--:-- Harry Stebbings: We had 36, 37 hedge funds in the portfolio. And when we got rid of them all, 80, 90% of our time is just out meeting individual companies. And that's very different than probably how most of your LPs spend their time. At one point, north of 20% of the portfolio is in SpaceX. Half of our portfolio is in our top 50 look through positions. Our model doesn't really work with mega funds. They don't need our capital. We hardly ever talk about fund performance. We only really talk about the underlying exposures in the portfolio. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings.
--:-- [Intro music fades]
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Now, how often do you hear one of the biggest allocators in the world reveal how they make incredible investment decisions? Very rare. This CIO today has taken their institution from $8 billion to close to $20 billion today. I'm so excited to welcome an OG of the endowment fund space, Scott Wilson at WashU. The incredible fact about this institution is that at one point, SpaceX was over 20% of their portfolio. It has done incredibly well for them. And today, we discuss the journey from 8 billion to 20 billion in AUM. The biggest lessons, what they did that they wish they hadn't done, and what they didn't do that they wish they had done. This was an incredible show to do.
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--:-- Harry Stebbings: You have now arrived at your destination. Scott, I'm so excited for this. One of the most respected in the industry. Thank you so much for joining me today.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, well, thanks for having me.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Not at all. But I'd love to start with a couple of lessons from the past. You obviously had roots with Grinnell, spent several years there building out an incredible book. What are some lessons for you from Grinnell that really stuck with you and you took with you to WashU and impacted how you think about building out your book with WashU?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, I think we ran a similar strategy at Grinnell. So I was fortunate to work for this guy, David Clay, who hired me at Grinnell. Grinnell had a long history of a mix of direct co-investments and external partners that managed the portfolio. It was a pretty concentrated portfolio. I think it was super concentrated relative to the peer group. And we do a lot of the same things. But David was a great guy to learn from because when I first landed at Grinnell, I really had no idea what an endowment actually did on a day-to-day basis. And I think our strategies evolved over time, but we still fundamentally do the exact same things we were doing at Grinnell here at WashU.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Which is concentrated managers, concentrated positions in directs as well.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah. I mean, if you really want to dumb it down, there's nothing particularly clever about it. We try and find really good external partners. When they find something that we think is really unique, we try and double, triple, quadruple down on it and then hopefully let that compound over long periods of time. That's it.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: If we go forward to WashU, I heard, and this was, I can't remember who told me, but they said that the first week in the job, most people have a bit of time, get used to the new environment. Nope. Scott did a fire sale, sold 75% plus of the WashU portfolio.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, I saw that stat. I'm not sure that it was 75%, but we put in redemptions for over half the portfolio in the first week. But I also had the portfolio for a couple months before I actually landed in the seat. So there was a lot of preliminary work that went into those decisions. It wasn't a complete fire sale of everything.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Were you worried about doing too much too soon? That is a very large shift.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, I mean, it was a mix. There was this obvious tension that performance hadn't been great for quite some time. And the board wanted to see results quickly. They had given me and the team three years to really show some real performance improvements. And to do that, we had to really restructure the portfolio relatively quickly. Changing around an endowment portfolio is more like turning around an aircraft carrier than a speedboat. So we knew that was going to take a decent amount of time. And then the private side, luckily the private side was in better shape, I think, than the public side of the portfolio. But we had 36, 37 hedge funds in the portfolio and then we got rid of them all. So we certainly weren't popular in certain parts of Manhattan. Ultimately, we turned over more than 75% of the portfolio through secondary sales on the private side.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: That is a fire sale. That would constitute.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, I'll take that. A fire sale over 18 months.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Oh, fine. And just don't go to Manhattan for a while. You won't be the most popular dude on Wall Street. Okay. And the endowment then is $8 billion?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, it was just under $8 billion when I started.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Okay. And today is how much?
--:-- Scott Wilson: The total managed pool is probably just under $20 billion today.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: I hope you have a 20% take rate personally.
--:-- Scott Wilson: No, unfortunately, that's not the way it works.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Unfortunately not. That would be a $2.4 billion take. So well done. So you have that restructuring of the portfolio, and you then have the freedom to reallocate and start a little bit more afresh. How did you approach it then going, okay, this is how much I want publics, privates. What did the portfolio construction look like when you had that flexibility?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I mean, I always say we're pretty much indifferent between publics and privates. And I would tell my board, the only difference between those two asset classes is how often they're marked to market. So if you have a 10, 20 year timeframe, should you really care that something is marked every day or something is marked once a quarter? Within that, we have obvious liquidity constraints. So our big broad target, I would say, is half publics, half privates. We're definitely out over our skis in privates, but that's reversing quickly.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: With the greatest of respects, I get you on the mark to markets. The biggest difference is, as you said, liquidity, no? I mean, the extended period that funds are now in terms of being 12 to 15 year funds and the time it takes to get cash back, the fundamental difference is available liquidity, no?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, I mean, we obviously have liquidity constraints and that drives that ratio between public and privates. But it's not like if Stripe goes public tomorrow, it should be in a different asset class.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: In terms of the capital requirements, you have net outflows a year of like 5%?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Roughly 5%. It's smoothed out over a rolling five-year average.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: If you didn't have the required net outflows, would you do anything differently in terms of capital allocation?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Oh, for sure. We would probably have 70%, 80% targeted privates.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Wow. Can you walk me through that thinking? I'm the board. Rationalize that for me, Scott.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah. Well, your payout is a function of your liquid assets, because you can't always convert your private portfolio and the payout is not guaranteed. In theory, some percentage of your private portfolio should become liquid every year, but you can never count on it when you actually need it. So if you have a 5% payout on and half your portfolio is liquid, that's 10% of your liquid portfolio that you're paying out every year. And if you're paying out zero, you really don't have that constraint. And if you look at the relative performance, over the last decade we've probably compounded our privates by in the low to mid 20s and we've compounded our public equities in 10 percent.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Did you always have this belief in privates being the value driver of a portfolio?
--:-- Scott Wilson: No, but I do think the markets are less efficient.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: What do you mean by that?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I mean, you can get access to investments that are less picked over. There are always natural buyers and sellers, and I think it's much harder to create alpha in public markets than it is private markets. And I think this is well documented over the course of time.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: So if we take the 70 to 80% that could be in privates, how do we think about structuring the privates book today? Obviously, privates is a very large allocation in itself. You've got directs, you've got funds, you've got credit, you've got debt. How do you think about how privates should be structured for you?
--:-- Scott Wilson: The way we do it, roughly half of our private portfolio is in, maybe more than half right now, in co-investments and direct investments. So we manage it the same way we manage the public portfolio. We find good partners. And to the extent we can, when they find something that's really interesting, we try and co-invest or add capital directly to that single name.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you have a separate direct team?
--:-- Scott Wilson: No, no. Everybody on my team is a generalist.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: What would you advise another CIO? I'm a manager. I have many LPs and they all say to me, "We'd really like to do more directs, but we don't feel like we're equipped to do so. We don't have the time to really do the work." What would you say to them? And how would you advise a CIO who doesn't really do directs today, but maybe should and could?
--:-- Scott Wilson: You have to build that muscle. You have to have that internal skill set on the team. So if you look at how my team allocates their time, and we still meet with a lot of external partners, but upwards of 80, 90% of our time is just out meeting individual companies. And that's very different than probably how most of your LPs spend their time.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Very different. Most of them spend 70% to 90% of their time with managers and then 10% of their time with directs, I'd say.
--:-- Scott Wilson: But if you look at our performance over the last decade, if we didn't have any direct or co-investments, we would have been right at the average of our peer group. As it is, I think we're at the top, if not the very top of our peer group over the last decade.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: So were you just better company pickers then? Because what you just told me is that you'd be average if it were just funds only. And if that were the case, you must just be better company pickers than everyone else.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, it's not us, though. We're not doing what you're doing. I think you have to be humble. We're trying to identify what we think is a really unique thesis or a really unique company. But we're not sourcing that from scratch. And so I think we're starting on second or third base because we're already invested with Harry. and we think Harry's a really smart guy and he really likes this investment. And we'll do our own work to independently verify the thesis. And sometimes we don't agree with the thesis. And we have certain partners that we think are high signal and lower signal. But that's where we start our process. Hey, somebody we think is really smart already thinks this is a great investment.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Tell me, how much will you have in one company? We have a mutual friend in Mr. Lee Fixel, who I happen to think is wonderful. And he told me that I had to ask about concentration limits. How do you think about concentration on a per company basis?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Well, I would separate cost versus NAV. And Lee and the board and Adam should get a lot of credit for the big win in SpaceX. I think that became such a large position for the portfolio. At one point, north of 20% of the portfolio is in SpaceX. And at that point, it had become like we had conviction as a team and we had many chances to take lots of liquidity in that name. But we advocated for holding it and letting that compound. And we did several continuation vehicles that allowed us to hold on to that stock up and through the IPO. But you can't do that without the right governance structure. So at cost, if we were going to put more than 2% or 3% of the portfolio in a single name, we would need to notify the board. I think it's 4%. We need their approval. But we have a lot of leeway to concentrate the portfolio quite a bit.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: You've also worked with some of the best funds. And we have capital concentration limits on a per company basis. Do you think those are inhibitors of great venture returns?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I do.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: They're mostly artificial?
--:-- Scott Wilson: If you think over the course of, say, you going to do five funds that X amount of capital and to have a 10% concentration limit in any individual fund, I don't think it makes sense. I think we have lots of funds where we have a mandate where it's like two or three stocks and we certainly wouldn't have a problem with. If you think about it, if you're 1% of our portfolio or 2% of our portfolio and you have a 50% position, that's only 100 basis points for us.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Have you had a position with a lot of capital concentration that hasn't worked out?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Oh, yeah, for sure.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: What did you learn from it?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Well, a lot. There's a couple that come to mind where we had super high conviction going in. One was an automated manufacturing company and another was an additive manufacturing company. Maybe we're just poor at underwriting manufacturing companies. Where we have substantial investments, I don't think the story's completely been written on either company, but certainly it's painful. It's painful when those don't work out.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you think 50% of your private book being in directs is the right allocation?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I would take it to 80%. When we started, it was just a tiny fraction.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Could you have it as 80% given that you are fed by the managers you back?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, there's a natural equilibrium there and that'll ebb and flow over time as you do get some of these bigger positions become liquid. There's no artificial limit on it. And it's somewhat of an organic process. If you're right on the underlying thesis and it can compound for a decade or more and it massively outperforms the rest of the portfolio, you get natural high concentration in that portfolio.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: I think investment decision-making processes are the product that we sell our LPs. I'm intrigued by your investment decision-making process on the direct side. What does that look like? How do you decide on direct?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, I mean, we have to agree with the thesis and we also have to underwrite it. So there's a ton of stuff that people bring to us that, for whatever reason, the team is not smart enough. We just don't have the right skill set or it's impossible for us to differentiate between this company and five of its competitors. And there we just don't play. So we have to be able to independently verify the thesis, understand the thesis, have the ability to underwrite the company, ability to monitor it going forward. And we have to think it's our best marginal use of capital. So we look at a lot of potential investments and I would say we do. It's probably more like 0.1% of those investments than 1%.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Is it challenging as you've scaled? Because now you're close to $20 billion and just something that moves the needle. I mean, writing a $20 million check into a growth round at $20 to $50 billion, even if it 20Xs, it doesn't move the needle in any meaningful way.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah. And I think if I look back, the biggest mistake that I've made since I've been at WashU is not adding capital to our winners just because they became a relatively sizable position early on. So we had lots of opportunity to add capital to some of the names you would know that have done extremely well. And we didn't do that when we could have just because they were already north of one or two percent of the portfolio. But I still think our model probably scales better than the traditional fund-to-funds model because it's hard to scale with managers as well. And what you end up doing is you just have to add more managers and then each manager means less and less. So we can maintain, I think, better concentration. Now, we're still probably over-diversified, but we can hopefully maintain this concentration even as we double in size from here.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: You say you're potentially over-diversified. What's the right amount of managers to have in a book, do you think?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Well, if you think about the underlying look through exposures, the quantitative benefits for diversification trail off really quickly when you get more than 20, 30 names in the portfolio. So if you have 20 or 30 investments, Charlie Munger would say if you have three, you're fine. But there's really no quantitative benefits beyond 30 for 30 underlying look through exposures. And the way we think about diversification is we want the top 30 names to be a significant driver of our performance. And the way we target it, we actually target half of our portfolio is in our top 50 look through positions. And it's taken us a long time to get there. And that's probably a good target for us, a realistic target, but it's still very diversified. I mean, if you look at a diversified hedge fund, typically they have the bulk of their capital in their top 15, 20 names.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: So just so I understand, we have 50% of privates in directs. In the venture funds allocation, how much do you allocate towards those 20 to 30 names?
--:-- Scott Wilson: At cost, I always tell if we don't have enough conviction to do 1% of the portfolio, then we probably don't have enough conviction to do it at all. But typically, at this point, that's close to $200 million and we just don't have capacity. So we have to continue to back the companies that we have high conviction in over time. So we might start off with a $50 million check in a co-investment and then scale that up over time.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: With a fund investment, will you do a $20 million fund check if it's completely irrelevant from a returns perspective?
--:-- Scott Wilson: It probably means it's a very small fund. And if it's a very small fund that's doing really interesting things and we would have an opportunity to write a bigger check into one of the underlying companies, then we would do it. But we don't do many of them because it's just not scalable.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: You have 20 to 30 funds. How many do you add a year?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I think last year we added one. We have one that we're going to add next year. But if we had one or two funds, it's kind of one in, one out. It's not a hard line, but we don't add partners very often.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: You said before about megafunds, that maybe instead of just growing, they should be more judicious about where they invest. I'm kind of paraphrasing you. And it seems like the world has moved in favor of megafunds. Capitalism moat now for many startups. Compute and capex is a very real cost that maybe wasn't there before. Have you reflected on that and changed your mind or not?
--:-- Scott Wilson: No, our model doesn't really work with megafunds. They don't need our capital and they certainly don't really need us for co-investment unless it's some massive round and some massive company that we can probably go direct in anyway. I think these mega funds, it's going to be very hard. We'll see. It's going to be very hard to generate the historic multiples of invested capital that they have on those much smaller funds.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: With respect, and I think this show is phenomenally successful because I do push back. So forgive me because you are an OG and I'm a podcaster. But you see Thrive absolutely crush it with OpenAI and Cursor and positions in sizes of outcomes that are just previously never seen before. And we're seeing outcome expansion so real, as you've seen with SpaceX. With respect, that would suggest that you could get venture returns on mega funds, if in those outcomes.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, and certainly when you get these trillion dollar plus outcomes in private markets, even before the public, it's possible. I think if you just think about the dynamics, when you double your fund size, you either have to double your check size in every company at the same valuation. And we know that doesn't happen. They end up paying a much bigger check, but it's a much higher valuation. So the multiple money is probably not going to be as good going forward as it has been historically. Or you have to do twice as many investments. And your 50 bets investment is not as good as your top 10 investments. So you have to do way more investments, double your check size. And typically, when they double the check size, it comes with a valuation that's commensurate. I think they would say they double their check size, but the companies need so much more capital. AI is this exhaust of capital that venture needed. Finally, we have an avenue to deploy the billions of dollars that you very kindly give us.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Yeah, there's certainly massively CapEx intensive businesses, but it's not clear to me what the long term returns on that CapEx is going to be.
--:-- Scott Wilson: With respect, given the size of checks that you need to write, are you able to not be in the mega funds? Just when you think about concentration on a per fund basis, if you have to write 50 to 100 million dollars and you don't want to be more than 10% of the fund, you've got to be in billion dollar plus funds.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Yeah, we're obviously in lots of funds that are north of a billion dollars. We're not in any that are north of 10 billion. And we would certainly have a strong bias. I wouldn't say never, but we would have a strong bias that that's probably not the best use of work capital. And we have no problem getting concentrated positions. If you look at our look through exposures, we have lots of significant capital allocated to a small handful of names that we built up over time in really great companies. That we don't need trillion dollar outcomes to have SpaceX-like outcomes. It's just a completely different strategy. We would rather be at somebody who's small, doing really interesting things in these companies early. And we can partner closely enough with it that we know those companies. We can develop conviction early on and we can essentially lead some of those middle to late stage rounds.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: When is it interesting for you to get involved? Company valuations are soaring so far so quickly today. How do you think about when is the WashU entrance?
--:-- Scott Wilson: We come across at all stages. It's more driven by our opportunity set at the time than any specific strategy we're targeting this stage of company. But I'd say we're not good super early stage investors. That's a really tough skill set that I would say we don't have. So if we can't talk to customers, understand the product, understand what we think unit economics look like, that's something that's going to be hard for us to build conviction in. So it tends not to be a lot of C or Series A.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Does it become difficult as more and more of these funds have IR teams? And so the distance between you and the manager becomes more real and your ability to get information, get deals becomes more buffered.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, well, I don't think many of our funds that we're real close to even have IR teams. But some of them have somebody that functions like our guest. But the way we typically do it is much more proactive. We're not waiting for them to bring us a deal. We're going out and saying, Harry, who are the five companies in your portfolio that you're most excited about? And then we'll just go out and meet those five companies. And if we find one that we think is really interesting, we'd be like, "Hey, we would love to get involved with this company. If there's a chance for us to help lead the next round." We've led employee tender offers. We've gotten direct on the cap table. We've done lots of things that help us get exposure. But that is more offensive than waiting for your IR person to call us and say, "Hey, we have an SPV in this fund." And I actually think there's a huge negative selection bias if you're just waiting for someone to give you a call and say, "Hey, we have $500 million of OpenAI that we're syndicating out."
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Can I ask you when you review the venture book that you've built in terms of managers? What do you know now that you wish you'd known back when you were at $8 billion, when you were doing the fire sale?
--:-- Scott Wilson: We've definitely learned some hard lessons. I think maybe the biggest takeaway is we've done much better on this offensive strategy than defensive strategy. So we do way fewer co-investment opportunities than we do outbound. That's probably the biggest takeaway.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Are you concerned by where we are in the cycle? You're a very realist investor that to me really likes fundamentals. Today, a lot is detached from fundamentals, it would seem, especially from the private's world, where you've got incredible exuberant pricing, real frothiness, juxtaposed by this very real public markets reality. How do you think about that?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I mean, I think the markets have short memories. If you look at the lessons from the original tech bubble in the 2000s and the GFC in 2021, from the crypto bubble, we're seeing the same kind of stupidity that we saw in all those other cycles. And it's like every five years, particularly in private markets, where I think the investors tend to be just less sophisticated. But it's clear to me that there's a valuation premium in the private markets. I don't know where Anthropic is going to go public, but it's clear to me they could have raised capital in the private markets if they stayed in the private markets at north of $2 trillion if they wanted to. I'm not convinced that the public market's going to give them that same valuation, maybe. Same with OpenAI. Aura tried to go out. Cerebras tried to go or has traded really poorly since the IPO. SpaceX is basically back to really close to its IPO price. There's just too much capital chasing these kind of late stage champions in the private markets. And the valuations are, I think that's why there's no DPI. It's not because the public markets aren't open. The public markets are pretty close to all time highs. It's just you can't go out public at the valuation that the private markets will get. Why would you go public?
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Is this a permanent transition in the financing landscape? Where to your point there, you could raise and stay private. But the Collison's have proven that staying private and having a great business is very beneficial. You're still able to do amazing tender offers to your employees. You're able to do M&A and buy OpenRooter for $8 billion. How, Scott, why are we going to go public?
--:-- Harry Stebbings: There's a lot of rationality to stay private. I think ultimately, the public markets are obviously much deeper capital markets. I think when SpaceX raised $85 billion or whatever in the IPO, that's pretty tough to do. The sovereign wealth funds, the big pension funds, SoftBank—they can only write so many of those checks. And I think most of those capital sources have been exhausted. The public markets are still multiple the size of the private markets. I think there's $14 trillion or something globally in private markets. Do you think we're seeing a massive sell-off now to make capacity for Anthropic?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Could be. It would obviously be a lot of the same potential buyers. But I think that's tough to beta test.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: You said about stupidity within private markets. What did you mean by stupidity? What are you pointing to? Is it valuations? Is it deployment speeds?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, it's just valuations. I'm sure that half of these AI-related companies don't exist 10 years from now. And it's not clear how many have a defensible moat around their business. It's not clear to me what the ultimate profit pools look like for these companies. I think it's a super strange dichotomy. If you take the top five large language models and they all had the same user interface for 99% of problems or tasks, you probably couldn't tell the difference. You wouldn't know which model you're using. I can't describe another industry like that that has a big, deep profit pool.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you have much exposure to OpenAI or Anthropic, the model providers?
--:-- Scott Wilson: We have pretty decent exposure to Anthropic through a few of our partners.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: With the greatest of respects, as you said, the ability and willingness to switch, the commoditization—do you ascribe little value then to that model provider layer?
--:-- Scott Wilson: The way the business models are currently constructed, yeah. When there's a free alternative, customer willingness to pay drops very, very quickly. And I think everybody starts with the frontier model. This is definitely true when I talk to our companies and our portfolio. Everybody starts with the frontier model because if you're trying to implement AI, you're starting at spending zero and you allocate some budget to it. So I think everybody starts with the most expensive models, they use it, they find it useful, they ramp up spend. And at some point they say, "You know what, for most of our tasks—and certainly this is true on my team—we don't really need a frontier model. We're not solving Millennium Prize problems."
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Why have you not sold then? We've had very liquid secondary markets. I completely hear and agree with you on everything, but then why hold a position that could be sold?
--:-- Scott Wilson: For us, it's relationship driven. These aren't held in SPVs where we could easily sell. It's one exposure in a fund of 40 other investments, so we wouldn't be selling just one thing in isolation. Those particular partners are great partners for us, so we're happy to hold it. And if it goes public, we have the ability to hedge if we think the price is right.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: How do you think about the stock distribution lens? We've seen several managers say, "Actually, we think we can manage your position once public, so we're going to create vehicles to do that." Others say, "We're going to distribute straight to you in stock." How do you think about what the right way is? And then what do you do once distributed with the stock?
--:-- Scott Wilson: It depends on the situation. We have stuff that we owned as private companies that went public five years ago, like NuBank. It's in our 13F. We've owned that since it was a private company. It was distributed and we still own it almost five years later. Other companies go public and we have the ability to hedge exposures, even pre-distribution, and we'll do that if we think the valuation is frothy. For us, it's kind of valuation. We probably have some independent view on what we think the right value for the stock is, so we'll partially hedge or fully hedge the position. So you get stock, you do a scheduled sell-down over an 18-month period. It's totally ad hoc and it depends on a per-name basis.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: I agree. I think NuBank's amazing and David is a rock star. I'm a holder too. But how do you do that for something like SpaceX or a really big position that we think still has a ton of potential upside over the next five, ten years?
--:-- Scott Wilson: We'll try and be as thoughtful as we can. I always say it's better to be not stupid than clever. So it would be stupid to not take some chips off the table because we have a fiduciary obligation to the university and the mission of the university. So we'll take some chips, but if it were a much smaller position, we would just hold it for the next 10 years. So we're to some extent risk managing that position, but we'll gradually sell out of it over a multi-year period.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: I believe you were the only allocator to suggest to Sequoia that maybe the eternal and evergreen funds were not optimal. How do you think about and reflect on that? And did you sit back and go, "Wow, this is a bold move" as you were doing it?
--:-- Scott Wilson: It was controversial enough that we discussed it with the board. They're great investors, they're great people, and they've obviously made LPs a ton of money over long periods of time. It didn't fit super well into our co-investment model, so they weren't great partners for us at that point in time. And it was probably detrimental to some LPs when they switched that structure. We really haven't followed the firm as closely since then. But hey, those guys will do great over long periods of time.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Scott, I'm so sorry to be so blunt. You don't freaking turn down Sequoia. You just don't do it. I really like you because you're blunt, you're honest, you're just a good dude. But like, what are you doing? Even if they 1x, the point is you're close to the green leaf and goodness comes from being close. It's like the genie in the lantern in the cartoons. Maybe don't rub it.
--:-- Scott Wilson: I'm sure it was a mistake if you look at the returns that they've generated, but we've done just fine.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Did every LP just come to you and be like, "Wow, that was so bold"?
--:-- Scott Wilson: It was funny. There were a bunch of LPs that called and we expressed our view. I think everybody complained about it, but everybody did it at the end of the day. I have so many LPs that call us up because we have a lot of data on the managers that we interview. They all say, "I can't believe it. They name a big mega platform. They make me do the India fund, the China fund, the bio fund, the crypto fund, the games fund. I can't believe it." And I say, "So did you do them?" And they go, "Oh yeah, of course we did it."
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Oh yeah.
--:-- Scott Wilson: And we just don't want to do that. We'll find some other place to put capital.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Is it a big decision for you to churn? Do you agree with the three-fund policy for fund commitments, which is traditional in venture—LPs will commit to three to give managers enough time and room to prove themselves—or not?
--:-- Scott Wilson: We don't have a hard commitment. Probably we're committing to more than three funds, but we will as soon as there's something for us to go and underwrite. We're fortunate that we don't have that many partners, so we typically know their portfolio companies relatively well. We'll start making our own judgment calls on what we think the quality of the underlying portfolio is early on. And if we think there's a big disconnect between our view of the portfolio and a partner's view of the portfolio, then we won't stick around. But that's super rare. Typically we have some view before we invest.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: When you review those decisions to not do a fund, what is the dominant reason? What's the number one most frequent reason why you will churn?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Discipline around valuation.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Wow, that's bold. But it's bold because you don't know, with the greatest of respects. And so the best companies often look expensive at the time, but very cheap in hindsight. So for you to take a snapshot decision and say that company is overpriced is bold close to it being done.
--:-- Scott Wilson: It's not just one example. We had one partner that I'm not sure he found a 100-times revenue deal that he was willing to turn down. It just didn't exist. And for something to trade at 100 times revenue, it has to be an exciting company. I get that. But for us, that's not what we want our capital to be used for. We want discipline around valuation. And you mentioned LeafXL. I think he's super pragmatic. He'll obviously pay up and he's participated in some of these great companies that are huge winners. But he's also very pragmatic about when things get too frothy, stepping away.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you think we should give managers forgiveness, patience for deploying funds much faster than they said they would? Scott, me and you are both old enough to know that every manager says three years and every manager right now is coming back 12 to 18 months later saying, "Scott, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, but it's the best time ever to be investing. It's the best time ever. New intelligence, intelligence." Should we give them forgiveness?
--:-- Scott Wilson: If we think that they're deploying capital at really high returns, we have no problem with really fast deployment. And if we think they're deploying capital at poor returns or poor expected value, then we don't care how fast it's deployed. We have a bias for smaller funds. We'd much rather have someone who raises a billion-dollar fund when they could raise $4 billion and comes back every 18 months than someone who raises $10 billion and comes back every three years. We just think the ability to write a small check in a venture portfolio and have that be a super meaningful outcome for the whole portfolio—a fund returner—is much easier on a billion-dollar or less fund than it is in a $10 billion fund.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you look at it through the look-through perspective? If I have a billion-dollar fund and I get 10% in every company that I invest in and you say, "Well, we're a $100 million check of your billion-dollar fund," our look-through is 1% in every underlying company. Is that how you think about it?
--:-- Scott Wilson: That's exactly how we think about it. We hardly ever talk about fund performance. We only really talk about the underlying exposures in the portfolio. So we aggregate everything up and we know that we have X dollars of SpaceX or Cerebras or Anthropic in the portfolio. And that's how we think about it.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Can I ask you, on Cerebras, how do you think about performance being challenged? And I'm not saying to comment on Cerebras at all. But when you have a company that is hit by bad tailwinds in the public markets, how do you think about whether they stick and hold or actually a fiduciary duty to just cash your chips in?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Cerebras specifically, for us that was a really big position at the IPO. And so we took some chips off the table and put some hedges on even pre-distribution. But we like Andrew and the team, so we'll continue to hold some of that. And I think if you look at the current KPIs of the business relative to expectations going out the next four or five years, it's tough to justify the valuation, even at $25, $30 billion, wherever it's at today. Based on what they've done the last 12 months, you're betting on the come, so to speak. So that company has a lot to prove, but it's clearly a great company and we have lots of confidence in Andrew and his team to produce good results over the next decade.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Scott, if you could do anything without retribution from any stakeholders—students, board, team—what would you do differently?
--:-- Scott Wilson: There's this natural tension between what we're here to do—support the mission of the university, that's why we exist—but I also think a 5% payout in certain market environments is tough long-term, depending on gift flow. So I've probably smoothed the payout over a longer period of time. But I understand that tension. It's great to grow the endowment and be able to see the impact on the institution. I think that's a natural tension. I don't think there's really much at WashU that if it makes sense for the stakeholders and for the team, we haven't been able to accomplish.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Scott, you've seen many cycles now. You're a pro. Does this have a shakeout or do we keep going on the meteoric wave that is super intelligence and AI?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I think there will be a shakeout. I don't know what the timeline of that is. Some of these industries that have just had massive runs, historically they were not great businesses for like three decades. They were businesses that probably barely returned their cost of capital. And at some point they'll go back to being not great businesses. But in the short term, if you used to sell a chip or memory for $3 and now you sell it for $30 and all that excess just falls to the bottom line, I think you see that in the multiples. I think some of these industries, you buy them at very rich multiples and you sell them at low multiples because that's how single companies work. But how long the cycle actually lasts, I think that's anybody's guess.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Can I ask you, given what we said earlier, you mentioned NuBank, or say Uber or NVIDIA of the world. These are comparatively very cheap companies based on a fundamentals basis actually today. And then the privates are exorbitantly priced if one looks at fundamentals. And then I look at your statement earlier of wanting to be 70 to 80 percent in privates. I just try and judge for us—well, we are deploying all of this stuff that we're generating liquid back into public markets right now.
--:-- Scott Wilson: So 70 or 80 percent—if we didn't have any liquidity constraints, I think over time privates would grow as a percent. We're at the end of our fiscal year, we were 70 percent in privates, but a bunch of that has become liquid so we're redeploying that. And we think the opportunities in publics, particularly non-AI, AI infrastructure-related publics, is a really good time to be investing in sectors completely that we think are relatively protected, if not immune from AI.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: It's a bit of a blunt question, but you've had such a meteoric rise. $11 billion is an incredible capital accrual value appreciation for WashU and it's an amazing journey. You could do anything now, Scott. You could have every trillionaire, billionaire in the world pay you an exorbitant amount of money to join them on their super yacht and run their family office. With respect. It's actually a lot. So in the nine years I've been here, we started with roughly $8 billion, we've generated $17 billion of profits on that original $8 billion, and we've paid out roughly $5 billion to the university.
--:-- Scott Wilson: I mean, that's just showing off, Scott.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Okay. But you could. Obviously WashU is an incredible institution, amazing, but humans are humans. Why do you stay?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I'm super happy here. I've got a great board, a great administration, a great team, and I make plenty. I'm well compensated. So it's a great place to be. I've obviously had opportunities to go elsewhere, but I'm very happy at WashU. If you spent time with my board and the chancellor of the university, this is a great place to work. And I think maybe more than half of your fulfillment and enjoyment coming to work every day is who you get to work with. From that standpoint, I'm just super fortunate. And you've spent time with my team. It's a really great team.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: I know I have. They're amazing. Listen, I think before we do a quick fire, you learn from sometimes mistakes. We've talked about the amazing successes. When you reflect back on the $11 billion that we've added, what did you not do in that journey that you wish you had done? Be it renewables, be it more in private, be it you name it. What did you not do that you wish you had done?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I think our biggest mistake was not adding to our winners, just because of frame of reference bias. We invested in this company at $2 billion and now it's $5 billion, so we didn't add to it. And obviously, the position was twice the size at that point. But we had times where we could have invested in stuff that I think was still probably our highest conviction investment, and we didn't do it either because it had grown in the portfolio or the price had just gone up. And that was my mistake. And it's cost us billions of dollars. So that's probably the biggest learning over that timeframe.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: What did you do that you wish you hadn't done on the flip side?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Oh, there's a lot. There's a lot of individual funds I wish we hadn't done. Obviously, we've made tons of mistakes on the co-investment side. It's an 80-20 rule where 20% of your investments have generated 80% plus of the profits. We're not quite that bad, but yeah, we've made tons of mistakes. We've added capital to companies that probably we should have let die, but we thought there was still a chance they could recover. We've made every investing mistake you can think of.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Is there one that really stands out?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Our biggest mistake—we had put in mid-2020, we had put a huge packet of LP interest into the secondary market. And the markets had this huge run at the end of 2020 going into 2021. And we decided to hold off because we knew that all those companies were going to have just massive write-ups in the December quarter. So we were waiting for the first quarter to basically maximize the value on the secondary sale of those assets. And then that was a short-term bubble in venture markets. So we were just essentially being greedy and we had the chance to sell at really good prices, and we didn't take it. By the end, I think it was probably mid-2021. So that 2021 period, we were up, I think, 65% and obviously wrote a bunch of that back down over the subsequent years. But we had a chance to get out of a bunch of that stuff at really good prices, and we didn't do it.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: And so you wish you'd done it?
--:-- Scott Wilson: For sure, yeah. We were probably taking like 80, 90 cents on the dollar, but we were pretty sure that the bubble wasn't going to last forever. And so we should take chips off the table.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: One of my dearest friends who's a very successful ambassador told me, "You must be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful." And it sounds so obvious, actually very difficult in hindsight.
--:-- Scott Wilson: I think we needed another three months or something. And it was a big secondary sale.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you care about Europe? I had David Moorhead on from Baylor. I mean, he laughed at me, in all honesty, when I said about Europe. Do you care?
--:-- Scott Wilson: It's mostly idiosyncratic ideas, but we like Europe and we've found lots of interesting stuff to do in Europe. And it's a super interesting market now. We recently invested in a fintech company in Spain.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Wait, pause, Scott. Europeans don't invest in fintech companies in Spain. What are you doing investing in a fintech company in Spain? How does that happen?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Well, it's by one of our partners. And we invested in another—it's more of a global fintech company, but based in London and Singapore. But we've done a lot in Europe recently. The thing is, for the same quality of asset, and there are good companies over there, just because the market as a whole has struggled, we find that there are great companies. Certainly non-tech related companies—if they were based in the US and had the same kind of KPIs, growth, and unit economics, they would trade at huge revenue multiples. And in Europe, they trade at small earnings multiples.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: My question to you on some of these companies in Europe or Asia is actually—everyone's like, "Oh, the Europe discount or the Asia discount." Well, if there's always a discount, it's not a discount. It's just the price.
--:-- Scott Wilson: There's price and value. I think you've got to separate the two. If we think companies—you can buy it at 100, we think it's worth 300, and we think it's compounding value at a significant clip—I think that's a much better investment than buying something in the US that trades at five times a multiple that's compounding value at the same rate.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: It does. So people understand. How do you determine the difference between price and value?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Value is what it's worth and price is what someone's willing to pay. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. And it's very subjective. And I think you have to be pragmatic about valuation. But for the same quality of assets and the same growth rate, over long periods of time, the core KPIs of the business will drive returns more than the original entry multiple. So if you get a much cheaper multiple on the entry price and you get the same growth over a decade, you're going to do a lot better.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you have much in China?
--:-- Scott Wilson: We don't have a ton in China. We have an office in Shanghai, so we cover that region really well. We have two guys there permanently. And we certainly look at a lot of stuff in China. We probably have more than our peers in China and we've been active. Since Jamie Dimon said China's uninvestable, we've added a decent amount of capital. And I think China was one of those markets. The geopolitical risk was always there. The fact that it was a little bit more visible—if you spend enough time in Asia, you want to do stuff that you think is either under the radar or supported by the broader political parties. So I think you have to be rational there. But when you can find a good company that can actually return capital to shareholders and has a pragmatic view on the world, we think China is a great place to invest.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Why does everyone else not then? I know, again, I so enjoy this show. People often ask me, "Why do you love doing the show?" I'm like, "Because I have conversations like this." Dude, the world is saying no. Run. They kill education overnight. Whole sectors get taken over. Xi Jinping has unlimited power and control, and everyone's like, "Get out." Respectfully, you're not. What do you see that others don't?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Well, you see that. We've seen worse behavior in very developed markets, like in the UK, where there was offshore oil and energy assets, and they took the tax rate from 25% to 75%. I mean, that's basically confiscating half the company. I've never seen that behavior in China. And they more or less did the same thing in Norway with certain types of assets. If they take the tax rate from 25% to 75%, that's the equivalent of confiscating half the company.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you mind that—and I bet you weren't expecting to go here, but my knowledge of investing in Chinese funds is actually surprisingly solid. When you invest in a Chinese fund, there's a dollar denomination and there's an RMB denomination. And now the average is $1 to 9 RMB. Do you mind that split? And if you're not allowed to invest in chips and some of the most exciting things with the dollar-denominated fund, does that not take out all the alpha of investing in China?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I think there's a natural agency problem. But for the most part, the entrepreneurs prefer dollar. And it's a way for them to get assets offshore if they're in the VIE structure. So you still get access to really good companies and that's a good market. We don't have a ton of funds in China, but we're certainly not afraid of it. And we've done more co-investments and one-off stuff in China over the last five years. But yeah, it's a huge market. You have to navigate it on the ground and be realistic.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you have to have a team on the ground to do China?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I don't know if you have to have a team on the ground, but you certainly have to invest through local partners.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Listen, dude, I want to do a quick fire round with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. What fund are you not in that you wish you were in?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Benchmark, probably.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: You're not in Benchmark?
--:-- Scott Wilson: We're not, no. I mean, I wish we had a bigger allocation to the early stage Founders Fund as well.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: How did you get Cerebras? Through Foundation?
--:-- Scott Wilson: We got Cerebras through a fund called Eclipse.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Oh yeah, Leo.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: You can put all of your money in only one fund. Which one do you choose? Private or public?
--:-- Scott Wilson: One each. I will say Addition, our core partner. I think he's the best investor in our portfolio. He's just very pragmatic. He's disciplined around price, but will pay up for super high quality assets. And I think his underwriting process and just the way he dissects companies and business models and management teams is really impressive. So of the people I've spent a lot of time with, I think he's probably the most talented investor in our portfolio.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Are you ready for a hard one? You have an amazing board. Who would you most like to have on your board who you don't have on your board today?
--:-- Scott Wilson: Probably somebody with real industry expertise, like Elon Musk or Thomas Reardon. Somebody who I think has real deep industry knowledge that we could use and could help us diligence a variety of investments. As it is, my board is really great at that.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Which other endowment fund do you most respect and why them?
--:-- Scott Wilson: There are several. I think what Eric's accomplished at Michigan, what Roberts accomplished at Virginia, Seth at MIT, Jane, now Josh at Brown. Those teams have just done unbelievably well over the last 20 years. And I think ultimately that's what you're judged on—the multi-decade performance of the portfolio.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: Do you have a CIO dinner party? All get together and shoot the shit?
--:-- Scott Wilson: I've been involved in various little groups over time and a couple of one-off chat groups where I keep track with some of my peers. My daughter goes to school in Boston, so I'll meet some of the folks in Boston when I go out there. But no, there's not an organized, regular CIO dinner. I think most of us spend enough time on the road that it'd be tough to organize.
--:-- Harry Stebbings: You've worked with incredible managers. You've met and worked with incredible founders. Final one, when we think about the best advice that you've been given that sticks with you every day, what would the best advice you've been given be?
--:-- Harry Stebbings: The best advice I tell this to kids all the time. I think it's very true. It stems from... I don't know who first said it, but you should always try and be the best at things that require no talent. So showing up, being curious, working hard, being presentable, asking good questions, being respectful, being kind. All those things that require no talent contribute a lot to success over time.
--:-- And I also think it's appalling when today you are equipped with tools that allow you to be so good at those things so easily. You can go to ChatGPT before an interview with Scott for a job and say, "Give me three things about Scott that will show that I've done my work and really impress him." And it'll tell me about an incredible investment you did at Grinnell, a quote that Adam said about you, and something else. And if I say those in that meeting, you'll be like, "Wow, how he did his work."
--:-- It should be easier than ever to do those things. Scott, I do the show for shows like this. I can't thank you enough for agreeing to do it, but also for being so open, transparent, and fantastic. Really, this has been a joy.
--:-- Scott Wilson: Yeah, well, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.
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