Carnegie Corp's Latest Portfolio

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Ever wonder where the world’s leading endowments and foundations invest their assets? At OWL, we dig through public disclosures to bring these insights to light, building comprehensive profiles for thousands of leading allocators. This week, we’ll look at recent filings from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and highlight several new allocations made by the investment office.

Carnegie’s investment office has been one of the premier training grounds for Chief Investment Officers, as highlighted in a Capital Allocators Podcast earlier this year:

“Ellen Shuman became Carnegie’s first CIO in 1999 after working for David Swensen at Yale. Over her dozen-year tenure and that of Meredith Jenkins and Kim Lew for the next dozen, an incredible 8 of the 17 investment professionals who walked in the door have become CIOs, and the rest appear either on their way or found their passion as leaders in complementary roles or outside the industry. Those who became sitting CIOs are Meredith at Carnegie and Trinity Wall Street, Kim at Carnegie and Columbia, Jon Michael Consalvo at Carnegie, Alisa Mall at Michael Dell’s Family Office, Niles Bryant at Bowdoin College, Brooke Jones at Bryn Mawr College, Ken Lee at Children’s Healthcare, and Li Tan at Radian X. Carnegie is a lesser-known allocator training ground than Yale, but it’s produced half the number of future CIOs from fraction of the team size.”

Earlier this year, Carnegie Corp appointed a new CIO, Jon-Michael Consalvo, to lead the foundation. Consalvo, a 15-year veteran of the institution, was promoted from his previous role as managing director. His appointment follows the departure of Mark Baumgartner, who stepped down in September 2023 to become CIO of the Dalio Family Office, and most recently joined as CIO of UFICO. 

Unlike many foundations, Carnegie discloses its performance on an annual basis. The foundation returned 4.9% for the fiscal year ending 9/30/23 and stands at $4.1 billion in assets. Though the foundation’s long-term results have outperformed its benchmarks, last year’s returns were weighed down by the underperformance of private equity, real estate, and other private holdings. Carnegie noted that its public equity portfolio was up 18.2% for the fiscal year ending 6/30/23, while private equity was down 2.8% and private diversifiers were down 1.0%.

This year, a noteworthy theme in Carnegie’s investments was a shift into more quantitative & multi-manager strategies. The largest new investment was in the Aleutian Fund, managed by Alyeska. Other new investments in the year included AQR, Boothbay, AFBI, John Street, and Engineers Gate. Of the capital deployed to new funds in the latest fiscal year, we estimate that more than 50% (~$390 million) went to these types of strategies, while Carnegie decreased investments with several fundamental-oriented managers. OWL users can see a comprehensive list of Carnegie’s manager investments and changes over time on our platform.

In its private portfolio, Carnegie did not disclose any significant new manager relationships during the fiscal year but did invest in several new funds launched by existing managers. A few new funds in the energy space appeared this year for the first time, including $22 million into Kimmeridge’s Energy Engagement Partners II, $12 million into Carnelian’s Ridgemar Co-Invest, and $6 million into Energy Capital Partners VB. Other notable new private investments include GCP’s Fund III, EMG Fund II, and Nexus Ventures VII. 

Briarwood Chase 

One of Carnegie’s new public manager investments is Briarwood Chase Management (BCM). Briarwood, founded by Aalap Mahadevia, invests in global small and mid-cap companies. Before founding Briarwood, Mahadevia was an investor at Tiger Management and Farallon Capital.

Briarwood was reportedly the first hedge fund investment for the Winklevoss twins’ family office and initially operated out of their NY offices. Mahadevia also co-founded the investor network SumZero with Divya Narendra, famous for joining the Winklevoss twins in their lawsuit over the founding of Facebook.

Briarwood also counts Howard Hughes Medical Institute as a notable LP and has steadily increased AUM since its 2014 launch:

Briarwood Regulatory AUM

In OWL’s new fund-level view, our users can see the number of LPs that have invested in each entity controlled by the manager. For example, here is the number for Briarwood Capital Partners LP, the vehicle that controls the majority of BCM’s assets:

Number of Briarwood Capital Partners LPs

OWL users can see a full profile for Briarwood on our platform, which includes publicly disclosed holdings, performance estimates, and various analytics about their portfolio over time. Briarwood primarily invests internationally and has disclosed holdings in 13 countries in recent years. OWL users can access these global filings from more than 60 countries for the 11,000+ managers on our platform. If you’d like to see a demo, reach out!

Other News & Events

• FT article on FY24 Ivy League endowment returns

• Article on Baylor’s iterative approach to portfolio management.

• Pinestone co-founder indicted for trade secret theft.

• Nokia of America hires Mercer to oversee $13 billion pension. 

• University of Rochester returned 9.5% for FY24. 

• Vanderbilt returned 9.2% for FY24. 

• Michigan State is hiring a Director of Investments. 

• Alfred Sloan Foundation is hiring a Senior Investment Professional.

About Old Well Labs

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

Disclaimers

Returns represent the return on invested capital of publicly disclosed long positions, as calculated by OWL. Actual returns may vary based on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) undisclosed positions, short exposure, non-equity holdings, cash holdings, and lagged disclosure of positions.

This newsletter and the material on the Old Well Labs platform are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, manager, or strategy. Old Well Labs shall not be liable for any investment gain or loss that may occur from the use of this material. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or used in any publication without express written permission from Old Well Labs.