Meet Erlina Yeo Terwelp, Managing Director and Head of Private Asset Classes at Columbia Investment Management Company

Erlina Yeo Terwelp is a Managing Director and Head of Private Asset Classes at the Columbia Investment Management Company (IMC), responsible for managing Columbia University’s $15.9 billion endowment. In this role, she oversees investments across private equity, venture capital, real estate, and real assets. She is also a generalist investor with deep experience across public equities, hedge funds, and alternative asset classes.

Born in Singapore, Erlina came to the United States for college, earning her undergraduate degree in Economics from Columbia University before going on to Harvard Business School for her MBA. She began her career as an investment banking analyst at Citi, focused on consumer M&A, and went on to work in private equity at L Catterton and Tengram Capital Partners before joining Galapagos Partners, a multi-family office. She joined the Columbia IMC in 2017 and has been there for nine years.

In 2022, she was named to CIO Magazine's NextGen list, with Columbia IMC President and CEO Kim Lew describing her as "one of the hardest working, most balanced members of the team" and noting her rare ability to "make tradeoffs between different asset classes" and assess emerging managers in a highly data-driven environment.

Michelle: You studied Economics at Columbia as an undergrad, and you're now back as Managing Director overseeing private assets at the same institution. What does it mean to invest on behalf of the institution where you studied? How has that personal connection shaped the way you think about the mission behind the capital?

Erlina: It is a huge privilege to be investing for Columbia and higher education. To not just invest — which is a passion of mine — but to invest with meaning and purpose, that is something I find extraordinary.

Both of my parents are first-generation college graduates. They are business people - my dad was a commodities trader and my mother has a doctorate in organizational behavior. I got interested in investing at a very early age because of that exposure. But what I never forgot was how vital higher education was in putting them on a path to careers like that.

Columbia was a big step for me because it was my first time in the United States. It was my first real community here, and a very welcoming one. It was also a great place for a liberal arts education, which I think is increasingly important for helping people think about the meaning and purpose of what they do.

I have seen first-hand how much education can change a life, through scholarships, through research, through the kind of thinking that drives medical advances and shapes how we understand the world. Every time we have a success on the investment side and our managers create alpha, it goes directly toward benefiting our stakeholders.

Michelle: You came to the endowment world after years in investment banking, private equity, and family office investing. What was the most significant mental shift required — moving from the direct investing mindset to the role of allocator and LP?

Erlina: People always ask me this, and my honest answer is that it is much more similar than you’d expect.

When you are investing, whether as a direct investor or an allocator, you have to truly understand how something makes money. What are the fundamentals? What are the moats? What is the edge? When I look at a fund, I ask the same core questions I asked when I was looking at a company: what is the beta, and why is this particular team or firm uniquely positioned to capitalize on it?

The second big similarity is that both are ultimately about people. As a direct investor, you invest in CEOs. You invest in their ability to attract talent, to execute, to lead through uncertainty. The same is true in allocating. At the end of the day, it is human capital. That has been a central part of how I think about both sides of my career. 

The biggest shift, I would say, is that being an allocator requires a broad curiosity about the world. You are not tethered to a specific asset class or mandate. You have to be genuinely interested and conversant across all asset classes and geographies. All of it. The fundamentals and first principles are similar. The breadth is much larger.

Michelle: Columbia's endowment has grown from roughly $9 billion when you joined to nearly $16 billion today. How has your job changed as the portfolio has grown in scale, complexity, and visibility?

Erlina: Honestly, it has not changed as much as you might expect, with one meaningful exception. Moving the needle is harder when you are bigger.

A lot of the most interesting investment opportunities come from inefficient markets where smaller check sizes are the norm. Emerging managers, niche strategies, early-stage ventures. These are places where the alpha tends to be highest, but where the capacity is limited. When you have a larger pool of capital, you cannot always access those opportunities in a way that is portfolio-moving. That is a real constraint, and it is something every endowment has to grapple with as it scales.

That said, scale also brings resources. The art is in figuring out how to preserve the same quality of alpha in a world where you need to be more creative about sizing and construction. There are ways to do it. Through partnerships, through building relationships earlier, through finding less crowded access points, but it requires intention.

Michelle: As Head of Private Asset Classes, you oversee private equity, venture capital, real estate, and real assets. What do you think about portfolio construction across these areas? Where do they complement each other, and where do they compete for capital?

Erlina: I appreciate this question because people often lump private assets into a single bucket. They are not. The leverage profiles, the time to liquidity, the risk-return dynamics — all of it differs significantly even within the same broad asset class. More broadly, each sub-asset class has a distinct reason for being in the portfolio.

For private equity, particularly growth equity and buyouts, the core value proposition is differentiated exposure. There are so many private companies today, especially in the lower middle market, that cannot be accessed through public markets. Buyouts also give you the ability to control and shape a company's trajectory in ways that minority investing does not. That operating leverage, the ability to change the journey of a business, is a meaningful source of return that the other asset classes simply cannot replicate.

For venture capital, the story is straightforward: it is your access to innovation at its earliest stages. It carries the highest degree of risk and illiquidity of any of the four. But when it works, it works at a scale that nothing else can match.

Real assets are a different kind of building block. They have historically served as diversifiers, offering inflation protection, yield, and appreciation. But you have to be careful, because the behavior of real assets can vary enormously depending on where you sit in the risk spectrum. A core real estate investment behaves very differently from a value-add or distressed one. 

Michelle: Over nine years at Columbia, what have you learned about yourself as an investor? How has managing capital for Columbia IMC shaped or challenged those instincts?

Erlina: I tend to lean into growth and innovation. I like to engage with things early. When something like AI comes along, my instinct is to be genuinely excited about it. To be bullish and to think hard about the many ways to engage with it and how it might change market structures.

But I have also learned that recognizing your own instincts is only half the work. The other half is balancing them. Any serious investor is naturally a little paranoid, and I mean that as a compliment. The best investors I know hold conviction and doubt at the same time. They are excited about opportunity and vigilant about risk.

For an endowment, that balance is not optional. The portfolio needs to be durable. It needs to be all-weather. Growth and innovation can be extraordinarily volatile, and you have to be disciplined about how you inject them into a portfolio that is meant to serve this institution in perpetuity. So the instinct I discovered — the lean toward growth — is always in conversation with the paranoia that a long-term fiduciary mandate requires.

Michelle: You've spent nine years at Columbia and worked with several leaders who have shaped the investment office. What have the best of them had in common? How has that influenced the way you think about culture, both within your own team and when evaluating fund managers?

Erlina: I have been very fortunate to work with incredible leaders and mentors. The common thread across all these leaders, Kim Lew, our current President and CEO, Peter Holland and Tim Donahue who preceded her at Columbia, is a deep commitment to culture. And I mean culture in the fullest sense: intellectual honesty, genuine agency for the people on your team, creativity, humility, and a pervasive sense of stewardship around what we are all there to do.

Kim is an outstanding role model, not just for me, but for women in investing broadly, and especially for Asian and Black women in this industry. I feel fortunate to work alongside her.

I spend a lot of time thinking about culture myself, both within our own office and when we are evaluating fund managers. Any durable edges a firm has comes from culture, and it is one of the hardest things to replicate. I feel very fortunate to have learned from people who took it seriously.

Michelle: What are your non-negotiables when evaluating a fund manager? What do you think about the difference between a great investor and a great partner for an institution like Columbia?

Erlina: When you first enter this business, it is easy to anchor on what is quantifiable, for example, track record, performance attribution, the numbers on the page. Those matter. But I have come to believe that the more important and more difficult work is understanding who that person actually is.

The questions around partnership are really questions about alignment. Are they doing this because they are genuinely committed to building something durable over the long term? You cannot answer those questions from a deck. You have to know the person.

In practice, the non-negotiables for me come down to transparency and proof of alignment. Transparency in the sense that they iterate with you. They share what is working and what is not, and they do not wait until a quarterly letter to tell you something important. And alignment demonstrated in concrete ways: their own capital in the fund, a legal structure that reflects genuine partnership, a genuine orientation toward the long game.

These are qualitative assessments that you build up over time, through pattern recognition, through repeated interactions, through asking good references and hard questions. They are harder to measure than looking at IRRs. 

Michelle: As it pertains to emerging managers specifically, what signals do you look for when track record is limited? Where do you think the market still misprices emerging manager talent?

Erlina: Emerging manager investing is one of the most inefficient spaces in the market, and that tension is exactly what makes it interesting. Because the dispersion in outcomes is enormous, you have to be very deliberate about why you are taking on the risk of an unproven fund when you could go with an established manager. The only rational answer is that you genuinely believe this manager can deliver top-decile performance. If you are not underwriting to that, you should probably go elsewhere.

We’ve been fortunate to back some managers who have made it into that top 5-10%, and they typically share two characteristics. First, exceptional training. They know what great looks like. They may not have an independent track record, but they worked in or started amazing organizations and had great mentors that shaped them. Second, extraordinary references, and not just on investment returns. People who worked alongside them describe them in superlatives, not just as smart, but as exceptional leaders, communicators, relationship builders, people who make everyone around them better.

The Venn diagram of both of those things — world-class training and world-class references on character and judgment — is smaller than you might think. We do not do a large volume of emerging manager investments. But when we find that combination, we lean in.

Michelle: What do you think about the GP-LP relationship evolving over the life of a fund partnership? What does it look like when things are working well, and what happens when there is a bump in the road?

Erlina: I always tell GPs: there will be a speed bump in every relationship of real duration. You cannot have a partnership for ten years without one. The question is how it is handled.

The thing I appreciate most from a manager facing a difficult moment is a phone call. Not an email, not a quarterly letter. If you have bad news, pick up the phone. That is a test of how good a communicator someone is, and it is also a signal of how much they trust the relationship. It tells me that they see us as genuine partners, not just capital sources to be managed.

I will also say that the best GPs call when there is great news too, not just problems. Interestingly, I have noticed that when a manager reaches out and says "can we talk today," 80% of the time it is bad news. I actually respect that. It tells me that their norm is performance, and that they reserve the call for when it really matters.

Michelle: Where do you see AI adding genuine value in your investment process as an allocator — and where does it risk creating a false sense of rigor?

Erlina: I think people have to lean into AI as hard as they can. The first-order impact right now is productivity: helping you move through the lower-value tasks faster so you can spend more time on the things that actually matter.  The cognitive fatigue from switching between tasks is real. If AI can absorb those tasks, it creates genuine space for clearer, more creative thinking. I am genuinely excited about that.

The second order impact, which I think we are just beginning to understand, is what happens to portfolio management and risk management when you have much more dynamic testing available to you. Asset allocation has historically been a fairly static exercise for most institutions. I think AI could make it meaningfully more dynamic, and I think risk management in particular could get a much richer lens — better visibility into second and third-order consequences of allocation decisions in real time.

The risk I worry about is that people start to anchor too heavily on what a screen tells them and lose sight of the things that only human relationships can surface. Investing, at its core, is about people — their unique ways of thinking, their motivations, how they behave under pressure. None of that shows up in a dataset. If the rise of AI leads investors to spend less time looking someone in the eye and more time looking at a model, I think that is genuinely dangerous for the quality of decisions in this industry.

Michelle: Can you share a personal routine or habit that has helped you make high-stakes decisions under pressure?

Erlina: I read for 30 to 60 minutes every night before bed, without fail. And it is almost always literary fiction. It’s my brain yoga. 

Michelle: What is one tradition from your heritage that you still practice or deeply value today?

Erlina: I care very much about feeding people. It is an instinct. I remember my grandmothers and grandaunts would always start a conversation with “have you eaten”. It is cultural — this idea that care is expressed through food, through making sure the people around you are nourished.

Michelle: If you could place your own message inside a fortune cookie, what would it say?

Erlina: "Tomorrow is another day." Things happen, in the markets or in life, that are upsetting or destabilizing. And I find that the most important thing is just the ability to reset, to not carry it all forward. 

Michelle: After a tough or draining day, what is your go-to comfort food?

Erlina: A hot bowl of noodles. Or any Singaporean food.