Your job security depends on failing conventionally rather than succeeding unconventionally. I get it.
Why can't you invest in them? Perhaps I've been lucky, but as I've begun to build trust with institutions; the social proof elements are clear. Your investment committee needs brand names. Impressive reference lists. Your consultants won't recommend managers without a five-year track record and $1B+ AUM. Your operational due diligence team requires infrastructure that only large managers or spinouts with existing capital can afford.
The natural output of this system: invest in the very managers whose size ensures mediocrity, knowing that the hungry, focused managers with capacity for alpha is uninvestable by your standards, regardless of what any one individual within the institution may think.
I've sat across from enough CIOs to know you'd love to do something different, and sometimes you do. I've also seen you trapped in a system designed to prevent ever being different. Your board wants what Yale had. Your investment committee needs consensus. Your consultants need to recommend what they've recommended to everyone else. Your job security depends on failing conventionally rather than succeeding unconventionally. I get it.