Transcript
A (0:05)
Welcome to Educational Alpha. I'm Bill Kelly, your host, bringing you on the ground conversations with business leaders, educators and industry colleagues from around the globe. Educational Alpha is sponsored by iCapital, the financial technology company with a mission to power the world's alternative investment marketplace. Part innovator, part educator and part navigator of the alternatives industry, iCapital offers intuitive, scalable digital solutions that have transformed how private market and hedge fund investments are bought and sold. With iCapital, financial advisors, wealth managers and asset managers around the world now have access to everything they need to deliver the return and diversification potential of alternatives to high net worth investors. To learn more, visit icapital.com.
B (1:00)
In this episode, host Bill Kelly speaks with Andreas Best, CEO and co founder of Stapleton, to explore how secondary markets are transforming access to late stage private tech companies. Andreas shares his entrepreneurial journey, the evolution of Stapleton and the creation of the top 20 unicorn index fund. The conversation unpacks the value of secondary market access, the convergence of public and private equity and how investors can tap into innovation without traditional barriers like high minimums and illiquidity. Andres also reflects on trust, transparency and the future of capital markets.
A (1:36)
Andreas Besner, welcome to Educational Alpha.
C (1:38)
Hi Bill, great to have me. Thanks for inviting.
A (1:41)
It's great to see you again and we're going to get into this in a moment but I went back and looked at my past experience and when we first met and I believe it was in your offices In Zurich in 2022 we recorded a set of videos, I think they're somewhere out on LinkedIn and social media so anybody can go back and see those and I think it was semi early stages for Sableton. I know you've been around probably seven years so this is maybe a little bit more than halfway through the life cycle and it was a very interesting conversation. As I recall we did a survey with our Swiss based Kaya members with you folks as well and we'd get into some of that in a moment too, but maybe a little bit of your background and experience and I would put you in the serial entrepreneur category based on some of the things you've done with some successful exits, which I think was a very good setup for what you're doing at Stapleton, but maybe a little bit on your prior experience.
C (2:31)
So I'm German by origin. In the meantime I'm living over 15 years in Switzerland. I also have a Swiss passport. I studied economics, wrote my thesis about the secondary market for private equity. Then I joined Ernst and Young as a transaction advisory analyst. Then I moved to Switzerland to work for a private equity company where I managed a Swiss exchange listed technology fund. Then I set up my own hedge Fund firm in 2006 with a focus on long short equity strategies, with a focus on technology. Scaled that to a team of 12 people, 150 million in assets. Then I sold My stake was a pretty good experience as a young man going through the great financial crisis, but we made it. We were positive in 2007 and 8. And then after I exited I was spending my time working with emerging managers, alternative investment fund managers to set up, shop, launch and distribute the products, get through regulatory projects. But I was still managing money for wealth management, the family office space. And that's when I came up with the idea to found Stapleton. Because mixing alternative investments and the needs of a wealth manager or the wealth channel, it was just like mixing oil and water, it never really mixed. And so we thought, well, let's create a new offering where we would bring alternative investments to the wealth channel in Switzerland where we would wrap strategies into performance and replicate the performance via certificates and allow investors to get access to those. So it was really the access problem. Then in 2020 we were doing the first gross equity deals and we saw that this is really the strong demand by investors. So we thought, okay, how can we get a consistent way to access the greatest growth equity companies in the world? And then all my experience from the past came back together. Transaction, advisory work, long short equity, hedge fund management, but especially my knowledge and interest for the secondary market. So we then 100% focused on providing access to late stage venture capital backed companies through the secondary market. And we're basically 100% focusing on offering. And so now we are basically one of the, I would say global leaders in direct secondaries and manage index funds with Stapleton. We are Swiss firm, 28 people, more than 400 million in assets. So that's where we are. It's going pretty well.
