During her senior year as an economics major at Yale, Casey Whalen enrolled in a senior seminar, one of only about 15 students in the class. The instructor was David Swensen, author of the landmark book Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment, which enumerated the principles that became known as both the “Yale model” and the “endowment model” of investing, a portfolio theory heavy on alternatives and illiquid assets. He used that investing philosophy to grow the Yale endowment from $1.3 billion when he became CIO in his early 30s, to more than $30 billion during his 35 years in the post, earning international renown along the way for his performance.

“It was fantastic,” Whalen says of the class. “He would bring money managers who Yale had invested with into the class to talk to us. This was back in the mid-1990s, and it was really mind-blowing that a nonprofit could have these sophisticated investment stra