Robert Wallace: Managing Stanford’s Endowment, Balancing Risk, and Driving Innovation
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Hi everyone, I'm Nikola Tanjen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovern Wealth Fund, and today I'm in really good company with Rob Wallace, who's built one of the most impressive careers in institutional investing. Now Rob is the president and CEO of Stanford Management Company, and if you are on screen you can see the wonderful campus behind him. I mean my hay, I'm I'm envious here. The uh Stanford Endowment runs more than $48 billion and is one of the most successful university endowments anywhere.
His journey took him from learning under uh under David Swenson at Yale on to leading Alta advisors, a London-based investment firm, before joining Stanford in 2015. And here he has delivered exceptional returns. So uh well done Rob and great to have you on. It's nice to be with you, Nikai. Just to kick off, what's the kind of core investment philosophy at Stanford?
Yeah, it's um it's actually reasonably simple. So uh we we start with, like any institutional investor, we start with the goals we have for the endowment. And if you're a perpetual educational endowment like Stanford, you generally have two primary goals. The first is you want your endowment to provide a material amount of support for the current generations of students and scholars. So this year we're distributing about $2 billion from the Stanford Endowment to support the current operating budget of Stanford.
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