Investing Billions - E213: How Fordham Invests Its $1B Endowment

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

How do you run a $1B endowment with a lean five-person team — while balancing liquidity, access, and high-conviction relationships? In this episode, I speak with Geeta Kapadia, CFA, Chief Investment Officer at Fordham University, about how she manages a concentrated portfolio of 30–40 manager relationships, the lessons she’s learned resetting the portfolio for liquidity, and why she favors passive equities with selective active bets in emerging markets and developed ex-US. We also dive into the shortcomings of interval funds, when to say yes to continuation vehicles, and how Fordham leverages the Gabelli alumni network and a student venture fund to extend sourcing and diligence reach.

Today, I'm speaking with Gita Capadia, Chief Investment Officer at Fordham University, where she manages over $1 billion across a dynamic portfolio. We dive into how she aligns different stakeholders and builds a portfolio that generates real alpha while also treating portfolio allocations as a high-stake strategic gain. If you allocate or raise capital, listen for her frameworks on active versus passive management, relationship-driven GP selection, and also how she ensures every investment decision advances both the university's financial goals and mission. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Gita.

So you run the Fordham University Endowment. You're the chief investment officer. Fordham has roughly a billion dollars, AUM. How does that affect how you construct your portfolio? Yeah, a billion dollars is like a very sweet spot. It's big enough to make important investments from a size perspective, but it's also small enough that we're not looking to put $300 million to work at any given point in time. So I feel like it's a really nice launching point to be able to create a portfolio that can

have a transformative effect on the endowment on the university. And so we're really looking to create a portfolio of about, say, 30 to 40 relationships because given the size of our team, that's probably about optimal for us to be able to cover meaningfully. And then we're looking to make sure that all of those relationships actually count. We're not interested in hiring our 100th best idea. So you're balancing a certain level of diversification with also alpha, not spreading your alpha too thin.

Exactly. As a CIA, you're not only managing the endowment, you're also managing the university relationships. Tell me about the stakeholders that you interact with as the CIA at Fordham. That was probably my biggest transition point when I came over from managing $5 billion of a health care institution's assets. In that former position, I didn't have a lot of donor. relation-type conversations other than at a very high level. And so the relationships that the

university has with important donors, alums, community partners, other people in leadership positions at other universities, there's a lot of layers to it that I never appreciated until I got in the seat. And so that has been a steep learning curve for me, but a good one because it really helps me to lean into some of those skills that have very little to do with investing and really have more to do with psychology and relationship management and telling a story and persuading people to understand why you're doing what you're doing. So it's been a really fun part of the job, an unexpected one, but unexpectedly fun. David Swenson originally popularized the Yale model, But he also really started this idea of leveraging the alumni base in order to help

him get access to funds. Today, University of Michigan is famous for doing this. The Apsom does it on a smaller scale. Are you able to leverage your alumni base to get into opportunities? And what other benefits accrue to having engagement with alumni? Yeah, it's been an amazing lever for us to be able to lean into as we think about ways to identify strong firms that we want to partner with going forward. So we have the Gabelli School of Business here, which has produced an amazing number of

high flyers in the worlds of finance and investing and venture and all kinds of different industries. We also have on campus a student-run venture fund, which is like an angel fund that the business school has supported, and that allows our graduate students to, to train on how to identify Angel investments going forward and hopefully sends them off into the world with that skill set. And then finally, as you said, we have a great alumni base that wants to help. They're out there doing the hard work that we're doing

and they want to be part of the solution for students in the future. And so having them think through ways that they can be useful, whether it's making an introduction, whether it's sending over a fund that they've recently invested in that they think could be a good fit for us, whether it's just having us dialogue with people in the field who can give us some ideas on which areas to focus on. All of those things are additive. They're kind of all pieces of the puzzle that can really help us enhance and improve what we're doing on a daily basis. You mentioned these 30 to 40 core positions.

tell me about, for lack of a better word, your relationship management with these fund managers. Tell me about the cadence, the style, when you choose to lean into a manager. And how do you go about managing this portfolio of relationships? Like with any relationship, you have to invest into it, right? So I was at an event yesterday where the speaker was talking about how just like with a marriage, you have to invest time and energy into it. You can't just say, okay, I'll see you in a year and then, you know, meet them again. So I think a lot of it, obviously, given how we all travel and we're all very busy with things going on in our day jobs, a lot of it is numerous touch points through different ways.

So whether that's a phone call, an email even, a webinar, listening to their AGM, going to their AGM, whatever the form that it might take for that specific manager, we need to make sure that we're deploying our resources in a strategic way to be able to. develop and strengthen that relationship. We don't want to be the person that finds out that someone's left the firm through an email blast or through a news article. That's kind of a worst-case scenario with us. So regardless of the size of the firm, whether it's a very small firm or a very large firm, we want to make sure that we have a relationship with someone there who can think of us when an important development comes up, when they're deciding to start a new fund. Whatever it might be, we want to make sure that there's actually a person on the other end of that phone call. So it can take a lot of different forms for the larger firms. It's making

sure that we're going to the right meetings with them. We're talking to other LPs. We're spending time with the client service people, but also some of the underlying investors, you know, doing reference calls, all of those pieces of the puzzle, I think. We flex into some of them for different types of firms. And so we've tried to be thoughtful about it because we can't, we can't do everything. There's only five of us total. We know that we can't go to every single AGM and we can't do every single call and we can't do. So we're trying to really identify which works best for us and for the manager and then double click on those. You have a relatively small team managing a billion dollars. Are you always meeting with every GP or the top GPs? Are you somehow allocating

that to your staff and what are the best practices that you've learned over your career on how to best break down this relationship management puzzle. One of the hardest things in coming into the CIO role, especially at a place like Fordham with a small team, is being able to delegate to the right people at the right time. So when I first started, I was the only person in the investment office at Fordham. They had never had a full-fledged investment office before. And so, So I was doing everything. So I was meeting. I met all the managers on Zoom.

I went to see the largest relationships. I did multiple calls, reference calls, all of that good stuff. But once my team got into place and got up to speed, that was no longer part of my portfolio. That needed to be put down to or that needed to be transferred over to the team because that was really their forte was double-clicking and focusing on those relationships. My role at that point comes into a more big picture, strategic, where would this manager potentially fit into our larger portfolio? How do we see that relationship growing over time? Is this something that we want to continue to be a part of in the next 10 years?

You know, thinking through the implications of what a new relationship might mean to our total portfolio. Where does that take assets away from in the future where we can't then put money to work in that asset class or in that space? So now it's a question of, you know, when do they need me to come in and meet with managers? Which managers are the most important for me to continue to invest time into those relationships? And when we're looking at new managers, when can I come in and be additive to the process as opposed to just a hurdle to create more questions that aren't really relevant to the conversation?

It might sound very woo-woo, but energy management is a thing. Jeff Bezos talks about it, all the top CEOs talk about it. I think one of the reasons it is a thing is that for some reason human beings are really bad at once you're on a task, regardless of how small or how big, more or less takes the same amount of energy. So in other words, if you're opening up letters and writing emails to administrative people by the time it comes into the afternoon, you're not going to have a lot of energy left for these higher level things. and even though these higher level things are really important, you could argue they're not urgent, so they're always at the back of the line. So you have to kind of make the space, it's as much about what you don't do, then what you do, because what you don't do leads to what you have space to do. It's absolutely a great point, and it becomes difficult, right? We only have so much energy,

mental energy to be able to deal with all the tasks in our lives. And so you want to make sure that you're giving your best self to the most impactful ones that you have on your plate. Double-click a little bit on your portfolio allocation today. And also, how has that evolved since you became CIO? So when I came into the university, the former CIO had been retired. He retired about a year before I joined. And so in the interim time, there was an OCIO firm that was managing the portfolio. When I came in, the portfolio was very heavily exposed to equities, both public and private, which was expected and needed. At the same time, there was a large allocation to real estate

and a large allocation to private credit. And so it was a very, it was a very high octane portfolio in that it didn't leave a lot of room for fixed income or capital call management from a cash perspective. And so one of the things that I did in conjunction with our consultant was work through transitioning the portfolio to a slightly lower level of private investment. to improve the liquidity of the underlying investments, but also to preserve the growth potential of it. So, you know, long story short, this portfolio needs return.

And we're not going to be able to get return if we don't emphasize an allocation to both public and private equities. And so we want to make sure that we're preserving the space for that investment while also managing strategically a portfolio of complementary investments, including absolute return, fixed income, and a very small amount of transitional cash. So it's a little bit more of a balanced portfolio now from a liquidity perspective, but continues to focus on trying to emphasize return on a risk-adjusted basis. Something that's been extremely surprising to me is this rise of these semi-liquid interval funds

that are being used by institutional investors, even pension funds. It's always been kind of billed for the last decade as this retail or high net worth product. Do you see a place for semi-liquid structures like interl funds in the Fordham portfolio? And if not, why not? I haven't had great luck with them. Just the small exposure that I've had with them, either through the portfolios that I've directly managed or through client portfolios that I've advised on, I have found that they've never been able to give me the liquidity that I've needed

at the right time. So that doesn't mean that there's not a place for them. I've just not been able to strategically manage them in a successful way. And so I think that as this space continues to evolve, there will probably be more and more use for those types of strategies in an institutional portfolio. I just don't know if I'm there yet or if the stress. I only know about interval funds theoretically. And I understand there's an infinite amount of iterations of it. But what I understand is typically it's about 5% liquidity per quarter over five years. Let's say that. That's a base case. Are you saying that you're having trouble, you've had troubles in the past liquidating 5% or is it that you need liquidity? You need 10 or 15% of the portfolio liquid.

and at that time, everyone's going for the gates and you're limited to 5%. Yeah, it's more of the latter. So I think, I don't think that the manager is not fulfilling their obligations. It's more that when we've thought about trying to generate liquidity from those types of investments, the liquidity hasn't, everyone's thinking about the same thing. So the liquidity hasn't really been as robust as we might like. And it's not that they're not fulfilling what they said they would do. It's more that the potential to redeem above and beyond is not really there in the times when we might need it.

And part of that is us as far as liquidity management, because strategically we should be able to forecast out a little bit better. But I found like they're kind of the, you know, the kind of devil in the middle. middle, right? Like, you want liquidity, but it's not really liquid, but you also want return, but it's a little less return seeking because of that liquidity space. So it's sort of like a, you know, a kind of tale of two cities. You were wanting to get something from it, but on both pieces you're going to have to give up a little bit. So I would kind of rather either go for one space, which is it's liquid, it's fully liquid, and you get that, or it's illiquid and you know that going into it. And so don't even expect that you're going to get

cash out of it because you're just not going to. And maybe a dumb question, but when everyone's trying to get liquidity, are these major crises like the global financial crisis where just people have liquidity constraints across the entire board? Or is it more like today you could argue large buyout is out of favor and maybe quote unquote too much capital is going into that and you want to cycle into other assets? Why is there consensus on everybody going for their gates? Yeah, for us it's more the ladder. So we are very far from any sort of a crisis at the moment. But when we think about trying to really take this portfolio to the point where my team and I feel like we've really

put our mark on it, we've really put funds in it that we believe strongly have a high chance of outperforming, you know, that we feel are very aligned with what we're trying to do within the endowment and the university as a whole, that becomes difficult if you have a lot of capital locked up. And when funds continue to not give distributions, continue to create more and more extensions on their original term, create contintuation vehicles to try and keep those one-off investments in the portfolio, it becomes very hard to see a path towards realization,

even though it's a 10-year fund, and yes, maybe you'll have one or two extensions. And we have some funds in this portfolio that I would have never guessed would be as long lived as they've been. And so understanding that tail risk as it relates to term, I'm almost sort of assuming that all of them are going to extend as long as they can because that's been our experience. They've just all been in the same sort of environment of no distributions or very low distributions. capital continues to get called. And then we find ourselves in this position where we don't see a way to generate cash out of this portfolio for many, many years.

And so the next step is, okay, so what are our options as it relates to a very less liquid investment heavy endowment? And that's not just venture. That's also private equity. Yeah. And you mentioned continuation vehicles. I have invested personally, but I feel very bullish on the promise, the alignment. Is your default stance when you have a continuation vehicle opportunity in your portfolio?

Are you a default yes or are you default no? I would like to be a default yes. I don't know if my investment committee would agree with me. Keep in mind that I've been here for three years. the investment committee is relatively new. And so I think they're grappling with a lot of different priorities at the moment, including the big picture state of higher ed, which is very negative. And so I think when they see a continuation vehicle opportunity arise from an investment

perspective, they may all want to say yes. From a big picture, this is where we are right now as it relates to the university. and our investment strategy, they see, I think they sometimes will see that opportunity for liquidation and say, this gives us cash and we need to recycle this cash back somewhere else. So it's a tough one. I think from a true investment philosophy, I'm a default, yes, for all the reasons that you mentioned, alignment, fees, the opportunity for a return stream that's just going to be transformative. I'm a default, yes. I just fact-checked myself. It does appear to be lower risk

and higher returning, which is rare for an asset class. Double-clicking a little bit on this DPI issue. Is it an issue of liquidity, or is it that I could promise you a two-x return, but if it's over 20 years, you're going to get that in, let's say, treasuries today. Is that the isn't an IR issue that concerns you, or is it just DPI and cash management? And what really drives this kind of the second order pain of not having liquidity in these funds? My instinct is to say cash management, but we don't factor cash coming back to us on a regular cadence with these types of investments in a way that we do with fixed income or something like that. So when we instinctively think about it, we say it's the cash management aspect, but I think

as we dig deeper into the DPI piece of it, and we think about how to measure return in these types of investments, it's a much fuzzier space. And so I worry that we're seeing a multiple or we're seeing an IRA and we're just saying, oh, yeah, yeah, that's great. but we're not factoring in all of the pieces that allow us to actually judge whether or not this investment has been a success over a number of years. There are a couple people on LinkedIn who I follow that talk a lot about, you know, the way that, of course, it's always marketing people and salespeople market some of these funds and they say, oh, you're getting a, you know, a return of 30% expected return. And, you know, those numbers don't mean a lot unless you're putting them in a context of vintage year and IRR and DPI and all of those things. So this space in particular, we really feel like we have to dig very deeply into what are the components of that return that that help us decide whether or not this has been a good investment. And of course, it's always backward looking because we don't know how the fund is going to perform in the future.

but we've spent a lot of time on that recently, particularly this summer. It almost feels like allocators have gotten so cynical with the IRA that they've almost overbalanced on moik. Of course, everyone says you can't eat IRA, you can eat moik. But the counter to that, I would say, is inflation eats your moik. So moik is also needs to have context. The best data and best kind of standardization of data that I've seen is Professor Steve Kaplan at University of Chicago.

He created this Kaplan Shore Index that normalizes stock market versus private equity versus venture capital and all the different asset classes. And he does it. The reason I love it is he does it on DPI basis, which I see as ground truth. Like cash in, cash out is essentially ground truth. It's non-gamable. Of course, you can't do it for recent vintages, which is complicated in general. but it seems to be at least the most unbiased and well-thought-out indexed I'm aware of.

Yeah, I very much appreciate academics and practitioners who really want to dig into this topic because it's such an easy thing to get lost, like the devil is in the details. And so I wish there was an easy way to just like create a headline to give to my investment committee and say, this is why the return is this. But it's just, it's just not, never that simple. So before you started out, your portfolio was quite active on the public side. You've chosen to go passive. Explain the rationale and how do you pick your passive book?

And that's kind of a paradoxical question, but tell me about that. So the portfolio was invested in a lot of line items that ranged from very large firms doing active global equity to smaller firms doing very active U.S. specific, like U.S. small cap equity. And I've spent a lot of time on this subject. I wrote a white paper on it when I was working consulting. I've watched it over many, many years, the active versus passive debate. And again, it comes down to kind of my lived experience. I have not had a great, a great spate. I have not had a great record in picking active long only managers. I have had good experiences in very specific asset classes, but when I look at broad strokes like the broad, you know, big picture U.S. large cap equity managers, I have not

had a good track record, and I personally don't think that there are a lot of managers who do it consistently well. So I would rather spend my time and my team's time looking on the private side, on the absolute return side, looking for active management in those spaces, because I feel like those are areas where we have a good chance of picking a manager or managers that can do well. So after becoming oriented with the book and meeting all of the managers in it, I terminated virtually all of them, not all of them, but virtually all of them, to go to a much more commodity-driven, and by commodity, I mean very basic, passive exposure, U.S. non-US equity book. The way we selected the passive manager is actually an interesting one.

You know, obviously there are, as I said, it's basically a commodity now, so there are lots of great people out there doing this work. But one of the things we wanted to do, given that it is a relatively sizable piece of the book, was make sure that we were picking the right firm that was aligned with what we were trying to do, and that we felt really good about. And so we reached out to a lot of other CIOs and investment teams, and we identified a smaller passive provider that works with another Catholic institution that we know of, does, you know, just as well as anyone else, does it at a relatively competitive fee, and is, you know, very much hands-on with us. And so we've found that that's been a really good way for us to express what we

want to do in the portfolio through a large position that otherwise would have just gone to a very large firm doing this all day long. And I'm very intrigued. You mentioned macro, long only is not, is a place. Certainly when you put in the fees, it's very difficult to outperform and the fees could be very heavy. What are the niche products in the public markets before that you found that actually can outperform a passive strategy? So we've had good success in the emerging markets. We haven't done country-specific. funds, so like an India fund or a China fund or a Latam fund, we, given the size of the portfolio,

we just really don't feel that that's a good use of the way that we invest. So we're using bigger picture emerging market strategies. And those have done relatively well. They're firms that we've known for a long time. We also have some active, we do have some active U.S. equity, but it's relatively small relative to the rest of the book. And that's been a longstanding relationship that the endowment has had for many years and has done very well. And then we also feel like there's a lot of opportunity in the developed non-U.S. space, but it's more of a manager-by-manager sort of area. So we've had some success identifying managers that we've worked with in the past. We haven't really pulled the trigger yet in that space, but I do feel like there

is opportunity for an active manager, particularly in Europe. We feel like there's a lot of lot of money on the table there that could be meaningful for our endowment. So we're thinking about that space. To use a sports analogy, a lot of allocators think of all their assets playing a different position, let's say akin to baseball team. What position do your assets play in your portfolio? So can I turn this around on you? Yeah. I'm going to use instead of a sports analogy, I thought about this. I'm going to use like an orchestra. So I was thinking about this today as I came into the office. So, you know, I think when we think about like a piece of music or an orchestra,

everybody has a different role to play. But there are certain pieces that are certain instruments that you think of are, you know, you're going to hear them like the piano or the flute, the clarinet, like the melody pieces. And yet underlying that is sort of like, you know, there's bases and there's drums and there's percussion, and there are pieces that they add to it. You could probably listen to the song without hearing them, but they're still there. And there are certain pieces where they actually are the main spotlight of the portfolio, of the song. And so I think about that as I think about our portfolio. So you've got kind of your engine of it, which is going to be, you know, the public

and the private equity piece of it, the venture piece, which you're hoping is going to continually do well for you out with the J-curve. But basically, they're going to continue to be outperforming. higher risk, but, you know, higher return. And then you've got like your fixed income, your cash management, your absolute return. They are like kind of the, you know, the drums, the like base, the like lower wind instruments where they're like, you don't really always hear them, but you know they're there. And at certain points, they're going to actually shine. And so we've seen that happen. We've seen those ballasts of the portfolio actually come through when we most need them when equities are down.

And so it's that combination of all of those pieces coming together that creates that end result, which is hopefully going to be a very nice sounding piece of music. I think the most underrated aspect of finance is behavioral finance has just been less focused. People see as soft and maybe not real, although the behavior is very real. That results from it. And one of the things that I think about is a lot of what you would call the drums, the cash management, the fixed income, it ensures that you take the right behavior during very

difficult times, and it provides for liquidity, and it makes sure that you're able to be in asset classes at the right time, which the market thinks is the wrong time. For example, like venture post-2001, venture, you know, I would argue in the last couple years, anything after a big downturn, because all these, all these asset classes are supply and demand driven. So in theory, if there's less demand, the pricing is going to be lower and then you buy low, sell high, essentially, which is much, much harder to do than it sounds. And I think that's one of the things that's underrated. I think if you were a purely emotionless AI, you could maybe overweight more in equity in theory if you didn't have to deal with your own emotions, if you

don't have stakeholders like investment committees, if you don't have liquidity needs for your students, for your scholarships. In theory, you could be more weighted, but in reality, having this kind of entire orchestra working in tandem, make sure that you allow to continue to compound your growth side of the portfolio. I totally agree with you. I think sometimes my team or our consultant maybe thinks that I'm crazy because I'm thinking about things like, you know, are we actually using the right fixed income fund? Are we using the right, are we doing as well as we can in cash management? Are we looking at fees enough? Fees is like one of my hugest, hugest areas of focus because that drag, although it's small, it's like a tap dripping in your house, right? Like, you know, I had this

happened to me. We had a sprinkler head in our backyard break and I got a water bill that was literally about the size of our whole town's water bill. Everyone was like, oh my God, what did you do? we had no idea. I mean, it was happening all through the month, and we had no idea. And so it's like those tiny drags on the portfolio that they're not sexy, they're not fun to talk about, they're not interesting, they're, you know, vanilla, but they're important. They make a difference. Oftentimes think about this advice that's not memeable, that's not spreadable, but important. Yeah. And that's where a lot of the interesting concepts come in. Yeah.

You really focus, Fordham really focuses, and you as a CIO focus on fun threes and fun fours, which sounds, sounds, you know, great by Fund Three, you know, but it's hyper, hyper competitive. How do you get into the top Fun Three's and Fun Fours by starting at that vintage? Yeah, I think we try and start to get to know people at Fun 2. So we start building that relationship earlier. We recognize that, you know, if a fund comes to us and says, oh, it's June 1st and our first, our close is going to be September 30th. The chances of us participating in a fund like that is basically none. We need to get to know the team, the fund, it's LPs, the investments, founders, all of the things

that we can learn. That takes months of time, whether it's for me or for my team or whoever it is that's working on the potential investment. So we want to learn about them long before they're out in the market closing and and raising and closing. That might mean we miss the fund three and then we end up in fund four, but we're okay with that. I think what we don't want to happen is for us to find out about a fund that we really, really like and then see that there's just no way that we can learn enough about it in time

to be able to put it in front of, put it in the portfolio. So we're trying to do the legwork in advance, and that's not always easy because of our day jobs, But we're trying to identify those names in a bullpen so that when we're ready to put them out, we can say, we've known them for the past year and a half. You know, we've been talking to them over many different periods. So that helps us to get us on that list of fund three potential LPs. There are definitely going to be funds where we're just not going to be able to get up there. They're just, they'll get to know us, they'll like us, and they'll say, you know what, we're just, we're not going to be. able to make room for you. Part of us being at that billion dollar mark helps us in that space

in that we are not trying to come in and dictate terms. We're not trying to come in and say, we need to put, you know, a commitment of $100 million in. Like, we're not going to be that manager or that LP, but we do want to command some time for of the underlying LPs. You know, we've had instances where we've seen, underlying GPs, I should say, we've had instances where we've seen GPs that are like, we won't do, we're not able to. You know, we're not able to do any calls with you. You know, you'll have to read our materials. And that's just not, the chances of us ever doing that are very slim.

Because if we're nobody, we're just another name on a spreadsheet, that's not a relationship. I want to double click on that because I've reached out to call it like the most difficult to access VC funds. And I always joke, like, I always volunteer. Like, I'll draft up a side letter that says I will never talk to you. all I need is a K-1, and I'll be the easiest I'll be, and then I'll try to make introductions. It's somewhat facetious, but also kind of serious. Obviously, you're fiduciary, it's not your own money, you're managing for the university,

but is there never a time where just being in is good enough? I mean, it's a great question, and we think about it a lot. I think just being in are chances of being on that list of someone who could just to be in are pretty slim already. I've, I haven't, I wish I could say that we've turned away a bunch of great investments because they refuse to meet with us. We really have it. It's a signal. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, maybe we're not in the right room because if we were, then we would have all these wonderful opportunities that we would just say, well, maybe we'll bend on this. We have yet to be invited to those types of investments. Do I think that if we

had those in front of us, would we be flexible, I'll always be flexible. I'll always be flexible. So if I can somehow recreate that relationship through other LP references, through meeting with people who've worked there, through meeting with founders who've dealt with the GP, that may get me to a place where I feel comfortable enough. I just haven't found it yet. So maybe you could double click on that. You mentioned you like to build a relationship from vintage two to vintage three. What are the best practices to building a relationship before you invest? A lot of it, as crazy as this is in our virtual AI computer-driven world, a lot of it is

meeting people in person. It's just creating that relationship. Again, it's, you know, going back to what I said earlier, it's about investing the time and trying to figure out whether we're going to be a good fit for one another. You know, we, of course, as the LP, want certain things. We want certain access. We want certain materials. We want certain insights. But we also want to create a symbiotic relationship in that we want them to understand. These are the students that you're managing money for. These are the students who we're trying to help get out into the world and become the next GPs to become the next, you know, Titans of Industry, all of those good things that we all want for our young people of the world. And so the best relationships that we've had

with managers and with GPs have been the ones who have really taken that to heart and have said, you know, thank you for what you're doing. How can we help? Whether it's coming to a class, whether it's doing a webinar, whether it's, you know, zooming into a portfolio management 101 class, whether it's helping with internships. There's so many ways that a GP can be helpful from very small things to very big things like inviting us to their AGM or being willing to have a coffee with someone who is out in Silicon Valley for the summer. Like things like that, they're very micro-level events, but they could be transformative for a student at Fordham.

And those are the types of things that really resonate with us. I'm thinking about this whole concept of the signal that they don't want to meet with you being more of the effect than the cause. What other signals are you looking for? Because you're investing your time. that's one of the things in this podcast is you're choosing what not to do and you're choosing also what to do and where to invest your time. So you have a portfolio of assets, but also a portfolio of time. How do you know to lean into certain GP relationships and how do you know what are the

early signals that there might be reciprocity there and they might value you as a relationship? As a GP, your job is to identify the investments that you think are going to outperform, the companies of the future that are going to make many, many millions of dollars. for your underlying investors. And so we're not trying to tell you that you need to come and spend time with us because that's very important to us. What's important to us is that you make money because that helps all of us. It helps me.

It helps you. It helps the students. It helps everybody that is your underlying stakeholders. So we want you to go out and do your job, which is invest. At the same time, if you have the capacity to be able to devote some time to understanding what it is we do at Fordham and how we. want to do it. And if you can be additive to that in some way, that's a pretty strong indication that we will likely be good partners. And we've seen it time and time again from

very large firms to very small firms. And so all of them have different, you know, similar to the analogy we're talking about earlier, all of them have different pieces to play. Not everyone is going to be very hands-on and, you know, take a forum student for the summer. That's not going to happen. But it might happen for one firm or maybe two firms. Another big firm might. give us, you know, an internship program that somebody could apply to. And that's their way of doing it. Every piece of it has a different way that they can be additive. You know, a really big firm may just make sure that our students get support for some kind of a program. We have one of the firms that we've been talking to did an orientation for new finance graduates. And they

invited our students and our students went and they really enjoyed it. So there are small things that for us may seem like, you know, not very impactful, but for the life of a student, particularly a Fordham student, many of whom are scholarship students, working a job, a work study job, potentially the first person in their family to go to college. A lot of those things are hard for them to navigate. And so having any piece of help with all of that is really added it for us. They also have their portfolio of money, but also time. And then meeting with you, then doing these things are not only valuable for you. They're also signals of the relationship.

They're true skin again. Yeah, I think that's right. We're looking for alignment, just like everybody else. So obviously, fees are alignment, you know, making sure that we were being rewarded for the fees that we're paying. that's really very important. It's the bottom line. But at the same time, we recognize that not everyone is going to be able to shoot the lights out of every fund every year. And so there are lots of ways that you can add value to our relationship.

And we've had a lot of this conversation focus on EQ and behavioral things, some IQ as well. Is a CIO position essentially half and half? Like, how would you divide up that finite 100% pie between what it takes to be a top decal CIO? I mean, at the end of the day, it's performance, right? We say this to our managers all the time. We may love you. You may be a great partner for us, but if you don't put up the numbers, you know, at the end

of the day, that's why we pay you. At the same time, any smart investment committee board, LP, anyone knows that performance goes through cycles. And so it's what you bring to the table when performance is challenging, that really demonstrates true character. And so to be able to highlight and illustrate all of the things that you've been doing for that eventuality, because it's going to come into all of us. We're all going to have years of underperformance. Being able to demonstrate the value that you bring to me is kind of what I think about when I approach the job and come to the office every day. you know, a huge part of it is relationship management, a much bigger part of it now than it ever was for me, particularly as it relates to investing.

Now investing is really my teams. That's their primary focus. My focus is making sure that investment message gets out there to the right people in the right way so that they understand and they can support the things that we're trying to do within the portfolio and for the endowment as a whole way. whole. A lot of that is donor management, alumni management, representing the university out there in the broader, in the broader universe, you know, talking with other CIOs, talking with other senior investment professionals at firms, talking to GPs that maybe someday we will get to the fund two with them or the fund three with them, building the framework so that my team can go in and do the heavy lifting of, all right, now we're going to do the due diligence on this manager because we really think that this is something special that we can really get behind from an investment perspective. And, you know, I never appreciated how much work I would have to do in explaining the portfolio to,

whether it's the president, the board, the investment committee, other GPs, you know, understanding where they fit in the portfolio, that message, understanding that story, all of that is a much bigger part of my job now than it ever was before. It's a tough question, EQ versus IQ on CIOs, but if you keep on double clicking on it and you work with some assumptions, let's say that there's not that much alpha in the public and bond portfolio. So now your alpha, your differentiates and is in the private portfolio, there becomes a second order question, which is, is being a great, is it being a great endowment investment in the private's markets more about access? or picking. So I'm going to ask you that. Is it more about access or picking? I mean, it's a great question. I don't, in a true endowment universe with, you know, kind of following that some variation of the endowment model that David Swanson created,

I find it difficult to understand how you can do really well, unless you're just a great market timer, how you can do really well if you can't pick the right funds. I just, it's, really been, it's really been brought home to me over the last year about how differentiating being in those, in the right vintages, and the right funds means how impactful it can be on the endowment. And so we've seen it because we look at, you know, we've analyzed the past performance of our endowment before we all join the firm, before we all join the university and really have just spent time, you know, seeing how those decisions that you make 10 years ago, how they are now impacting the portfolio.

So I really think it's a combination of both. I mean, it would be great. You know, there are probably LPs that are so well-known and so well-regarded and, you know, so sought after that they kind of can fail up, right? Like there's no way that they can pick them. They're not going to end up in bad funds, mostly because they're going to get invited

to their really, really sought-after fund. and they probably have the assets to be able to do it. You know, they've got space in the portfolio, and they have the time to be able to devote to it because they have very large teams. So, and they have the network, right? So they can reach out to other people who may know this GP and say, okay, is this really something that we want in our portfolio?

Whereas we don't have any of them. Or maybe we have a little bit of it, but it's a very small scale, right? Like I have a network, but it's not the network that the Yale University Endowment office has. It's not the network that the Harvard management company has. So we have to recognize our limitations as a smaller institution, as a smaller investment team, and work with what we have. We can't try to be all things to all people.

There's no way we can be Harvard with the type of resources and the type of endowment that we have. So for us, it's more about singles and doubles, going back to your sports analogy. You know, we wish and we hope that we have a couple of those home run grand slam type hitters in the portfolio, but for us it's about slow. and steady, you know, identifying firms that we believe have the tools in place to be able to identify the companies of the future that are going to do well and break out. And really spending time making sure that we're making those good decisions as it relates to each one of

those funds has to play an important role. Taking to the most extreme, if you're the Yale endowment, you don't have to worry about picking because you just have access. You just go into benchmark founders fund sequoia so it's it's almost about like brand reputation management and keeping that reputation on the other extreme if you have if you're a high net worth individual you have to be the best in the world almost up picking you have to actually be better than yell ironically because you don't have the the automatic kind of the automatic alpha and then with you guys at a billion dollars you have to also be good at picking but you're also advantage in that you could go to smaller funds, which Yale cannot go into. So you have to be kind of the giant in the,

call it the 500 million to $5 billion kind of peer set. So you have to be the yell of that peer set in order to kind of get that automatic alpha. Yes. Yeah. And I think there are no hard and fast rules, right? Like if we can identify through our network or through our alumni base or through our investment committee, our board, if there is a fund that comes to us, and it is a fund one, and there's compelling opportunity there, we will think about it. We will do, and we have done a fund one. So it's not that there's a hard and fast red line. It's more that we have to have enough evidence to flex on we'd rather do a fun two or a fun three. I know it's another term that gets highly overused. First Principles thinking, but if you think

about it, not as vintages, but as parts of a thesis that needs to be de-risked, if a fund one might have 30 positions, fund three might have 15 positions, you could argue not apples to apples, but you could argue the fun one in some ways is more de-risk on certain factors, not on team and vintage and all those things. So taking a true first principles approach can give you kind of a leg up versus your peers. because a lot of peers are also saying we only do fund threes. These kind of try and true rules can keep you kind of going into hyper-competitive situations. For sure, for sure.

And, you know, we kind of assume that we're unlikely to be able to win in a very hyper-competitive situation. Maybe that's being pessimistic, but I try to temper expectations so that if we're surprised on the upside, that's a great thing. we'd rather enter a space where the GP really wants us to be an LP. They want us in their portfolio of LPs. They want us on our client list. They are not just like, eh, you're going to get cut back, you know, you're going to get $3 million. $3 million is not going to do anything for our portfolio.

So it's really not worth the time to invest in that partnership if we're only going to get an allocation of $3 million. I would call it probabilistic, right? How do you design a portfolio strategy by default wins? versus relying on luck, which I think could be a difficult strategy. What is one thing that you wish you knew when you went over into the dominant world? When you first started, what's one piece of advice you would have came back and told yourself when you started?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think it centers around the idea of you don't have to be right all the time. That idea, and it's ironic given that Fordham is a Jesuit university, and the Jesuit concept of discernment really resonates with me and with my team in that it focuses on the idea of trying to be open to being wrong and to really spend, truthfully spend the time listening to someone else's point of view and researching and looking into the fact that you might not be right. And so if you're not open to not being right, you're never really going to be able to truly express or truly reach a positive answer or a true answer. And I find that, you know, every day, right, you know, whether it's my family, whether it's my relatives, whether it's my coworkers, whether it's my boss, whether it's my committee, whoever it might be the person, you know, giving me a coffee at Starbucks. It looks like, you know, that person's wrong and I'm right. That person's wrong and I'm right. I know I'm right.

I'm right. But being able to allow yourself the possibility of not being right, it's hard when you, I think, you know, many of us, right, we go to good schools, we go to great programs, we have great employers. We, you know, we live in a world of hypercompetitive. We're all great and we're all smart. And we are. We're all smart.

We've all done the CFA and the Kaya and all of these great things. And, you know, we get asked to do great podcasts like this one. So we're all, you know, we're kind of in a world of, you know, meritocracy, and we all think we're, when we are, we're all smart, right? But I think being willing to say, you know what, I wasn't right about that. Like, I have found that very important as I think about being willing to stick up for what I think is correct, but also being willing to listen to other people and what they have to say. And it's a tough one for me because I think especially being a woman in the same.

industry, you often kind of think you're being second guest or you're second guessing yourself. And maybe I think I'm right, but I don't want to say it because I'm going to look, you know, obnoxious or aggressive. So being able to sort of let that person, that other person across the table from you, explain where they're coming from. That has been really powerful for me, particularly as I deal with alums or donors at Fordham or vice presidents or whoever it might be that is like, well, we always do it this way. So like, explain to me why we always do it. You know, let's get to a place where we can both be happy and comfortable. It may not be where I thought I'd get to.

It may not be where you thought you'd get to. But there's probably somewhere in the middle that we can all kind of agree on. So spending time on that without doing myself a disservice. And that's the other piece of it is making sure that you stick up for yourself and you're not constantly putting yourself down or thinking that you're always wrong. That's kind of the flip side of it, which I work with my team a lot on. because I think a lot of them, they instantly, especially when you're the CIO, they think, oh, well, the CI knows best.

She knows what's right all the time. And that's definitely not the case. So many great things to unpack there. One is, I have a framework for this. I call it fine-tuning my LLM. So part of the reason why I make these statements on the podcast is to be corrected. And I'm, like, very excited. I actually, I want to be corrected.

I've somehow, like, rewired my brain in that I get excited by it at this point. The second thing is there's an interesting nuance. I learned this from Tom Bill Yu. So he started a company. He's literally went from poverty, sold a company for a billion dollars. Then he started, he now is like the top five podcasts in the world. He has a podcast called Impact Theory. And he's also lost 60 pounds.

He's just like succeeded in all these domains. And the nuance that I learned from him, which was really helpful, is that you want to listen to everybody, but you also don't want to essentially like flatter a junior your person by taking what you know to be the wrong decision. There's like two types of people. There's people that like don't listen to people or people that like listen too much. And if you listen too much, especially like it's your role as a CIO or as any leader to listen, but ultimately it's your decision.

It's your head and your decision. And the organization could only function in that manner and almost like placating and doing something that you know or just feels wrong is also the opposite extreme. and balancing those could be extremely powerful. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely resonates with me what you just said. Gita, this has been a pleasure. I look forward to sitting down.

I know we're both in New York's and no excuses and look forward to continuing a conversation live. Thank you so much, David. It's been great. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to my conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend.

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