(upbeat music) Welcome to the Family Office podcast where we bring you exclusive
insights from top investors, billionaires, and family offices shaping the future of
private investing. In this special Beverly Hills Super Summit series, you'll hear live
conversations straight from the stage, exploring how the most successful investors
source exclusive deals, build trusted relationships, and create lasting value. This
episode kicks off with what top investors are looking for in deals and the partners
they trust. Let's dive in and enjoy the series. For the next several months, we'll
be releasing three new episodes each week. Packed with insights, you won't want to
miss. - I was always, I want to start with thanking Richard very,
very much for putting this event on. These are just amazing, just like what Michael
Scott said before, these are life -changing events for a lot of us. Yes, so This is
the first panel of the day here, supercharging your investment opportunity set, how
to seal deals that nobody else gets to see. So this panel is going to be very
valuable for both investors and sponsors. It's going to be valuable for investors
because a lot of us have massive deal flow, which means we have a lot of quantity,
and we really want to see what kind of quantity, especially those that people don't
get to see very often. And for sponsors, you might pick up some pointers on how to
get to the front of the line. My name is Mark Halpern from DeepDueDiligence
Investors. Richard mentioned it earlier today. We are an investor group made up of a
lot of analytical investors, credit investors. And what we do is we maximize our
returns and minimize our risk by performing DeepDueDiligence. So what we're going to
do first is we're going to get to know the panel a little bit. And you can keep
it down to about 90 seconds or so, just introduce yourselves, you know, background
of what you guys are doing. Sir, for Impex Capital Group, which is a single family
office based in Houston, Texas, we manage a $2 billion portfolio and primarily focus
on real estate opportunities, but we do have an affiliate adventure capital group
called Gurukul Ventures, and we've invested in quite a nice range of early stage
technology companies as well. Third generation Italian -American get in dual citizenship
to go back and live both places. My father had some success with a company called
Telzon. We were the global leader in handheld barcode readers. And then I spun that
into a dual family, multiple private equity firm strategy. We've deployed about three
and a half billion. We've done some large deals like Nashville Yards, you might have
heard of, the biggest development deal in Tennessee history. We're currently the
largest player in manufactured housing in the country, creating a new Class A model
to try to bring back the American dream with massive holdings in Dallas and Houston.
We're looking for distressed assets. We're looking for multifamily, low -cost housing.
We think, like the centimillionaires said, this window we all have before we're
slaves and ownership class is shrinking and fast and we think we have a window
here. So we're open to anything that has a distressed nature. We can get into it
below market value.
Aloha. Jack and I are excited to be here today. We work for separate companies, but
we come from the same place. I told him he's got to wear a Hawaiian shirt next
time.
I'm a serial entrepreneur turned investor, a company I started in 2013 called
Tereslate, makes waterproof paper that you guys have all held within the last few
days inevitably. It's in everything from the restaurant menus at the restaurants all
around you to the nuclear submarine escape pod manuals. We're excited to have done a
deal with SpaceX yesterday. I am also the founder and chairman of windward equity.
We are a singular family office, primarily doing deals with companies at the $2
million to $10 million EBITDA range. And we specialize in deploying an AI tool set
through a company we invested in called Cube Dynamics, which can typically double a
company's revenue within 18 months by automating significant parts of the businesses.
And what I love about that is that you don't have to spend a lot of money to
double the size of a business. So anytime I invest, I want to get involved and get
the CEO or the founder out of the day -to -day operations. I don't want them working
in the business. I want them working on the business. And that's immediately how
we're going to scale and leverage. I come out of the Nathan family office.
We built a private index fund for alternative and emerging assets. We have one of
the largest investment portfolios of venture capital, probably in the world. Nathan
Family Office prior to this was a pure real estate group when we decided that we
wanted to get a little bit less real estate and a little bit more, everything else
that's out there. So yeah, I'm looking forward to digging in today. - Okay, very
good. So you can see we have a great panel here, people with a lot of experience
and great perspectives. So before we go on to the question that I'm dying to hear
the answer about how you guys find deals that other people can get access to, if
you just stick each one of you can just maybe talk a little bit about what kind
of deals you're looking for, kind of service providers. I mean, part of what we do
here, we have a lot of sponsors out in the audience who are pitching things. So
what are you guys looking for in terms of opportunities, but any service providers
that you're looking for. I'm happy to kick things off at IMPECs.
On the real estate side, we're primarily looking for multifamily residential or
commercial opportunities that are in the roughly 10 to 50 million dollar range.
That's our typical transaction side. On Gurukul Ventures, we do work with a lot of
earlier stage technology companies. So we are generally looking for companies that
have revenue already, but they don't necessarily have to be profitable. We're often
coming in at the angel investment stage or the series A stage. And we are pretty
open to ideas that are disruptive and people that are looking to rapidly gain market
share by challenging existing business structures we've done about 75 deals we think
networking and people are the most important component every group up here is talking
about minusing the humans so I think your network is going to be very important
when you compute against the computers and robots I I think we like hard assets
stuff below replacement values, good sponsors, taking people from, you know,
here to cash flow, providing a creative capital solutions that the market does at
most very rich families and very large firms, they sit up here and they don't
really dig in the trenches. They're too good. They're too good to come to stuff
like this, most of them. So we dig in the trenches and try to create value and
then, you know, before we take it to the investors.
- Yeah, at Windward Equity, like I said, we're looking for businesses with $2 to $10
million of EBITDA post -revenue, of course. And what we want are what I like to
describe as founders with grit. I loved what Michael Scott said earlier, the founder
that you could drop out of a helicopter in any place in the world, they're gonna
figure out how to bring value and make wealth. Those are the type of founder -led
companies that I like to invest in and I like to be a part of. What I find is
that the people that start companies like that can do is they can leverage just
about any product in any industry and make it successful. What I wanna do is
provide our operational playbook, our system and tools, our tech stack and our AI
that can really grow their company and focus on the difference between growth and
scale. Now growth is when your revenue and your costs increase at the same rate.
Scale is when you disconnect the two and your top line grows faster than your
expenses. So that's what I'm looking for. So if you have a great deal, please grab
me at lunch. So before we went down the private index road, when I say a private
index fund, all of the money is from our family office. We started with early -stage
pre -seed venture capital. We liked that a lot. We liked the Y Combinator model, and
we thought we'd play on that. And then we layered in some public market options and
warrants on top of that, and then we layered in some private equity on top of
that, and then we layered in emerging markets. So for us, it was like always, we
start very, very early, and then we take our babies all the way through, as long
as they're hitting the scale that Kyle is talking about. In the world of venture
capital, there's two types of companies, right? There's a company that's growing and
they're doing fine, and then there's a venture -backable -based company. Venture
-backable -based companies are companies that have the potential of doing 100 % to 200
% growth every single year with a market size of like 5 million plus a month.
That's what we look for. We know that if we can find those companies, they do
well. Anyone who's heard me on panels before, they know I love India. India, I
think, is to be one of the most exciting markets in the world in the future. So
anything very early stage tech, really strong founders to cause point, people who can
execute rather than just talk. And I suppose I'll just layer in on the real estate
side, it's a multi -billion dollar asset of the family office, one of them is a
small town, maybe a large town outside San Francisco that we own, and then tons of
other RV parks and then just the usual stuff that everybody has in real estate.