E148: TIFF's $8B Portfolio Revealed: Strategies Institutions Need
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What early investment risks did Brendon Parry consider?
I think early on, I would consider sort of a wider range of investment opportunities, willing to take certain risks that I wouldn't now, but maybe those risks depended more heavily on a very specific future state of the world. Hey, I was confident about it. The experts I talked to were confident about it, but there were fewer paths, again, fewer paths to victory, fewer ways to win. And so you really needed to believe that you could predict the future a bit better. Tell me about how David Swenson from the Yale Endowment got involved in TIFF.
How did David Swensen influence TIFF's early days?
TIFF has been fortunate enough to have involvement of a lot of fantastic people over the years from the nonprofit community. It all started with the MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundations back when TIFF was founded in 1991. And David Swenson, a TIF board member, Hall of Famer, and he was involved with TIF in its very early days. I think there are myriad reasons why any CIO or other senior executive typically gets involved with TIF. And they're typically CIOs or senior execs at larger nonprofits, and they come sit on our board. I think a fairly universal one is that they have a desire to serve a broad array of nonprofits worldwide. while at the same time getting to share ideas and best practices with other accomplished investors who sit around the table. So I had not yet joined TIFF when David was on our board, but I have been told over the years of his many contributions and lasting contributions from asset allocation, help recruiting other great board members and clients.
Potentially, most importantly, particularly in those really early days, he helped TIFF access great closed managers just as we were ramping up. And a fun fact I learned fairly recently, so I haven't verified this, and if I'm wrong, I apologize. I was recently told that in the first edition of his famous pioneering portfolio management, Swenson called out TIFF as actually one of a very few number of allocators or fund of funds that he thought merited consideration by serious investors. So instrumental board member in the early days. And thankfully, we have a great board still of amazing people CIOs and other senior execs at a great list of nonprofits. And tell me about TIFF. What is TIFF exactly? Sure. So TIFF's existed over 30 years to provide investment solutions, primarily to nonprofit institutions. We're really specialized as an outsource chief investment officer and specialize in private market solutions.
What is TIFF and how does it serve nonprofit institutions?
When we started, again, MacArthur and Rockefeller Foundations looked at the investment landscape of the non-mega nonprofits of the day, and they saw the lack of scale, the inability to find and access the best investment opportunities. And they saw really high fees for pretty bad investments. They created TIFF to help solve each of those issues. So it's been our mission to partner with our clients closely, educate them on areas of our investment expertise and other areas of expertise and create investment solutions that help them and support them with their long-term objectives. Most importantly, delivering what we view as the top investment returns consistently over long periods of time. How does TIFF partner with foundations and tell me exactly how that's done? At the core of it, we're trying to deliver client-centric investment solutions crafted to support that institution's long-term mission and objectives. Typically large, medium to larger size nonprofits, small nonprofits as well. It's really been our mission to serve a broad array of clients that...
How does TIFF create tailored investment solutions for foundations?
could fit with our expertise. So what's included in that? The first piece is investment portfolios. That is core to our client needs. Based on each client's unique situation, we believe that any institution, even if it is another foundation of a very similar size, they have their own unique needs and we want to make sure that we can customize to build around that. We try to partner On other topics outside of investment as well, though, investments is really the core of it. So many clients come to TIFF to outsource their entire endowment, and some come to TIFF just to manage a portion. Those clients for endowment will be typically coming for all or a portion of our private markets program.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What early investment risks did Brendon Parry consider?
0:02–0:34
2
How did David Swensen influence TIFF's early days?
0:34–2:23
3
What is TIFF and how does it serve nonprofit institutions?
2:23–3:24
4
How does TIFF create tailored investment solutions for foundations?
3:24–8:06
5
Why are private markets and independent sponsors crucial for TIFF?
8:06–12:33
6
What makes lower mid-market private equity investments attractive?
12:33–19:25
7
How does TIFF evaluate independent sponsors?
19:25–26:43
8
Why does TIFF engage in independent sponsor deals over fund ones?
26:43–41:45
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from How I Invest with David Weisburd
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