A Fireside Chat with Yup S. Kim YC ’07, former Chief Investment Officer, Texas Municipal Retirement System (TMRS)

The Swensen Institute is excited to launch its “Food & Finance” Speaker Series: Bridging Theory and Practice - Conversations with Investment Practitioners.– providing students with lunch and hosting investment practitioners to discuss their careers, investment approach, and current market trends.

We will be joined by Yup S. Kim YC ’07, former Chief Investment Officer, Texas Municipal Retirement System (TMRS). Our conversation will be moderated by Song Ma, Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship. This fireside chat brings together academic insight and real-world investment experience to discuss how these forces are influencing long-term investment thinking. The conversation will explore how investors assess geopolitical risk, technological disruption, and structural change in the global economy. This offers a rare opportunity to engage with strategic thinking at the frontier of finance and society.

Rising geopolitical tensions, the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, and shifting global growth dynamics are reshaping the investment landscape. Hear from Yale alum, Yup Kim ‘07, former CIO of the Texas Municipal Retirement System (TMRS), a $49 billion public pension. He will discuss his investment career and the market forces changing the nature of the investing landscape. As technological leadership becomes increasingly intertwined with national strategy and economic security, long-standing assumptions about globalization, capital flows, and risk are being reexamined.

Speaker biographies:

Yup S. Kim most recently served as Chief Investment Officer of the Texas Municipal Retirement System (TMRS), a $49 billion public pension fund, where he chaired the Staff Investment Committee and oversaw the total portfolio across public and private markets. Over his career, he has deployed more than $100 billion into external managers and directly into operating companies worldwide. Previously, Kim was Head of Private Equity Investments at CalPERS, California’s ~$500 billion pension fund, where he helped lead a global private equity program spanning strategy, portfolio construction, team leadership, and investment execution across primaries, secondaries, and co-investments. His work was the subject of a Harvard Business School case study examining the reinvigoration of large-scale institutional private equity programs.

Earlier, he served as Senior Portfolio Manager at the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, a U.S. sovereign wealth fund (~$80 billion), where the private equity and special opportunities portfolio generated approximately 25% net-of-fee returns over a decade. He began his career at Citigroup in New York and has held investing roles at DB Private Equity, Performance Equity, and Silver Point Capital. Kim holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale Universityand speaks six languages. He chairs the Milken Institute Rising Allocator Forum and serves as Vice Chair of the Korea Finance Society, a Term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Global Investment Ambassador for the Seoul Metropolitan Government. He is a frequent commentator on global markets and private capital—appearing on CNBC, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times—and has received numerous industry honors from Institutional Investor, Private Equity International, Forbes, P&I and Chief Investment Officer.

Song Ma is a Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at Yale School of Management (SOM) and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He is also an affiliated faculty member at Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law and Yale SOM Program on Entrepreneurship. He joined Yale SOM Faculty in 2016. Professor Ma’s main research interests are innovation economics, entrepreneurship, financial economics, AI, and big data. His research also spans to corporate strategy, industrial organization, antitrust, labor, and business law. His research has been featured in top academic journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies, and won numerous research awards. His research has also been referenced by legislator and policy makers around the world, including the Federal Trade Commission, EU Competition Commission, and UK Competition and Markets Authority.

Professor Ma has been quoted or interviewed by dozens of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and Forbes. Professor Ma teaches popular elective course at Yale, including “Entrepreneurial Finance”, “Venture Capital and Private Equity”, and “Finance and the Society”, and he was recognized as Poets & Quants 40 under 40 Best Business School Professor in 2021. Professor Ma received his PhD in Finance from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in 2016, earning Top Finance Graduate Award.

He obtained his BA in Economics from Zhejiang University in 2010.
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"The greatest teachers create thinking students." David F. Swensen

 

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Co-hosted with: Swensen Asset Management Institute

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