Stanford Wants a Bigger Piece of Silicon Valley’s Top VC Funds: Endowment Chief

Stanford University’s $37.8 billion endowment raked in nearly $1 billion from its venture capital portfolio’s bets on Airbnb and DoorDash after the startups went public in late 2020. Now it’s looking to increase its stake in the small number of elite VC funds responsible for those wins.

But Stanford Management Company CEO Robert Wallace, a former professional ballet dancer who joined the university in 2015 after learning the ropes at Yale University from the late David Swensen, its pioneering chief investment officer, said increasing the size of its venture portfolio has been challenging. The Stanford endowment has found its appetite to invest often outstrips the size of the funds it wants to back.

“As our endowment gets bigger, the amount of capacity that we receive from these very carefully controlled, very disciplined early-stage funds doesn’t go up proportionally,” said Wallace, referring to funds like Sequoia Capital’s. “We can get more than we got 15 or 20 years ago, but it’s not enough.”