Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495)

Bruce MacDonald is the CEO and CIO of the Virginia Commonwealth University Investment Management Company, which runs $2.5 billion for VCU's endowment and health system. Bruce joined the University in 2015 and shortly thereafter, had the opportunity to sell the portfolio and start fresh. Since being promoted to CIO in 2022, VCU has been a top decile performer with a team of just five investment professionals. Our conversation covers Bruce's unconventional path from a religion major at Wesleyan to fixed income investing at Putnam and endowment roles at Columbia and UVIMCO before arriving at VCU. We discuss the principles of VCU's approach, including building a portfolio around secular tailwinds like India, Vietnam, gold, and artificial intelligence while maintaining abundant liquidity to act countercyclically during market dislocations. We explore VCU's team-based underwriting process, lessons learned from mistakes, and personal influences that have shaped Bruce's investment philosophy. Learn more about our Strategic Investments: Ascension. https://www.ascensiondata.co/capitalallocators Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides https://twitter.com/tseides?lang=en or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedseides/ Subscribe to the mailing list https://capitalallocators.com/ Access Transcript with Premium Membership https://capitalallocators.com/signup Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠ https://thepodcastconsultant.com/https://thepodcastconsultant.com https://thepodcastconsultant.com/⁠ https://thepodcastconsultant.com/)

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When there's just five of you, you can't do everything. You have to make a choice about things to leave out. Because you're leaving out a lot, you really have to be focused on picking the right things to lean into. Our portfolio probably looks a little bit different in that there's a lot of things that we've decided to not spend our time on because we believed we'd be better spent spending time elsewhere. Things like private credit, China, Latin America, Africa. We decided to keep focused on other areas of opportunity. Market timing is a mug's game, as one of my old bosses said. Endowments have an unfair advantage in that we work with the smartest investors out there.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  It's not necessarily market timing when your expert in emerging market internet companies comes to you and says, my companies have never been cheaper. We are seeing opportunities we have never seen before. That, to me, is backing good investments. Historically, endowments have done a great job of that, but in the last 10 or 15 years with the obsession of private assets, that tool has been taken out of the toolkit. We pride ourselves in keeping that tool in the toolkit. We have abundant liquidity to stay in, step into dislocations, either at the manager level or at the market level.

• 1:22Ted Seides?

  I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Bruce McDonald, the CEO and CIO of the Virginia Commonwealth University Investment Management Company, which runs $2.5 billion for VCU's Endowment and Health System. Bruce joined the university in 2015, and shortly thereafter, had the opportunity to sell the portfolio and start fresh. Since being promoted to CIO in 2022, VCU has been a top decile performer with a team of just five investment professionals. Our conversation covers Bruce's unconventional path from a religion major at Wesleyan to

• 2:04Ted Seides?

  fixed income investing at Putnam and endowment roles at Columbia and Uvimco before arriving at VCU. We discussed the principles of VCU's approach, including building a portfolio around secular tailwinds like India, Vietnam, gold, and artificial intelligence, while maintaining abundant liquidity to act countercyclically during market dislocations.

• 2:28Ted Seides?

  We explore VCU's team-based underwriting process, lessons learned from mistakes, and personal influences that shaped Bruce's investment philosophy. Before we get going, it's travel season. Partner meetings, board meetings, the Capital Allocators CIO Summit, Omaha for Berkshire and Milken. Across planes, trains, and automobiles, you're bound to run into a few snacks. When they're unavoidable, I try to remember Will Godera's story of the pilot who lifted everyone's spirits by bringing families into the cockpit. But it's not always easy, which leads to my most recent pet peeve. I was on a flight with some unfortunate delays. We were scheduled to land

• 3:13Ted Seides?

  from a cross-country journey at 11:30 PM, but got diverted from New York to Philadelphia because of weather at just the wrong time. After a gas-and-go stop that took about an hour, we finally landed at 3 AM. And at that time, there's only a scant crew working at hangars, so we waited another hour on the tarmac. None of that was anyone's fault. But after a long flight and equally long day, you can imagine everyone was ready to go home. All the passengers queued up to depart one by one in an orderly fashion. It's actually uncanny how respectful people are when getting off planes. But there's a moment when it's your turn to get moving. And on this particular flight,

• 3:58Ted Seides?

  after eight and a half hours, the person in the row in front of me seemed oblivious to the cadence of the queue. When it was his turn, he arose, seemingly clueless, and forced everyone behind him to wait. Of course, this wasn't just a grab-your-bag-and-go. Two bags, maybe three, come down from above. Then he pauses to put on his jacket, then reorganizes his bags to put a backpack on top of his wheelbag. And then, without as much as I'm sorry, he slowly started walking off the plane. Not a single movement in his deplaning occurred until after the person in front of him had started walking. So there you have it, my new recent pet peeve.

• 4:43Ted Seides?

  Don't be that person who isn't ready to deboard a plane when it's your turn. It's just not that hard. And thank you for spreading the word about my most recent pet peeve, which you'll only hear by tuning in to Capital Allocators.

• 4:58Ted Seides?

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• 5:42Ted Seides?

  so you can easily turn new insights into the briefs, models, and memos you'd otherwise build by hand. It was designed to work like an extension of your team, so it remembers your projects, follows your templates and processes, and links every output to its source so you can see where each conclusion came from. The best way to judge its quality is to give it a whirl. Pick the research task on your desk before your next committee meeting and hand it to SuperAnalyst. Start a free trial at alphasense.com/capital and see what it has ready for you. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by RidgeLine, the investment management platform built for firms who are rethinking how work gets done.

• 6:27Ted Seides?

  You're at your desk, looking at a line graph of your firm's growth. The line is moving sideways, linear growth, and you know exactly why. You're constrained by your operational bandwidth that's been the same for so long, it just feels like the cost of doing business. RidgeLine is built to change that line's trajectory, to be the inflection point that takes your growth from incremental to accelerated with the team you already have in place. RidgeLine is the only AI-native investment management platform that brings together the front, middle, and back office with one set of data and powerful AI agents that automate away operational drudgery, so your talent can shift from managing old technology to materializing new ideas.

• 7:13Ted Seides?

  RidgeLine helps asset and wealth managers understand and improve their firm's growth trajectory. To see how your firm compares to 16,000 of your peers, visit ridgeline.ai/trajetory. If you file Form ADV, your firm is already there. Then talk to RidgeLine about how you can do more with the team you already have. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Juniper Square, the operations partner trusted by the leading private market GPs. One theme that keeps coming up on the show is GPs that build the strongest and most durable relationships with LPs are the ones that have both strong returns and strong operations.

• 7:56Ted Seides?

  AI raises the stakes on operations and having Juniper Square as your operations partner helps ensure your data is organized, accurate, and accessible, so you can unlock operational alpha. That's why thousands of GPs trust Juniper Square. Learn more at junipersquare.com/capitalallocators. Please enjoy my conversation with Bruce McDonald.

• 8:24Ted Seides?

  Bruce, thanks so much for joining me.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  It's great to be here, Ted.

• 8:27Ted Seides?

  Why don't you take me all the way back to the influences from your upbringing?

• 8:32Speaker 00

  If you believe that investing is a combination of art and science, I had a very unfair advantage. My mother was a printmaker. My father was a geophysicist. I literally am a combination of art and science. I grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, which was an idyllic college setting. My big passion was swimming. I was very competitive. I won an award. Because Hanover is such a small town, the newspaper came and interviewed me. This was when I was 10. There was a prize that came with it. They asked me what I was going to do with the money. I was going to invest it. Apparently, it's been in my blood for a while. I went to Wesleyan University.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  And wanted to be an econ major. I took micro, absolutely hated it. It was the worst experience. I pivoted hard, and we're talking really hard. I became a religion major. I hadn't had a religious upbringing growing up. I was very curious about it. Wesleyan is a great liberal arts school. I decided to take full advantage and dive in. It's pretty much been a life journey since then, trying to figure out how that applies to investing.

• 9:40Ted Seides?

  How did you pivot to religious studies?

• 9:44Speaker 00

  I took an intro to religion class that was a survey of all religions, from Christianity to Buddhism, to early religions in Mesopotamia. I was curious. I was young and thinking big thoughts, trying to understand the meaning of the world, and thought I would find it there. Where I ended up really getting passionate in my religious studies was with Kierkegaard. He was a religious philosopher from the 19th century. I read almost every one of his works as part of my studies. One of his books leans hard into the concept of true faith is not something that is blind. It's something where you're constantly questioning. There's a back

• 10:25Speaker 00

  and forth. In investing, you have to have faith that what you think you're doing, whatever you think you're buying, whatever manager that you're going to invest with, is going to do well. You need to always be asking yourself, where can this go wrong? That was a central tenet of how he thought about faith. I have carried that forward with investing. The analogy dies, though, because I don't think in faith you're supposed to change your mind as much as you have to when you're investing.

• 10:51Ted Seides?

  You're coming out of school and thinking about work. What did that look like as a religious studies major with some underpinning of microeconomics once?

• 11:01Speaker 00

  I got lucky in that I took the second half of intro economics my senior year and had an amazing professor named Richard Slotkin. He had this analogy that sparked my interest in markets. He asked this question, if Martians came down,

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Went to Congress and said, we'll give you $50 billion in real wealth every year, but we're going to take 50,000 lives. Would Congress take that deal? Throughout most of my life, the answer would be a clear no. I thought that was fascinating and his answer was that's what the car industry has done. By making transportation more efficient, they've generated all this real wealth, but there are 40,000 to 50,000 people that die every year in car wrecks. That is not a decision that can be made politically. It's one that the markets make. I was turned on at that point. I was like, I want to understand how this works. I want to make this part of my life's work. It was a tough time to get into finance. This was post RTC, post 1990 recession. Wall Street was not hiring.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  They definitely weren't hiring a religion major. I moved to New York. I slept on a friend's couch. I started taking temp jobs. The first one was counting receipts during Christmas in the back office of Bloomingdale's with a group of 12 other temps. I somehow got a break and I got a job at Columbia being a fundraiser. They had this amazing benefit that gave you tuition so you could take classes. Wesleyan is a great school, has no core curriculum. So I had not taken a math class in four years. I took calculus. I took intermediate economics, did great in them and realized I can do this. Part of it was to prove to myself that I could do it. Part of it was to prove to a future employer.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  And I got another big break, which was a job in Columbia's investment office opened up. I took my limited experience and my class history and was able to get a job there. It was a wonderful opportunity. This was early days of endowment investing. There was private equity. There wasn't venture and growth and buyout. I got to see everything. It was also a time when a lot of the stuff that's been outsourced wasn't outsourced. We used to get private equity distributions. I had a great mentor there named Steve Lehman, who ended up working at Pew Trust for a while. He would have me trade the distributions. So I learned how to read a Bloomberg ticker. It was just an amazing experience and I gravitated towards fixed income.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  A lot of that was that underpinning of what drives the market, trying to understand that key drivers, interest rates, and I wanted to understand as well as I could the fixed income markets. I applied to Columbia Business School, made a huge mistake in that I did not take a single one of the value investing classes. I was too much of a contrarian. This was the Henry Blodgett years. It seemed like every one of my classmates wanted to be an equity analyst like Henry Blodgett. I was like, no, I'm not gonna do that. I had other great professors, though. I took an economic history class with Rick Mishkin, who ended up on the FOMC during the GFC. That whole class was just studying Friedman and Schwartz, monetary history of the US,

• 14:10Speaker 00

  which if you're trying to understand historical parallels is a great background for investing.

• 14:16Ted Seides?

  With that early experience, multi-asset class endowment, how do you think about what you wanted to do after business school?

• 14:22Speaker 00

  I stayed on the fixed income path. I still had this passion for understanding interest rates. I also thought of myself more as a quant. I liked the closed formed equations of fixed income land. You can answer the duration question and price of bond very clearly, whereas equity seemed more mysterious to me. I focused exclusively on getting fixed income jobs, and I ended up getting a job at Putnam Investments, joining in August of 98, right before the long-term capital crisis. My initial boss there was this guy Krishna Maman, who has since went on to become CIO at Oppenheimer Funds in the Fixed Income Group and is now CIO at Lafayette. He was a great mentor. Unfortunately, I only worked with him for a short time

• 15:07Speaker 00

  because Putnam stubbed their toe in the long-term capital crisis. They had a big reorg. The work that Krishna had me doing fell perfectly into this group called the Global Asset Allocation Group that was run by Jeff Knight. They didn't have anybody who knew fixed income. If you think about the Global Asset Allocation Group, their alpha driver was this global tactical asset allocation model that they used to trade futures. They traded all the major G7 markets, both equity and fixed income. A big part of their alpha driver, they had no expert in. Finally, my fixed income expertise became relevant and helped me land on my feet in that particular role.

• 15:47Ted Seides?

  What do you think you grew to understand with a lens of the fixed income markets that applied both before and since in thinking about multi-asset investing?

• 16:00Speaker 00

  My original driver for wanting to go into fixed income was to understand what set interest rates and how interest rates drove things. That insight was driven by understanding that all cash flows are priced off of the current discount rate. That underpinning in fixed income helped me think about the cascading effect of changes in the economy, to how the Fed behaved, to how interest rates were set, and then how asset prices were set. I got this intuitive grasp of the dynamics of asset pricing. Early on, it was ingrained into me, the flow through from what unemployment is doing into

• 16:41Speaker 00

  interest rates, then into equities, into currencies, and then into global markets. You quickly picked up on the fact that the US always seemed to lead interest rate cycles. If you were thinking about overseas investing, you had an edge because you could understand the dynamics of risk asset pricing because you had this underpinning of interest rate knowledge.

• 17:02Ted Seides?

  You navigated your career from coming out of school into an asset manager and then went back to the endowment world. Love to hear about your thought process behind that transition back.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Some of it was driven by personal choice. I had decided to move to Charlottesville, Virginia, and was a pioneer of the remote work setup. I was still working for Putnam. I was on the portfolio management team, managing a hedge fund strategy version of the global tactical asset allocation model that we ran. That particular hedge fund had been anchored by General Motors. I thought I was in a great role and I didn't want to leave. I got a call the day that I moved to Charlottesville from a recruiter for this role at Uvimco, at UVA's investor management company. I thought, I'll take this interview, I'll just see what it's about. It was like lifting my head out of the weeds, which is funny to think about because I was a multi-asset class investor.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  It wasn't like I was just focused on an industry sector and equities. But still, I had never thought about venture, even though I ran a hedge fund strategy. I'd never thought about all the different hedge fund strategies that were out there. I didn't understand multi-strats. I never dug into traditional long short investing. It was incredibly eye opening experience in the interview process. It seemed like a great fit for me. The CIO at the time was Chris Brightman, who had an untraditional endowment background. He didn't come from the endowment world. So he wanted somebody to marry the traditional investing framework into the endowment model. He saw my background as being quantitative with a risk component to be helpful in that process. Turned out to be an amazing role for me.

• 18:40Ted Seides?

  What was different for you in what you saw from the years spent managing fixing portfolios with those two bookends of Columbia at the beginning and then Virginia afterwards?

• 18:53Speaker 00

  I came at it from a quantitative background. My interest in this all was fixed income was easy because you had closed form equations that could solve the pricing. When I got to UVA, I understood how so much alpha was generated by being able to have a more creative thought process about asset pricing. This was when the Tiger Cubs were at the height of their powers. Being able to look at the Lone Pine portfolio and see how Steve Mandel and his team could see into the future about what these high quality businesses would be worth was eye opening. It was completely different model for making money than I had understood in the past, and it was so much more potent.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  It lit a fire in me as far as thinking more creatively about investing, which fit my personal background really well.

• 19:40Ted Seides?

  Why don't you walk me through your path from there to ultimately the seat where you are today?

• 19:45Speaker 00

  It's a little bit of a rocky path. I've learned the hard way that there's a risk to having risk in your title. I was at Uvimco when the GFC hit. Our $5 billion endowment went to $4 billion. As the guy with risk in his title, when you lose 20%, sometimes somebody has to take the fall and I was that person. That was a challenging period professionally. I was fortunate to have an amazing experience afterwards that repositioned my career to get me to the path that I'm on. That's a real lesson to when you have hard times is understanding it's cliche to say when one door closes, another one opens. In my experience, there's nothing more true.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  I met this guy named Jim Dilworth, who had an idea for democratizing hedge funds. One of the things I had done at Uvimco was build a managed account platform. We transitioned a bunch of LP relationships in long short equity into our own prime brokerage account. So we could control how much capital was at risk and how much leverage was used. It turns out that's exactly the model you would need to democratize hedge funds. Create a managed account platform and you put a 40 act wrapper around it and you've got a mutual fund. It was a great product for its time in one sense, in that it was so much easier post GFC to find a hedge fund that was willing to do a managed account than it was pre GFC when hedge funds were the cat's meow.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  It was a lot harder because it was a straight up market and there wasn't a great market for a hedged product, especially in the retail world at that point. We did a good job building a business. We got a three-year track record. We got a hundred million under management, but it really needed to scale at that point. There was not conviction on the team to hire a sales team, which is what you need to do in mutual fund land, either hire a sales team or JV with an established fund. So it was time for me to move on. I was fortunate to gotten connected with Larry Koshard. And he introduced me to Nancy Everett. He said, Nancy's building this thing down at VCU. You should go check it out. Nancy and I connected. We hit it off. The rest is history.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  It's been a wonderful experience on so many levels. I didn't know much about the mission of VCU and getting familiar with it has been one of my favorite parts of this journey.

• 22:07Ted Seides?

  What's special about that mission?

• 22:11Ted Seides?

  As you think about managing the endowment.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  VCU is a public university in the state of Virginia, but it plays a much more traditional role of a public education institution. It tries to serve the less traditional college student. For example, more than a third of the undergraduate student body of 30,000 people is first gen. More than 70% have some kind of job while they're in school. It's a majority minority undergraduate student body, and it's predominantly in-state students. It's a unique mission among the established endowment world. It gives us a lot of purpose because when you're running that kind of institution,

• 22:55Speaker 00

  it's not like you have a legacy of great donors that can provide a cushion to the university. Every dollar that we generate in returns has a profound impact on the university's bottom line. Even though overall endowment spending is a single-digit percentage point of overall university spending, every one of those percentage points matters. We also manage money for the health system that's affiliated with VCU. That plays a similar role. It's the designated indigent care provider. Every dollar that we earn, we have a sense of impact in everything we do.

• 23:29Ted Seides?

  Let's dive into how you go about it. I understand there was opportunity for a whole scale change not too long after you arrived. So why don't you walk through what was going on and what happened?

• 23:41Speaker 00

  We manage money for six different entities at the university. Each one of those entities has its own governing body. The university had a plan to build an investment team. They actually ran an RFP to try and get everybody to pick one manager so the transition to hiring V Simco would be easy. Unfortunately, it didn't work out. It's hard to herd all those governing bodies into one box. So when we started, we had the opportunity to take over two portfolios. Or sell them all and start over. That was a weighty decision. What you decide at that point in time dictates what your primary use of your time is for the next two years. If you keep those portfolios, you're going to spend most of your time reviewing what's in there,

• 24:24Speaker 00

  slowly changing things out and adding new stuff. Whereas if you start over and start from scratch, you get to build the institutional knowledge from day one. You get to build your culture, build your taste, build your process. One of the most important parts of an endowment management process is sourcing, which would have been muted if you were spending that time looking at the existing portfolio. So we made the choice to sell everything and start from scratch, which was a bit easier than it would be for most portfolios because there was actually no private equity at all. We weren't having to sell privates or figure out what to do with that side of the book. It was hard, though. This was a market in 2015, 2016 that had just come through the energy crisis.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  There was an R and B scare that the R and B was being devalued. So the markets just ripped. We were under invested as we built out the diversification of an endowment portfolio. We started with a portfolio of ETFs and slowly layered managers in. We weren't going to take the traditional amount of equity risk in those early days because we didn't have the traditional amount of diversification. That was a hard stretch. It was 100% worth it. We built the investment process. We built the culture. Even though those were hard times early on, it deepened our relationship with our board, which has turned out to be a strength of ours. There was a lot of back and forth with staff and board about how to optimize what we were doing. It built trust because we got feedback.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  We listened to the feedback. We acted on the feedback. It benefited us going forward and building a few key advantages to our process that wouldn't have existed if we had just taken the portfolios we had inherited.

• 26:05Ted Seides?

  When you start out that portfolio and you're looking at the world, there are probably some similarities, differences, competitive advantages you wanted to lean into. Walk me through the design of this and how you've implemented it. What's similar from other pools and what's different?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  What's similar is we have equity centric portfolio, just like any other endowment.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  We need to generate a 5% plus real return. You can't do that any other way than investing in equities. We use primarily outside managers. Those two key tenants are pretty similar. What's different are a couple of things. One is we are resource constrained. It's been a team of mainly five investors since day one. When there's just five of you, you can't do everything. You have to make a choice about things to leave out. Because you're leaving out a lot, you really have to be focused on picking the right things to lean into. Our portfolio probably looks a little bit different in that there's a lot of things that we've decided to not spend our time on because we believed we'd be better spending time elsewhere.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Things like private credit, China, Latin America, Africa. We decided to keep focused on other areas of opportunity. The other real difference in our portfolios that's significant is we have less illiquidity risk. We only have about 20 to 25% of our portfolio in private assets. Some of that is a structural constraint that we have, which is that most of the assets that we manage are actually not true endowment assets. They're balance sheet assets. There's not a statutory constraint. Elroy Dimson is a researcher. He wrote a paper a few years back.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  One of the things he looked at was the 75-year history of endowments. What drove returns? One of the surprising findings of this paper was there was a real counter cyclical behavior to endowments for most of their history. As asset prices became richer and more fully valued, risk asset allocations would decline when there would be a crisis or a downdraft in the market. Risk asset allocations would increase. That is a really important toolkit. Market timing is a mug's game, as one of my old bosses said. Endowments have an unfair advantage in that we work with the smartest investors out there.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  It's not necessarily market timing when your expert in emerging market internet companies comes to you and says, "My companies have never been cheaper. We are seeing opportunities we have never seen before." That, to me, is backing good investments. Historically, endowments have done a great job of that, but in the last 10 or 15 years with the obsession of private assets, that tool has been taken out of the toolkit. We pride ourselves in keeping that tool in the toolkit. We have abundant liquidity to stay in, step into dislocations either at the manager level or at the market level.

• 29:16Ted Seides?

  I'd love you to dive into the concept of limited time, limited resources, have to focus on the things that are most interesting. How do you go about deciding where to spend your time and energy?

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Primarily, that has come from our relationships with our managers. Some of that has also come from our own research. An example of the latter would be when we started, if you looked back on the last 10 years of our peers and where overseas they had generated all the returns, it really was in China. From the beginning of the admission of China to the WTO to 2015, that was where the golden years of both the China economy and investing in China. That's right when we started and we look back, you could see some of the political winds changing in China. You could see some of the political winds changing in the US in regards to its relationship to China.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  It was also clear to see that that opportunity wasn't the same as it was in 2005. We then started to think about where that opportunity might be. We spent a lot of time in India. Since 2018, India has been our largest overseas allocation of any region or country. That was primarily driven by an internal iteration of our own research. We've been fortunate to work with some managers who, this is a rare skillset, can see where economic value creation over the next 10 years will be. There was an individual named David Mock, who had done an amazing job at Hill House riding that China wave.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  We backed him day one when he launched his own fund, Composite Capital. Within two years, he had stopped investing in China and pivoted his portfolio hard towards Vietnam. He just said, "The opportunity that I see in Vietnam right now is exactly what I saw in China at a much smaller scale." That resonated. We found a way to make our own direct allocation into Vietnam, which was not easy. There are foreign ownership restrictions on many of the best companies there. With a bit of resourcefulness, we found our way to have that be our own dedicated allocation. It is really a hybrid of trying to pull the best ideas from the smartest people around us, as well as doing some of our own iterative research.

• 31:41Ted Seides?

  What is it you're doing to get conviction that it makes sense to allocate to India over everywhere else in the world?

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Some of it is first principles thinking. I read this book way back in my Putnam days called The Equity Risk Premium. Gripping title, page turner. One of the great things about that book was it did this study of the equity risk premium. What has been the exceptional equity return in different markets over time? It was fascinating. If you went back to the 1870s, there were four emerging markets that were super promising, that investors were jazzed up about. One was the US, one was Argentina, one was Germany, and one was Russia. Other than the US, three of those went to zero multiple times over the next 100 years. Obviously, that's a risk with any emerging market investing.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  What are the core drivers that allow an emerging market to retain value over time so that the capital gets the accrual of the value that comes from the economic growth? Rule of law is one of the big ones. India having the English legal history was key to us getting comfortable with India as an allocation. A lot of that was our first principles thinking about what makes sense. Similarly, looking at what the drivers of economic growth have been for many of these countries that are emerging, having a demographic base that is fairly young is important. That was something where we tried to do our own research, but vet it with other folks. And there were more controversial parts to the thesis that we batted around with a

• 33:18Speaker 00

  bunch of different people and got different opinions on it and had to make our own judgment call it. One of them was this question of capital recycling. And this is common with many emerging markets. The wealth that gets generated there gets invested somewhere else. That was true still when we started investing. There was a bit of a leap of faith that that was going to change, and that has started to change dramatically. I was in India for the venture AGM, the Nanza that happens every spring there. It was shocking to see the evolution of the venture ecosystem there, where now many of the funds we visited, 60% of their LPs were domestic. That was encouraging, but that was a process of our own insights and then leaning on the expertise of folks around us to pick their brains.

• 34:03Ted Seides?

  Once you have the conviction you want to step in, how did you go about the sourcing of the opportunity set?

• 34:10Speaker 00

  We leaned really hard into our network to get referrals. One of the nice things about trying to invest in these secular tailwinds is you don't necessarily have to get the manager selection piece right. We like it when there's multiple ways to win in the stuff that we do. The nice thing about the secular tailwind is you ideally win on both fronts, but even if you screw up on the manager front, you've got the tailwind behind you. We also got fortunate where managers that weren't necessarily India-focused but had family histories in India would connect us with people in the industry there. I remember one of my first trips, I got to meet the patriarch of a big real estate investing company. India is such a small world.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  I could ask him about two managers that we were looking at and he would know them both, even though I had just met him since I was sitting face to face with him. Even though he would say great things about each of them, his facial expressions would be telling me something different. It's back on the ground like work and using our network that we leaned into to make those investments.

• 35:10Ted Seides?

  How do you balance where you want to look for secular tailwinds and just global diversification, saying you may not be right in picking those secular tailwinds?

• 35:21Speaker 00

  It is a balancing act. We view it as there's a huge part of the portfolio that just needs to be generic US equity risk. When we say a huge part of the portfolio, 50% or more has to be generic US equity risk. We invest on the behalf of a US institution. Their expenses are dollar based. We don't want to have too much overseas risk. It's thinking about in the global opportunity set, call it 50% US, 50% rest of the world. Let's be smart about what that 50% rest of the world is and tilt the portfolio that way. The way endowment portfolios work, if you have long, short or hedge funds, you're

• 36:00Speaker 00

  not 100% exposed to any market. What we are is 50% US, 30% other, with the rest being manager held cash, short exposure, our cash. When I was at Putnam, if you were a smart international equity manager in the 1990s, your smartest move was to just not invest in Japan. It got to be so exploited, they started to create indexes that didn't have Japan because it was such an easy bet. We tried to be ahead of those dynamics. China for us was a perfect example. China became a large part of the index when we started thinking about where is that risk dollar best spent overseas and making sure it's

• 36:41Speaker 00

  in the best opportunities possible. One of our big advantages is we have a healthy risk culture below the portfolio level. We're happy to take manager risk or the strategy risks where we're doing a lot in Vietnam or India, but we're not taking a lot of equity risk. Our total portfolio risk is going to be at a 70/30 traditional benchmark level. If you can pick some of these higher octane or more promising secular tailwinds and marry it at that total portfolio risk, you end up with a portfolio that is more robust, better diversified than the index, which as you know, is so concentrated these days. That has been something that has really worked in our favor.

• 37:24Ted Seides?

  What are some of those other secular tailwinds you're excited about?

• 37:28Speaker 00

  We started owning gold five or six years ago. Part of the thesis there was We have this India and Vietnam exposure. We were worried about emerging market crises, the traditional emerging market debacle, which seems to be to be the biggest risk when you invest in India or Vietnam. Gold actually turns out to be the best hedge. The best hedge would be to be short those currencies, but those are super expensive. Gold tends to do really well as a hedge to emerging market currency risk. Initially, we held gold for that reason. As time has gone on, the case for gold as an asset has gone up on a secular basis.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  We're in a period now of a total and complete restructuring of the geopolitical equilibrium. We're in a period of sustained higher inflation. There's one asset that fills that gap that's created when things change like that. All that change leads to fear, uncertainty and doubt. Gold has historically been the asset that benefits from that. Yes, it's very hard to price. You have no idea what fair value is. Sometimes it gets frothy as it has recently. For us, that's another example of a secular theme that evolved that as we saw again, the political environment changed in the US, the economic environment changed, the geopolitical environment changed.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  The secular case for gold solidified as time went on. Artificial intelligence, there's a tremendous amount of potential there. That is an incredible secular tailwind that we have been studying back to our early days in 2017, when we were doing autonomous vehicle co-investments. That has been a profound secular tailwind. We're seeing now that there's headwinds associated with it. That's a key theme for us to stay focused on.

• 39:23Ted Seides?

  Those two, gold and AI, have such different duration characteristics to them, longevity, ways of getting exposure. On gold, with the initiation of it being this is a nice hedge for some of our exposure in Vietnam and India, how did you go about expressing it?

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Very simply, just as an ETF. Over time, we've thought about adding managers who specialize in mining stocks, and we're still exploring that area. We thought about private equity strategies in mining. We decided to keep it really simple. This ties back to our focus on liquidity. If we can get the essence of the value of that in a liquid format, we'll do it. There might be a more clever way to do it. You might want to have structured exposure using options, given how volatile it can be and how episodic the returns can be. I find if you get too clever, you can outsmart yourself out of returns.

• 40:23Ted Seides?

  It'd be pretty hard to get a simple expression of AI. On the other hand, love to hear how you navigated that landscape to get exposure.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Ted, it's better to be lucky than good. We did well in the last year, but from managers, we would not expect to give us dedicated AI exposure. They were managers who had a keen sense of cycles, supply and demand dynamics historically across industrials or commodities, and they saw some of the bottlenecks that we're building in the memory space, for example. We've since pivoted towards trying to find AI experts who run more dedicated strategies that have unique insights and close ties to the AI community so that we can leverage their insights, both inside the strategy that they run for us and beyond it in our portfolio more broadly, or even in our workflows.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  That has been key. It's been part of our tangential discussions with managers in the space for some time. It's been focused more recently on finding dedicated strategies to that space. It's a space where expertise is at a premium. There are a few distinguished investors and experts in that space who can really see six to 12 months ahead of the market. That's where we try to focus our exposure.

• 41:45Ted Seides?

  Your past experience in the endowment world before VCU was working at two of the bigger pools. VCU, like many, is a smaller size. Would love to hear your thoughts on where you have competitive advantages and disadvantages because of size.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  As far as a competitive advantage, I'd throw Vietnam out there again. If you are a $20 billion endowment and need to write a $500 million check into that market, it's not possible. There are opportunities like that that are size constrained, that give us an unfair advantage. In our early days, we were too dogmatic about thinking about our size as an advantage and trying to find ways to play it. One of the mistakes that we made early on was we were inclined positively to any asset class that had a smaller total AUM base, thinking that we could be early and make a lot of money. The problem is you need people to follow you. We were in a small cap ASEAN equity strategy. Things were cheap there, market caps were small.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Nobody has ever cared about it since we've invested. You can be too clever. Over time, that is one of the things we have refined. One of the early decisions we made, though, was where our size could be a real advantage was in first check venture with early-stage managers. The best of those managers, the best historical fund performance has been in funds that are 200 million and below. Our check size tends to be five to 10 million. We want to have a meaningful relationship with our managers. There was a real crossover between the opportunity set being the right size and our check being the right size for us to be a meaningful partner. That's been another space where our check size is the right size, where we can get fit into a fund that might have scarce capacity. We're only asking for 5 million.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  It's a lot easier to fit us in. Vietnam and early-stage venture are two great examples of that. Where it's been a real impediment is resource allocation. We have excluded a lot of things. Most of the time, China and Latin America and crypto have not done well, but there are times when they do do well. If we had more resources, could we be more tactical? There's alpha that we're leaving on the ground because we don't have the capacity to explore it. Buyout is another one. We do very little in buyout. That's been a windfall for us right now because we don't have to worry about private equity software. I'd love to find the next short capital, but I'm not going to find it because it's not a research focus of ours.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Another example would be the reinsurance space can be periodically really interesting. After a natural catastrophe, we've spent a lot of time trying to understand that space. It's hard because we're so resource constrained. We just end up needing to focus on opportunities that are five to 10 years and not things that we trade, which in the end might be the right spot for us.

• 44:39Ted Seides?

  How do you go about organizing your team and investment process?

• 44:43Speaker 00

  We have a strong risk culture. There's a few key components to that. One of them is the team, our board and our relationship with our board. We couldn't take the risk we do at the strategy level or at the manager level if we didn't have the board's support, the board have our back and understand what we're doing. We have a team approach that fits well into that risk culture. We do team-based underwriting. There is a lead on every investment. Everybody on the team plays some kind of role in the process and everybody on the team has to meet the manager. It diffuses ownership of that idea so that folks might be incrementally willing to take more risk in those ideas.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  There's only one person who it all falls onto if it doesn't work, and that's me. It's not their career that's at risk. There's a downside to that where we don't have a private equity person who can say, this is my private portfolio. We want to have a team-oriented culture. Organizing the team in this team-based underwriting way has been the perfect alignment for how we want to manage the portfolio.

• 45:48Ted Seides?

  As you've gone over this journey, the last 10 years of starting from scratch, building out the portfolio, ETFs, managers, where have you come across mistakes and places that you needed to change course?

• 46:02Speaker 00

  There's times when we've been too clever in trying to manage overall portfolio risk through hedging. We had great insight in 2021, 2022 that rates were going to go up. We put on an overlay and the way we expressed it was all wrong. It was too complicated. It would have been simpler to have no position at all and not have lost money on the hedge or just taken a short interest rate bet. Excessive complexity is one thing. One of the things that we're known for is running into burning buildings. We'd like to be countercyclical. That's both in the market when there's opportunities. Sometimes that's with managers. There have been a couple of times where we saw opportunities in managers who were down. They had had great track records up until that point.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  We thought they've just made a mistake. We were too quick to enter into a new relationship on a short time fuse without doing the normal amount of research that we would do. One thing we've learned is if we're going to step into a burning building, it's helpful to have lived in the neighborhood before. We've had great experiences stepping into burning buildings in our portfolio, less good experiences stepping into new burning buildings.

• 47:12Ted Seides?

  It feels like today there's either a lot of simmering or a lot of burning across a lot of areas, private equity, private credits with emerging markets, US. Where are you thinking about diving in to do research?

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Some of it is in our own kitchen. India right now is going through a very difficult period. It's got a double whammy now of being in the crosshairs of AI because of IT services and the huge part of their economy that that sector represents. It's got the risk that it's facing from Iran war, where it's so dependent on Middle Eastern oil, gas and fertilizer. That's a place where we're spending a lot of time to underwrite what we have to be ready as dislocations there might increase. We have been positioning our credit portfolio to better take advantage of dislocations. We've done a fair amount of work to be well positioned for what's happening in private credit.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  We recently Reconfigured that part of the portfolio, added a new manager. We have capacity to add there. That's where there'll be tons of interesting opportunities. There will be indiscriminate selling in private credit. There's good reasons why many of those companies will be sold, but there'll be many reasons where it's just liquidity that's driving prices down. We're excited about opportunities coming from there.

• 48:38Ted Seides?

  When you're looking at a burning building inside your portfolio and you're thinking about re-underwriting and making that decision, we want to lean in or maybe we made a mistake and get out. How do you go through the process?

• 48:51Speaker 00

  It's unfortunately something that happens. We make mistakes. We pride ourselves on trying to avoid bad investments. Sometimes there are bad investments in our portfolio. One of the things that we do with all the managers that we work with, we'll share our memo with the managers before we invest. We'll have all the work done. We'll run it by them. We want them to fact check our work. Sometimes there's mistakes in there. The most important reason is that we want them to know that we know what they're doing. We want there to be a clear understanding that we have a clear understanding of what they do. There've been some amazing discussions we've had along those lines where we have a manager, for example, that's almost a multi-asset class, meaning endowed with portfolio.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  We had to benchmark them versus high yield because they had some credit background. They called us when they got the memo and they're like, we're not a high-yield manager. We're like, no, no, we get that. Those are the conversations we want to have before we invest. Because if things do go wrong, the base of understanding was clear at the outset. One of the things we put in our memos are premortems. Along with those premortems, we have a bunch of KPIs that we monitor. We'll share those with the manager and there's a big faith-based trust thing going on there. They know what we're looking for. They could always gain the relationship, but obviously we wouldn't be investing with managers if we thought that would happen. When it comes time to have a difficult conversation, we have a document that we can point to and say, hey,

• 50:17Speaker 00

  these were concerns we had when we made the investment. We're seeing them manifest. We appreciate the work that you've done for us. We are big believers in you. We're not going to be invested anymore. There'll still be hard feelings. Everybody's got some emotional attachment to their work. It's a better communication mechanism than any other one that we've come across.

• 50:38Ted Seides?

  If I told you today, hey Bruce, it's time to sell the entire portfolio again. Take out liquidity restraints and things like that, but you could rebuild it tomorrow. How different do you think it would be from today's portfolio?

• 50:51Speaker 00

  One of the big changes would be in our private portfolio. Because we have such a limited private allocation, we try to focus on where the most asymmetric return opportunities are. I do think our venture portfolio has many great managers in it. I don't think we've leaned hard enough into the asymmetry. We should have more managers who are at that smaller level of the fund sizes, 200 million and below, where their outcomes could be a 50x or an 80x. There's good reasons to invest with established managers. You end up paying a lot in fees for returns that might be available on public markets. It might be a better fit for our portfolio to just have a little bit more of that emerging manager risk

• 51:34Speaker 00

  or smaller fund risk, because the payoff when it works can be so much greater. That's probably the biggest change we would make.

• 51:42Ted Seides?

  How about a different scenario analysis? I told you you were doubling the size of the pool overnight. What would you do differently?

• 51:49Speaker 00

  What we would do differently is lean a lot heavier into co-investments, direct investments. We have a fairly sizable allocation, high single digits. That's where the alpha would be when you get to that size is being able to do more concentrated, single name positions. If we had more staff, I'd have a lot more faith in our ability to underwrite more of those. There aren't a lot of interviews with Seth Alexander out there. I found an obscure podcast that he was on. He mentioned that his team did a study similar to Elroy Dimson's of what an endowment looked like 50 years ago. And then did a thought exercise of what an endowment looked like 50 years from now.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  That got me thinking, 50 years ago, I think there were a lot more single stock holdings. It was just like an equity portfolio with a bunch of bonds, not all this illiquid stuff. Maybe we're back to the future. If you're at a larger size and you can find co-investment opportunities where you can have a lot more in a single name, that would be one way to compensate for the fact that your overall portfolio has to be larger, maybe in larger managers that are less punchy or more diversified.

• 53:05Ted Seides?

  Some of those thoughts leaning more towards publics, more towards co-invests, are at least contrarian in the sense that more channels are leaning towards privates. People are concerned that co-invests might get crowded out by the high net worth channel. In the private markets, how are you viewing the various bottlenecks of liquidity and the new flows that may be coming in from different pools of capital?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  It's been a confirmation of some of the biases we've held. We've not done a lot in the buyout space. A lot of that was driven by, we try to not make things too complicated and think about from a valuation perspective, are the assets priced where we'll get a reasonable return for the amount of risk that we're taking? What we've seen in the buyout space since we've been invested is that that's just not been true. The valuations have been extended and some of that was related to low interest rates, but even as interest rates have repriced, we haven't seen enough of a valuation retrenchment to get really excited. When we see retail money come in, I almost worry that it's, be careful what you wish for, private equity managers.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  You get a bunch of retail investors in there who don't have a great experience. It's not a great thing for the industry. That industry is very mature and super competitive. When there's that much money chasing an idea, all the talent tends to chase it too. I don't have statistics to back this up. Anecdotally, there's been a talent vacuum into private equity. Given the predominance of indexing in public markets and that talent vacuum into another space, there might be a lot more alpha in public markets. Even if there's not, we love the option value of liquidity. Having the ability to step into those dislocations can make up for the alpha that we might be sacrificing in private markets.

• 54:58Ted Seides?

  What are the biggest risks you're worried about going forward?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  I continue to worry about geopolitical risks. The current conflict in Iran is troubling from the perspective of our India and Vietnam exposure. So we're focused on that. I worry about the geopolitical reshuffling that's happening. The current conflict that's happening, does that make it easier for China to invade Taiwan? That particular risk is one of the hugely cascading impact that would be felt across the portfolio because so much of the public and private markets are linked to the AI build out. There's no part of the portfolio that wouldn't be severely impacted by that. When I like to worry, I like to worry about the big things and that one is definitely worth worrying about.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  There is positioning changes we can make in our portfolio broadly in terms of equity risk. There's not a lot that you can do to protect yourself. Even getting in front of it and trying to think about your game plan in such a scenario is very helpful. We pride ourselves on being counter cyclical and a prepared mind heading into one of those environments is going to allow us to not feel as much regret and lean into the opportunity set that's in front of us.

• 56:07Ted Seides?

  Bruce, I want to make sure I get a chance to ask you a couple of fun closing questions before we wrap up. Before we get to the closing questions, I want to tell you about one of our strategic investments. We've made a few and each are working on a product or service we think will be valuable to our community. One is Ascension Data. Ascension provides workflow software for compensation that allows you to track, plan and take care of your team. We're excited for you to check out how they can help solve the sticky pain point of compensation. There's a link in the show notes so you can learn more. And here are those closing questions. What's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?

• 56:46Speaker 00

  I still swim. There's a sensory deprivation component to it all day. There's a lot of talking, both to and from. It's great to have the silence that comes with it. There's a component to swimming that is meditative because it's polyrhythmic. This ties back to music. You've got your stroke rhythm that's happening. You've got your breathing rhythm that's happening. You've got your kicking rhythm and they all have to fit together. That is when it works, a very gratifying experience. I went to Wesleyan. I was recruited to swim there. When I got there, I did a season of water polo and then I was like, I don't want to swim. Wesleyan had this great program where you could take private music lessons for credit. Music is my other hobby. I've always loved listening to it.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  For three years, I took jazz guitar and I got really annoyed. In my fourth year, I went to see my teacher and he couldn't remember my name. I was like, that's it. I'm not doing your lessons anymore. So I'd gotten into bluegrass music and it just so happened that the guy who wrote the book on how to play the dobro, which is acoustic steel guitar, was at Wesleyan. I ended up taking dobro lessons and the dobro has been my passion as far as music goes. I actually went back to swimming my senior year too and had an amazing experience. One of the challenging things about living as a human is the allegory of Plato's cave. We mistake our perceptions for reality. The way our brains work, it's really hard to see the essence of things.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  When I play music, especially with other people, there are times when it feels like music approximates more closely than anything else, getting to the essence of something. It's really a liberating and sustaining experience for me.

• 58:27Ted Seides?

  Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life?

• 58:31Speaker 00

  My daughters have had a big impact because they taught me patience. I have four daughters. That's big. There have been two individuals. One is Jeff Knight at Putnam. Jeff was an incredible mentor to me. One of the things you have to have to be a successful CIO is to realize that it's not just investing. There's multiple parts of the business. You have to have relationship expertise and experience with the board. You have to have an ability to sell to managers, the mission of the university, how great investors you are. There's a lot more that goes into being an investor. Jeff gave me the opportunity to not just be on the portfolio management team at Putnam, but to also take part in pitching for business.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  He was having me in front of big Middle Eastern clients when I was 30 years old. I couldn't understand why he was doing that, but I was grateful for it. The other thing he did was before he put me on the portfolio management team, he said, Bruce, if you're gonna take risk, you gotta know how to do it. You gotta open a futures account and start trading. I have great lessons learned from that. I traded two assets. I traded Eurodollar futures and S and P minis. I was good at one, bad at the other. That is a great lesson when you're looking at managers. It gives me a lens to understand whether or not they're in their sweet spot. Their skill set matches to what they're doing. That's really important. The other person who had a huge impact was Nancy Everett, who hired me here.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  I had been out of the endowment world for a few years and she took a big chance on me. Even from day one, I showed up the night before my interview. I had driven my daughter down to a beach vacation with a family friend. I tried to pack everything for my outfit for the interview with Nancy the next day. And I did, except for shoes. So I walk into my interview in flip flops. Nancy, that's just who she is. Everything for Nancy is substance over form. It was such a perfect fit for me culturally to be with her. She spent so much time grooming me to be a CIO. She told me to build relationships with each of the board members.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Her superpower is that she hires smart people and lets them run with it, which takes an incredible amount of trust and faith. Finally, she led by example in that she was fantastic about receiving feedback. It's hard to give your boss feedback and give them direct feedback. She made it so easy. It set an example for me as a leader. I want to do the same thing for my people because getting honest feedback is one of the hardest things to get. The more senior you are, it was a huge impact on me. What's a mystery you wonder about? I'm very curious about intuition. I've had experiences personally with it that have been really profound. Somebody was telling me recently, there's clairvoyance, but there's

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  also something called clear cognizance, where your body becomes aware of something before your mind does. I've had a few of these experiences where I even got physically ill because I had to like make a choice. I didn't understand for even months afterwards what I was doing. It's a mystery to me. There's something obviously outside of your brain that serves some kind of reasoning function that I'm not exactly sure how it works. I'm trying to lean into it, but it's kind of like Peter Parker after he got bit by the spider, where it's just everything's going all over the place. When I try to use my intuition, that's what it looks like. I think it's real. I think it's there. And learning how to use it can be a really important and valuable skill set for an investor.

• 1:02:07Ted Seides?

  Bruce, last one. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  Right. Oldest daughter, she was 14 or 15 and doing what teenage daughters do. And I got annoyed with her. She looked at me and she said, Dad, it's not about you. That has been, wow, one of the best lessons in life as a boss, to know that people have stuff going on and how they're acting to you might not have anything to do with you. The real professional one that has been most profound was I did not start building a professional network intentionally until I was 40 years old. It's been such a benefit to me since then. My network now is one of my strengths. If I'd had another 20 years to build it and compound it, how valuable it would be. I used to think of networking

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  as transactional. And I've since learned it's not bad at all. It's a real profound life lesson.

• 1:03:00Ted Seides?

  Bruce, thanks so much for sharing this incredible journey you've been on.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Thank you, Ted, for having me. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:03:06Ted Seides?

  Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.