Tim Barrett

But as we've moved more to lower middle market and growth investments for co-investments, we don't believe we're going to hit zeros on any of the ones we do.

We think downsides in a lot of them could be, you know, single digits.

You could have that kind of downside and upsides could be, you know, 30, 40, 50% kind of IRRs on those trades or multiples in the three to five X. There's very few that we underwrite where we go, Oh, we think we can get a 10 X. I think there's only one in the portfolio that's been mentioned that we think we could have a 10 X on.

And most people don't even pay attention to that because it's, it doesn't happen very often.

The first thing a CIO solves around is ensuring that his stakeholders are happy.

Because that is your career, right?

So when you think of the Board of Regents or donors at Texas Tech, what they want to see is consistent outperformance over the benchmarks.

And as soon as you introduce a ton of venture, that volatility and that ability to have two, three, four years of middling returns creates a lot of stress on the time and a lot of political stress.

From my standpoint, that's probably the main driver of wanting to push that direction.

The second piece has to do with benchmarks.

It goes right back to governments again, right?

So some endowments will have a venture cap benchmark, a buyout benchmark, a growth equity benchmark, and they blend those three together, and that's what they're trying to be.

Well, if the benchmark has 30% venture in it, you're naturally going to push to 30% venture because you're trying to match that benchmark up.

So whether venture is a great deal or not, you're in it.

We don't have that.

The ACWI is our growth benchmark, ACWI plus 100, for the entire growth portfolio, whether it's public equity, long-short equity, private equity, real estate, whatever.

And that's what we're trying to beat.

So when you think about that as your benchmark, if you're not compelled to invest in venture, you're compelled to invest in something that will build a portfolio that will consistently beat that benchmark and beat it handily, right?

Not just by a little.

In the private, you probably want to double that benchmark at least, right?