Roger Vincent

Roger Vincent is a career private-equity investor with more than 25 years of experience spanning global buyouts, growth equity, and venture capital. He began his PE career in 1995 at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ), where he was a principal investor in the firm's Merchant Banking and Sprout venture groups. He later became an investment partner at Founders Equity, a New York–based private equity firm making control investments in lower-middle-market businesses.

In 2012 Vincent joined Cornell University's Investment Office, where for over a decade he led the private equity portfolio of the university's roughly $10 billion endowment — overseeing manager selection and portfolio construction across the venture capital, growth equity, and buyout books. Over his tenure he led more than 100 transactions valued at over $1.5 billion and, per firm materials, generated top-tier returns among peer endowments.

In April 2024 Vincent left Cornell to found Summation Capital, an independent private-equity fund-of-funds firm, where he serves as Founder and Chief Investment Officer. He launched the firm alongside co-founder Dan Fordyce, a former investment analyst at the Cornell endowment and OCIO Summit Rock Advisors. Summation aims to give smaller endowments diversified PE exposure on par with larger, better-resourced allocators.

Vincent earned a BA in Economics from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Columbia Business School, where he graduated with Beta Gamma Sigma academic honors.

• Builds diversified private-equity fund portfolios (fund-of-funds) covering buyout, growth equity, and venture capital for institutional clients — an LP/allocator model, not direct angel or seed investing.
• Central thesis is that portfolio *structure and cash management* matter as much as manager selection: *"even though in private equity people spend a tremendous amount of time talking about manager selection, you can argue that a more important solution is that coverage ratio."*
• Solves the "uncalled capital" problem by letting clients deploy their entire PE allocation upfront, then investing unfunded commitments in public equities and cash rather than leaving them idle: *"No endowment in the world runs with 15 percent cash on hand. If they did, they'd always be at the bottom of the league tables."*
• Fee innovation as a differentiator — charges carry only on returns above a public-market benchmark: *"there isn't a single private equity product where people only charge carry on alpha. We think we are the very first ones to do it."*
• Fee structure: ~1% management fee + 10% carry over a public-equity benchmark, with no fees on uncalled capital and co-investment alongside managers to lower client costs.
• Targets roughly six fund investments per year in an open-ended vehicle designed for long-term alignment.