“Our whole private investment portfolio did extraordinarily well with venture up over 100%,” he said.
Some of the performance is unrealized gains, said Hall of Vanderbilt, where returns boosted its fund to $10.9 billion. Venture funds won’t actually deliver the gains until they can exit the investments, usually through initial public offerings. Even then, some firms continue to hold onto public companies, such as Airbnb Inc. and DoorDash Inc., said Hall. He declined to comment about specifics in the school’s portfolio.
“The positions in the companies themselves are so big it’s going to take a lot time to unwind these,” said Allen Huang, director of investments at Michigan State. “There’s a lot of volatility in those prices when they’ve finally liquidated and returned to limited partners, the endowments, they could be less.”
The endowment of Bowdoin College, a liberal arts college in Maine, returned 57%, boosting its value to $2.7 billion, said Clayton Rose, the school’s president. Public markets created a tailwind and many of the investments that performed well were made years ago, he said. He didn’t provide details.
Bowdoin was also helped by the fact that it had liquidity in the endowment during the worst of the pandemic and didn’t need to sell anything at the bottom of the market “in a distressed way that we would regret later,” said Rose, a former banker and Harvard Business School professor.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.