Meet Wendy Li: Building “Endowment-Style” Investing for Individuals at Ivy Invest

Wendy Li is Co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Ivy Invest, where she leads portfolio construction and investment strategy for an endowment-style platform designed for individual investors. Prior to founding Ivy Invest, Wendy spent nearly two decades as an institutional investor stewarding multi-billion-dollar portfolios for some of New York’s most prominent mission-driven organizations. Most recently, Wendy served as Managing Director of Investments at the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation, where she built the investment office from the ground up and oversaw the foundation’s approximately $4 billion portfolio across public and private asset classes. Previously, she held senior investment roles at the UJA-Federation of New York, managing both the endowment and pension assets, and began her career in the Investment Office of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wendy is a graduate of Columbia University and a CFA charterholder. Her career reflects a consistent focus on rigorous, long-term investing, strong governance, and aligning capital with institutional values—experience she now brings to building Ivy Invest.

In this conversation with Michelle Moon for Asian Tech Collective, Wendy reflects on serendipity, risk, governance, and what it takes to translate institutional investing into a consumer product.

Michelle: You began your career at the Investment Office of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. What drew you to institutional investing early on?

Wendy: I always feel almost guilty for my answer, because I fell into it. When I was graduating from Columbia, on-campus recruiting was heavily oriented toward consulting, banking, and finance. On a whim, I applied for a position at The Met that was posted in the recruiting portal. They were hiring their first investment analyst.

The job description was vague. As you can imagine, describing an investment office at an endowment to a college student was totally over my head. But when I met Lauren Meserve—she hired me—I stepped into this phenomenal team and role.

At the time, endowments and foundations weren’t broadly known. It felt like a cottage industry. Learning that this role existed, and that investing could have such a broad purview beyond more “narrow” finance roles was incredibly compelling.

Michelle: Looking back, what were the most formative lessons from working with mission-driven institutions like The Met, UJA-Federation, and Mother Cabrini?

Wendy: I think about it in two dimensions.

First: the investment lessons—what you learn managing large pools of capital across asset classes through market cycles. This career is humbling. Markets surprise you. Macro events surprise you. The “unknown unknowns” are always there.

We do rigorous diligence, but you have to maintain a constant recognition that things can go south. I’m always wary of excessive confidence in predicting outcomes. We do our best with probabilistic thinking, but you need to anticipate that reality can break your assumptions.

And it’s not only macro. You can be surprised by governance, for example, how partnerships and firms operate. Operational and partnership risks can unravel faster than you’d expect.

Second: what it means to invest on behalf of an institution. You’re optimizing not only for returns, but for stakeholders and values. The closer you get to senior decision-making, the more you realize there are always compromises. Being “first principles” in the endowment world is a gift, but it doesn’t remove trade-offs.

Michelle: After years in the institutional world, what motivated you to shift into entrepreneurship with Ivy Invest?

Wendy: It wasn’t an easy decision. It came from conversations with my two co-founders. They had this early thesis: institutional investors invest very differently from individuals, and the market’s approach to “democratization” had largely been marketplace models.

The issue is the tyranny of choice. You’re asking an individual investor to select from a marketplace without the experience or reps to underwrite those decisions. That burden can lead to disappointment—misaligned expectations, underperformance, confusion.

Our thesis was that a turnkey, all-in-one solution is often the right answer: private markets exposure alongside a fully constructed portfolio—an “endowment-style portfolio” as a natural model for long-term dollars.

At first, I told them they were crazy. But over time, we kept iterating, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would look like to build this business. I may never get this chance again, and I knew I’d regret not trying. I had a lot of conversations with my husband along the way, too.

Michelle: Ivy Invest is often described as bringing an “endowment-style portfolio” to individuals. How do you balance long-term investing with the real-world constraints of personal investors?

Wendy: It’s a critical question. We felt strongly that we needed to avoid creating a major asset-liability mismatch. We also assumed individuals, despite good intentions, may need liquidity earlier than they expect.

One key framing that resonates: the closest analog to endowment capital is retirement assets. They’re long-term by nature, tax-advantaged, and in many cases, people aren’t managing them thoughtfully. Many professionals have 401(k)s or IRAs they haven’t looked at in years, often sitting in cash or invested sub-optimally.

Structurally, we use an SEC-registered 40 Act interval fund model. The endowment-style portfolio fits well because roughly half the portfolio can be liquid (equities, fixed income), and the other half can be less liquid (private credit, private equity, real assets, opportunistic strategies).

The major enabler is that asset managers have innovated. Evergreen and interval-style structures are more common now, especially in private credit, and that makes this product possible without watering down quality.

I’ll give a practical example. At Mother Cabrini, we built the investment office from scratch. We stepped into $3B in treasury bills. Building a private markets portfolio traditionally takes time. You’re horizon modeling years.

But for a consumer product, I can’t tell customers, “Come back in seven years and you’ll have the private markets exposure we promised.” We needed a day-one value proposition, and evergreen structures let us build multi-asset, multi-manager exposure from the start while managing liquidity responsibly.

Over time, we’ll incorporate closed-end drawdown strategies where they’re structurally necessary. Early-stage venture, in my view, needs duration and is best suited to drawdown formats. But day one, we needed to be sensible, liquid where required, and institutional in manager selection.

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

Wendy: High-pressure decisions don’t always need to be made in that moment. I benefit enormously from stepping away completely, clearing my head, and coming back later with clarity. Even a day can help you see what truly matters and what you should prioritize. With my co-founders, it also helps to talk objectively together, but personally, stepping away is key.

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

Wendy: I’m Chinese, and we make dumplings as a family. Everyone contributes. It’s social, it takes time, and you talk while you work. Even my youngest participates now. And we’re very adamant: store-bought wrappers are not acceptable.

Michelle: After a tough day, what’s your go-to comfort food?

Wendy: Any kind of noodle soup. Ramen, chicken noodle, udon.