels. But I was on the very, when he formed the Children's Investment Fund, I was the point personal in that relationship. I was at Yale. Yale was the initial investor with TCI. I was in the very first meetings with Chris and the Yale team and David Swenson. And it was obvious. I mean, I was pretty junior at that time, but it was obvious even then, even in that first hour or two or three.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think most people are familiar with Chris Hahn from the Children's Investment Fund. He's got a brilliant understanding of businesses and business models.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every once in a while, every few years you'll have a meeting with a partner or a potential partner where it's just so clear that they've got just some unique capability, unique way of looking at businesses and understanding business models.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're sloppy, if you throw capital around without discipline. Or if you clearly are out to make money for yourself and you don't really care about your part”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we put it all together in a big investment memo. We write it and we write it down. It's mostly text. And we find that's really important. Nikolai, because when you have to write something down in all of its full complexity, the qualitative things are hard to kind of write it down and have it in black and white and have it hang together really helps us make the right decisions. It's funny how sometimes even after you've worked on an opportunity for months and you think you know everything about it in your head, you write the memo and you read the memo and you've missed something. Something's important that's not there or something's there that's uncomfortable. And that still happens even now. And I've been a CIO for 21 years. That still happens.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People that they've worked with in the past, sometimes they're peers or competitors. And we try to kind of triangulate or substantiate our own views through that reference type of work. There's obviously a quantitative assessment of their track record.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, we have to spend more time. I have to spend a lot of time with the potential partner and get to know, I have to kind of go through all the work again. Sometimes I'm part of it, that process very early. I might be even in the first meeting. Sometimes there's several meetings before I join the group. But no matter what part I join, I have to kind of go through all of that work all over again. I have to talk about how they built their work, how they make decisions, what they care about, talk about many, many case studies from their past, understand them as people, what's their background, what motivates them, what do they care about, you know. And that takes a long time. And then we kind of write it all up in a 40 or 50-page investment memo. We talk to everybody we can who knows the group, who knows their work.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We really work together on everything. I'm the chief investment officer, so ultimately I make the decisions, but the real way that the decisions are made is we work iteratively in small kind of deal teams on an individual investments. We work collectively on our larger strategic issues like how are we going to change our asset allocation, which we don't do very much. But we look at once a year. And really, the decisions sort of They're not consensus decisions, but they do evolve in an iterative way as we work together in these small teams.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that efficient way of thinking about risk is probably more important. And it's actually helpful to have people on your team that are on different parts of that spectrum.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find it's a spectrum. And I think I've sort of, I'm not sure I'm right about this, but I've kind of come to have a theory that we all sort of, because of our temperament and our experience, we all fall on a different part of the risk return continuum. Some of us are naturally happy and comfortable taking a lot of risk, and some of us are naturally very risk-averse. I think it's okay to be either. You can't have a long-term investment portfolio as an endowment that's too risk averse because you'll fail the preserve purchasing power. So you need to take enough risk in your portfolio. But on your team, I think it's okay to have a variety of people that are on that continuum at different places. The important thing is that they're all sort of on the efficient frontier so that they're, for whatever amount of risk they're taking, they're getting the highest level of return possible.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say you can teach a lot of that, but there's also some of it that sort of seems to be innate in somebody. The way that people tend to just sort of naturally or natively process information, some people just have a very facile way of bringing together all of that different type of data, prioritizing it correctly, synthesizing it in a way that really makes sense. And they make the best investment.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a lot of intellectual curiosity, always questioning the ability to kind of combine quantitative and qualitative data thoughtfully in the type of investment that we do, both aspects are really important. And so we tend to find that the best endowment style investors kind of spike enough in both areas that they're quite competent in both areas, but then the real skill is how you bring them together and to form investment judgments. And some people are just kind of”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And talk about your work in Norway. But we have a small seminar of 20 students that apply to take the seminar, and we can tell through the course of that seminar who really feels passionate about this work. And then we often offer them an internship. And sometimes that internship matures into a full-time job.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dozens and dozens. And one of the ways that we find people that are particularly well suited is we teach a class. We teach an undergraduate seminar. Maybe you'll be kind enough to come help us teach it one time.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the best investors and venture capital or public equity or real estate, and they grow very, very fast very quickly. They kind of absorb information like a sponge. And after they've been in this program for a remarkably short amount of time, a few years, they're really competent. And after they've been in this program for seven or eight or nine or ten years, they're fantastic investors. How many people?”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We care a lot about Stanford Management Company having a team of individual very high performers people that seek and accept a high degree of personal responsibility but who care more about the overall result of the team, the overall result of the endowment than their own individual area. And when you have that type of incredible motivated person that has very low ego and is team oriented, you know, you can accomplish enormous amounts of wonderful things. So one of the things that we've been doing for the last 10 years is hiring for our team, our analysts right out of Stanford undergrad. So these are 21 or 22 year old people when they graduate. They're young, they're super intelligent, they're super energetic, and they grow very fast. We show them the entire investment world, all the asset classes all over the world. In real time, they get interact.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think certainly you need to be, if you're managing an endowment that has the type of asset allocation that we have where you're investing in these alternative asset classes and you're trying to invest $40 or $50 billion, it's hard. You need to be early. You need to create your own opportunities. You're never going to get enough capital to work with a disciplined partner that's not going to outgrow their opportunity set with too much capital. You're never going to get enough of your endowment to work to have a high conviction portfolio if you're not there first, if you're not there early. So you need to be early. You need to be creative. You need to be very forward-leaning in terms of your ability to find new opportunities. In order to do that work, you need a team that's energetic, that's open-minded, that's passionate about their work, that work well together. So one of the things we've”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible talent and that incredible discipline that will treat Stanford's capital like it's their own capital or better and then you're aligned and you have a better chance of success in the long run.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very carefully, we will usually, almost all of them are groups that we find ourselves or are referred to us in some sort of qualified way from our network. We very, very seldom end up working with a partner that is introduced to us from a broker or cold calls us. So it's kind of a curated set from which we then, the initial step would be spending a lot of time with the partner over a series of meetings in person and going through all the things I mentioned earlier. What is their process? What is their motivation? How do they, are they rigorous? What is their investment judgment like? What's their philosophy? What are their ethics? Are they aligned with Stanford? There's a lot of smart people in private equity who do good work but who are not going to make a lot of money for themselves before you. What you really need is that”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. A lot of the whiz kids Stanford is sort of one of the parents of Silicon Valley for sure, and we benefit enormously in the investment office from having that network. And it helps. It helps a lot. We should be able to find ways to create and to some degree our own venture opportunities. And we've been working on that over the last decade. That's something that, for instance, I could not have done when I was working in London, but I can do here in Palo Alto.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it takes a lot of work, takes a lot of rigor, it takes an enormous amount of care and careful selection of your partners and close work with your partners once you are working with them. And that's one of the reasons you don't want to have too many partners. It's hard to find a lot of good early stage venture capitalists. I mean, there's probably 10 or 12 in the United States that generate the substantial majority of all the profits generated in any venture cycle. And so in particular, but also in buyout and other private categories, you absolutely need to be at the top of the distribution.”
2025-08-27 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source