Meet Richard Chau, Chief Investment Officer at Tulane University

Richard Chau has served as Chief Investment Officer of Tulane University since May 2021, the culmination of a career he had been building at the university since 2013. He oversees Tulane's Investment Management Office, which manages the university's endowment and related long-term investment assets. These assets play a critical role in providing perpetual support for students and professors across generations. Since joining Tulane, Chau has built and managed the endowment's private equity and real assets portfolios, adding investment managers across venture capital, growth equity, buyouts, distressed debt, energy, and real estate, while expanding the endowment's international exposure, particularly in Asia.

Prior to Tulane, he served as a vice president at Bessemer Trust, where he helped manage multi-billion-dollar private equity and venture capital portfolios, and before that worked at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, focusing on private equity and asset allocation. A native of Lincoln, Massachusetts, Chau holds a bachelor's degree in Economics and Chinese from Williams College, where he was an All-American hammer and discus thrower, and an MBA from Columbia University.

Michelle: Your first job out of college was at Cambridge Associates. What drew you to institutional investing at that stage, and how did that consulting vantage point shape your philosophy before you moved in-house?

Richard: My parents and siblings were all born in Cambodia. We came to the U.S. in the late 1970s, when Cambodia was going through its genocide under the Khmer Rouge. My family arrived as refugees and settled in a small town outside of Boston called Lincoln, where the church group that sponsored us was based.

I grew up in a fairly affluent town where we were one of the only Asian families. Most professionals were doctors and lawyers with very few working in finance.  During the bull market in the ‘90s I started to learn more about the stock market and investing. It piqued my interest because it seemed like a good way to apply my quantitative and analytical skills.

At Williams College I knew I wanted to work in investing, but I wasn't certain exactly which direction I wanted to go. Cambridge Associates stood out because they were pioneers in investment consulting for institutions — one of the earliest consultants to many of the great endowments. I thought it was a tremendous opportunity to see and learn a great deal, and it was exactly that. I worked with all different types of clients, including endowments, foundations, family offices, and pensions, across all asset classes.

After Cambridge, I went to Columbia Business School, and then into investment banking. I very quickly realized I wanted to return to institutional investing. A couple of things drew me back. One was the long-term nature of the work, which is simply how I prefer to think and process things. During business school, I interned at a long-short hedge fund, and I knew almost immediately that it was not for me, which confirmed that long-term investing was the right fit. Beyond that, what I truly value about institutional investing is the intellectual curiosity it demands. As a global investor, you can look at almost anything with very few constraints. The market is always evolving, and you are always trying to look around corners to find the next opportunity. That continues to energize me.

Michelle: You studied Economics and Chinese at Williams. Looking back, how did that unusual pairing, quantitative rigor alongside language and cultural immersion, help build your vantage point and personal philosophy?

Richard: Williams offered a true liberal arts education, and both majors turned out to be more useful than I anticipated. Economics is analytical. It helped me understand markets and models. Chinese was far more cultural, and it helped me appreciate different perspectives and ways of thinking.

I also took psychology courses. As an investor, markets rely not only on fundamentals but on investor psychology. Experiencing both worlds at Williams was the beginning of forming my own investment philosophy. That behavioral dimension — understanding people's backgrounds and biases — continues to shape a great deal of what I do today. It applies when you are operating as a global investor, but even closer to home: someone from the Midwest may approach a situation very differently than someone from New York City. Recognizing that people arrive with different perspectives, and maintaining an open mind about different approaches, continues to inform how I think about investing.

Williams also taught me how to think and reason critically. The hard technical skills came later, in business school, which felt like a necessary step to build that additional foundation. But learning how to think, how to question assumptions, how to hold multiple perspectives at once — that started at college.

Michelle: You joined Tulane's Investment Management Office in 2013 and became CIO a decade later. What did it mean to grow up inside an institution and then lead it? How has your tenure shaped the kind of CIO you've become?

Richard: I joined Tulane to build and grow the private portfolio, which was fairly nascent at the time. It was a meaningful opportunity to build something, and that has been a rewarding journey.

Over the thirteen years I have been here, I had the opportunity to learn from a very strong CIO who mentored and prepared me to eventually serve in this role. It also gave me the opportunity to impact not just the portfolio, but the culture of the office.

Perhaps most importantly, it gave me the chance to truly understand the institution: its priorities, its constituents, what purpose the endowment is meant to serve, and what the mission really requires. I did not attend Tulane and had little exposure to the university before joining. But over time, I came to understand its values deeply, which I believe has allowed me to better steward the capital and ensure we are genuinely fulfilling the university's priorities.

Additionally, I believe the longevity of my tenure here gives our investment partners confidence that we value long-term partnerships and intend to grow with them. Many LPs move around, and that can be difficult for GPs who were counting on a lasting relationship. The longevity of our team — not just my own, but that of several colleagues who have also been here for many years — builds genuine trust with our managers. This truly is a long-term partnership, and we intend to be here for the long run.

Michelle: Looking back on your tenure as CIO, what initiative or contribution are you most proud of?

Richard: Two things come to mind: the portfolio and the team.

On the portfolio side, building out the private markets allocation has had an enormous impact on the university. We believe private markets will be the primary driver of our long-term performance. We are firm believers in the illiquidity premium inherent in private markets, and as a long-term institution, we believe an endowment like ours is well-positioned to take advantage of long lockups and be compensated for them. Building that portfolio to the point where it now represents nearly half of our endowment, we believe it has been, and will continue to be, a significant contributor to our outperformance over time.

On the team and culture side, we hire nearly all of our interns and analysts directly from Tulane. Many other endowment offices will not hire straight out of school, because they simply do not have the bandwidth to train new graduates. We face the same constraints, but we decided to make the effort, because we know it matters to the school and the students. We give them a strong start, train them thoughtfully, and help them find an excellent next step after our analyst program.

Of our seven-person investment team today, five attended Tulane and were hired directly out of school. One has been with us for thirteen years. Another for eleven. And another for eight. I take genuine pride in mentoring the next generation of investment professionals, and I believe that longevity and trust within the team are some of the things that make us unique.

Michelle: How do you balance the longevity of your team, which brings deep institutional knowledge, with keeping thinking fresh and challenging each other?

Richard: We have deep institutional knowledge and strong processes that have served us well, and we want to continue building on that foundation. But complacency is a real risk for long-term investors, and I take that concern seriously.

Part of what keeps us honest is the new analysts and interns who arrive without our accumulated biases. I work to create a culture where they feel comfortable speaking up. There are no dumb questions, no dumb observations.

Beyond that, we challenge each other constantly, even on decisions we have made before. It is an expectation, not an exception, so no one takes it personally. I continue to push the team to question long-standing assumptions, and revisit first principles. I will put forward ideas, sometimes deliberately provocative ones, and invite the team to push back. If they cannot make a compelling case against it, perhaps it deserves further exploration. I have no interest in being the CIO whose word is simply accepted without scrutiny. That is not how we will stay ahead.

Michelle: What does it mean to you to steward capital on behalf of a mission-driven institution like Tulane? How does that accountability show up in day-to-day investment decision-making?

Richard: It is deeply meaningful to me. The capital we invest comes from the generosity of alumni and parents, and we have to honor that seriously.

First and foremost, that means preserving capital. These are gifts intended to support financial aid, research, and professorships. We have to invest them prudently.

At the same time, we want to grow the assets, because growth is what maximizes their long-term impact. That places a real responsibility on us to understand the risks we are taking and to ensure we are assuming the right level of risk to achieve strong returns. It is a delicate balance.

The risk we will not accept is the risk of permanent impairment. My framework is straightforward: if I cannot clearly explain our investment strategy and its risk-reward profile to a donor who has entrusted us with their endowed gift, I probably should not be pursuing it. So far, I believe every investment we have made passes that test. But it is an important discipline — keeping front of mind who we are working for and what the mission demands.

Michelle: What is your framework for evaluating a new fund manager? How has that evolved as the market for alternative assets has become more competitive?

Richard: With every manager we evaluate, we are focused on understanding their competitive advantage, i.e., their genuine reason to win. If we are speaking with them, they likely have a track record worth examining. But a significant portion of our diligence time is spent trying to distinguish skill from luck, because we are not investing in past performance. We are investing in what they will do going forward. The central question is whether they have a repeatable strategy capable of generating outsized returns.

Assuming they clear that bar, we turn our attention to the long-term relationship. These are meant to be enduring partnerships, and with that comes a need for trust. We want to understand their integrity, their alignment, and their genuine orientation toward partnership. Those softer qualities take real experience to assess — a great deal of pattern recognition around what proper alignment actually looks like in practice.

Finally, we consider how a manager fits within our overall portfolio. That is where the evaluation becomes more nuanced. We may encounter an exceptional manager and still conclude that we cannot invest, simply because the strategy does not complement what we are already doing. That is not a judgment against the manager. It is just the reality of portfolio construction.

Michelle: Tulane's endowment has ranked in the top quartile of university endowments over a ten-year period. How do you think about balancing what has been working well with the need to stay innovative?

Richard: We have been fortunate to generate strong long-term returns, and I think much of that comes from focusing on where we have a real advantage rather than chasing what others are doing.

In private equity, for example, we have leaned heavily into the lower middle market. Because we are not a large endowment, we do not need to write enormous checks, which means we can be a better fit with smaller funds. Lower middle-market managers can acquire small companies at attractive valuations, grow them meaningfully, and then sell into a mid- and large-cap buyout universe flush with dry powder, which can produce compelling multiple expansion. That focus has served us very well.

In venture, our size works in our favor in a couple of distinct ways. With established, blue-chip managers who have capacity constraints, we stand a better chance of gaining access precisely because we are not seeking a large commitment. With smaller emerging managers, our check size fits naturally, and we can offer something beyond capital. We can be genuine thought partners as they build their firms and develop institutional-grade processes.

We understand what differentiates us: our size, our tenure, our alumni network, our team. We work to capitalize on those specific strengths. We learn from what our peers are doing, but we do not always try to replicate it. What works for a large Ivy League endowment is unlikely to work for us, and the reverse is equally true.

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

Richard: Chinese New Year is probably the most enduring tradition in our household. We clean and sweep before New Year's Eve, eat something sweet on the first day of the year, a tradition I picked up from my wife's family. We observe the custom of not washing or cutting our hair around that time. We are hoping to pass those traditions down to our children.

More broadly, I know this is less a tradition than a mindset, but I think it is simply the immigrant mentality my parents instilled in me — an almost reflexive frugality and an aversion to waste. I rarely leave a restaurant without taking the leftovers home, and I take real satisfaction in making sure nothing goes to waste.

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

Richard: It would be something about humility — the importance of knowing what you do not know. And as an investor in particular, the value of staying curious, open-minded, and adaptable. I am not sure how to compress all of that into a fortune cookie message, but those are the things that matter most to me.

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

Richard: White rice, some kind of stir fry, and steamed eggs — the way my mother used to make them, with small dried shrimp folded in. So simple, but when you put it all together, it is deeply comforting. It takes me right back to childhood.