Charles Skorina & Company
● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●
Our clients: visionary families, transformative nonprofits, Wall Street trailblazers
Our vision: build investment preeminence, create opportunity, enrich lives
Our work: provide talent, access, relationships, and insights
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Diversification is protection against ignorance; it makes little sense if you know what you are doing. —Warren Buffett (1996 annual meeting)
Janet Lorin, Bloomberg News, reported recently that Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) could see an astonishing 3000 percent return on their endowment’s $50 million dollar investment in SpaceX.
When asked how this came about, Scott Wilson, WashU’s prescient chief investment officer said, “We try to find really great partners and do interesting things. When they find something that is super attractive we try to add capital to those individual ideas.”
[For a more substantive reveal, here’s a recent interview with Mr. Wilson, courtesy of Ted Seides, Capital Allocators]
There has been a perceptible shift the last few years away from broadly diversified asset-class constructs toward more concentrated portfolios.
Jagdeep Singh Bachher, Ph.D. and chief investment officer at the University of California regents, wrote in UC’s 2025 annual report that his staff intends to invest in fewer, higher quality, top-performing assets.
“Experience has shown us the value of lean, high-performance teams working collaboratively to manage a concentrated, high-conviction portfolio.
We’ve greatly reduced the number of external managers we use and the number of line items on our books. That makes it easier to understand what we own, especially in a crisis, and gives us fewer decisions to make.
The result is a small, agile team laser-focused on areas where we can outperform the market.”
Boards matter
Concentration and high conviction are all well and good, but how many university trustees have the fortitude to weather unruly markets? As it is, the double-edged attacks on university budgets from research cuts and endowments taxes have put schools in serious binds.
Richard J. Chang, reporting for FundFire (an FT service), noted recently that large endowments contribute on average about ten percent to university budgets, (source: Christian Tiu, associate professor of finance at the University at Buffalo School of Management).
However, some schools lean on their endowment for much greater support, in Princeton’s case for example, sixty-five percent of the 2026-27 operating budget.
Mr. Wilson’s winning ways
Embracing risk is a hard sell on campus these days.
As a former Wall Street trader, fly-over college CIO, and staunch individualist, how many schools would have hired Mr. Wilson as chief investment officer do you suppose? When, by our latest count, nearly two-thirds of university CIOs come from peer group endowments.
Fortunately, the WashU trustees spotted a winner and signed him up. And thanks to Mr. Wilson and his investment team, the endowment has moved from fourth to top quartile and even top decile since Scott joined in late Q4 2017.
In our latest endowment performance report, WashU ranked seventh out of one-hundred twenty-two schools over one billion AUM for the ten-year period ending June 30, 2025, doubling in size on Mr. Wilson’s watch from roughly seven billion to over fifteen billion dollars while maintaining a yearly distribution of four to five percent.
The rest of the story . . . (Paul Harvey 1918 – 2009, ABC News Radio)
How WashU built a winning team.
The Washington University in St. Louis endowment had been underperforming its peer group for years and by 2016 the trustees had had enough.
So, the President and board forged a commitment to pursue whatever measures necessary to build a preeminent investment organization – keenly aware that better returns add millions, even billions, to school coffers over time.
In 2016, while he was still CIO of Makena (OCIO), the WashU board asked Eric Upin, an alumnus, university trustee, board chair of the investment management company (and former Stanford CIO) to serve as Interim CIO and Chair of the Search Committee – with emphasis on restructuring portfolio strategy, the investment team, board governance, compensation, and retention.
As a Trustee with full-on university support, Mr. Upin wielded a forceful writ.
The IMC board began their transformation with unvarnished self-examination and concluded that tentative, short-term thinking was part of their problem. This, in turn, had led to conflicted guidance and mixed signaling to the investment staff.
The board asked:
- What is our primary goal?
- How should we measure success?
- Define the roles of the board and team?
During the year and a half period before hiring Scott Wilson, the board studied the qualities and characteristics of top-performing endowments and portfolios, as well as those that consistently underperformed or fell out of the elite class.
In total, the board spent five years working on governance, compensation, and liquidity management.
Lessons learned
Read More »NEWS AND COMMENTARY
ABOUT
Adela Skenderasi, new CIO, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
Brendon Reay, new MD investments Bush Foundation
Mark L. Baumgartner, new CEO/CIO University of Florida Investment Corp
Katharine “K.C.” Krieger, new CIO at The Getty
x CIO, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation , x Cambridge Associates, BA Colby College
SKORINA IN THE NEWS
2-19-25 Institutional Investor: Most endowment returns aren’t high enough to cover universities’ costs
11-15-24 Institutional Investor: Nokia taps mercer to navigate evolving corporate pensions
5-7-21 BloombergNews: Yale Names Alex Banker Interim Endowment Chief, Plans Search
5-6-21 The New York Times: David Swensen, Who Revolutionized Endowment Investing, Dies at 67
5-6-21 Forbes: Yale Endowment Chief David Swensen Leaves Legacy of Top College Investment Leaders
CHARLES A. SKORINA & COMPANY works with leaders of Endowments, Foundations, and Institutional Asset Managers to recruit Board Members, Executives Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Fund Managers.
Mr. Skorina also publishes THE SKORINA LETTER, a widely-read professional publication providing news, research and analysis on institutional asset managers and tax-exempt funds.
Our Practice:
• We recruit Board Members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Senior Asset Managers.
• Our research and analytics are backed by over thirty years of hands-on recruiting experience and an unrivaled personal network.
• We collect performance, compensation, and background data on most senior institutional investment professionals in the U.S. and the funds they manage. We analyze that data to construct profiles of those managers and their funds, identify best-in-class people, and map their career trajectories.
• We share our research and insights in a widely-read professional newsletter – THE SKORINA LETTER – and website – www.charlesskorina.com.
• The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Thompson Reuters, Financial Times (Fundfire), Institutional Investor, Pensions & Investments, Private Equity International, and the institutional investment community use our research and analysis. Skorina has been interviewed on chief investment officer compensation issues on Bloomberg TV.
• Our work is regularly re-printed in Allaboutalpha.com and other industry magazines, blogs, and third- party web postings.
• We focus specifically and effectively on the world we know: Board members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers, and Senior Asset Managers at institutional investment firms and funds – including sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, pension funds, banks, investment banks, outsourced chief investment officer firms (OCIO), and sell-side money managers.
Prior to founding CASCo, Mr. Skorina worked for JP MorganChase in New York City and Chicago and for Ernst & Young in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Skorina graduated from Culver Academies, attended Michigan State University and The Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey where he graduated with a BA, and earned a MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago. He served in the US Army as a Russian Linguist stationed in Japan.
Charles A. Skorina & Co. is based in Tucson, Arizona.
That one in a million
There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. —John Kenneth Galbraith
I recently reviewed endowment performance and investment talent with the board of a major university. Subjects under discussion included effective board structure, endowment office best-practices, and adaptive leadership for changing times. My assignment is to research and report on investment office successes and failures, all-weather overachievers, and pathways to preeminence.
I’m not alone. A growing number of boards and investment heads suspect the good times and bull market mania might not last and are taking precautions, de-risking and re-thinking conventional portfolio management. Heather Gillers caught the vibe in her recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Ivies Are Having Second Thoughts About Investing in Private Equity.”
We’ve heard rumblings for ages. Howard Marks sounded the alarm three years ago in his memo Sea Change, when he cautioned that the rapid rates reversal and the end of free money would have profound implications for institutional investors:
It seems to me that a significant portion of all the money investors made over [the last forty years] resulted from the tailwind generated by the massive drop in interest rates.
All-weather winners
Managing money is one of America’s key competitive advantages and we recruit the managers who manage the money. What hurts institutional investors and family offices hurts us. If there’s stormy weather ahead, we scout for all-weather chiefs.
Who are the likely winners? Our client would like to know. An iconic venture capitalist once told me he put his money on tenacious, dogged optimists, the ones that assiduously work a problem and never give up.
During last week’s board review, as we discussed high-performance offices and indefatigable overachievers, I recalled an article on genius, and several qualities in particular:
Their openness to new ideas and their breadth of interests infuse them with seemingly irrelevant stimulation that can enrich blind variations.
Hey! I know these folks.
Searching through the haystack
We begin every assignment by looking at the data. Hence our yearly performance reports. Who’s on top and who’s not? Returns may be historical, but they are useful clues to the views, process, and discipline of investors and boards and how well they work together.
Chart one*: Endowment payout levels versus performance
*My thanks to an astute west-coast CIO
As the chart implies, if we assume a four to five percent distribution for university operations, add a few points to pace inflation, and another percent or two for contingencies and growth, the investment office needs to generate an average return of at least 8.15%. Who’s done that?
Our first league table at the end of this note ranks chief investment officers by ten-year returns – data from our January newsletter. Sixty-seven of one hundred schools over one-billion AUM made that first cut, earning eight percent or more for the period. About two-thirds. However, when we raised the bar to nine percent, a more realistic hurdle given all the unknowns, just thirty-two schools remain, one-third the total.
How about career experience and years of service we wondered? How does that factor in?
Turning to the second league table at bottom, with start dates and years in the role, we re-sorted by tenure to spot the correlations between experience and performance.
In the group that generated nine percent or more, the count includes eleven CIOs out of thirty, 37 percent with ten years or more tenure, fifteen CIOs out of forty-three, 35 percent with tenure between five and ten years, and six of twenty-seven CIOs, 22 percent with four years or less.
Experience is important, and a helpful indicator. But there’s more than that to a winning record.
That one in a million
What distinguishes top investment officers? Recruiting talent is both science – can we identify skill and persistence in a candidate’s background? And art – intuition and experience. Is this candidate someone that catches our eye? Piques our curiosity? Are their backgrounds different, interesting, exciting? And how about that second-level thinking Howard Marks refers to?
Here is one example, Ms. Jane Dietze, Brown University’s chief investment officer and perennial chart-topper. Nothing run-of-the-mill about her story.
(Nor Ms. Paula Volent, who frequently held the top spot during her two-decade sway at Bowdoin College, or the many talented women looking for a chance to move up.)
Jane Dietze – Like Mother like Daughter
If you want to know what’s driving Ms. Dietze, you don’t have to look far.
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