Opinion
Public pensions have zero chance of hitting return targets without private markets
“They have a six or seven percent actuarial assumption that they've got to meet, and there's zero chance that their public equity or fixed income buckets are going to meet that need, so they're having to do more privates.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
A CAZ partner firm turned a $2.5M Solana investment into over $4B
“Right now, one of our firms, they invested two and a half million dollars in Solano, and today that stake is worth over four billion dollars.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Zook predicts Opendoor will completely dominate iBuying after Zillow's market exit
“Opendoor, we thought it was going to be Coke and Pepsi, and now it's just going to be Coke and Coke.”
Disclosure
CAZ Investments charges zero management fees on most of its investment offerings
“In most cases, we don't charge management fees at all. We just get paid a percentage of the profits. And if there is no profit, we don't get paid.”
Insight
Hedge fund GP stakes yield binary boom-or-bust outcomes within two years
“If you own a piece of a hedge fund in two years, you're either just doing incredibly well or you're out of business. There's really not a lot in between.”
Opinion
Some private equity firms expand AUM purely to harvest management fee revenue
“Well, in the private world, I think there is some of that that is absolutely happening. Where firms are growing just for the sake of growing, not because of the fact that they're doing it for performance.”
Insight
Pension board governance forces allocators to write bigger checks to mega-funds
“He said, if I go to my board and say, these are the 20 managers we're going to hire this quarter, and next quarter we're going to hire 20 different ones, at fifty million bucks a piece, I'm going to get fired. Because of the fact that they're not going to want…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Publicly traded alternative asset managers will accretively acquire smaller private GPs
“Which ultimately could potentially be acquired by the Publix, which we think is a next wave, where the Publix will use very expensive currency to acquire smaller private companies, bolt on new product lines, new geographic lines, and they can do it in a massiv…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
The global energy transition will take two to five decades to complete
“While certainly energy transition is going to happen over time, it is that over time, and it's not a two year process. It's a two decade to five decade to who knows how long process.”
Insight
Private equity GP stakes offer downside protection via locked-up management fees
“The private equity business model and private credit and private real estate fit in the same bucket. But you have locked up capital. That's going to pay a contractually obligated management fee, regardless of what transpires with that business, which provides …”
Disclosure
CAZ Investments deployed over $1.5 billion into GP stakes over five years
“We've invested over a billion and a half dollars in that space in the last five years.”
Insight
CAZ passes on investments if three network calls yield no team references
“If after three phone calls, we can't find someone who knows this team, Then there's a reason why they're not known, and we're probably going to pass. Not always, but that's a good litmus test.”
Disclosure
Zook committed to John Paulson's subprime short within 45 minutes
“My literally very next trip was to New York, and I was with John and his team, and they were talking about what they were doing in housing, and it took me 45 minutes to say, I'm in, we definitely want to do this.”
Disclosure
Zook used subprime short profits to fund a 2009 distressed buying spree
“So in 2009, 2010, we were clearly contrarian when we were buying up everything that had gotten destroyed during the global financial crisis. But because we shorted subprime, we literally had the benefit of all of this cash coming into us”
Disclosure
CAZ Investments sold a minority equity stake to Tony Robbins in 2021
“We sold a minority interest in our business to Tony Robbins earlier this year.”
Disclosure
CAZ aggressively bought publicly traded private equity firms during COVID lows
“About a year and a half ago, two years ago, and particularly at the depths of COVID, we were very aggressively buying the publicly traded private firms.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tony Robbins is opening RIA distribution channels for CAZ Investments
“Tony and AJ and Josh are very connected in the investment advisor world and have been for a long time. They know a ton of investment advisors, so they're opening doors to those investment advisors so that those advisors can learn about how we can help them gro…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zook conceived CAZ Investments during a 1991 Tony Robbins audio workshop
“My wife and I actually in 1991 did Tony's tape series, and part of the goal setting workshop that we did there, I actually set the goal of starting a firm within 10 years by the name of Kaz Investments, and I knew exactly what it was going to be, and so every …”
