Single Family Office Summit 2019 | February 22nd, New York And today’s panel is going to be Getting in Early: Investing in Early Stage Fund Managers. So how’s everyone doing today? Good. Yeah? Great to hear. Great. Great. All right, if we can just quickly give a big round of applause for our panelists here today. And by a show of hands, who is an early stage fund manager here today? By a show of hands. Nice and high. No chicken wings. Nice and high. Nice and high. Fantastic. Thank you. My name is Andres Ospina. I’m Director of Charter Membership here at Family Office Club, one of Richard’s directors here. And one of the great honors of working here is being able to learn about so many of your businesses and your funds and your strategy and really be able to take in all those different perspectives from across the globe on these early stage funds. So we’re going to talk a little bit today about how these family offices and investors are sourcing early stage fund managers and how they’re doing due diligence and how they pick early stage funds to invest in. So we’re going to start off with quick introductions. I’ll remind our panelists to please keep all our answers today to anywhere between 45 seconds to a minute and a half maximum so we can get some really good insight and make sure to get some good questions from our audience members today. So we’ll start off with Doug. Okay. My name is Doug Doan. I’m the GP of a small angel group fund called Hivers and Strivers. Hivers and Strivers is a name for a kid at West Point that spends all his time in the library to achieve even higher standards. It wasn’t me, by the way. But it fits for us because we are very narrowly focused. We invest exclusively in companies led by military vets and especially graduates of the service academies, West Point, Annapolis, Coast Guard and Air Force Academy. Because we’re so fiercely focused, we essentially believe that our founders and our graduates are going to give us superior returns and they do. They’re the most likely to succeed, but the least likely to be funded. So to put it in your words, we have an asset class that no-one else values but we understand it very well and we are fierce for these guys. Thank you. Andrew. Great. Andrew Karsh. I spent the last 20 years managing institutional investments directly for large sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and foundations around the world to basically direct investments. The reason I’m here today is to talk about potential models for disrupting what currently is the wealth management model that I feel like has significant layers of fees. I know it was mentioned in some of the panels before, basically looking for potential investors who would want to invest in a multifamily office that does direct investments. But having lots of experience in with emerging managers seems like a great panel to add some value. Hey, everybody. David Johnston. So I’ve got a family office, Yeoman’s Capital. We’ve been in blockchain since 2012. Made about 40 investments across the industry. Put half in digitizing of assets, related use cases and the other half in digital infrastructure. We’ve also got a growth capital and private equity firm focused on the later stage blockchain protocols. Really focused on that because we sort of see this megatrend around the digitization of assets in general. We think this is the technology stack that’s going to be largely used. And invested in a number of funds as a GP and an L
Getting in Early: Investing in Early Stage Fund Managers
