177: The Courtship of Investment Allocators & Managers: Inside iConnections - With Ron Biscardi
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Welcome to the Money Maze Podcast. If this is your first time joining us, I'm the host, Simon Brewer. And in this show, we talk to proven leaders and thinkers from the worlds of business, investing and beyond. To stay up to date with every episode, please do sign up to our newsletter via moneymazepodcast.com.

episodes are also published on our youtube channel and we're active on all major social media platforms thank you for listening if you are an asset allocator what's the most effective way to widen your lens on identifying potential investment managers and if you're an investment manager how can you be more effective in meeting some of those key allocators who might transform your business

Enter Ron Biscardi, the CEO and founder of iConnections, who in April 2020 launched the Capital Introduction Technology platform, allowing managers to share fund information with allocators who can more easily evaluate and engage with relevant managers.

Ron, just off a plane here in Marylebone from New York. Welcome to the Money Maze podcast. Great to be here. Thank you guys for having me. Well, also with us as a co-interviewer is the Money Maze co-founder Will Campion, our own equivalent of the grand chess master, visionary, diagonal thinker who sees moves others might miss. And our little Money Maze podcast business founded also in 2020 expands and involves with him at the bridge. Welcome, Will.

Thank you, Simon. I think it's an absolute treat to see Ron in person here. And this is my second time I've been allowed to be a co-interviewer after some near 200 episodes. I think we're approaching that. But I'm going to be very quiet, but it's a joy for me to sit in it. So there we go. It's great to be here. And you are excellent at these intros. That was spectacular. Lots of homework. Thank you.

You launch iConnections just as COVID envelops the world. How bad a decision did you think that was? Well, at the time, I had just left the firm that I had built over 15 years, and I didn't have anything else to do. So it actually seemed like a very logical decision because at the time, what I was hearing from friends in the industry was,

was really panic. You know, it was April of 20. COVID was in full swing. You couldn't go to a restaurant. You couldn't go really anywhere except maybe the supermarket if you were covered in, you know, a mask and gloves. So people were really struggling because we're such a face-to-face business in alternatives. And fundraising had really ground to a halt. So

I knew the opportunity was there to try and solve that problem. But as we moved through April, we actually sort of came up with the way in which we launched the business in late April. In the beginning of April, we were still thinking, oh, this is going to be a rough couple of months. And then by the end of April, it was, oh, wow.

we may not ever see anyone again this year. So it was kind of obvious at that moment that the industry needed a digital solution to give people a way to find each other, review who was a fit and why, and just bring people together digitally. I mean, I had personally never done a Zoom call before March of 2020.

And then by the end of April of 20, you know, we were all becoming experts in it. So bringing the industry together with video and a platform that allowed everyone to share their information, it just seemed like a logical move, even though starting a new business in a pandemic is not an obvious move.

Smart move. And a very good friend who will remain nameless did say to me, Simon, do you think you should just hold off before you launch? And in fact, that was absolutely awful advice. But we need to press rewind. And I want to go back. Were you the product of an entrepreneurial family?

I was. My mom had built, my mom and dad had built a small accounting business in the house. My dad was a software, he had run an IT department through the 70s and 80s and then actually became a software developer, like kind of went back.

to being just a software developer because that was his true love and along the way my mom and dad worked together to create an accounting business where my dad actually built custom software and my mom was the one with more of the the finance background and uh

So as a kid, I watched them build that and grow it. And it was always more of a lifestyle business, but it definitely helped raise five kids and put us through private school and college. And we all kind of had the bug for it. My brother built and sold an accounting consulting firm, a

My other brother had built multiple businesses. My sister built an optometry practice. So, yeah, we kind of had the entrepreneurial bug in the Biscardi family. I feel sorry for your neighbors if they weren't very ambitious. Ron, can I ask which number in the five are you? I'm the first. I'm the oldest. That's quite telling. Yeah, I'm the oldest. So you go to Drexel University.

First of all, where is Drexel and what did you go to study? It's in Philadelphia, right next to a much more famous school called University of Pennsylvania. I wasn't smart enough to get into that school, but I went to Drexel for electrical engineering. Engineering forces you to think very logically.

And you have to, you're kind of geared towards thinking from a first principle standpoint, because you have to understand the fundamentals of how everything works. And then on the math side in finance, once I made the transition to finance, there has never been any math in finance that intimidated me, because the math and engineering was just so much harder.

But so that the combination of those two things, I think, have served me well. I started interviewing and found my way into high tech recruiting, which I absolutely loved because as an engineer, I had a real edge over other recruiters who had come from probably more business backgrounds. For me, when I would look at a job spec or a resume, I knew what all those words meant.

And in recruiting, there were a lot of people who came into the industry from different angles, and they just didn't have the same fundamental understanding. So I did very well in it.

very quickly because I just had credibility because I had been an engineer. And then I, uh, worked for another firm for a year left, started my own firm, built that to about 70 or 80 employees and really rode the build of the wireless network, the, uh, infrastructure of the internet. And then ultimately at the end, the.com craziness, uh,

There's lots of funny stories from the dot-com era. I remember going into every office I walked into. They had just gotten $10 million. They had no customers. They had no revenue.

But they had just been funded and they had the most beautiful offices with that Herman Miller chair that everyone wanted. I would look at those and think, God, I can't wait till I'm doing well enough in business that I can afford a conference room like this. And then two years later, all the Herman Miller chairs were on fire sale. And that was a real learning experience for me in business. That firm went from...

probably 80 people at our peak to six or seven people in a span of two months when the bubble burst. And it really shocked me because I thought, I was very worried about that happening, having seen all the businesses with no customers.

But it was shocking to me how every area in the economy, this is a lesson in a crisis or in a crash, all things correlate to one. I had infrastructure clients, I had dot coms, I had SEI Investments, which is a huge financial firm based in Philadelphia.

It didn't matter. All the clients just stopped hiring when that crash happened. So it was, I learned how volatile the recruiting market could be. You know, I got lucky in that I got into it in the early 90s and it just went up

for six straight years. And then in 2000, 2001 really is when we felt it. The whole thing flipped. The market went from having many, many more jobs. I think there were a million open jobs that we just couldn't fill.

And then in a matter of weeks, it flipped to every company that was on our client list was letting people go instead. So that was a very tough period. But it also created, I probably wouldn't have transitioned into finance, quite honestly, because I was doing well in that business. And it was, you know, when your business goes from 80 to six, you

You stop and say, okay, is this really where I want to spend my time? And I had built a number of relationships in the venture world in particular. And it gradually led me into the world of finance where I ultimately co-founded a seating business in 2005 with a couple of guys. And that was kind of the beginning of the path that I'm still on today. So how long did that –

Eye connections concept marinate. Oh, a long time. In the seeding business, we were a mid-level player before the financial crisis. And it was relatively easy to find deals. It was not that hard raising money if you found a deal. Everyone, you know, the hedge fund industry was really just beginning to roll.

And after the crisis, it, again, same kind of experience, it completely flipped. We would put 20 or 30 million into a deal in 2010, 2011, and then raising money for that was just brutal.

Investors after the crisis cared much, much more about business risk of the fund they were investing in than they cared about the returns the fund generated. They would gladly take a much lower return from a bigger established manager who they just knew wasn't going out of business next month versus a small guy. It was trying to solve this marketing problem in the seeding business

that really led me into the conference business. We started looking for better ways to market the funds that we had seeded. And in 2013, I had heard about this company called Alphametrix, which had a, they had built a pooled managed account platform where small retail investors could put money into the pool and then spread it across multiple hedge funds.

And so this was it was geared purely towards high net worth, you know, accredited. But most of the clients probably were under 10 million of net worth. So you could put a million into the pool and then spread it across 10 funds. And they had created this. Initially, they had created a golf outing where they would put three investors and one manager in a foursome.

And that was a form of cap intro, right? They would do a golf outing and everyone would kind of hang out and get to know each other.

And then deals would happen afterwards. It evolved in a year or two into a small Cap Intro event held at the Fountain Blue. It was about 1,000 people. And there was really no content. So as conferences go, it was very unique in that it was really just one-on-one meetings. You know, maybe they'd have one speaker, but it was not a content event. Well, I had heard good things about the conference. I had never actually attended it before.

Then one day I see a headline. I think it was in the journal Alpha Metrics accused of fraud by the CFTC and I thought you can't be a managed account platform and be accused of fraud by your regulator So that's probably not gonna make it I called a friend of mine who knew the the guys who ran the conference business and I said hey, I

I heard that conference was pretty good. Do you know if they're doing anything to spin that out? And he said, as a matter of fact, they are, and I'm helping them to do it. So I said, I'd love to talk to them. You know, we had a quick series of calls. Two weeks later, I owned the conference.

We were able to do a really quick deal, get some cash to them, which obviously they needed because of the troubles they were in. And then I was in the conference business. And the day we did the deal, I can tell you, I knew absolutely nothing about the conference business. But, you know, the price was right. So it was a smart calculated risk.

And did you own a database then? I mean, what did you get in your hands when you bought it? We licensed the customer list as part of the deal. It was an interesting transaction. We weren't able to actually buy anything because you knew this was going to head into bankruptcy. And in the US, anything that goes into bankruptcy, every deal that's done, every transaction pretty much can be unwound.

The court will look back six months and unwind anything they sold. You could rent the list, but you couldn't buy the list. So we actually didn't buy anything. We were able to do two key things. One was we went to the hotel, the Fountain Blue, who was owed about a million dollars, and we said...

if you release Alpha Metrics from their contract, will enter into a new contract with you on the same exact terms.

So that solved the hotel problem. And then we went to all the clients and we said the same thing. If you release Alpha Metrics, we'll enter into a new agreement with you and anything you paid them, we will honor. So you won't have to pay twice. And I didn't realize how well received that second piece would be. But pretty much overnight, we had 150 funds who had already paid them for the next event, which was two months away.

And those funds loved us. It was like we were the good guys. We were the white knights who came in and saved the event because at that point everyone assumed, you know, we just – we sent our money but this will never happen again.

And they were so happy. They told everyone they knew. And then about 170 more funds actually paid to come to the event. So on that first event, I thought we'll probably lose a million bucks on this thing. And we ended up making about $200,000.

So that was a very fun deal to do. So let's talk iConnections. I mean, there's a plethora of investment conferences and there's lots of technology to improve the experience. And I thought we should split this part of the conversation into the conference piece and the technology piece. And then we can drill a little bit into manager and allocator interaction. But vis-a-vis the technology, did you buy it or build it?

We built it. We built it because in my prior firm, where it really was just a conference business, we had actually built our own custom software at the prior firm. So I had had the experience of how powerful it was to be able to control every element of a tech platform. When you buy software off the shelf,

Maybe it does 75% of what you need, but sometimes that last 25% can make a huge difference in the experience you can deliver to customers. So when we started iConnections, we knew that we wanted to build it ourselves and build it from scratch. And I co-founded the business with the...

my friend Chris Altomare, who had built our software at our prior firm. So I knew that he knew exactly what needed to be done. And so that first version of the system, we didn't even really sketch it out. Chris just started coding because he knew, okay, we're bringing managers and investors together. These are the things they care about. So that first system Chris built in about six weeks.

We went from the idea to launch the business by way of a charity event, which we called Funds for Food. We raised $2 million for food insecurity at the height of the pandemic. We called investors first and we said, here's the idea. We want to throw an event. We'd love for you to participate. Pledge to take meetings. We're going to publicize your pledge and publicize that you're going to be in this event and

And if you agree to do that, we'll go out to the manager community and get them to come in and pay to be in the event. And we'll give 100% of those proceeds to food banks around the world, hence funds for food. Actually, it was initially called Managers for Meals. And I said that to my daughter and she said, that is the worst name I've ever heard. And then my daughter came up with funds for food. So she deserves credit for that one.

But that event just exploded because we were right in our premise that the industry was really locked down and that activity had ground to a halt because it's such a – alternatives because of the regulations is –

is primarily a face-to-face industry. It has been for as long as it's been here. So for an industry that was so accustomed to in-person meetings to not have that option,

really through the whole industry for a loop. And we were signing up probably 30 investors per day leading up to that event. And in the end, we had about 400 LPs and roughly 300, 310 managers attend that event. And we had the idea on April 23rd, and we held the event, I believe it was the third week of June.

So and on April 23rd, we had literally nothing. We had no money, no employees, no software, no clients. So it all happened. And we ran about 3000 meetings in that first event. So before we continue this conversation, we're going to take a short break to have a note from our sponsors. The Money Mates podcast is proudly sponsored by the London Stock Exchange Group, a global leader in financial markets infrastructure.

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When Schroeder succeeds for clients, society and the wider world benefit too. Let me just ask you because I'm not sure I understand why it is that the alternative industry has always been face to face. The crash happened in 29, goes back this far. The government decided too many people

retail customers lost everything. And they lost it in bad ways. You know, they lost it because people were peddling really risky and probably fraudulent investment products. So in the U.S., the government made a decision that if you were going to run an investment product, it had to be registered with the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission.

But if you wanted to create an investment product that wasn't registered with the SEC, that was okay, but you were only allowed to sell that to people with a net worth of a million or more. So that was really the beginning of...

creating this mainstream market that you could sell to retail investors and then the alternatives market where it was really only high net worth and institutions. Ron, can I just tip my hat to you on the funds for food? Because my day job, CampionCapital.com,

You know, we were in lockdown and we were like, what the heck are we going to do? And I was just incredibly jealous. And I heard the most amazing thing. So, you know, entrepreneurial 10 out of 10 spirit. Thank you. Fantastic. I have to say it was one of the most fun things I've ever done in my career because it was absolutely fun to build something new. But it was also amazing to do it in a moment when so many people really needed the help.

And we were, you know, after the event was over, we were just calling food banks and saying, hey, we're going to send you $200,000, $300,000. And people were just breaking down on the phone because all the food banks were stretched to the max, of course.

So it was an amazing experience. Far better than meals for meetings. Yeah. So let's stay with the technology question. As I understand it, the iConnections, your platform is now used to power the technology at big industry events like Salt. In fact, Anthony Scaramucci who's behind Salt has been on twice and...

has been a very entertaining guest to have. He is always entertaining. Amos, CNBC, Forbes, and we are going to work with you for the Money Maze Allocators Summit launching at the end of September. And we're going to come back to that a little later on. What does it give you in the way of data? Oh, a tremendous amount of data that's very unique. So as of

Right now we probably have about 90,000 meetings worth of data.

We know which LP met which GP in 90,000 meetings. So if you think about that, as the business continues to grow and we see more and more activity even outside of the events, obviously we know that lots of meetings take place in the events. Just this year in Miami at our flagship event, we ran just under 19,000 meetings.

What I'm really excited about is we're seeing more and more engagement every month from investors who are coming in and just researching funds in the platform. As that continues to grow into more and more monthly meeting activity, it really gives us an interesting view of where investors are headed.

It's interesting. At a lot of these events over the years we've seen, investors will set up their preferences in the system, but then the meetings they actually do are often different because they established a mandate maybe three or four months ago and that's there, but they're starting to think about what's coming next and that's often what

you know, shapes some of their meeting schedule at these events. So as the platform continues to grow and is more and more widely adopted, it really gives us an interesting view into where investors are likely going to allocate in the next six to 12 months.

So let's move to the conferences themselves. I mean, everybody's attended a conference who's been working at any firm, but why generally have conferences proved so popular and enduring? Well, I can tell you coming out of COVID, people were just so tired of being trapped in their home.

there was this incredible pent-up demand. Our first in-person event was January of 22, and we had 2,300 people. That's not typical for a first-time event. Now, we had done really well with the platform during COVID, and we definitely were an outlier, but that was still, I didn't expect that. I thought if we get 1,200 people in a room, I would be thrilled, and then it was double that. Yeah.

I think, again, going back to our industry, our industry is not all products are illiquid, but pretty much everything in alternatives is less liquid than the mainstream market. Where, you know, in the mainstream market, you have mutual funds, which you can buy and sell on a daily basis. You have SMAs, which you can get in and out of as fast as you like.

But in alternatives, hedge funds are probably the most liquid. And even a hedge fund, you're not getting in and out of it in the same week. I mean, if you can get in and out of it in the same year, that's probably pretty good as an initial investor. So because of that lockup, and by the way, that's the liquid side. The illiquid side is a 10-year relationship. So-

In that world, you're just not going to cut a check knowing when I cut this check, I am in this thing for a long time without meeting the people who are running that money for you. And of course, because it's not a retail – it's not the retail end of the market. It's really like our entire LP base is all institutional. They're writing enormous checks. They're just not going to do that without a face-to-face meeting –

getting to and multiple face-to-face meetings, you know, they want to get to know the people that they're going into a big partnership with. So I think

I think that's why, at least in the alternatives industry, conferences have always been a big part of it. So you run, I think, the biggest of its type in the world, iConnections Global Alternatives, held annually in Miami Beach. Now, can you describe to me why it has been so successful?

apart from it being in February in Florida February in Florida does not hurt that is for sure smart play isn't it and I think there's been tailwinds of just the whole of America moving down to Miami and Miami's become a genuine financial center hasn't it so oh it absolutely has Miami there were when the when the migration started I thought that this probably won't last

But there are a lot of people who I don't think they're ever coming back to the Northeast. I think they like the weather. They like the taxes. They like the lifestyle. And now you have a real community down there. I mean, Citadel building that huge office down there.

I can't believe how many VCs I've met from the West Coast who have come to Miami. So Miami is definitely here to stay. But as far as the conference goes, I think what has made it the biggest in the world of its kind is how we focus on delivering a great experience to both GPs and LPs.

Almost anyone could throw an event where you rent a hotel and you set up a stage and you hire an AV production company to deal with the cameras and the lights and all that stuff. And then you invite speakers and they come and you can create content. And that's...

The hard part of that is do you have the relationships? But there's lots of people who have the relationships, so lots of people could do that. What we did that's different and that is much harder to do is we built an amazing technology platform that enables the industry to put so much more detail into the software so that both sides of the market can really run effectively.

very detailed searches to narrow down who it is they want to meet. So if you think about our Miami event this year, we had over 5,000 attendees, 1,000 GPs, 1,200 LPs. If you're an LP and you're trying to sift through 1,000 GPs,

There's no way to do that efficiently unless the software that is sharing all this information is really good. So there are plenty of conference software products and apps out there, but none of them come close to us in the way ours is tailored to this industry. I think it's really the combination of probably three things –

Miami in February. Our reputation with LPs, we've been able to get the best LPs in the world. That's not easy to do, but we worked hard at it, built an IR team, spent a lot of time traveling around the world, making friends and educating people on who we are and begging them to come to Miami.

And the tech platform. I think those three things have made it really the event that it is. And then, you know, of course, this year, we really took it to a new level. And I have to give our partners at MFA credit for that. So the Managed Funds Association, which in the U.S. is really the biggest trade association, especially for hedge funds. But really, they're serving the entire alt universe. And I think that's really important.

We partnered with MFA, and they really helped us take it to another level. MFA's client base, it's really the biggest, most prestigious funds in the world. And having their stamp of approval on our event, it really enabled us to get that last, like, 1% or 2% of the top, top tier, who frankly are so big and so well-established, they probably feel like they don't really need a conference. But

I think after experiencing Miami this year, they'll probably all be coming back. I think there's a sprinkling of fun about the event, isn't there? If I could ask you, Ron, I mean, there's an extra magic sauce there that you get some incredible people and that must be a draw. It is. It's definitely, again, it's fun to be in Miami Beach in February.

So there is a fun element, but I think we have actually struck the perfect balance of fun and work because this is not a boondoggle in any way. Before, the average meeting count for attendees was 20. 20 meetings in two days is intense. Each meeting is a half hour. So you're spending five hours each day

And that doesn't count, you probably did a breakfast meeting, a lunch meeting, drinks, then a dinner, then drinks afterwards. It has never been a huge party scene the way I think other events have. For the LPs and GPs, it's unbelievably efficient. You know, for a GP to come down and meet 20 qualified LPs in two days, there's

I really don't know any other place in the world where they can do that. So it's, yes, our attendees are definitely having fun, but it is serious work at the same time. Lots of people just pitch up at conferences and I suspect having observed it and, you know, being that in various capacities, there's often a lack of preparation. What advice would you generally issue to those turning up?

Oh, I mean, you have to, our attendees are in the software messaging and researching and evaluating who they want to spend time with once they're at the event. That goes on for two months before you even walk in the door.

So the amount of preparation in advance, I think what the tech platform has really done is it facilitates this activity. Again, if it was a less structured event, I think people kind of try to throw a schedule together in the last week. It's, oh, wait, right, I'm going to be there at this thing next week. I don't have any meetings, and they start scrambling.

But we have a very structured process where our system opens first to the LP side. They get access to see the managers who are coming about two weeks before we open it up to the manager side.

So a lot of the LPs, you know, they've probably already sent out requests before the managers even get in. And then once the managers come in, then the frenzy really begins because now you have a couple thousand people all messaging and sending requests to each other. Because of that process and because the tech platform is set up to facilitate all of that activity,

just by being in the software and participating in the event, that is really the preparation. That's, that's a,

A huge percentage of the preparation. Then, of course, once you know, okay, these are my 20, 30, I mean, we had some funds down there that did 60 meetings, believe it or not. They're starting to now send teams of people. And because we're in the convention center, our footprint is much bigger. So funds are taking a much bigger square footage space and

and having multiple meeting areas set up so that multiple teams can operate at once. But for sure, once you know who you're going to meet with, having a sense as to who they are, what they've invested in. I mean, now there's so much data in our system and so much data available to allow you to prepare for

For sure, in these first meetings, the GPs who we see do it best are working it really, really hard, and they're absolutely coming in with at least kind of a one-pager on each LP they're meeting with. The LPs don't have to do that quite as much because they're the guys showing up with the checkbooks, but the research teams for some of the bigger LPs, I mean, we've had sovereign wealth funds send 10 people

and just crank out over 100 meetings across that team. And they're showing up with lookbooks of here's who we're meeting with and here's a little summary on each fund. And if there were one or two things that you would say are key to people returning the next year, what are they? The number one metric is meetings. How many meetings did they get?

In our analysis, you know, really the last four or five years of meeting data, a fund who achieves about 40 meetings in our system over the course of a year is about 80% to renew. A fund, this was interesting, a fund that gets at least one meeting is 62% to renew. Yeah.

That one surprised me. I thought it would actually be much lower, but I think because the room is so good and there's such good networking. But presumably there's also the building of the brand. There's the strategic partners that you might meet, you haven't. There's the intelligence gathering. It's a cocktail, is it not, of things that matter? Absolutely. And we work – I probably spend –

In the three months leading up to the event, 70, 80% of my time just on the agenda. Recruiting speakers, figuring out which speaker goes into which time slot, because we have four stages running simultaneously on the content day. And this year, we had so many A-listers, it was really hard to not have them overlap.

So absolutely, meetings are the ultimate metric, but it is a cocktail. And the fact that they can come and see Stephen Ross and Steve Cohen and Howard Marks and, you know, these are some of the best investors in the world all in one place and then go through two days of a hardcore, well-orchestrated cap intro event. There's really nothing like it out there.

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So all this technology is facilitating and providing greater depth and insight. Interestingly, our mutual friend Jen Prosek has said about the problem many managers have in nailing the narrative. Would it be fair to say that for all this brilliant technology, a lot of managers actually are not very good at delivering their message? That is absolutely true. As an industry leader,

Because of the – again, I go back to the regulations. The deal that the government cut with the industry when they passed those rules back in the 30s and 40s was if you're not going to register your fund –

You're not allowed to sell it to retail customers. And you're not even allowed to advertise in any way because we don't want retail customers to even see that your product exists. So to this day, if you're running a hedge fund, you're not allowed to say the name of the hedge fund on TV.

You can talk about your management company, you can talk about the market, your strategy, but you're never allowed to speak publicly about the fund. I think the byproduct of that is the industry is largely terrible at marketing. And I think you can see the firms that have achieved huge AUM growth, they have mastered branding and marketing. Those guys are nailing the narrative. But

Most firms are started by people who are introverts, in my opinion. They're quantitative. They're amazing investors, many of them. That doesn't mean you're going to be great at marketing. It doesn't mean that you know anything about how to build a brand. And I think this is really one of the weaker spots in the industry because in the –

you know, early 2000s, it was so nascent and people were so excited about the returns that hedge funds were putting up. You could just put up good numbers and money would find its way to you. You didn't really have to think much about the marketing side. And I think even great firms like Steve Cohen's firm in the early days, his numbers were so amazing. Everyone wanted to give Steve money. It's just, you know, it's a different...

industry now. You absolutely, if you want to break out from the 50, 100, 200 million size and get into the billion plus category, you have to spend real time on your brand, on your marketing, figure out how you're differentiated. You know, there's a lot of funds out there. So you have to think about the marketing message in a way that in the early days just wasn't as necessary. Yeah.

So we're going to be partnering with your firm iConnections for the Money Maze Allocated Summit. Will, do you want to just maybe give a colour for why we're doing this? Yeah, so I think we noticed from a lot of the allocator community that they love coming to London, but perhaps they didn't think there was an absolute best-in-class conference. And we have the advantage of a clean sheet of paper and...

We're going to be doing it a little bit different to you, Ron, in that it's going to be very private and it's going to be a very small event. But we've had an incredibly flattering response. We think we've got some amazing people flying in from the globe. It's a global thinkers conference, but we're going to also boast about London and some of the specialities in the UK. And as Simon says, you know,

your business came to us from many different directions as having the best in class. And that's what we want to be, the Money Maze Allocator Summit. So thank you for being here today. And, you know, we're looking forward to seeing your wonderful work

app and all the data and technology in action. Yeah, we, unlike many conferences, because one of our sponsors, London Stock Exchange Group, were able to host it there, these fantastic facilities in Patten Osler Square, you know, beneath a sort of, you know, support cathedral. So we're all very excited. So just a couple of closing questions. We often talk about culture of firms and the challenge with companies

comes with growth. Am I right in saying you don't have any offices and yours is a virtual business? It is a virtual business. We have a

a few WeWork offices where people can get together in person. Um, but, but we don't have a dedicated space where everyone is showing up five days a week. I have to say before the, before COVID, I would never have thought this was possible. I had no interest in working from home. I hated working from home. Mostly. It just felt like lots of distractions. Uh,

This is probably still too many distractions, but because of COVID and largely the introduction of these video platforms like Zoom and Teams, we got really, really good at running the business virtually. And what it enabled us to do was kind of like the same thing that made that first event really successful was because people could attend from anywhere. In that first event, we had incredible audience.

managers and LPs in that event who we never would have gotten to a first event if we held it anywhere in the world. The same thing really became true as we built the business and started hiring people. As we found people,

great people. We hired them wherever they were and we didn't have this geographic restriction in our way. So we just totally leaned into it. The downside is if I wanted to create an office now, I don't even know how we could possibly do it because we have probably 40 or 50 people in Brazil and a cluster here in London, a cluster in Singapore, a bunch in New York.

But it really is working for us. And I don't know, maybe in the next phase of our growth, we'll have to take another look at it. But so far, it has not slowed us down. I think it's been a huge asset. Well, I just interviewed Brookfield's head of real estate, so I don't think he'd quite like that message.

I don't know if you're using any of those Bruce Miller chairs that you had from years ago, Ron. Herman Miller. Herman Miller chairs. Before we wrap up with a few closing questions, anything that we haven't asked you about your business you'd like to have shared? So one thing that we're very focused on is how do we take what is an amazing Cap Intro platform and evolve this into a full-blown investment platform?

Amazingly, I mean, what's the number in alts? It's like 20 trillion, 21 trillion. I mean, it's obviously a very big number. We have the most sophisticated managers, the most sophisticated investors in the world, and yet there is no dominant investment platform that exists for this industry. So we're sitting here with...

All of the biggest players in our software, many times, many of them are in our software multiple times a week.

I think the next big challenge for us is how do we capitalize on that? They trust our brand. They're in our software. It's helping them at the front end of their investment process. How do we take them through all the roadshows they want to do throughout the year? How do we digitize sub-docs for them? How do we create an investor portal so that the experience is consistent and they have history there?

from all the activity, whether it's our event or other events or meetings they've had at their office, give them one full solution so that they can do everything from the start of the investment process through post-investment and portfolio management. That's really what we're building now. And we have elements of it that have already been released. Our roadshow module has been

unbelievably successful. We released it in September of last year. And as of today, we've seen just under 1300 roadshows created by GPs and LPs who are traveling around the world meeting people. So for us, the future is really taking this huge lead we have in Capintro and turning it into a full blown investment solution.

Well, we have four closing questions, two from Will, two from myself. I will kick off. Was there any advice you'd give to a 21-year-old Ron Biscardi? God. Was he going to help you?

You know, I think the thing that probably has helped me the most when my, I feel like my career really started to move when I stopped worrying about what everyone else thought and just took more chances, even in small ways. Uh,

I probably had more what I'll call head trash than maybe other people in the industry in the early days because I didn't come – I didn't have a Wharton MBA. I didn't grow up on a trading desk. I was an engineer and then I had been a recruiter. So it wasn't – it didn't always make sense to people like why I was even in this business in the early days. Yeah.

I think my advice would be just don't worry about that. Just keep... If you find ways to pay it forward and to help people, everything just kind of takes care of itself. If you work...

to build your network in a way where you're helping people with what they want, what they're trying to achieve, and that's your focus, you'll make a lot of friends very fast, and you'll have a lot of people that want to pay it back when you need it. So it took me a little longer to learn that one than I would have liked.

So Ron, this is your name drop moment. Oh no. You have and must have seen so many inspirational speakers. Just give us a couple of your favorites. Because of the growth of the business, I haven't been able to do this one event that I absolutely loved. I did it probably six or seven times in a row, but the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.

uh warren and initially warren was just such a hero to me um in that he was so smart and so logical and his thinking always felt so simple to me it just never came across as overly complex and then as i started to go to the meetings and discovered charlie munger he was also like equally amazing um

Those two, I feel very fortunate that I got to attend those annual meetings and hear the two of them in person.

Just, I mean, it was really remarkable. We'd be in a stadium of 22, 23,000 people with microphones set up all throughout the stadium. And they would just, you know, microphone number one, microphone number two, field whatever question came to them in the simplest format you can imagine. Two guys sitting at a table with like Coke and, you know, See's candy and beer.

field questions on every imaginable topic. It was, it was really amazing to watch. So I think those guys far and away were my favorites. My final question is we were lucky enough to have Mike Horvath who founded Strava on last year. And, uh, you know, Mike said, well, I've got another business in me. And I wondered if you weren't doing this today and couldn't do it, is there something that you think, Oh, I'd like to have a crack at that. That's that's opportunity. Um,

I don't, I really don't, there's nothing else that really comes to mind that I would want to do. Certainly nothing I'd want to do more than this. I'm really having fun at iConnections.

But I definitely would be doing something. I have really no interest in retiring. I feel like I'm lucky enough to be in an industry where, you know, you can do this well into your 80s if you're fortunate enough to, you know, stay sharp that long. But it's, I definitely love business. I would absolutely be working on building something if it wasn't this. Yeah.

Well, that, you know, it clearly comes through just looking at your smiley face. You enjoy what you do and they say that's not work. But I'd love to finish with, you know, what brings you to London, Ron? A very good friend of mine,

who also happens to be the best fun marketer in the world, in my opinion. Rahul Mughal is having a party this weekend to invite us. So we're headed over to Rahul's tomorrow night for a little party. Okay. So you have no motorbiking planned or anything? No, that's in the month. That's next month. Yes, next month I'll do my two-week motorcycle vacation through the western U.S. We'll do this year it's Utah and Wyoming.

So that'll be fun. My wife did that years ago in the Himalayas and said, wow, it was a spectacular experience. So Ron, we're going to let you go and have that shower that I think you may not even have because you jumped off a plane. You came here because I said you had to be here by this time because I, I'm going to go and jump on a train, which sounds very pedestrian, doesn't it? I will take a couple of conclusions. One is that actually we haven't had many people who started life as an electrical engineer or,

or an electrical engineering degree. So, you know, wow, that's proved to be a very interesting course of action and opened up lots of stuff. So maybe more young folks should be going to study electrical engineering. But what is absolutely clear is, number one, conferences are here to stay. The underlying technology sort of, you know, supports may have changed. But particularly, and it's a little bit to do with the legislation, but I think globally, you know, rather than just the US, is that when you are going to commit capital,

for long periods with the attendant illiquidity, you better meet those people because there is... You're going to be with them a long time. There is chemistry, you know, there is, it's, this is science and nature. Yes. Ron Biscotti, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you both. It was great to be here, gentlemen. Thank you.

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