Matt Mendelsohn ’07, Yale Investment Office, Chief Investment Officer Q&A with Professor Toby Moskowitz
The Yale College graduate talked about his path to institutional investing and developments in the field as part of the Master’s in Asset Management program’s Colloquium.
Matt Mendelsohn YC ’07, Yale’s chief investment officer, visited SOM on February 20 to speak with students in the Master’s in Asset Management program about his experience managing the university’s endowment over $40 billion. Moderated by Toby Moskowitz, the Dean Takahashi ’80 B.A., ’83 M.P.P.M. Professor of Finance, the event was part of the program’s Colloquium in Asset Management, a speaker series that brings leading executives, investors, and practitioners to campus for candid industry discussions.
Mendelsohn told students that he didn’t originally anticipate a career in academia. The son of two educators, he majored in physics at Yale and interned with the mayor of New Haven, aiming to pursue a career that allowed him to use both quantitative and qualitative analysis skills. After one economics course and a chance meeting with the university’s then-CIO David Swensen, who pioneered the Yale Model of institutional investing, he realized that the endowment office offered a mission-driven and intellectually stimulating career opportunity.
After graduation, Mendelsohn joined the Yale Investment Office and worked with Swensen to steward the endowment through a period of rapid change and economic upheaval, especially during the Great Financial Crisis. In 2021, he took over the office as CIO. Today, he focuses on transitioning the endowment from the “founder-led” organization Swensen created to an office that invests heavily in technology, people, and processes to keep up with the tremendous growth of the university’s assets under management over the last 40 years.
Looking ahead, Mendelsohn named geo-political shifts and the exponential growth of AI as some of the core investment considerations on his mind today. While acknowledging change is necessary to support growth and address current market conditions, he emphasized that he continues leverage the historic strengths of the Yale Model—operating from the first principles that made Swensen a titan of institutional investing.
