The Ledger
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Del Buono: Most tech-focused RIAs have at most one or two professional investors
“So a lot of these firms do not have professional investors. So I often ask people as a quiz how many professional investors do you think are in, you know, RIA XYZ? And people will answer, I mean, percent, right? People answer me, 20%, 50%, 30%, but the number …”
Attorneys and CPAs ignore tax-loss strategies that rival complex trust structures
“Where I find that people have difficulty is you hire attorneys, right, and they're going to tell you everything about, or CPAs, about these trusts, but they're not going to have the knowledge
To compare that and contrast that to an investment strategy that gen…”
Del Buono: Traditional Wealth Managers Are Trained Service Providers, Not Investors
“Most of these firms, the independent firms have spun out of banks and the banks themselves don't train people to be professional investors, right? These people are trained to be service providers. They're trained to be responsive. They're trained to be helpful…”
Del Buono: AI CapEx boom shields leveraged private credit from near-term crisis
“And that, right now, there's no indication of a slowdown in the economy, really. There's a few, you know, there was a bit of a surprise on the employment report, but by and large, the economy's growing, you know, the long-term trend for growth is not even two …”
Del Buono: Single-family offices require billions to justify talent compensation
“If you're trying to build a multi-asset class portfolio, global multi-asset class portfolio, you're going to hire a bunch of these sort of professional investors I mentioned. I don't know, you need five, six, seven of them, different asset classes. You've got,…”
Del Buono: Portfolios with 50-70% alternatives incur 3-4% annual look-through fees
“50, 60, 70% alternatives. On a look through basis, your fees are going to be three or four percent a year. So it's a huge headwind. If you can get rid of some of that by having a professional team in house and not always just hiring third party managers that c…”
Del Buono: Wealth managers charge AUM fees for services because it is more profitable
“So these services, in my opinion, should be fee for service. But because that's of course less profitable than having an AUM based fee on someone's entire balance sheet you charge that fee, you go through the motions of the investment management, but you view …”
Del Buono: Wealth managers offer menus of options to deflect liability
“A lot of, again, firms will present you alternatives. They'll say you can do this, or you could do that. You tell me what you want. And they're doing this for various reasons. One, they may not actually have a strong opinion. Two it's liability. If I tell you …”
Del Buono: a16z Perennial buys liquidated assets from dissolved family offices
“When the patriarch or matriarch passes away, very often the family office falls apart. Either the investments are completely turned around and things are liquidated in a hurry that results in large losses. By the way, we're the beneficiaries of that. Sometimes…”
Del Buono: Family decisions, not trust mechanics, stall wealth planning
“If you don't have those basic things thought out, trying to structure the trust itself is not the difficult bit. It's these things you define inside a very difficult bit.”
Del Buono: Holding investments in fund vehicles enables tax-loss offsetting
“The way to use a loss is inside a fund vehicle that generates its own gains that can be offset by its own losses. Then you don't have to worry about extracting the losses and putting them on your personal balance sheet and not being a user.”
Del Buono: Tech employees can monetize volatility through options without selling stock
“Part of their strategy should be to diversify, but part of it should be to hold on to that stock long term and think about how to maybe even monetize the volatility. So we've built some options programs and things like that for people here to monetize. These s…”
Del Buono: Single-family offices struggle to retain talent without founder involvement
“The principle of the family is signing up really to be a manager of an asset management company. That's really what they're signing up for. I don't think many of them actually realize that's what they're signing up for, and I don't think they want to do that, …”
Del Buono: Clients are experiencing a 'fever' demanding direct private investments
“More and more people want access to these directs. They're clamoring for it. And they'll come and they'll say, oh, I've got these, you know, these six different things I'm looking at. What do you have? Let me compare across this. It's a complete fever around t…”
Del Buono: Pre-Liquidity Planning Rests on Trusts, Tax Investments, and Philanthropy
“So there's kind of three elements
To preparing yourself for a liquidity event, right?
Structuring your trust and estate, thinking about how to sort of make key investments that help offset taxes to some degree, and then donating into a donor advice fund or som…”
Del Buono: a16z Perennial serves only a couple dozen families
“And so we only have a couple dozen families that we work with in that sort of overarching quarterback of everything.”
a16z Perennial maintains higher liquidity for founders self-funding next companies
“If that's the goal, we try to keep the portfolio actually more liquid because their hope is that they can finance more of it themselves, right?
The idea is, well, I did my first company and by IPO I owned 15% of it.
The next time I want to own 30% of it, right…”
Del Buono: a16z Perennial Serves Firm Principals and External Founders
“It's a multifamily office for the principals here and a number of founders, not necessarily been backed by the company, but many in fact backed by the company.”
Del Buono: Perennial targets centi-millionaires and billionaires with $25M-$50M minimum
“25, fifty million dollars would kind of be the minimum, really, but I would say it's really more for the centi-millionaires and billionaires who have, again, you know, an institutional time, multi-generational time horizon, so they're more like an endowment th…”