Michael Blake

Michael Blake served from 1994 to 2016 as the Vice President of Finance for the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund in San Francisco.  He was the chief financial officer for this private foundation and chief investment officer for its $450 million portfolio.  During his tenure at the Haas, Jr. Fund, Michael was extremely active in the Foundation Financial Officers Group (FFOG), a membership organization of CIOs and CFOs from the largest private foundations in the U.S. and Europe.  He served as FFOG’s president for 3 years and as the editor of its monthly newsletter for 16 years. An ardent networker, his work was central to the development of FFOG’s very active private intranet, in which colleagues share, with unusual openness, information about their investment and financial practices. 

Beginning in the first decade of the 2000s, Michael began to develop knowledge about the Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) model for institutional portfolio management.  This was a time when many elite teams, often with pedigrees from large university endowment offices with strong investment track records, had launched operations as OCIO firms, accepting capital from multiple institutional investors.  Michael traveled widely, meeting with these top-tier firms, with an eye to finding an appropriate OCIO firm to manage the Haas, Jr. Fund’s assets.  He started an ad hoc group within FFOG to share information about the burgeoning OCIO field and to serve as a repository of best practices.  He also conferred regularly with some disinterested observers of the OCIO phenomenon, including Rosalie Wolf.  Beginning in 2009, he began to invest the assets of the Haas, Jr. Fund with an OCIO firm, while also traveling and meeting widely with competitor OCIO firms.  When he retired at the end of 2016, management of the Fund’s entire portfolio had been outsourced.  

Michael, who has a B.A. in economics from Duke University and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, spent his early career in the nonprofit sector.  From 1988 to 1991, he was the Peace Corps Country Director in the Central African Republic. 

Married with one grown child, he lives in San Francisco.