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- [00:05]
A
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.
- [01:01]
B
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.
- [01:36]
A
Andreas Besner, welcome to Educational Alpha.
- [01:39]
C
Hi Bill, great to have me. Thanks for inviting.
- [01:41]
A
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.
- [02:31]
C
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.
- [04:46]
A
Excellent. And the origin of the name Stapleton, I assume stable has something to do with it, but maybe that's my English translation, I missed it.
- [04:53]
C
Yeah, Stable was basically from the old days where we want to provide stable returns through alternative investments to our end clients. Of course those stable returns have become a little bit more volatile with basically focusing on private blue chip tech companies. But still, it's still a fairly good name to be a stable partner to provide high quality investment opportunities to our clients.
- [05:15]
A
Thanks for that background. And as I alluded to in my opening remarks, I went back and looked at this joint survey. We did with you and your team. And I think it was just our Swiss base of KIAM members. And I think there were five points that were raised coming out of that. And one of them was the access problem, which you just alluded to. And manager selection and due diligence is everything if you're going through a gp. But you seem to have solved for that by, I don't know if bypassing is the right word, but going direct to the secondary market to the holdings themselves. So manager selection is not necessarily part of the mix at all. Was that part of the original design of Stapleton when you first thought about solving for that problem?
- [05:58]
C
When we first started Stapleton, as mentioned, we were focusing on the broader offering of alternative investments. So here also an excess problem was teaming up with the right manager, having the large minimums to diversify and being able to deploy from a bank or wealth manager point of view. So you need that bankable to deploy that to all your clients. But when we then switched the focus only on growth equity, we kept the original promise. We wanted to solve problems for our core customers which are financial intermediaries, the wealth channel. But we have been also expanding to institutional investors, but they still have the same problem. And the problem that private markets investors have is that it requires huge minimums. It's very difficult to value them. You receive infrequent reporting client assets will leave the bank to invest through private contracts in these private companies. So there is of course no incentive for the banks necessarily to offer that to their clients. And hence it's important that they have an eyes and they can be held in custody by the banks. So they be they are kind of within the mandate of our clients. Something else was then the problem of carry payments of capital calls commitments which would make this super difficult to deploy across all of their clients. And so we thought okay, let's remove all of those frictions, remove the manager selection risk because client relationship and they don't want to lean out of the window. And that's why if they do private market investment, they like to go with the global brand names, kkr, Apollo, et cetera, because you can be fired by making those investments, but they don't necessarily need to lean out of the window. So we solve that by not betting on Stapleton, but betting on our underlying companies like SpaceX and Stripe and Revolut and Databricks, OpenAI etc. Which are in our portfolio. So they're effectively they are not betting on a manager. But I'll come to how we do this, but they're betting on a portfolio of existing companies that they know. Secondly then the access problem, in order to be participating in this market, you will need to otherwise build relationships to very strong managers like Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz to potentially be invested in some of those unicorns. But through the secondary market you do not need to commit capital to these funds. You can also buy into the winners through direct secondary transactions. Then in terms of transparency, the problem was that you just commit your money to a manager that has historically had a great performance and they say that they are going to identify the next big theme and the best companies and then identify the future winners. In our case, you're investing in an existing portfolio of companies where everything is known. The composition, the targets, the valuations, the fees, everything is known. So it makes it also much easier when it comes to valuation. You can already know what's it worth. And because there is a secondary market for these companies which we hold like most Valuable Private Top 20 Private Blue Chip companies, so we value our portfolio always based on secondary market valuation on a mark to market basis, so that risk is gone. And lastly the high fees with fees on committed capital, which doesn't mean that this is actually invested capital and the carry. So we just took this analogy of a low cost index fund where you just have a low ongoing fee on the assets under management or on the nav. So we've been solving a number of problems and that led to a great success because now it's possible to be invested in private markets without the hassle in an easy to understand product. So that has been really then taking off.
- [09:27]
A
So I do want to spend a fair amount of time in this unicorn top 20 before we get to that and just listening to you now Andreas, I'm curious to get your views on alpha versus Beta and maybe I'll give some of my bias coming in. Alpha is very difficult to find. Today's alpha is tomorrow's beta. And if I think about how maybe access to the private markets is being sold around the world is the alpha component to it. That may or may not be true. And as you said, today's great fund might be tomorrow's dud. Who knows if this performance is sustainable. And I once said to a reporter when I talked about accessing alts, it's really about trying to give the investor exposure to beta they may not be able to find in the public markets. And where the alpha is going to come from is how much you allocate to each one of these beta sleeves. So the asset allocation maybe becomes the alpha. So when you think about creating this top 20 unicorn product, is it alpha, beta or both?
- [10:29]
C
In general, I think it's a super interesting asset class to be invested in. The problem is you cannot participate if you can invest in it. And even if you invest in it and you pay higher amount of fees, for example, as a proportion of long term expected returns over that asset class is also not really beta that you want to have if fees kill your performance, or if the hassle of allocating is outweighing the additional benefits of incremental positive returns. So in a way we are really focusing on beta, not trying to pick the one or two winning companies, but bet on all 20 instead. Of course, you could be doing the home run if you invest in early stage funds and you've got the winner company. However, it's likely better on average to invest just in all companies and work on the fees. Just by removing the fees, you're already much better off. It's just exactly like how Vanguard became so successful, because on average you can actually realize the average and reduce what you can control, which are the fees, and optimize the access and the entry, but not having an opinion to outperform in terms of selection. And then you've got that alpha that we can hopefully create, but not because we select or do something magic, but just because we are investing through secondary market transactions. So the alpha in this respect would be that we buy company shares from early investors that are maybe common shares or early preferred shares, which don't carry the same shareholder rights or liquidation preferences, and then you've got the liquidity discount, someone wants to sell, and we've got, let's say, worse shares compared to the latest preferred shares of the last fundraiser. So that leads to a discount. Sometimes the discount is also in terms of timing. For example, if you're paying the same price, but the company has grown revenues 30% ever since, you're already investing a discount based on price multiples and then that is actually a source of alpha compared to beta investing in primary fundraisers. And that reason for the discount will go away naturally if the company continues to be successful. So the liquidation preference really don't matter. If they go public, all share class will collapse into one and hence this is an extra basically boost to the long term performance of that asset class. Because illustratively you can invest, let's say at 80% at a discount, compound your value, because the Companies may grow 20 to 50% on average in their revenues and exit when A company goes public and potentially gets pre IPO or IPO premium and then we repeat the same. But in general, I think if you say an investor should be participating for three to five years, then most of that performance will be driven by the great fundamental growth of these companies instead of that additional alpha component. So the longer you hold, the more beta it is.
- [13:03]
A
And one follow up and we can move on from this and this. I think something we had discussed before we hit the record button about companies staying private longer and maybe in some cases forever. And if I'm thinking about myself as an investor, every investor should want exposure to innovation in their portfolio. But if a lot of that innovation is happening in the early late stage VC market, I can't get that in the public market. So if nothing else, if I'm thinking about a beta component that will lead to alpha as you just described it, potentially alpha, I can't really get that innovation exposure. At least I don't think I can. Is that part of the dynamic? Not so much for Stapleton, maybe it is, but part of the dynamic as to why a fund like this exists in the first place.
- [13:47]
C
Everyone knows that companies stay private for longer. Historically, they've been going public much, much earlier than today. Why would a company go public in the first place? It's because they either need to raise money, which they can now do, basically every amount in the private market space, or because their investors want liquidity at the IPO or after the IPO. But these companies, they are maybe already profitable. 50% of our companies in the top 20 portfolio are profitable. They have positive cash flows, they don't need to raise. So hence they could stay private forever. And if they've got single investors that want to exit, they can just utilize the direct secondaries market to exit whenever they want at their own discretion, without forcing the company to go public. So that means that a company would likely only go public if they have an advantage, that maybe being public is an asset and not a burden by disclosure and regulations, or that the growth slows to such a degree that the private market returns will not justify the returns for a private market investor. And then the company will go public at a, let's say slow growth, higher valuation, and then it's a great outcome for the company to go public. But I continue to see companies stay private for longer. Some will never go public, but the private and the public market space will converge even more. Just some illustration, the public market is likely 99.9% a secondary market where investors sell shares to each other. All the time, but hardly used for fundraisers. The private market space has been historically in 100% fundraise and no secondary market. So now there are different estimates but I would all say it's between maybe 2 and 5% secondary market. But that proportion is going to increase significantly so it will actually converge. So it's actually happening that there is like a private stock exchange, even though it's fragmented, happening on different places or directly with shareholders, but it's getting much, much more liquid compared to previously. So it's great. You don't have the burden of being public, but you still have the liquidity in the secondary market. Companies can grow, have long term shareholders, long term use without the burden to report quarterly and meet analysts expectations on a very short term basis.
- [15:55]
A
It's interesting on that point of the secondary market, Andreas, and maybe I'm thinking of specifically the buyout space and maybe it's broader capital markets that I had a number like 1% in mind. You said 2 to 5, but regardless, 12 to 5, it is a small number and I absolutely agree with your thesis in that not only did we see it in the institutional space where markets freeze up over time and institutional investors have needs, these pesky pensioners need to get paid every two weeks. So you need to have some level of liquidity. They want to invest in the next vintage fund. And then as you're getting greater access to the individual investor and you've got interval funds in the states offering 5% liquidity every single quarter. I think a maturation of any market naturally is greater depth in the secondary market. So I think you're spot on to think that this was just a phenomena that's going to go away. Again. We saw the secondary spaces, maybe a bit of a crisis window coming out of the gfc, but I think we come out of this liquidity freeze, not only is it here to stay, I think we want to need greater depth there.
- [17:00]
C
Yeah, 100% agree. You have more solutions to create liquidity in terms of direct secondaries, LP secondaries, continuation funds, nav financing, all the different tools to provide at least some liquidity. When I'm talking about our space, it's of course more liquid than let's say a buyout of a mid market company or a smaller company. What creates the highest amount of liquidity? If you've got standardized products like a future exchange or currencies or large cap stock market companies, but those companies are so large already in value, so they've got 10 billion to 400 billion in valuations and it's not standardized yet, but there's a lot of interest. So that also facilitates. You've got new platforms, you've got more information, you've got ratings, you've got indices, you've got market participants. And that also creates more liquidity and helps then to make that even more liquidity.
- [17:49]
A
And maybe just as a public service announcement for the listeners. Just because liquidity is there doesn't mean you should be taking it every single time it's offered. I think it's a natural release valve. But I think investors, particularly of the individual variety, have a tendency to come in and out of these markets at the most inopportune times. And having a good asset allocation mix and staying fully invested, I think it serves the investor well at the end of the day. But I do want to turn to this unicorn top 20 fund and spend a few minutes on that. Andreas. So 20 names equally weighted, not cap weighted, is that correct? 5% holding in each one?
- [18:25]
C
That is correct. The purpose of that index is to provide broad diversified exposure to that segment of the world's most valuable privately held tech blue chips. There is a broader unicorn series done by Morningstar PitchBook. It's a global unicorn series including all unicorns in existence. However, of course that's not physically replicatable. You can do so many transactions and the liquidity dries off significantly after number 30 to 50. But the top 20 unicorn fund is physically replicating the Morningstar Pitchfork Unicorn Select 20 index. And that's equal weight, 5% allocated to the most valuable 20 companies that also have a liquid secondary market and are from developed markets.
- [19:05]
A
So the primary criteria then, is it fair to say billion dollar valuation and reasonably good secondary price discovery?
- [19:14]
C
Yes, that's on a statistical basis. So some companies like Waymo or checkout.com may be valuable based on their last primary fundraising round, but there's hardly any liquidity or none in the secondary market, hence we wouldn't be able to physically replicate it. So it's removed. But you're typically removing maximum 5 to 10% of those companies. All other companies typically have a more liquid secondary market. And that's basically naturally driven because typically 50% plus of those companies are held by business angels, early stage VCs, employees with vested stock options and they have a liquidity need at one point in time.
- [19:48]
A
And I assume you don't necessarily go into this with a sector bias, but because of the way the VC space has developed and where the emphasis is, is this a tech play? To a very large degree.
- [20:02]
C
Regardless where you look, if you look at the S&P 500 as well. So tech is driving the world. And now of course venture capitalists like to back tech driven asset light, very fast growing high margin businesses. And that's kind of the case. So our portfolio consists of four A AI machine learning companies, then software consumer like Epic Games or Discord or fintech companies like Stripe, LED, Rex Chime or other like SpaceX or Kraken. But that's the natural evolution. But within the broader tech ecosystem, the shift of the index can vary depending on what's valuable, what's not. Just like in the NASDAQ 100. So there were times where maybe databases like Dropbox or Box were more overweight or sometimes software as a service, sometimes fintech. And today we definitely see a trend towards more exposure to AI companies. But that's also a positive because if you bet on a certain theme, let's say you had the great idea to bet on the metaverse in 2021, you would be stuck in metaverse stocks until 2030. And I'm not sure if that's a good idea. So this naturally really adjusting to what's valuable and self adjusting without the investor needing to switch themes. It's always following just in the Nasdaq. And of course it's driven by very large successful companies that work on megatrends, have huge markets and hence deserve the valuation that they're having.
- [21:21]
A
And as this fund then continues to grow and the underlying markets move not always in lockstep, I assume there's some rebalancing mechanism which you can talk about, but maybe trying to pull a couple things together, exits as well, is the only way One of these 20 names comes out of this index is IPO or are there fundamental reasons why you take one of these 20 names out?
- [21:43]
C
The beautiful thing about an index strategy is that it's based on a rule book. And the rulebook has hard factors when a company is included and when it exits. So every major index has a rulebook. So that also allows looking at the data to go back in time and an analysis basically every single day what companies were included in the portfolio and what were the reasons why they may be replaced. So with the Morningstar PitchBook Index Unity, this is the pitchbook data, so you can go back in time every single quarter and see what companies would have qualified based on the rule book. So when you look back over the last 10 years, 69% of the cases when a company left the index was because it was acquired or going public and only in 25% of the cases the companies were replaced by another large company. That could happen because either they had a downrun or were unsuccessful and would fall out of the top 30 or because another company would make it actively into the top 10 to replace one of the existing companies. So there is some buffer so you wouldn't immediately follow. If you're only top 21 first company, that's basically to create index continuity. But the biggest exit channel is definitely an IPO and acquisition. So as of today we've actually foresee there will be more IPOs. But even if there are none, you could still rebalance the index by having new companies join the index and some others fall out and you would then be utilizing the secondary market to buy into the new companies or selling the existing companies via the secondary market alike.
- [23:11]
A
And I don't know if it's a hardwired portion of the rule book, but I think I read somewhere that the holding post IPO is 180 days and oftentimes it seems like with these IPOs and maybe these rules are being rewritten in real time. Not your rules, rules of the market, but oftentimes that pop happens in the initial trading sessions and trying to capture that upside, maybe that's a bit of a fool's errand. But if it is 180 days post IPO, what's the thought process behind that as a hard, hardwired rule?
- [23:40]
C
Well, you have restrictions. If you are a private investor before the company goes public, you are subject to a lockup. There are companies that go public where they may not raise assets but allow for secondary liquidity. So maybe then you have the opportunity to sell earlier or if it's a direct listing. But most companies still have that lockup where you are subject to and of course we've done a great analysis of what happened after a company goes public. Of course you have a documented, I think it's around about 24% first day gain for tech IPOs over the last two decades. Typically you've got that pop. That's correct. And typically companies go public more in positive market environments when there's a lot of IPO frenzy and people bid up the stock. But even then after that pop fades out. So you will still have a positive performance on average after the company has gone public, even though IPOs then tend to underperform the S&P 500 slightly, but they still have a positive average outcome. But our thesis not to bet on the post IPO performance, our thesis to bet on the private market performance and hence Whenever we can sell it in the now public company, we would be exiting it as soon as we can after the lockup and redeploy that money into the next private company to harvest both the stronger fundamental growth of those private companies, but also the secondary market discounts that we receive when we buy into these companies and then the IPO premium that happens when they go public.
- [24:59]
A
And you don't have to mention any names specifically unless you want to, Andreas, but I know this product is relatively new. Have you had exits and then gone back in the other way and bought a new investment? On the unicorn side, all of us.
- [25:12]
C
Know that there was a little bit of a no IPO phase in 2022, 2023. We had one company which was part of the index, but instacart, which went public out of the index, and one company that is part of the index. And the portfolio currently is Chime, which went public, but is still basically within the lockup period. But we foresee a number of other companies to go public anytime soon, and there's a lot of preparation for some of those companies.
- [25:40]
A
I don't know when this is going to be released, but we're sitting here in the latter days of August and it seems like the IPO calendar for Q4 is already quite active, and if rates are cut, it seems like all bets are off in terms of this nuclear winter. So it's going to be interesting to see. So it seems like you've seen, or at least close to seeing, the full maturation of the early stages of acquisition through the exit. And as you go through that process, Andreas, if you come back and then looking for a new quote, unquote portfolio company as you exit, one I know we talked about before, having the unicorn status and reasonably good secondary market liquidity, how do you make a judgment if there's 10, 15, 20 companies that meet that criteria then coming in, Is there some additional analysis you do to decide who is that winner that gets into the portfolio?
- [26:29]
C
No, it's really purely systematic and driven by the index calculation agent, which is Morningstar. So the index, basically whenever a company doesn't meet the rules of that index anymore, like Chime, because it's now public and it's not private anymore, and hence after the lockup is going to be sold, it's going to be replaced by the next largest most valuable company that could be very likely, Enduril, for example. And those valuations are known, they are part of Pitchbook. And hence the logic is, take a look at the valuations of those Largest companies ranked by most valuable to least valuable. Check if they are from developed markets, yes or no. And then if they've got a liquidity which is decent and it's based on statistical method by looking at liquidity on certain platforms and then that would qualify the company to enter. But then of course you would actually need to build relationships to the companies, to shareholders. So you can do this by purchasing those shares directly from existing investors and become a direct shareholders. For example, we are on 13 cap tables of the top 20 companies and where it's not possible then you can invest in CAP Table SPVs where we would be a shareholder of an SPV that's already an investor in the fund by replacing some other existing investor or by leveraging for example some pro rata rights of those investors whenever they want to take part in some primary fundraising rounds. For example.
- [27:46]
A
And maybe a thought for a son or daughter of type of product as I think about the market cap of some of these names and we talked a moment ago about companies staying private for longer or forever and I also think tied into the same observation question the Economist I believe and maybe ZFT did an article on these valuations and it's almost and I forget you may know what I'm talking about where the term unicorn was no longer applicable because firms like ChatGPT might be trillions and trillions of dollars and still private as opposed to the billion dollars really being a major plateau for a VC based company. That may be true in some industries, maybe less so in tech. So you can take the other side of those observations. But to formulate that into a question, you could be sitting here three to five years from now with 20 names that have multi unicorn type of market cap and yet there's still some very interesting companies reaching that billion dollar level that would be very good to have exposure to. So I wonder if there's a mega unicorn top 20 offering and then maybe the son or daughter of that might be more to get exposure to the next generation because there's no reason for you to exit any of these other 20. So maybe some of your thoughts there.
- [29:03]
C
These companies, despite being public, they become very very large. So 50% of our holdings would immediately enter the NASDAQ 100 if they went public. Companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Xai Stripe, they are all on the secondary market above 100 billion in valuation. So these are very very large mature companies. You've got so many companies that generate hundreds of millions or even billions of cash flow. These companies just by their fundamental success become more valuable and larger. And then of course, you've got some newer companies, maybe like Perplexity or other companies that have a rapid rise and may still make it to the top 10, where they may not have those fundamentals yet, but then they have 200 to 500% revenue growth year over year. What you're saying is right. So you're buying into a specific segment of companies that are super successful or super innovative, disruptive, cover very large markets, which will then ultimately lead to very large valuations. And if the company still doesn't see the need to go public, there'll be trillion dollar companies soon that are still private.
- [30:03]
A
I'm sure that you have some information on this offering too. But I did see in advance of this discussion, Andreas, that Morningstar has a very nice 12 to 14 page explainer paper out on this and I'll put a link to that when this comes out. And it actually names the 20 names and talks about the origins of this index as well. And I thought it was a very interesting piece. So we don't have much time left together today, Andreas, but you're probably pretty well positioned to look out in terms of what does public versus private markets look like five years from now? And something you said earlier was very interesting to me because I oftentimes say something very similar. And if you go back to the Buttonwood Agreement, which started the public offering of equity exposure, that goes back almost 240 years ago. And back then there was no such thing as public equity, but they created an exchange, a specialist network, the ability to create a secondary market. And now, as you said a moment ago, the public markets are all secondary exposure. We're going to start to see more and more of that privately, and you and I agree on that. I think most sensible people would not be able to take the other side. Do you see a convergence where equity exposure is equity exposure and you can maybe get some of it public, some of it private? What does the future look like in the capital markets and particularly these private versus public dilemma that we're faced today?
- [31:26]
C
In general, I hear this from the very large players to players like us, there's going to be this convergence. Actually, I think it's the wrong approach to look at public versus private. It's actually about the exposure you're going to buy. So if you're buying, let's say, debt exposure, you should consider private debt and bonds. And if you look at infrastructure, it doesn't matter if it's public or private. I think it's More about what are you able to tolerate in terms of the liquidity of your products. If you can hold that liquidity or invest over longer periods of time, then I think you just have much more opportunities in the private market space and specific exposure that you cannot get on the public market side. So that's going to converge even more. And in our specific case, I definitely see the convergence of that pre IPO space or private blue chip tech space where you've got a lot of participants, ratings, research, trading platforms, brokers, automations, specialized players like us asset managers that participate in that. I could foresee that there is going to be some private exchange where you've got different requirements for these private issuers or these companies, which is not so burdensome. On the other hand, you also only have qualified or very professional participants involved because still sometimes it's a little bit of a wild west and it's super fragmented and super difficult. So it's certainly useful to have some more standardization and more rules and ways, but I think everyone's working on that. So in general I would more look at it like what types of exposure you want to get and what's the best way to achieve that exposure, private or public, and that's really subject to restrictions in terms of liquidity needs, et cetera.
- [32:58]
A
You're preaching to the converted there. I think allocating to wrappers or allocating to private equity never made any sense to me. And I think we're seeing here in the States this siren song of the 60 40s, dead to me and now has to be 50, 30, 20. It makes no sense, at least from my vantage point. And I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, Andreas, but if I want equity exposure, why shouldn't I just widen the aperture? And harkening back to your prior gigs before Stapleton, that if I want equity exposure, but I don't like the volatility, I don't like the drawdown risk, I could minimize some of that. There's a product for that. So I can maybe be long public and private equity. I can maybe use some options and then have hedge funds tucked in there as well. And I think it's a wiser way to approach asset allocation as opposed to 20% to privates. It doesn't make any sense to me.
- [33:48]
C
I think it's the same as if you look at an index like the S&P 500. You're just buying into a big group of companies, but within that index is completely different, different types of export, different types of companies. Why would you invest in the NASDAQ 100 if you can also invest in the, let's say in the Most valuable, largest 20 companies, which would easily make it into the NASDAQ 100 if you could actually as efficient. And you should, you should invest not 10% in the NASDAQ 100. You should invest 7 and 3% in the top 20 unicorn portfolio, for example. So I think the basic categories and boxes that you put in investment, they need to be rewritten. Definitely. And look more at it in terms of exposure that you can achieve and utility of your investments. What are they? In our view, our portfolio looks more like a growth at a reasonable price portfolio, strong growth, reasonable valuations, like a venture portfolio, for example. But yeah, it really depends. But I think those boxes and definitions need to be rewritten over the next five years.
- [34:42]
A
I agree. So one final question is having gotten to know you a little bit when we were together in Zurich and we recorded some of those videos, you know, you are a serious professional. But then I have recently seen that your social media profile has been pretty active and I'd like to think that you're playing into this, trying to demystify these markets. But it seems to be purposeful that you're out there, not so much trying to ultimately sell product. We all do that at the end of the day. But I think you're trying to sell education and do it in a way that the investor does understand it. So I don't know if that's a purposeful move, but I've seen you quite active on the content and I commend you for it. I think it's great. So just curious as to how that's going and what you're trying to accomplish there.
- [35:25]
C
Well, there's many reasons. One is, of course people or investors or people that buy our products effectively need to trust us as a company and hence the people behind the company. Secondly, there is a lot of things that you need to learn about where we operate because it's so new and people may not understand it. So there's of course education involved. Third, we don't have, as a younger company, don't have the means to sponsor about every single event and I do marketing, so I think it's also a very cost efficient way and to be competing on a different level with those large companies. We got really good feedback and so we are of course then leveraging that. But I think the positive feedback, effectively financial investment products are a very rational thing. So I think it's important that investors have a good feeling about them, understand what they're looking for and somehow also align with what they're investing. And I think that's super easy to achieve what we do because you can actually align with all these great companies that are shaping our futures, that of our families where you would otherwise have no exposure to. So I think it's an easy place to be writing about on social media.
- [36:26]
A
Well done on that. And I think without trust we have nothing. And who doesn't believe in trust? We all do. And most of us have it in a mission statement, but living it and breathing it for the sake of the end investor who is coming to our window is critically important. So congratulations on that and I wish you and your partners continued success. It's been a great, I think approximately seven plus years since you launched and I'll continue to follow the story and hopefully next time in Missouri can stop in and maybe record a video or two with you once again. So Andreas, thanks again for your time today.
- [36:58]
C
Thank you so much Bill. Always happy to meet you in Zurich when you're back. So thanks for the opportunity and your thoughtful questions. Was a pleasure. Thanks so much.
- [37:07]
A
Thank you for listening to Educational Alpha. I'm your host, Bill Kelly. Learn more about the Kaya association and subscribe to the show@kaia.org that's C A A IA Org. See you next time.