Michelle Knudsen is Chief Investment Officer of NYU, where she oversees the university’s $8 billion endowment. Michelle joined NYU two years ago, after fourteen years as an allocator at Partners Capital and the Mellon Foundation, with a mandate to build a best-in-class endowment from a clean sheet of paper.

Our conversation traces Michelle’s lessons learned working at Goldman Sachs, a growing OCIO, and a foundation that shaped her investment philosophy and views on portfolio construction, risk management, and manager selection. We then turn to the transformation of NYU’s investment office from the ground up across governance, portfolio strategy, investment process, and the team. Along the way, we discuss manager selection, emerging managers, venture capital, hedge funds, AI, stress tests, and what it takes to build an enduring investment organization.

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