on the Maine liberal arts college’s then- $1.4 billion endowment. Her portfolio even outperformed that of her legendary mentor, Yale’s David Swensen. Fiercely competitive, Swensen didn’t like to lose, says Volent. But that year he sent her a letter she has since framed and hung in her office. It quotes Leonardo da Vinci: “Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.”
As a Ph.D. student in economics at Yale he had studied under Nobel laureate James Tobin, a proponent of diversified investing. Swensen radically changed the traditional mode of endowment investing, putting money in a broad range of assets, including hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, real estate and natural resources.
Under Swensen’s leadership, Yale’s endowment grew from $1.3 billion to $31.2 billion. But his greatest legacy is the dozen-plus people he trained, including Princeton investment head Andrew Golden, MIT’s Seth Alexander and Penn’s Peter Ammon. Known as the “Yale Mafia,”run some of the best-performing endowments at several of America’s top colleges and philanthropic organizations. Swensen himself chaired the investment committee at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.
“A combination of common sense and finance theory caused me to improve the diversification of Yale’s portfolio,” he has been quoted as saying. “An understanding of the long-term nature of endowment investing caused me to increase the equity exposure of the fund.”