Who they are, where they're from, and what your investment perspective is.
Absolutely pleasure to be here. My name is [Name]. I lead healthcare investing strategy for our single family office. Our family office is called [Name], based in Southern California. We also have an office in New York. We invest primarily across three strategies: Real estate, public equities, and what we call venture and growth. Within venture and growth, we focus on two sectors: healthcare and fintech. I lead the healthcare strategy for us and manage about $2.9 billion in AUM in invested assets today. Mostly, we invest directly into companies, not so much managers.

• Great, thank you.

Should be on.

• Good morning or good afternoon, I should say. My name is [Name]. It's a pleasure to be here. This is my second time attending this conference. I'm from Seattle. I work at [Company] doing debt and structured finance. Our team financed about $3 billion in assets—three billion for our commercial institutional real estate investors nationwide in the last few years. Outside of CBRE, I’m also in the process of setting up a family office based in Seattle. Our future strategy would be, I would say, 60 to 70 percent focused on commercial real estate because that’s what I’m very familiar with. The rest of the allocation would be in venture capital or private equity. Healthcare would be a focus in AI technologies.
• Great, thank you.
• Good afternoon, my name is [Name]. I'm the founder and CEO of [Company]. We have our investment office in Greenwich, California, an office in Scottsdale, Arizona, and our major operating companies are in Salinas, California, which is referred to as the "salad bowl of the world." See the hesitation there? You like salad? Yeah, the salad bowl of the world, 80% of all the salad you eat comes from Salinas, California. We have 13 different companies under our umbrella at the moment.
• Awesome, thank you for being here.
• Hi, my name is [Name]. I’m the founder of [Company]. Our firm focuses on sourcing and conducting due diligence on differentiated, high-quality alternative investment managers and GP-led co-investments, predominantly for family offices. Prior to [Company], I spent 20 years at a multi-billion-dollar family office as a director. During my tenure there, I probably allocated to an excess of 200 alternative investment managers. My expertise is really as a generalist. I've looked at all strategies, but with a little bit more of a focus on the liquid side—hedge funds, private credit. I’ve done a lot of allocating over my years and look forward to sharing my thoughts.
• Great, thank you.
• Hi, I’m [Name]. I am a co-founder of [Company] Management. We are a national real estate investment trust (REIT) specializing in private credit. We have one strategy—it's simply just real estate private credit.
• Great, thank you for being here.

So, a few of you mentioned an interest in healthcare, venture capital, or maybe hedge funds, etc. But do a couple of you want to share something that’s super specific—like some really small niche within healthcare or venture capital or alternatives that maybe someone here in the room is exactly what you’re looking for in that small niche?

Sure. I can get us started. Specifically, I’m doing a lot of work right now on all things healthcare and biological data. So if you have a company that has some access to a net new data set or has some new way of aggregating, cleaning up, or standardizing the messy world of healthcare data, come talk to me.

• Great, thank you. Anyone else want to add something really specific?
• I want to add, the focus that we have is on food waste. We’re investing in Ag infrastructure, and what that means are cold storage facilities and all the supply chain to make sure that all fresh produce maintains its temperature from field to table.
• Great, thank you.
• Yeah, I can add a few. So within the commercial real estate field, our strategy right now is to focus on the existing access multi-family sector because there are a lot of opportunities you can buy at this account without doing development. So, in the healthcare industry, I’ve been looking at a few companies recently. One is retina imaging technology enhanced by AI, and also in the food sector, allergen-free products for babies. So just a few examples.
• Sure, sure.

So, you're really connected in the real estate space. With where we are with interest rates and inflation and real estate valuations, do you lose sleep being in the real estate space? I know you guys manage over a billion dollars. Just kind of curious about your perspective.

• Yeah, it's a good question. I don't lose sleep. I make other people lose sleep. And I say that because, as a lender, there’s a reason why I’m in private credit. I don’t want to take the risk that equity players take. We’re in the debt space for a very specific reason. I always want to be where I’m in control of the entire capital stack. And being in control of the capital stack—that’s what allows me to sleep very peacefully at night.
• Right. Right. I have a follow-up question on that. I know you’ve spent over 30 years building—a fund backed by Oaktree Capital, Howard Marks is a billionaire, well-known investor and head of Oaktree. Over three decades, we talk about investment structures here in the club and going deep on investment structures. When you spoke at our mastermind, it struck me that you’ve spent over 30 years, probably 1,000+ transactions negotiating and customizing your own proprietary or preferred structures, and it’s come up a few times at the event. Can you comment on the importance of that? Because when I hear Warren Buffett say, "Hey, over 50 years, I’m competing against CEOs and conglomerates. They trade out every four to ten years. Like no one else does this for 50 years," that must give you such a sharp edge on structures, being an attorney as your background. Can you comment a little bit on that?
• Yeah, happy to. Like you said, it’s definitely an evolution over 30 years. When I first started in the real estate business, I never, in a million years, imagined I’d be running a multi-billion-dollar fund. And how did I get there? I started off just doing real estate deals in the Bronx. For the first 10 to 15 years—and I kid you not—I would not do a deal outside of the Bronx. That’s what I knew. That’s where I was comfortable, and that was it. The way I did those deals was I would use my own capital, and then I would participate out the rest of the stack, so to speak, to get that deal fully funded. So, just to keep the numbers easy, if I was doing a $100,000 deal, maybe I’d come up with $20,000 and then participate another $80,000 to get that deal done. That was the amount of deal flow I was doing—maybe $100,000 to $250,000 deals. That lasted for about 10 to 15 years until I started growing and said, "Alright, maybe I’ll do a deal in Brooklyn." For those of you not from New York, doing a deal from the Bronx to Brooklyn might as well be like crossing to a different country. The values are different, the court system is different, and the borrowers are very different. It took that amount of time to figure out how a lot of the borrowers worked. But just to get back to the structure, I realized that participating on each specific deal, even if I was using some financial engineering and leveraging on the back end of a deal, really wasn’t conducive to creating any enterprise value or a fund structure where I could go out and actually get a leverage facility across my entire fund. That eventually led me to set up a fund structure. And I did the typical fund structure, set it up as an LLC with a preferred return and the waterfalls and the 80/20 split—like the usual fund structures. Fast forward, we evolved one more time because we noticed a lot of our investors wanted tax advantages. We restructured the fund into a REIT—Real Estate Investment Trust—and if that wasn’t enough, we realized that even a REIT wasn’t tax-advantageous for all our offshore foreign investors. So, we had to go to Luxembourg, Cayman Islands, and start setting up blockers and feeder funds to make it more tax-advantageous for everyone. It literally took 30 years to come up with the proper structure where we are now, a national REIT with a Cayman Islands blocker fund, and it’s very tax-advantageous for everyone involved.
• Awesome. Appreciate you sharing that. Thank you.

If somebody is trying to approach a billion-dollar-plus family office—whether it's a single-family office or multi-family office—and a lot of people try to do so, what is something you could suggest to them that might cut the time down in half of really understanding what they’re trying to communicate or really to clearly stand out from all the other stuff coming into your inbox? How do they get the attention of someone like yourselves who are representing billion-dollar-plus families?

• Yeah, I think for us, it’s actually easier than most because we’re quite public about it. I post pretty actively, and I speak at events and talk about what themes I’m interested in. So if you’ve done, let’s say, even an hour of research looking me up, you kind of know what I'm interested in and investing in, and if you send me something that's completely out of that wheelhouse, then obviously you haven't done any research, right? So for us, it's actually easier.
  A lot of the family offices are not that public about it, so it might be a little
  bit more difficult. But I think just a strong first email with a blurb about
  exactly what you're doing, I cannot tell you how many times I'm on a pitch meeting and 45 minutes into the meeting, I still don't know what this company does.
  So that's the dead on arrival, right? So just very clear blurb about exactly what the company is doing and attach your deck in a PDF, please. Because the more number of times we have to go back and forth to ask you for preliminary information just creates friction you lose a lot of time people miss emails everybody is busy so just give them what they need to see for to make that initial pass of whether this is in my wheelhouse and I want to take a meeting or not. 

Awesome, yeah, you're so evolved as a single family office compared to others in getting the deals you actually want because you're still on your team, open to speaking publicly, commenting publicly on social media, what you're wanting, being clear that you're interested in healthcare data, healthcare in general, and that's miles beyond most family offices. They feel like if they do anything public, then people are going to find out the family name, but they could create a brand around the family office and hire professionals, and they don't do those things. And some families, I try to tell them, if you want to get better deal flow, especially in a niche, go out there and stay focused on that niche, and they'll say, "Well, we don't only do that. I do that niche, I know that, but you're never gonna see deals first if you don't have any focus, right?"

• Yeah, I think this is generally true in life. Most people operate under the fear of missing out. If I scope it too narrowly, I miss out on all the other stuff, but in my experience, life works actually the other way around. When you set an intention and you are committed to that intention and you are vocal about that intention, you attract people and opportunities that further that intention.
• Right, yeah, for sure, awesome. And by the way, if any questions come up, my team can alert me and we'll bring a microphone over to you.

What about yourself and your experience? You've allocated over 200 different investment managers, some of which might be here in the room or offering a very similar strategy, so what would you suggest for getting the attention of billion-dollar-plus family offices? The connection to the person you're reaching out, obviously, is a big one. You know, LinkedIn would be a great way to see if you share anyone in common and say, "Hey, I know this person." Usually, if you get a call, you're not going to pick up the phone, and you probably won't even call them back just because you just get so many inflow calls. It's just impossible to keep up. You know, it's always great to reach out to that family and say, "What do you focus on?" And they'll say, "Hey, our average ticket's $10 million, and we don't want to be more than 10% of a fund, so you've got to be at least $100 million. You've got to have a three-year track record. And we don't do anything with liquidity worse than quarterly." So immediately, you know what they are and if you can fit.

And then if you do an email, I think it was already kind of really nailed, but you just want to do three points. You know, one is what do you do, your edge, and what makes you different? And then two is your performance. And that's, I don't want to say everything, 'cause, you know, but it's pretty close. You know, have you performed well and ideally over different markets? And then the last one would just be your experience. And then you attach your one-pager, you attach your presentation, but very short email, straight to the point, and that's at least going to get a quick read and most likely a response—that is your best probability for a response.

• Awesome. So if anyone missed that, say very concisely what you do, what is unique about it, what's the edge, and what your performance is. And I'm sure if you could say that in three bullet points or two sentences to cut to the chase and maybe suggest it, maybe have a Dropbox link or some sort of PDF to be able to open up materials real quick. If that email is super short, they're probably better than 90% of emails that get sent to investors. I would guess, based on what you just said. Are you going to add anything to that before I move on?
• No? Okay, that's perfect. Anyone want to say something?
• Yeah, I want to add a little bit. I found that one-pager sometimes is helpful. I receive like 49-page decks that dive very deep into, you know, the terminologies, the biological terminologies can be very hard to digest. But if you can summarize your thing in one page, you know, be concise—what’s your, what’s the problem that you’re solving? And then what’s your solution? What makes you, what differentiates yourself? And how large is the market? I think that would be very helpful.
• Right, sure. Yeah. I know one of our investors took like a 50-page pitch stack and just put it in ChatGPT and said, "Summarize this thing for me," and like seven bullet points, you know? Because I don’t have time to look through this, you know?
• It has become so much easier now with that, and I think if you can't even do that, then that says a lot. I have a talk on YouTube about how to create your pitch deck, and I talk about it shouldn’t be more than 10 to 15 slides, so for someone who’s working on it, if it’s helpful. More intended for companies, not for funds.
• Awesome, yeah, we always say 12 to 19 slides, so super similar compared to the average 44-page deck you see there.

We haven’t heard from you enough, so you own 13 companies in this area. Can you talk about how maybe the niche focus or what strategy led to you having successful negotiations to buy those companies and what led you to be successful in raising the capital needed to acquire them?

• Yes. Why did I buy them? I’m still trying to answer that question. A lot of these companies that we looked at are typically fourth-generation family companies. And what we find is, in our space, especially in the ag space and the Salinas, California area, it’s all family-owned businesses, right? And what we started to identify is the families—many of them did not forget who took the toy away in the sandbox in the third grade. So they had a lot of ego. So the companies started to take distributions, take all the money out of the company.

So we recognized we could come in, offer a fair evaluation, do the blocking and tackling. I think we all know what we mean by that. Do the hard work, start adding value, start having consistent returns, and EBITDA. Get your management team in place, and then you can go out and start telling your story: What problem are you looking to solve, how are you gonna solve it, and don't take all day to tell me how you're gonna get there.

• Right.
• So just be straight, be concise, as I’m not being right at the moment, be very, very, very straight. So then you’ve got to put real accountability in place to hold all of your management team accountable to the matrix, to the overused word, the KPIs. And you’ve got to continue to educate.

We are a strong, strong, strong company in education. 97 % of our employees are
Hispanic. We offer every employee an opportunity. If they do not have a high school education, we will pay for it. If you want to go to college, we will pay for it.
People are getting very concerned about the overused word AI. And I've been in this business over 53 years, and my EI was a slide room, and I thought I was really
high technology, which a HP calculator.

So we have got to remove the fear of the employees that are gonna live their job.
So hopefully that-- - Right, yeah. - Give us some insight. - Thank you, appreciate
that. And you talked about acquiring multifamily properties at a discount. Is there
any niche area you're focused on, like student housing, multi -family, or workforce,
or anything like that? Conventional multi -family. So for example, we were raising
equity, like 400 million equity, for institutional client based in Seattle. So they
already have 3 billion assets across the U .S. So they have been purely focused on
multi -family assets. They own 10 ,000 units. So their most recent transaction was in Arizona, Scottsdale, 117 million purchase price when the seller bought it three years ago. They bought it for 143 million So it's a huge discount and it was brand new.
It was built in to 2021 the reason for the discount was the seller put a three
-year bridge financing back in 2021 So it's matured this May. So with Deutsche Bank 84 million balance, So we financed the debt for a 64 million fixed rate with
Freddie Mac. So there's a delta of 20 million. So you either sell or you need to
cash in refinance, come up with the 20 million delta. So that's why there are a
lot of opportunities come from this situation. Yeah, it makes sense. I read a report
that in 2022, five times as much capital was raised for real estate than 2024 so
far. So if anyone's having trouble raising some capital, you know, there's others out
there as well. The other thing that makes it more challenging, even though if you're
in the business, you have to plant seeds and gain new relationships right now for
later, is just that some families are used to seeing and some investors are used to
seeing like a rescue capital deal coming in to recapitalize the platform or a
distressed asset or hard money lending and the returns are pretty good, and like
John, maybe you're sleeping at night because you're on the debt side of the balance sheet. When you have a traditional deal, sometimes it can be a little bit harder right now at this moment in time because of the families are used to seeing these kind of rescue capital type deals come by has been my experience. Do you have any questions out there in the audience for any of our panelists that you're curious about and would like to get their opinion We had a couple of questions planned for the panel, but I want to make sure you can go down the line and provide like a million dollar insight that you'd love to share at the room or answer as to one of the questions we didn't get to, for example, is there something out of favor right now that you think is coming back soon or something so unpopular that nobody really talks about it and that might mean it's a good time to go in? Actually, like Howard Marks from Oak Tree Capital, he's famous for saying that like when something is unpopular and other people think you're not smart to go into it, is when you can get a good deal. And when they think that it's pure toxic, then sometimes it's the best deal of a generation or of a decade because it's so discounted and unpopular right now. So we could answer one of those questions or just provide your number one insight you wanna leave the room with today that you think could, at least as someone in the room, add $100 ,000 or a million dollars of value to. 

• Yeah, I'm happy to. I just kind of piggybacking off of what you started with respect to where we see opportunity. And again, I'm a real estate investment trust. I'm a fund manager for REIT. So it's obviously very industry specific. And I don't know how many of you out there are in the real estate world, but what we're seeing right now is a maturity wall where a lot of the debt that real estate owners had are now entering maturity and this is creating a tremendous opportunity. Right? I mean, not to give you a real estate lesson, but there's two ways to make money in real estate: it's either net operating income or your market discount rate, and they're both directly linked to interest rates. So think about it—your debt remains exactly the same right now, your rents are the same, your operating expenses are the same, but as interest rates rise, your cap rates also rise, which devalue your real estate. So now you have a maturity wall, you're going to refinance, you are lucky if you're getting 50% of what your debt is today. That is going to create—and we're seeing it, we're seeing it in the industry—it's creating tremendous opportunities for real estate investors because now they were able to go in and either infuse equity because the only way to refinance without getting a new mortgage is to just pay down the loan, obviously, or they're just selling the properties outright. So we see a lot of opportunity there, right?

I think it's really important that one impact what just said is that right now in the last nine months more than the last seven years combined, we've seen investment managers stop distributions, lower distributions, have to recap projects. In some cases, investors get wiped out on projects and some investors, rightfully so, get upset when their money stops producing income for them that they relied upon or get upset when some money is lost or there's a reduction in value. But the whole industry is being impacted by this unless you have long-term fixed 2.9% debt, then that was smart of you to lock that in. But just know that even some of the most honest, hardworking, high integrity managers out there have to do some of these things that John was just talking about. It doesn't mean that they mislead you or mislead you on purpose, etc., as one of the risks, as one of the natural fluctuations in the real estate market is what happens, right?

So, any last comments you'd like to share?

• Yeah, I mean, continuing on the theme of maybe what's out of favor, and on the real estate sector, I don't think it's quite 08-09 opportunity, but within the distressed CNBS space, these bonds have traded off pretty substantially. And there's people out there with specific expertise to really go after that fulcrum security and cram down the equity and the junior debt, and these bonds come along with special servicing rights. So you can go to the special servicers and get an extension on the old debt that was issued three, four years ago at 3%. So I know that a lot of this stuff has been thrown out, maybe with the bathwater, but there is single-name CNBS, where the underlying asset of the CNBS is just one particular property. So you can really do your digging on that and you're not just looking at a portfolio of 20 different properties within the securitization.

Just another big area that I'm a big believer in is just finding niche, uncorrelated managers—just good old-fashioned portfolio construction. You're going to have some things that sell off. You want to have other parts of the portfolio that aren't correlated. So things like appraisal rights, mitigation, finance, California carbon credits, that's a niche beta factoring, just being able to kind of diversify your book portfolio and uncorrelated investments, I think, just creates a more powerful and high-quality return.

• Great, awesome. Yeah, I think a lot of investors who see a lot of deal flow and, like you, have selected a lot of allocations, after a while, if you don't do a good job of what you said and what you said earlier about the unique edge, everything kind of starts to look the same. Like a lot of people email you, it's like I feel like I've read this email like 900 times before, so it's so critical to appeal to people like yourselves that see a lot of deal flow to be super clear on that unique edge, right?
• Awesome. Any last comments you'd like to share with the room? Any big insights?
• In our industry in Salinas, I think I heard a stat earlier with one of the other moderators about how many people were turning 65 years of age—10,000 a day. What we're seeing in our industry, all family-owned businesses, that is occurring. They're not prepared for an estate. As surprising as that may be, they're not surprised, they're not prepared to pass on their companies. So then you go to the real estate side, from the cold storage industrial. Average age in Salinas is 45 years of age. There has been no upgrades in technology. The debt's coming due, as you said. So we see opportunities there to move in from an educational standpoint. So we can help solve your problem by working with your debt. We can help solve your problem by doing some capital investment and bringing some management expertise to our particular area that we know well.
• Right, right, makes a lot of sense. To your point on the debt side, and it being harder to find the last couple years, we acquired about $5 million in real estate. We just did all seller financing, and our LTV is like 23%. Analyst seller financing runs off after three to five years, and we got some of those deals done at the height of the real estate market. Now people are much more negotiable on getting seller financing done because they may need that liquidity for another asset, and it's the only way they can get the deal done sometimes. So I appreciate you bringing that up. It's a time of opportunities as long as Warren Buffett says: when there's a flood, you want to be selling life preservers, not begging somebody to buy one because banks don’t want to lend money when people need it the most. They don’t want to lend money to the people who are so well positioned. They barely even need the money, and Warren says that himself. He doesn’t use high debt, very low debt, and then maybe once every 10, 20, 30 years, they’ll put on a moderate amount of debt, but that's like an emergency action. It's like a cash reserve.
• Any last comments, insights you'd like to share with the room?
• Maybe two aspects. One is stay focused. Using the same example I just mentioned earlier, a client has three decades of experience focused on the same area. That's why when opportunity presents, they can take those opportunities and they did that successfully in '08 for the five years between '08 and '13. They achieved a 53% IRR. That's why they're so confident to use the same strategy right now, even though lower expectations, maybe 20% IRR, but still a similar pattern, right? So you mentioned the stress in commercial real estate. I say, of course, there are stress, but like I mentioned, the crisis for some could be opportunity for the others. And that's number one. And number two, I would say it's lifelong learning—that’s to develop yourself. Like I myself am learning, doing my MBA program at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania. So just to further broaden my view.
• Sure, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. One challenge of running this event with 100+ people on stage is that any one of these people has enough experience to do a two-hour workshop over breakfast or a full-day workshop of everything they've learned. And they're only up here for like a few minutes. But the point is just for you to know who they are, where they're from, what they're focused on, and then you can network with them during lunch and cocktails here in a couple of minutes. And then the favorite speakers from the audience will be back for some of our masterminds, our investor masterminds, and do like a little bit longer to dig deeper into, you know, how to source deals or something of that nature. But do you want to finish us up with the last insight for the audience?
• Yeah, sure. I would say to build off what Regina said, opportunity hides in plain sight. If you don't like waiting for a cab, build an Uber. If you had to drive two miles to go pick a piece of gum, build an Amazon. You had to go wait in the ER for three hours with a broken hand, build a healthcare company, and then come pitch it to me. So, yeah, opportunities everywhere. Just think about your life, your experiences, and reflect on them to derive insights that can change and meaningfully improve those experiences, not only for you, but also for others around you and then have the fortitude to go build something.
• Awesome, appreciate that, thank you. Thank you to everyone here on the panel for sharing their thoughts tonight.
• Join the Family Office Club by visiting familyofficest.com. We look forward to seeing you at our next live event.