Well, hello and thank you for being here. I've been excited about this panel since
it was announced this in the last one I think it's pretty interesting that the
alternative allocation family office out you just in general I think the UBS report
showed that Alternatives what used to be a 6040 split, traditional equities and bonds
is now something close to, I think it's 40 % alts and 60 % traditional asset
management. And that alternative side is really growing because that's where a lot of
people are seeing yield or looking for yield or finding alpha. We have a great
panel here today. Dan, I was actually going to kind of start with you because of,
even though you might have more of a traditional asset management side, your hedging
technologies or your algos kind of help manage from a traditional side risk,
downside risk. Would you say that's right? Yeah. And so maybe we could start by,
if you don't mind starting and then we can kind of go down the list and we can
talk, maybe a quick introduction for two minutes and Now, we'll go into kind of
panel questions, if that makes sense. Great.
You can start, Gideon, let's find her. Or Dan, either way, let's start, yeah. - So
a little something different that you don't know already about me is something that
you can probably all relate to as it relates to growing up and in your work.
Looking for pain points opportunities and trends and so a little bit about my
background when I was just 13 both of my brothers had applied for Stanford and
didn't get in there's a pain point and so I made a determined goal that I was
gonna do whatever it took to then get into Stanford and when I first graduated in
1987 and entered into the investment world, the month before the crash of '87,
there was some serious pain points there. And then by the time we got to the 2001
tech bubble crash, which is the worst crash since the Great Depression, there was
enough pain that then determined at that point that we were gonna come up with the
opposite, that we were gonna be dedicated to coming up with advance and protect
strategies that could then provide peace of mind and confidence and security instead
of the opposite of what we saw in '87 and 2001, people committing suicide over
their losses. And then again in the late 2010s when we were looking at our overall
portfolios nationwide, we found that the one firm that was providing the research
that allowed us to have the greatest returns of any of our portfolios was 74 years
of age and he was spending 16 hours a day, six to seven days a week getting the
information into his spreadsheets, incredibly inefficient.
So pain points, certainly it was there, but there was opportunities because of
inefficiencies there. And so that then allowed us to then decide to buy the global
leader in the tactic glass allocation area. Nice,
great. Mark, of course you have a very interesting alternative asset in that it
works with both art and precious metals. Do you want to take a minute there and
make an introduction, Mark?
Michael, sorry, forgive me. - I thought he was Mark. - Yeah, forgive me, Michael. - I
thought I might be Mark too, I wasn't sure.
Well, I didn't get into
(audience laughing) with my brother Daniel, but I do come from Precious Metals.
The last 20 years been serving as chief executive officer for a mining company,
doing gold, silver, and platinum group metals. And then since 1998,
I've been involved with fine art, mostly of guilliary art doing auctions around the
country, hundreds of donated live auctions helping charities,
and we quit counting at $50 million, raising money for great causes that we believed
in. And so in those last six years, it's been interesting because for the first
time, And mostly, since the trip to Florence, as many of you know, we went,
we have been able to combine precious metals with fine art.
And that will be actually available in a fractionalized art fund or art collection
that we're going to be announcing and keep us gain, obviously, with this family
reunion. So, this alternative asset class with the help of Dan Pinkerton is probably
the most exciting thing I've ever done. That's great. And on the cannabis side, you
want to talk quickly, you know, yesterday's presentation I thought was fantastic. It
made such a compelling case. For cannabis is an alternative investment. Maybe give a
quick introduction and we can kind of go from there as well. - Yeah, so my name's
Todd Sullivan. I'm the president of Canterbury Partners. We are a Massachusetts -based
cannabis holding company, but at our heart, we're value investors. We've made a
series of acquisitions over the last two years that, what we believe is the market
lows in cannabis, probably for the rest of eternity, they're just gonna go up from
here. And happy to go into a while later. - Did you say, forgive me, I thought I
heard this and I think it's an amazing stat that among Gen Z and 4, it's basically
they use cannabis more than, cannabis consumption exceeds alcohol consumption. - Yeah,
Gen Z and Millennium. - That's amazing. - That are the largest demographic in the U
.S. right now. They consume more cannabis per capita than alcohol. There's a reason
every alcohol company of any significance out there is getting into cannabis beverages
in the cannabis industry because the long -term demographics of this country are lower
alcohol sales and significantly higher cannabis sales. So we're basically value
investors at heart. We've made a series of acquisitions over the last four years,
the last two years, I'm sorry, that will grow our revenue from $3 million last year
to $18 million this year. And there's more on the horizon. So on the investment
side. I do believe that this is, you know, people talk about generational lows,
but there are significant federal policies being changed in December that are going
to be a significant boost to the entire industry, not just my company, but the
entire industry, and that they're very, very positive. Tom, do you want to discuss
your opportunity? Yeah. I love following the cannabis part.
I have kids recently from college and it was always interesting to see my wife and
I get our heads around the level of cannabis consumption and the fact they don't
drink alcohol at all. Are you guys looking at psilocybin too? So in Massachusetts
right now the psilocybin is not legalized. Vermont it is state by state. But I do
believe there's tremendous potential for psilocybin. I think it'll be, that'll be
pharmaceuticalized prior to cannabis, because you can dial in the effects on people
much better than you can with cannabis. - Thank you. I'm Tom Stevens, I'm CEO and
co -founder of Tombot. We make robotic pets for people who cannot have pets.
My background is I've been in the high tech industry for about 30 years. My two
tombot co -founders and I built a prior start -up into one of the world's largest
litigation automation companies we were successfully acquired. Unfortunately that same
year my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's dementia and of the many difficult
decisions I had to make on her behalf, by far the worst was having to take away
her dog for safety reasons. I looked around for substitutes for live animal
companions but she hated everything that I brought home and I realized there was a
very large gap in the market. That launched me on a multi -year research and
education journey which culminated a master's degree from Stanford. I did not get in
as an undergrad.
And I learned through that experience that there are over 300 million seniors with
dementia or pre -dementia, mild cognitive impairment and about half of the world's
population that does not own live animals for reasons including health adversity,
cost, burden of care, and living restrictions. And so we launched TomBot to be in
service to those people. Our first robot to the market is what we believe to be
the world's most realistic robotic puppy. It is designed to treat the behavioral and
psychological symptoms of dementia, reducing the need for psychotropic medications. It
will be the first to be both an FDA medical device and a remote safety and health
monitoring platform. - Wow.
Can you describe just quickly, are you approaching it from an AI standpoint? - So AI
is used as a tool for getting the robot to behave more realistically.
Happy to dig to the details, but you can't really do this work without sophisticated
software programming algorithms and AI is among the tools we employ. - All right.
Hi, do you want, please make an introduction, if you don't mind, Michael. - Yeah.
Michael Tanner, I'm with Trevino Resources. We're a small family office and an asset
management company. Based in the great state of Texas, we focus on acquisitions in
the oil and gas sector. We've basically, for the past, I would say, 20 years
focused on just deploying the Trivino family capital. Recently, we've opened up our
own asset management company to kind of invest our own assets alongside other
institutional and retail investors. This will be the third year now. We've had kind
of opportunities open to both those type of people. It's been going really well.
We're mainly focused on operated and some operated assets in the kind of the North
Texas area. Our current project right now is actually just about to go full cycle,
which is super interesting. And, no, just really excited to be here. I think, you
know, from an alternative investment standpoint, I think, you know, oil and gas
definitely I think gets overlooked in a lot of that stuff. I think there's
especially kind of where it sits within kind of the real estate space, the arbitrage
we're seeing right now between kind of where rates are and how that doesn't
necessarily affect oil and gas, but no, just happy to talk about it. That's great.
And Gideon, I'll have you clean up, I guess. Do you want to? Yeah,
sure. I'd be happy to introduce myself. I'm Gideon Pfeffer. I'm with Charge Capital
Partners. It's a venture that I'm a partner in. I've got a real estate background.
I've got a large portfolio of multifamily communities across the country, and I'm
super excited about the energy space.
The current energy demand is like 150 percent of the actual capacity of our grid
across the United States, and it's been less than 10 years that individuals or
companies can actually harness that energy and store it and then sell it back as a
profit. So Charge Capital Partners basically buys energy when it's cheap off -peak and
sells it right back, you know when it's more expensive, so It's pretty niche, but
it's it's it's a part of a a sector. That's Incredibly There's an incredible amount
of potential over the coming decades. Is that through battery storage or how do you
battery energy storage systems? It's great and that's an area where family offices,
especially the larger larger family offices investing more on the energy infrastructure
side, are you seeing that? Is that? Yeah, you know, so larger institutional capital
and family offices are racing to be able to control as much storage capacity as
they can. One of the problems that they're facing is that based on the size of the
capacity that they want to create or the interconnection that it takes, Often it
takes two to four to five years to get these battery storage systems up and
running. Back in my early real estate days, I would buy hundreds of single family
homes at a time and aggregate them together and sell them to institutional capital
that wanted packages of homes. And that's basically what Charged Capital is doing
now. We are able to connect the grid within three to six months in smaller capacity
storage systems and then we aggregate them together and sell them to those large
capital groups that want larger capacity. Great. Thank you.