David Russ

David Russ is a nationally recognized endowment and investment manager with a reputation for adding value, conceiving unique investment strategies and developing high performing investment teams to execute on his innovative and analytical investment visions. He has nearly 30-years of institutional investment management experience with foundations, endowments, corporate and public pension plans, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and family offices.

He was most recently the founding partner and Chief Investment Officer/Strategist at Spruceview Capital, a start-up investment entity.  Spruceview’s approach to its focused client segments of endowments, foundations, pension plans and family offices is to provide a complete and holistic partnership to manage their entire portfolios.  Prior to his tenure at Spruceview, he was Chief Investment Strategist and a Managing Director at Credit Suisse Asset Management in New York. His responsibilities included investment policy and asset allocation, objective-driven solutions, quantitative risk analytics and hedging strategies for SWFs, global corporate pension plans, endowments and foundations stretching from New York to Hong Kong.  He was also a member of the Global Investment Committee, Global Asset Allocation Committee and Global Risk Committee based in Zurich.

Before being recruited to Credit Suisse, David spent more than 18-years serving a variety of academic institutions in managing their endowment and foundation investment portfolios.  From 2005-2009 he was the first Chief Investment Officer for Dartmouth College’s endowment.  During his leadership tenure, the college’s endowment grew from $2.7B to nearly $4.1B, in part due to asset allocation changes and disciplined rebalancing. Prior to his role at Dartmouth College, he was in the Office of the President, Treasurer of the Regents and Vice-President for Investments, and a Principal Officer of the Regents for the University of California in Oakland from 2001-2005. Total assets under management grew from $55B in 2001 to $63.3B (with significant measurable value-added alpha) under David’s investment stewardship. Earlier in his academic investment career he was the Managing Director – Public Markets for the University of Texas Investment Management Company where the portfolios that he managed grew by nearly $5B from 1997-2001.

His early investment career included roles at Pacific Telesis Group as Director – Investment Management and the Stanford Management Company in the role of Senior Portfolio Manager, Assistant Secretary to the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

David holds a Master of Administration in Finance and Accounting from the University of California, Davis and a B.A. in Genetics from the University of California, Berkeley.  He is a former member of The Dean’s Advisory Board at UC Davis Graduate School of Management; a member of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance; a former member of The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center Investment Committee; a former member of the Tuck Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship Executive Advisory Board; Trustee Emeritus for the Dartmouth Class of 1953 Trust (managed external to Dartmouth); and a former trustee of the UC Davis Robert Mondavi Trust