(upbeat music) Last panel of the day. So just wanna make sure that we drive it
home. For this panel, we're gonna be talking about investor mandate strategies and
opportunities and just how to navigate the ocean of uncertainty that we're all going
through right now in so many different levels. So if we can just welcome again,
Bill, Jack, Daniel and and we're just going to go really quick from here starting
with Bill, just to give us a two -minute introduction, a little bit more about who
you are and what you're looking for at an event like this and what your ask is.
I'm a specialist in family office, high net worth investment banking, and I'm the
unusual person on this panel, and what I'm usually looking for is a family office
that wants a peer review to help me come in and restructure their private equity or
venture capital. Great. And any type of investment opportunities or industries that
some of the families that you advise that you're looking for or interested in? Say
that again, question. Any industries or opportunities that you're looking for that you
advise some of your families with right now? No, not in particular, but in the 24
years I've been doing this, we have trends, right? And, you know,
for the Northeast for the last 25 years, I love those guys on Wall Street.
I'm not a big fan of real estate. And if I'm west of the Rockies, I love real
estate or a business and I don't like those Wall Street guys. My job is usually to
come in and talk to all of you who have done really well and talk you out of
what has made you a lot of money. I have the toughest job in America, it's called
diversification. And sometimes it goes well, and other times not so well. The trends
are obvious, Bitcoin and other. And almost everyone has some sort of real estate.
I don't care whether it's 2 /3, 1 /3, or 1 /3, 2 /3. I try and come in and add
value by observing objectively. Even if you have great managers, some ideas, and add
value by trying to get them. I have a big ability to weave webs to source to
whatever they need. Sounds great. Thank you so much. About $2 billion under
management, primarily focused on real estate, although we like hospitality. We also
are investing in ancillary businesses that go along with our platform. So what is
that? PropTech, FinTech, AI plays. As long as it can benefit us. I'm always open to
conversations. Sometimes it could be even a retail play in the tenant could fit into
one of our communities. So I love ideas. And I think one of the big things is to
be surprised. I like having conversations where it's something new, something I
haven't thought of. And I think you know, we're in the business of listening. It's
very important to us. I agree. And anything in particular that you're looking for
right now? Well, again, I'm looking to be surprised. I think that's generally, I
think this we're in probably the my mind, you know, and that's part of this today
is this is the I think the greatest opportunity for investors right now that I've
seen in my life. And I think, you know, distress, which there is a lot of chaos
is all time for very smart people to make a lot of money. So us in real estate
right now as a family office, we're seeing our greatest deals that five years ago,
we thought could never happen. And that's for land, that's existing assets. There's a
lot of capital that's sitting out there, a lot of liquidity. And I think for folks
to understand that this is a time where you should be out there, 'cause this will
change. And I think the chaos will go away,
things will get a lot know, from a perception standpoint. But I think this is the
time to strike, at least for us. That's exciting. That's exciting. We manage a $2
billion portfolio primarily of real estate. We're looking for multifamily residential
and commercial real estate investment opportunities. And we also manage an affiliated
venture capital group called Gurukul Ventures. We invest primarily in seed and series
A technology opportunities. I previously served as CFO for Anthos Capital,
which is a traditional private equity group in San Monica, about three and a half
billion in assets under management. And before that, I managed corporate development
for Gene Pritzker's family office. And what type of technology are you looking at
right now that's exciting? Previously, we've mostly invested in software opportunities.
We are very enthusiastic about AI opportunities at the moment and we are also very
interested in energy storage opportunities as well, which I know is a big thing out
here in Hawaii. Yeah, and that's something I definitely want to touch on later in
the panel. I know there's been a lot of conversations on AI and kind of the
infrastructure behind it, but there needs to be energy to back it. So I would love
to see what are some of those alternatives and energy that you guys are seeing to
kind of fuel the infrastructure of AI. And I created a AI for AI brokers.
That's document management for lenders and family offices.
I'm looking to collaborate with anyone who is processing more than 20 deals per
month, especially targeting high volume to reduce the cost for 85 % and increasing 5x
as I did or my own family office. - Sounds great. And just this question goes for
the whole panel. On top of your mind, as you look at your portfolio, is there any
particular deal that comes to mind that you've utilized creative deal structures? So
as a joint venture, as a co -GP, I know Richard really likes revenue sharing
opportunities.
Any ideas come to mind or recent deals you guys have done with creative deal
structures? - Yeah, - Yeah, in fact, I was talking with Richard actually set me up
with some really great meetings today. So thank you. And one of them we were
talking about, just happened to talk about an investment we made into a company
called Chicken and Pickle. I don't know if anyone's familiar here, it's a pickleball
play. We had a lot of land, actually hatched at something where I was scuba diving,
myself and the founder started talking, he liked pickleball. I had land.
This was a long time ago now. And so we hatch this idea of doing chicken and
pickle. We had the capital on the land. What's made it successful is a non
-traditional revenue sharing model. So we have the land already, instead of taking a
tremendous amount of rent, we share in the revenue. And we also do reverse built
suit as well. So we're now at 20 locations nationwide.
And that started from a very different model of how we looked at the deal. But I
will say, and this is something people have been talking about today is, you know,
you always have to be listening and I haven't been scuba diving. And we just struck
up this conversation and pickleball. And then I said, what do you do? Well, you
know, I have a lot of land and we're acquiring land all over the country. So do
you have a piece of land, you know, in North Kansas City? Because I have this idea
that I've been tossing around, you know, for pickleball. And this, again, is pre
-COVID. Pickleball wasn't as hot as it was as it is now. And that's where that all
started. And if I hadn't been listening to someone who was next to me talking about
pickleball and so on, we would have never had that relationship. But again,
you know, we don't have a one size fits all to how we approach deals. We look at
everyone completely different. So if you stacked up the 30 deals we've done so far
this year, none of them are the same at all. And I think that's important,
that creativity is so important. - Yeah, it's very situational and it sounds like a
perfect example of a win -win situation, but first you were building the relationship
while scuba diving and that's very important. Any other creative deals that you guys
have done recently? - All my businesses are creative. I buy retiring businesses and
usually I buy them for free just because kids doesn't want to take it over. And
this is why I build the GPS for life where we teach next gens how to learn,
take over, run family business. It's very crucial.
Yeah. Jimmy, if I might add, from the Wall street side as an institutional portfolio
manager for many years. Um, I'm really passionate about one thing right now,
which is probably sort of simple compared to this conversation. And that's that,
uh, most, uh, foundations and private clients are under allocated to alternative
investments. The national association of college and university business officers,
Google analyzes through a survey with 3 ,000 foundations and endowments every year,
what should your asset allocation be? Twenty years ago, it was 70 /30 stocks to
bonds. Today, it is 53 % stocks, 26 % in alts,
and 21 % in bonds, and I no longer speak publicly to large audiences about stocks
and bonds. I speak about stocks and alts with a little bit of bonds. Now, in the
case of foundations, if you look at that survey, they have less than 1 % allocated
to alternative investments at 25 million. Well, why is that? Because the 1940 Act,
Regulation D, will not allow them to add alts until they have 25 million, but there
are liquid alts that they could use that they are completely unaware of and are not
advised to use. If you look at the one billion foundations,
they are more than 35 % in alts. Now, on Wall Street, almost every house is limited
to 25 % maximum alts to the value of the estate, not value of the liquid portfolio,
but value of the estate. For those that I speak with over 50 million, they're
unconstrained, And many of them are 75 % in private equity or alts.
In 2021, I was interviewed in Family Office Magazine and they said, what are the
hot trends in family offices? And I said, well, look, family offices don't like
manage money. If it's grads, clats, or foundations, okay, for tax reasons they manage
money, but they like real estate, businesses, private equity, and to a lesser degree
the last three years venture capital, which makes it hard on all these startups in
the room. But you're in the right place, you know, I smell and you can tell that
the market's going to turn. So keep at it. But also, you know,
if I were to ask everybody in the room, how much lending is done by banks in the
United States?
20%. 80 % is now it. So 80 % of the money in the United States is outside of
banks and stocks and bonds, which is why we're all in this room right now. That
would be one of the things I might share. That's a great point. And, you know, by
coming to these events for almost three years now, and just kind of observing and
learning from family offices, I've noticed that there really are just three main
buckets to all the decisions that they make when it comes to investments. The first
one is real estate, the second one is operating cash flowing businesses, and then
the third one is IP. And you can pretty much put everything into those three
buckets, which I find very fascinating that Bill kind of touched into that as well.