David Swensen was one of the great LP investors in the early days of DFJ. In this photo, he was still smiling, but when he could not remove our logo tat from his forehead the next morning, he had to explain it at other venture firms’ LP meetings the next day. Oops.
From the WSJ cover today: “David Swensen, the pioneering Yale University endowment chief who changed the course of institutional investing, died Wednesday evening. He was 67 years old.
Mr. Swensen and his longtime deputy, Dean Takahashi [far left in my photo], espoused the then-radical idea that institutional investors should de-emphasize stocks and bonds. Investors should instead take advantage of their long time horizons to invest in hedge funds, real estate, timber and other alternative investments.
That framework helped popularize venture capital and private equity, contributing to the shrinking of the public markets reshaping the investment world. One of Mr. Swensen’s books, Pioneering Portfolio Management, went on to become a bible for investment management.
He helped transform the business of endowment management from a boring, backwater function to a prestigious and professionalized business. He looked beyond the numbers to incorporate qualitative assessments of investment managers into his decisions. ‘I’m an old-fashioned guy that wants to sit across the table from someone that’s done the analysis,’ Mr. Swensen said in a 2017 interview on stage at the Council on Foreign Relations. His remarks explained his skepticism of quantitative strategies but also translated to his larger investment philosophy. He said later, ‘I don’t understand any other way to invest.’
Tall, lanky and blunt, Mr. Swensen often blasted the excessive costs of the mutual-fund industry and the conflicts of interest on Wall Street. He bashed activist investors as value-destroying and asset-gathering managers as out for themselves.
The university said Thursday the endowment’s performance under Mr. Swensen translated to gains of $45.6 billion. At the first meeting of the endowment investment committee after his cancer diagnosis, Mr. Swensen told the committee that friends were encouraging him to step down to tick through his bucket list.
He told the committee that helming the endowment was what he wanted to be doing: ‘This is my bucket list.’”
May we all be so lucky.
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