The Pritzker Foundation's Portfolio

This week we’ll look at the investment portfolio for The Pritzker Foundation, one of several foundations associated with the prominent Pritzker family in Chicago. The Pritzker Foundation has no website and little footprint outside of its annual tax filings, which show that Gigi Pritzker serves as President alongside four other directors, including her brother Thomas Pritzker and cousin Penny Pritzker. Thomas serves as CEO of the Pritzker Organization as well as the executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels. Penny founded PSP partners, serves on the board of Microsoft, and was formerly the Secretary of Commerce under President Obama. Gigi is an LA-based movie producer who has produced notable films like “Drive” and the Oscar-nominated "Hell or High Water". The foundation’s assets stood at around $700M as of 12/31/23.

The foundation's roots can be traced back to the entrepreneurial success of Nicholas Pritzker, who arrived in Chicago from Ukraine as a penniless 10-year-old in the late 19th century. It was his son, Abram Pritzker, the grandfather of the foundation’s directors, who laid the groundwork for the family's vast fortune. Abram’s sons would parlay a 1957 purchase of a hotel near the Los Angeles airport into an international chain of Hyatt hotels, while also starting the Marmon Group, an industrial holding company that eventually sold to Berkshire Hathaway in 2013.

Abram Pritzker also established a series of trusts, both domestically and in offshore havens like the Bahamas, to preserve and pass on wealth to future generations while minimizing tax liabilities. These trusts and the family’s closely-held empire would later explode into public view when the family patriarch and founder of Hyatt Hotels, Jay Pritzker, died. Shortly after his death, Tom Pritzker was sued by his cousins for allegedly directing family assets into various trusts that benefited himself at the expense of other heirs. The family settled the cases several years later, which allowed the remaining 11 heirs to proceed with a family agreement to divide the Pritzker empire amongst themselves.

The Pritzker Foundation has no listed investment staff but does disclose a service fee paid to Monticello Associates. We also believe that several Pritzker-related entities rely on Ganesh Investments to manage their assets via third party managers, including the family offices of Tom, Penny, and Gigi Pritzker. The foundation’s portfolio includes a number of well-known endowment and foundation favorites including TCI and Baker Brothers. OWL users can see the full list of disclosed managers on our platform - reach out if you’d like to see the full manager roster for Pritzker, along with hundreds of other foundations that we track on OWL.

The Pritzker Foundation’s filings show they made partial redemptions from several managers during 2023, including Boyu, Hillhouse and Tiger Global. Pritzker fully redeemed from East Bridge and also disclosed that it received proceeds from Lime Rock’s co-invest vehicle that owned CrownRock Minerals, which we wrote about previously here.

One recent addition to Pritzker’s portfolio is Avala Global, which first appeared in the Foundation’s disclosures in 2022, when the firm launched. Founded by Divya Nettimi, Avala was one of the first female-led hedge funds to launch with over $1 billion in commitments, alongside Surgocap Partners. Prior to founding Avala, Nettimi was a portfolio manager at Viking for seven years. Aside from the Pritzker Foundation, Avala counts The Pritzker Taubert Foundation and The Jewish Federation of Cleveland as notable LPs. As always, OWL users can see a more comprehensive list of Avala’s disclosed LPs on our platform.

As of the latest filings, Avala manages roughly $1.7 billion in AUM, which has increased each year since launch:

Avala runs a long/short strategy with an ability to also invest in privates. The firm invests predominantly across the Consumer & Tech sectors and typically has ~30 positions on the long side, with the largest currently amounting to ~10% of the firm’s AUM. OWL estimates that Avala’s disclosed longs have outpaced the indices by a wide margin since first being disclosed in 2023:

A more detailed version of this newsletter is sent to OWL customers, including more detail Pritzker’s manager investments. If you’d like more info, reach out for a demo!

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• Interview with Michigan State CIO Phil Zecher

• Podcast with Lime Rock Capital founders (see previous Insights as well)

• UVA is hiring a Managing Director of Public Equity

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• Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is hiring an Investment Director 

• Northern Trust is hiring a Head of OCIO Business

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.