Inside WashU's Endowment Fund | SpaceX Made Up 20% of Out AUM | Scott Wilson
Harry Stebbings talks with Scott Wilson, who runs WashU's endowment, about growing it from just under $8 billion to just under $20 billion by concentrating on direct and co-investments, including a SpaceX stake that topped 20%.
The gist
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Wilson says his team spends 80 to 90% of its time meeting individual companies, and without direct deals WashU's returns would have been only average.
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He tracks the underlying companies across all funds rather than fund performance, aiming for half the portfolio in its top 50 positions.
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Wilson says his biggest mistake was not adding to winners after prices rose, which he estimates cost WashU billions of dollars.
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He sees inflated private valuations, expects half of AI companies to be gone in 10 years, and is redeploying cash into non-AI public stocks.
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His best advice is to be the best at things needing no talent, like showing up, curiosity, hard work and kindness.
Scott Wilson uses it
"We hardly ever talk about fund performance. We only really talk about the underlying exposures in the portfolio. So we aggregate everything up and we know that we have X dollars of SpaceX or Cerebras or Anthropic in the portfolio, and that's how we think about it."
▶ Play at 38:22What they recommend · 1 pick
Look-through exposure analysis
Finance & investing
"We hardly ever talk about fund performance. We only really talk about the underlying exposures in the portfolio. So we aggregate everything up and we know that we have X dollars..."
Also mentioned
5:54
Stripe
· "It's not like if Stripe goes public tomorrow, it should be in a different asset class."
10:50
SpaceX
· "Lee and the board and Adam should get a lot of credit for the big win in SpaceX. I think that became such a..."
19:35
Cursor
· "You see Thrive absolutely crush it with OpenAI and Cursor, and positions in sizes of outcomes that are just..."
19:35
OpenAI
· "You see Thrive absolutely crush it with OpenAI and Cursor, and positions in sizes of outcomes that are just..."
27:04
OpenRouter
· "You're able to do M&A and buy OpenRouter for $8 billion."
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