The Rainwater Charitable Foundation has hired Randy Kim, the former chief investment officer at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, as its first-ever CIO.
Kim will join the roughly $1 billion nonprofit on May 15, almost one year exactly after ending his eight-year CIO tenure at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation in Agoura Hills, California. He’ll relocate to Fort Worth, Texas to fill the newly created position.
“We conducted a national search with comprehensive due diligence,” said Jeremy Smith, executive director of Rainwater Charitable Foundation, established in 1991 to improve the lives of children in the U.S., particularly those in poverty. “We couldn’t be more pleased he has agreed to steward the Rainwater Charitable Foundation’s endowment to further our mission.”
This is Kim’s second move in his nearly 20-year career in asset allocation. He spent a decade working under industry luminaries David Swensen and Dean Takahashi at the Yale University Investments Office, which he joined in 1998, shortly after graduating from the Ivy League school. Kim left the endowment in the summer of 2008 to lead his own team at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.
As one of the youngest CIOs leading a major U.S. institutional investment firm, Kim earned a reputation among his peers for manager selection and successful application of the investing model he’d learned from Swensen. In a March interview with Institutional Investor’s Alpha, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation Co-CIO Michael Buchman — one of Kim’s two successors along with Yatin Patel — described Kim as a “great mentor” and “friend,” and said they plan to build on his work and continue with the same Yale Model strategy that has brought them success.
The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation doesn’t release performance figures.
At the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, Kim will oversee a pool of assets built by another elite investor: Richard Rainwater, the onetime head of a Bass family office who became an independent investor in 1986.
“I am honored to be the Rainwater Charitable Foundation’s first chief investment officer,” Kim said. “I look forward to applying the investment principles taught to me by David Swensen and others to further Richard Rainwater’s charitable legacy.”
