[REPLAY] Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College

**Ted Seides** (0:01)
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Hello, I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can keep up to date by visiting capitalallocatorspodcast.com.
My guest on today's show is Collette Chilton, the Chief Investment Officer of Williams College, where she's overseen its $3 billion portfolio since 2006 Collette is nothing short of a legend in the business. She sat in a CIO seat since the early 1990s at the helm of public pension MassPrim and corporate pension Lucent before joining Williams. Institutional Investor bestowed its Lifetime Achievement Award on Collette in 2019, and Barron's named her one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Finance in 2020 Our conversation covers Collette's career path and lessons learned before joining Williams. We then turned to her arrival at Williams in 2006 to a phone, a computer, and a legacy portfolio. Williams' governance structure leveraging alumni advisors, asset allocation, manager selection, manager monitoring, hedge funds, venture capital, and navigating around popular managers.
Please enjoy my conversation with Collette Chilton.
Collette, thank you so much for doing this.

**Collette Chilton** (4:02)
Thank you for asking me.

**Ted Seides** (4:04)
You've been at this in the seat for a long time, and I mean, I guess it makes sense to go back and ask how you first got interested in investing.

**Collette Chilton** (4:12)
It was purely out of necessity. I was working in investment banking. I was nine months and two weeks pregnant with my second daughter, and this was during the banking crisis in 1993, and the bank eliminated the group I was in. And I was the first person they walked into HR because I literally was almost 10 months pregnant. And I needed to have a job. We needed both of us to be working. And so I went around and looked for a job before my daughter was born, and then as soon as possible after my daughter was born. And a guy who I had done some transactions with, a lawyer, was the general counsel for the state treasurer, who at that time was a sole trustee in Massachusetts. And the guy who was the state treasurer was a Republican who had come in after Bob Crane, who was a famous sole trustee and Democrat treasurer in Massachusetts. And there were all kinds of things that had been alleged to have been going on. So they were being investigated by everybody you could imagine. And so this guy I knew said, I know you don't know anything about investing, but this will be a great experience. You'll learn so much because it's bad here. And so there used to be two pension funds in Massachusetts that was called Masters. And so I went to work at Masters knowing nothing. And I remember going to my first meeting in New York with this guy and he said, so you know the difference between growth and value, right? And I'm like, I don't know what any of this is.