PAULA VOLENT

Volent did not take the usual path into finance. She trained as an art conservator, specializing in works on paper, and worked at places like the National Gallery of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Then she went back to school for an MBA at the Yale School of Management, graduating in 1997. While there she knocked on the door of David Swensen, Yale's legendary chief investment officer, and offered to intern.

She ended up helping him write Pioneering Portfolio Management, the book that defined modern endowment investing. In 2000 she became chief investment officer at Bowdoin College.

She ran that endowment for about twenty-one years and delivered top-decile returns. In August 2021 she took over as chief investment officer of the Rockefeller University endowment, worth around $2.5 billion.

Volent does not buy companies. She runs endowments, which are giant permanent savings accounts for institutions.

She started at the Yale Investments Office under David Swensen, the place that invented the modern endowment playbook. Then she spent two decades at Bowdoin College, a small liberal arts school in Maine, where she turned a modest endowment into roughly $3 billion.

Now she runs the money for Rockefeller University, a research institution focused on science and medicine. In 2020 Barron's named her one of the 100 Most Influential Women in U.S.

Finance.

Volent runs the Yale model, also called the endowment model. The idea is to mostly skip plain stocks and bonds and instead spread money across private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, and real assets like real estate and timber.

You lock the money up for years to earn what is called the illiquidity premium, basically the extra return you get for being patient and not needing your cash back quickly. The other half of the job is picking great outside managers and sticking with them.

She compares it to art conservation. You study the piece carefully before you ever touch it.

Bowdoin is the win. Volent took the endowment of a tiny liberal arts college, fewer than two thousand students, and delivered top-decile returns over one, three, five, ten, and twenty-year stretches.

The endowment grew to roughly $3 billion under her watch. The ten-year return ran around 11.6 percent.

A small school in Maine, with a small team, beat most of the giant Ivy League endowments at their own game. That is the proof that the Yale model is about discipline, not just size.

Volent is not famous for a blowup, which itself says something. The honest weak spot is the one she names herself.

The endowment model leans hard on illiquid private funds, and that can bite. In a sharp crash, like 2008 and 2009, endowments stuffed with private holdings can get squeezed.

The public markets crater while the private funds keep demanding cash through capital calls. That era taught the whole endowment world, Volent included, to keep more liquidity on hand than the textbook suggested.

Her lesson is simple. The illiquidity premium is real, but so is the bill when everyone needs cash at once.

Her principles come straight from Swensen, and she keeps returning to them. Align your interests with the managers you back.

Rebalance with discipline instead of chasing whatever is hot. Get access to the very best managers, because in private markets the gap between the top funds and the average ones is enormous.

And lean into market dislocations when everyone else is panicking. On top of that sits her conservator's rule.

Do all the homework before you put the money to work, so you already know your move if things break.

Volent's most interesting personal fact is her path. She is one of the very few top endowment chiefs who started out in a completely different world, restoring and conserving art on paper at major museums before finance ever crossed her mind.

She has called her career a story of serendipity, of leaning in and raising her hand at the right moments. That outsider's eye, trained on fragile centuries-old prints, is exactly what she brought to managing money.

She still frames investing through the lens of conservation.

Volent has an unusually deep set of degrees. A BA from the University of New Hampshire, a master's in art history from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, and a certificate in conservation from NYU with a focus on works of art on paper.

Then came the pivot. She earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management in 1997.

That MBA is where she met David Swensen, and that meeting changed everything.

As an Amazon Associate, Netfigo earns from qualifying purchases. Book links above may be affiliate links.