Private Capital: Intelligence for the Family Office Investor

Michael Fisch is a founder and the CEO of American Securities, a $23 billion private equity firm that originated in the Rosenwald family office.   This is a great story of a fabled family office turning their investment DNA into a thriving private equity firm by buying market-leading businesses.   William Rosenwald, son of Julius Rosenwald who built Sears Roebuck, started the family office back in...

Today's guest is Jim Tananbaum of Foresite Capital.  One of the most exciting places AI is revolutionizing is drug discovery, so I was very excited to have Jim on today. Jim Tananbaum is the founder and chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, a U.S.-focused healthcare investment firm founded in 2011 that has approximately $3.5 billion in assets under management.   During the last three decade...

Today's guest is Mark Gerson of 3i Members. Mark is a remarkable entrepreneur, philanthropist, and master at creating networks.   He is most well known for founding Gerson Lehrman Group, the original and largest expert network in the world, and most recently, 3i Members, a global deal network for investors, all of whom have exited a company or led a family office.   Mark is also the chairman of Un...

David Salem has had a remarkable career. He did his undergrad at Middlebury, went to Harvard Business School where he sat next to Seth Klarman, then went to work with Jeremy Grantham at GMO where he became a partner.   He started The Investment Fund for Foundations, a groundbreaking way for smaller endowments to benefit from professional investing and scale, and had David Swensen of the Yale Inves...

Jennifer Prosek has built a powerhouse communications firm by focusing on asset management.   She asked herself, "Why does the financial industry not care about its brand, and why are they so on the back foot about everything?"   I was particularly keen to talk to her about how firms struggle to differentiate, especially as formerly low-profile parts of the industry, such as private equity funds,...

Zoe Cruz is a prominent figure in the financial services industry, known for her significant contributions and groundbreaking achievements as one of the highest-ranking women on Wall Street. She was named one of the Forbes top 50 women in business four years in a row.   With a career spanning over 25 years at Morgan Stanley, where she served as Co-President, Cruz played a pivotal role in managing...

Michael Weisz has a real knack for finding unconventional opportunities and a strong entrepreneurial spirit.   He cut his teeth in real estate, but quickly found his nuanced understanding of mis-priced risk prepared him for creative investments like litigation and receivable finance and strategies like loans to professional athletes during lockouts.   We talk about the development of the Yieldstre...

Today's guest is Ted Seides from Capital Allocators podcast.   I first did a print interview with Ted exactly seven years ago, when he had just completed his first book So You Want to Start a Hedge Fund? and had just started his podcast.   Since then he has written two more books, Capital Allocators and today's topic Private Equity Deals and now has one of the top investment podcasts in the world,...

Greg Fleming is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Rockefeller Capital Management, a role he has held since the firm, formerly known as Rockefeller & Co., launched in March 2018. Greg and I discuss the pivotal Lehman weekend in September of 2008 when he was instrumental in the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, his thoughts on organic growth and mergers in wealth management, the f...

Ken Kencel is the President & CEO of Churchill Asset Management, a $50 billion dollar platform serving over 700 institutional clients.   He shared valuable insights on the growing private credit market, the evolution of the industry, his first job at Drexel, working at Carlyle and then going out on his own to start Churchill from scratch.   We also discuss the nuances of the art of the covenent an...

Jason Schwarz is Deputy Chief Executive Officer and President at Wilshire, which currently manages over $100 billion in assets and advises on $1.3 trillion.   Jason was raised in a legal family, but his path diverged from the expected, fueled by a desire to carve his own niche. He told me, "I think you see this with sons and daughters of successful parents," he mused. "One path is to follow in the...

Anthony Scaramucci, is the founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital and the SALT Conference.   We had a wide ranging and candid conversation about his new book, his path from Port Washington to the White House, navigating the cutthroat world of Wall Street and politics, adapting his investment style to survive, and the importance of non-transactional networking.  Anthony Scaramucci is the...

Carin-Isabel Knoop is the founder and executive director of the Harvard Business School Research and Case Writing Division.   This conversation was spurred by two things, one that I found out on the Business Breakdowns podcast last year that Harvard Business School Publishing is larger than Forbes, and two that I've also always been curious about how case studies are actually written.   Anyone who...

Scott Sperling is the Co-CEO of Thomas H. Lee Partners.   We had an excellent conversation about his time at Harvard Management Company under legendary figures like Walter Cabot and Jack Meyer, his thoughts on the evolution of private equity, the growth of THL, how the firm is structured, his top metrics and how to find new areas of growth.   Scott is Co-CEO and co-chair of the firm's management c...

Michael Tiedemann is a founding partner and chief executive officer of AlTi Tiedemann Global, a publicly traded $70 billion investment firm. He is also a member of the firm's board of directors and chairman of the firm's internal investment committee.  We talk about starting the business with his father, Carl Tiedemann, the former president of DLJ, spinning up a wealth manager from scratch after t...

Alex Chaloff is the CIO of Bernstein Private Wealth Management. We had a great conversation talking about his personal litmus test for a manager, what to do with lagging funds, the advantages of scale, and the importance of having a sleep coach. Please enjoy my talk with Alex Chaloff.   Alex Chaloff is the Chief Investment Officer of Bernstein Private Wealth Management. Before his current role, he...

Today we have Mark Hurley, who recently co-authored a white paper called Welcome to the Jungle: The Next Phase of the Evolution of the Wealth Management Industry. Mark has written several influential papers over the years, and makes some intriguing and provocative points. We go into the mechanics of the wealth management business, how to find talent, discuss the ten-year acquisition spree in the i...

Steffen Pauls is a serial entrepreneur with a long background in the private equity industry.  His career started at BCG; he started and sold a fintech company during the dot com era; worked at KKR when it was still a small firm and grew along with it; and then left to start his own company in 2016 called Moonfare - which is a private equity investing platform making top-tier funds available to re...

Casey Whalen has had a remarkable investing career starting at the Yale investments office, then Rockefeller University, the CIO of the New York Public Library, running three billion at Truuvo partners and now heading up Lazard's family office partners.  Casey and I talk about the many lessons she learned from David Swensen, and I especially liked her stress on getting alignment with all the playe...

Today we are speaking to Ryan Eisenman, co-founder and CEO of Arch, a leading fintech startup that is a digital administrator for private investments.   I thought it would be great to catch up with Ryan to get a look under the hood of a rapidly growing B2B SaaS company tackling one of asset management's persistent back office issues such as K-1s and capital calls, as well as a look at how their fo...

Today we have Jon Hirtle, founder and executive chairman of Hirtle, Callaghan & Co, a $20 billion   OCIO firm.   I was especially interested to talk to Jon because he is a real process guy, and has been thinking deeply about managers and portfolios for over thirty years.   John trained recruits at Paris Island, worked at Goldman, and left with no clients to become a pioneer in what came to become...

AI for Portfolio Insight Jan Szilagyi is the CEO and co-founder of Toggle AI, a generative AI startup that uses machine learning to turn institutional-grade data into insights for investors of all stripes. Szilagyi spent most of his career with Stanley Druckenmiller at Duquesne Capital. He was co-CIO of global macro at Lombard Odier and also managed portfolios at Fortress under Michael Novogratz....

Stan Miranda is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Partners Capital, a global OCIO with $50 billion under management.   Stan was previously a longtime director at Bain and chairman of their Worldwide Executive Committee and a co-founder of Evolution Global Partners, a venture capital firm affiliated with Kleiner Perkins and TPG.     I was interested to talk to Stan about the very interesting DNA of Pa...

Paul Edelman is a psychologist who has worked with some of the world's most successful hedge fund managers.   Today we take a deep dive into how psychological techniques can be used to look for investment managers, how Paul applied what he learned from great mentors to filter for the investment management skill set, the importance and uncovering of conceptual and probabilistic thinkers, and why yo...

Rebecca Patterson was most recently Chief Investment Strategist at Bridgewater Associates where she was on the Executive Committee and was a frequent author of Bridgewater's Daily Observations.   Previously, she was CIO of Bessemer Trust, overseeing $85 billion in client assets.   Before joining Bessemer, she worked globally for JP Morgan where she was Chief Investment Strategist and ran the priva...