Alt Goes Mainstream: The Latest on Alternative Investments, WealthTech, & Private Markets

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.On today’s show, we have a private equity expert who is as thoughtful and sharp as they come.Graham Elton is the Chairman of Bain & Company’s EMEA Private Equity practice, where he’s helped many of the largest PE and alts firms navigate a growing market and build successful businesses.Graham has also spearheaded the industry standard in reports — the Bain PE Practice Report — which is read by many across the industry.Many of the world’s largest GPs often turn to Graham for advice on their business due to his background as an operator, investor, and strategic consultant. He previously ran multiple media businesses – he was the CEO at Miller Freeman UK, was a MD at The Financial Times  Business, a strategy director at Pearson, and a Partner at Evolution Global Partners.He serves on a number of boards, including Lane Clark & Peacock, Pageant Media, Capital Economics, SLR Consulting, and Now Teach and National Youth Centre.He was awarded a MBE for his services to the economy in the Queen’s 2020 Birthday Honours List.Graham and I had a fascinating conversation about the evolution of private equity - and what the growth of the industry has meant for GPs and LPs alike. We discussed:How the $3.7 trillion in dry powder in private equity will get put to work.The business of private equity and how funds have evolved into platforms.How the growing size of PE has paved way for the opening up of the retail channel for fundraising.What the future of private equity looks like.The narrowing differences between public and private markets.Thanks Graham for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to share your wisdom.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.We have a special episode today – it’s a collaboration between Alt Goes Mainstream and Venture Unlocked: Samir Kaji, the Co-Founder & CEO of Allocate and the Venture Unlocked Podcast, and I have a back and forth discussion about the future of private markets and venture. If you are an allocator to private markets or a VC fund manager, you won’t want to miss this.Samir co-founded Allocate to enable the wealth management community to be able to access high quality venture funds in the same way institutions have for years.He draws upon a background of 22 years in venture banking at First Republic and SVB, where he worked closely with and advised over 700 venture capital and private equity firms. He completed over $12B in structured debt transactions and has invested in a number of funds and companies.Samir completed the Kauffman Fellows venture program and is an active writer and podcaster with Venture Unlocked.We cover:Where is venture now and what the future looks like.Alpha vs. Beta in venture.Why VC should be included in many investors’ allocations.How LPs can approach venture in this dynamic market.How VC funds have turned into platforms, much like private equity, and what this means for the industry. Note that the podcast was recorded before the Silicon Valley Bank news, so we did not cover the topic of the banking system and its impacts on the venture ecosystem on this show.Thanks Samir for collaborating to have a rich conversation on the complexities of venture capital and the current environment. 

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.On today’s podcast, we have an expert in alternative assets and fund accounting. We welcome Gareth Hewitt, a fund accounting veteran and co-founder of LemonEdge, to the show.Gareth is the CEO and Co-Founder of LemonEdge, where they are building a better, more efficient fund accounting software platform.With backing from Blackstone, Lauren Iaslovits, the founder of pioneering fund accounting software Investran (acq by SunGard), Sidekick Partners, and others deep in the PE and alts world, Gareth has been building a next generation fund accounting solution for GPs, fund admins, and investment platforms.LemonEdge’s solution has a modern core infrastructure, full multi-currency partnership accounting, system-aware fund structures and integrated waterfall technology. They've built a platform that is already used by a number of the industry's largest GPs and asset managers.Gareth is an expert in alternative assets — he was Head of UK Product Development & Sales for eFront, a unicorn focused on software for alternative investment funds, which sold to BlackRock and he then founded and ran a fund solutions business.Gareth and I had a fascinating conversation about private markets. We discussed: Why innovation in fund accounting is so critical to the evolution of private marketsHow LemonEdge is on the cutting edge of the transformation in fund accounting.How to take a problem that’s historically been solved by spreadsheets to a low code / no code platform.How the fund accounting space can be digitized and customized.When and how strategic investors can be valuable in the alts space.Thanks Gareth for coming on the show to share your wisdom and experience in private markets and let everyone know about the exciting business you’re building at LemonEdge. 

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.Today’s episode of Alt Goes Mainstream features someone who is building a vertical SaaS solution for fund managers and LPs.Today’s guest is Michel Geolier, the Co-Founder and CEO of Betterfront, a b2b vertical SaaS company dedicated to private markets. He’s building a comprehensive solution to enable fund managers to more efficiently and effectively fundraise trade secondary market fund interests.Betterfront’s mission is to transform the way alternative fund managers engage, win, and retain investor by using technology, data, and analytics. Betterfront is already trusted by a number of top European VCs, including Cherry Ventures, Partech, Episode 1, and more.Michel comes at the problem of fundraising with a very unique perspective. He was previously on the LP side, where he led due diligence and fund manager selection for the Siemens’ pension fund in Germany. And he started Betterfront out of frustration for poor solutions for analyzing alternative investment funds.Michel and I had a thought-provoking conversation about the current challenges that GPs have with fundraising and how Betterfront was built to provide better solutions for GPs. We discussed how much of private markets technology is ripe for disruption and why it’s historically been difficult to build modern specialized software for private markets. We then look to the future about how Michel believes that the placement agent and secondaries businesses can be disrupted with technology and data.Thanks Michel for coming on the AGM podcast. We hope you enjoy.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast and Welcome to Wrexham.On today’s show, we go to Wrexham, the town in North Wales that has become a football (soccer) mecca due to a blend of its rich history as home to the 3rd oldest club in the world and a recent injection of Hollywood with Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buying the club.We talk with Shaun Harvey, the Advisor to the Board at Wrexham AFC, and a highly experienced football club and league CEO to discuss how teams can have success on and off the pitch.Shaun is the CEO of Wantaway Limited, where he advises football clubs, organizing bodies, and companies on all things related to the business of football. His current clients include Wrexham AFC, FIFA, Inner Circle Sports, and Macron.He’s taken his experiences as the MD at Bradford City FC, which he led to Premier League promotion, the CEO at Leeds United, and the CEO of the English Football League to Wrexham AFC, where he and the team are working to secure promotion back into the Football League and bringing a successful club back to the town of Wrexham.And they are well on their way to building a global brand in a number of respects – they are performing well on the pitch, they have created a show, Welcome to Wrexham, that has been a hit on Hulu, and their recent FA Cup home match vs Sheffield United was the most followed soccer game across ESPN’s website and digital platforms in the US.Shaun and I had a fascinating discussion. We talked about:How clubs balance on the field performance and off the field business success in a world where the evolution of entertainment and social media have turbocharged the concept of monetizing engagement.How important it is to think about the community when investing in a sports teamWhy Shaun believes “the Wrexham effect” has been a huge driver of success for their club.How lifting up a club financially and on the pitch can create tremendous economic and social benefits for the town that they play in.Thanks Shaun for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to welcome us to Wrexham - and share why this is such an exciting and impactful project that we can all learn from.It’s always sunny in Wrexham.Thanks Steve Horowitz at Inner Circle Sports for the kind introduction to Shaun to make this episode possible.

On the latest episode of Alt Goes Mainstream, we talk with one of the pioneers of the online investment space.Today’s guest is Ben Miller, the Co-Founder and CEO of Fundrise, America’s largest direct-to-investor alternatives investment manager.Ben has tremendous experience and expertise in both the real estate space and in building innovative alternative investment technology solutions. Prior to founding Fundrise, Ben was a Managing Partner of WestMill Capital Partners and President of Western Development Corporation, where he was responsible for acquiring, developing, and financing more than $500M worth of property.In Fundrise, Ben has built a company whose aim is to use technology to build a better financial system for the individual investor, which is simpler, lower cost, more reliable, and transparent. They build software that enables the company to develop and manage investments uniquely well-positioned to grow and preserve their clients’ capital in any economic environment.Since launching America’s first online real estate investment platform in 2012, Fundrise has now become one of the largest direct-to-investor alternatives investment managers with more than 1.6 million active users, more than $3.3B of equity under management, and $7B of real estate transacted. From private credit to real estate private equity to growth-stage venture capital, Fundrise offers investors exposure to various asset classes.Ben and I had a fascinating conversation. We discussed:Fundrise’s evolution from real estate to broad based alternatives investment manager and how they got there. The evolution of the real estate market and current investment opportunities in real estate. The importance of technology in building a more efficient and low cost way for investors to access alternatives and how Fundrise has focused on this to grow their platform.Thanks Ben for coming on the AGM podcast to share your views. We hope you enjoy.

We have an exciting episode today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.We are joined by Mathias Pastor, the Co-Founder of Semper, a London and Paris based company that uses liquidity to align the interests of private companies, employees and investors.Mathias and his co-founder Balthazar de Lavergne created Semper after observing that private companies are staying private longer and employees and founders need ways to unlock liquidity in a systematic, recurring way. Working at The Family, a European VC fund, Mathias saw that employees at some of their largest and fastest growing companies were paper-rich, but didn’t have the liquidity that reflected the value of their shares.Mathias and Balthazar have created a liquidity financing platform to help fast-growing private companies run recurring, end-to-end secondary transactions. They believe this can enable teams to retain talent while enabling investors to access high-quality private companies.Mathias and I had a fascinating conversation about how and why they have started with liquidity solutions for private companies, how they are approaching secondary market liquidity for both companies and investors, why recurring liquidity programs make sense for companies and employees, how employee retention for companies can be an important feature of private secondary transactions, what is beyond secondary market liquidity for a platform like Semper, and why Europe is an interesting place to start.Thanks Mathias for coming on the AGM podcast to share your insightful views on private markets.

Henry Ward, CEO and co-founder of Carta, discusses building a category-defining company for private markets, being a 'plate spinning company' with network effects, and the future of private market liquidity. They also explore the concept of equity ownership, the impact of data on private markets, and the importance of building an ethos of equity ownership.

We believe that good things come in bunches. On the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast, we’ve covered a number of innovative ways in which more investors are now able to access alternative investments thanks to innovation in infrastructure that pools investors together.Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast, we are lucky enough to peer into a market that’s creating a bunch of excitement: the early stage venture market in Europe.Levent Altunel and Enrico Ohnemuller are a big part of making alts go mainstream in Europe with their company, Bunch.In Bunch, Levent and Enrico are building the operating system for private markets investing. They’ve brought their fantastic and relevant backgrounds to bear – Levent as a Citi alum and VC investor at Paua Ventures and Enrico as a Goldman alum and a builder at FinLeap, building critical core banking and payments infrastructure – that will enable them to unlock the private markets for more investors and make these markets more efficient.Levent and Enrico have quickly figured out how to build the critical infrastructure for private markets in Europe while navigating a complex regulatory landscape and multiple jurisdictions. They’ve built compliant, regulated end-to-end infrastructure to help founders roll up smaller investors and angels and help VCs and angels to efficiently and seamlessly raise capital and manage SPVs.They are coming off a recent 7M EUR seed round led by Cherry Ventures and have already grown in leaps and bounds at a time when alts are going mainstream in Europe.Levent, Enrico, and I had a fascinating conversation. We discussed: Why they believe SPVs are the atomic unit of value for private markets.How the seedification and decentralization of private markets has created the need for better private markets infrastructure.Why they are creating the “Clean Cap Table Club.”How SPVs can help investors build a track record to launch their fund. How there are very big businesses to be built in the alts space.Levent and Enrico share a very thoughtful, nuanced view into the importance of private markets infrastructure so any investor and founder will enjoy hearing their wisdom.Thanks Levent and Enrico for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to share your wisdom about private markets. Good things really do come in bunches. 

Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast, we have the third podcast in a special three part series with some of the titans in the alts world.We are partnering with CAIA, the leading global professional body in alternative investment credentialing programs, for a very special episode that dovetails with the release of their latest report on Renewed Professionalism and creating client centered outcomes for the Portfolio of the Future.We are lucky enough to have Jenny Johnson, the CEO of Franklin Templeton, one of the world’s largest asset managers with over $1.5T AUM spread across a number of specialist managers.Jenny and I had a fascinating conversation: About the evolution of the asset management industry.How companies can be considered nation-states.How to distribute alternatives to all investors in a responsible way, which is a particularly interesting perspective given that Franklin Templeton has over 25% of its $1.5T AUM in alternative assets.Why net of fees is the most important question in the fee question debate.Why now is a great time to be building in the crypto space (note: this episode was recorded prior to the recent crypto news).Jenny is the President and CEO of Franklin Templeton. She joined the firm in 1988 and held leadership roles in all major divisions of the business before becoming CEO in February 2020. She led the historic $6.5 billion acquisition of Legg Mason in 2020 and has been named to Barron’s list of the 100 Most Influential Women in US Finance.Jenny has been instrumental in building Franklin Templeton into a firm that serves clients across asset classes and has over 25% of its $1.5T AUM in alternative assets. Jenny spearheaded Franklin Templeton’s acquisitions in the alts space, including the $1.75B acquisition of secondaries PE firm Lexington Partners and private credit firm Alcentra.Jenny has managed to bring the past, present, and future together at Franklin Templeton, balancing being the third generation in the family to lead the business, helping the firm to maintain its culture through numerous acquisitions, while also looking to highly innovative corners of the investment world, like crypto and blockchain to keep Franklin Templeton ahead of the pack.Thanks Jenny for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream Podcast to share your wisdom. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.