20VC: How LPs Allocate to Venture in 2026: What They Want, What They Do Not Want | Why Fund Multiple Does Not Matter Without a Timeline | Why Velocity of Cashback is the Most Important Thing with David Morehead, CIO @ Baylor

David Morehead, CIO of Baylor University’s $2.6 billion endowment, has a rule in his office: you are not allowed to talk about returns without also talking about time. This single principle drives how he evaluates every investment, from venture capital to public equities, and it explains why he is “perplexed” by the lengthening fund lives that have become standard in private markets. Morehead’s conversation with Harry Stebbings is a rare, unvarnished look at how a sophisticated allocator thinks about portfolio construction, manager alignment, and the math that actually governs whether an endowment can pay for scholarships.

The Primacy of Velocity Over Multiple

Morehead’s central critique of modern venture capital is that fund durations have stretched from 10–12 years to 15–18 years, often in the name of letting winners run. He finds this misaligned with an endowment’s mission. “The single reason that private exists is to make money. Period. End of story,” he says. The problem is that a 15x return over 18 years is mathematically inferior to a 3x return over six years that gets redeployed twice. The latter compounds to 27x over the same period. “What we’re really after is the velocity of capital, not just returns on capital,” Morehead explains. He is explicit that he is not optimizing for the GP’s business model—he is optimizing for “the largest pile of money for our studen