Private Equity
Jane Mendillo, CEO of Harvard Management Co., speaks to Reuters Editor in Chief Stephen Adler at Thomson Reuters' Partner Connect East 2013 conference. . Mendillo said she sees investment opportunities in European private equity and emerging markets. . Video date: April 11, 2013
1 min read · 11 April 2013
Mark Yusko, founder and CEO of Morgan Creek Capital Management, shares his perspective on how institutional investors make money during gloomy economic times at Thomson Reuters' PartnerConnect East 2013 conference in Boston in April 2013. . If you invested $10 million in U.S. Treasuries seven years ago, you could expect an annual return of $480,000, but today you see a return of just $24,000 a year, Yusko said. . “In this age of financial repression, we have to think differently about how we invest,” said Yusko, whose speach was entitled “Surving the Age of Financial Repression.” . Yusko founded Morgan Creek in 2004 to provide investment management and advisory services to institutional partners and family offices. Today, the firm has about $8 billion in assets under advisement. It invests across all asset classes and strategies, from traditional equities and fixed income to alternatives, such as hedge funds, private equity, real estate and venture capital. . Prior to founding Morgan Creek, Yusko served as chief investment officer for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1998 to 2004. Before UNC, he was senior investment director for the University of Notre Dame Investment Office. . Video date: April 2013
1 min read · 02 April 2013
Benchmark Capital General Partner Bill Gurley tells LPs at Thomson Reuters' Venture Alpha 2012 conference in San Francisco that there are a number of brights spots in the VC industry, but he’s worried that they didn’t learn to be wary of funds in excess of $1 billion. His message for institutional investors: Stop blasting money at what have historically been top-tier venture funds, please. It’s bad for the industry. . “You’re not in the stands,” he said. “You’re in the field. And when you allocate obsessively to firms in the top quartile, it will have an impact on how things play out.” . Video date: Oct. 18, 2012
1 min read · 18 October 2012
Countering years of gloom and doom about the venture industry, Pathway Capital Management Director Cheryl L. Maliwanag offered up a decidedly sunnier outlook on the business at Thomson Reuters' Venture Alpha 2012 conference on Oct. 18, 2012. . “It’s no secret that venture funds have received limited love over the past decade, yet I stand here telling you that we are pretty excited about the opportunity,” Maliwanag told the audience. . Maliwanag heads up due diligence and monitors existing investments in the California office of Pathway, which manages $25 billion in assets through its funds of funds. Her data-intensive presentation was entitled, “Venture Capital: We Weathered the Storm, Here Comes the Sun.” . In particular, Maliwanag addressed the controversial Kauffmann Foundation study. That 51-page report, released in May, analyzed the investments Kauffman made in nearly 100 VC funds over 20 years and concluded that “the limited partner investment model is broken,” because LPs “invest too much capital in underperforming venture capital funds on frequently mis-aligned terms.” The result, at least for Kauffman, is that 62 out of the 100 venture funds it backed “failed to exceed returns available from the public markets, after fees and carry were paid.” . Maliwanag praised Kauffman for releasing the report, but noted that Pathway’s analysis of its own portfolio of venture funds reached different conclusions in some cases. “It really is incumbent on every investor to assess their specific portfolio and their organization’s resources and not accept some of the conclusions of the Kauffman report out of hand or accept blindly anything they read in the headlines,” Maliwang told the audience. . For example, while Kauffman found that its larger funds under-performed its smaller funds, Pathway looked at a portfolio of funds similar to Kauffman’s and “couldn’t find any evidence of that,” she said. “We believe fund performance isn’t related to fund size. It’s really determined by the quality of the manager.” . Pathway, established in 1991, is one of the world’s largest private equity fund of funds managers, with about $25 billion under management. The firm maintains a database of 8,000 funds raised over the past 30 years, which Pathway says gives it “a unique perspective on the asset class.”
1 min read · 18 October 2012
Co-founder of BluePoint Venture Marketing dies at the age of 60
2 min read · 14 December 2009
