How I Invest with David Weisburd - E128: iCapital CEO Lawrence Calcano on the New $145 Trillion Entering Private Markets
Episode Date: January 10, 2025In this episode of How I Invest, I sit down with Lawrence Calcano, Chairman and CEO of iCapital, to explore the transformative potential of alternative investments in the wealth management space. Lawr...ence shares his journey from Goldman Sachs to building iCapital, a platform managing over $200 billion in alternative assets. We dive deep into the challenges and opportunities in democratizing access to private markets, the role of technology in scaling the alternatives industry, and the growing appetite for private equity and credit among high-net-worth investors. If you're curious about the future of wealth management and the intersection of technology and alternatives, this episode is a must-listen.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Well, so Bain did a study.
Every year they do a study of the wealth market.
And the 23 study had an estimate of about $145 trillion
that was owned by retail on a global basis.
So if you think about that...
$145 trillion.
$145 trillion.
It really rivals the size of the institutional market.
And if you think about some percentage of that being allocated to alts,
it's a fairly large addressable market
for the community. If you're successful, what will iCapital look like in 2030?
So what is the mission of iCapital? Give me a sense for the scale of the business today.
Sure. So the mission of iCapital is to create opportunities and access for financial advisors
to be able to invest in the highest
quality alternative products, the same types of products, for example, that institutions would
have access to. And at the same time, it's to help GPs access the very fragmented wealth management
market. Today, the business has about $205 billion in assets on the platform and alternatives.
We have about $170 billion in structured notes that we manage in their lifecycle and nearly a half a trillion dollars
of data assets that we report on. So walk me through going from Goldman Sachs to the founding
story of iCapital in 2013. Sure. So at Goldman, I ran tech banking, and we spent a lot of time taking companies public, doing M&A and making a lot of investments. And, you know, fast forward to iCapital, it was a great group of people that had the same idea around bringing automation into this alternative space to provide both that access I talked about, but not just access itself, i.e. I can now have a chance to
buy the product. Importantly, my whole experience would be based in technology and would be
automated. A lot of the early advisors that we served at iCapital, they were managing a lot of
money, but were fundamentally still small businesses. And so they didn't have the capability
or the desire, frankly, to hire lots of operational people, administrative people, etc.
So they needed to be able to leverage technology to sort of manage the life cycle from learning
about funds to subscribing to funds through all of the post-subscription activities like capital calls, distributions,
reporting, et cetera. And being able to rely on a tech platform was critical for them to be able to really implement the technology or the product in their platforms.
I've spoken to some of the top private equity funds in the world, and they're all focused
on this wealth channel. Why is that? Well, so Bain did a study. Every year they do a study of the wealth market. And the 23 study
had an estimate of about $145 trillion that was owned by retail on a global basis.
So if you think about that-
$145 trillion.
$145 trillion. It really rivals the size of the institutional market.
And if you think about some percentage of that being allocated to alts, it's a fairly
large addressable market for the community.
And I will tell you, when we started the business, most of the GPs that we talked to, not all,
but most, were not really focused on this channel.
Historically, they raised
all their money from institutions. And so over time, as it's become very obvious that the channel
is large, it is also stickier than I think a lot of people assumed when they first started thinking
about the channel. They realized that they could build a foundational part of their fundraising strategy within this channel.
And so that's really what's evolved over the last decade.
Was it difficult when you started?
You had this contrarian thesis.
You saw the world differently.
Was it difficult to build something that a lot of people didn't think should exist?
Well, I don't know that they thought it shouldn't exist
versus they just didn't think about the question.
And I think the hard thing
was the classic chicken or the egg problem, right?
So if you would go to independent financial advisors
and say, we're gonna bring you a platform
that will provide access to alternatives,
the first question is,
well, which managers are on the platform? And if you to alternatives. The first question is, well,
which managers are on the platform? And if you go to the managers and you say, we've built a platform that's going to give you access to this massive and distributed wealth management channel,
they're going to say, well, how much money is on the platform? Which advisors are on the platform,
et cetera. And so building that or managing that chicken
or the egg problem, so both sides of the equation, if you will, sort of grow over time,
was really the critical challenge that we were able to overcome throughout the last decade.
And what surprised you the most about the interest of high net worth investors versus
traditional institutional investors? I think probably the biggest threshold issue
for a lot of individual investors is illiquidity.
Institutions are very used to that, right?
They're investing in these assets
to fund longer-term liabilities.
Whereas individuals, you know,
illiquidity is a less natural and or comfortable topic.
Yeah.
And so managing their perception of illiquidity is a less natural and or comfortable topic. And so managing their perception of illiquidity and thinking about how do they properly incorporate these types of products
into their portfolio, you know, has been and continues to be a really important challenge
for the industry. Which if you think about the market as being efficient, efficient market
hypothesis, one of the only true ways to outperform is with illiquidity, the illiquidity premium. So
not being able to take advantage of that really disadvantages high net worth.
It does. And I'll tell you, I say this a lot, the illiquidity is not a bug, it's a feature.
And if you think about how these asset
managers generate returns for their shareholders, that period of illiquidity is fundamental to what
they do. If you think of private equity, for example, it's probably the ultimate active
asset class, where they're not just investing and following a company, they're investing in
the company, they're taking a seat or several seats on the board, they may control the company,
they're hiring management, maybe they're firing management, they're buying divisions,
selling divisions, launching new products, changing prices, growing geographically.
There's a lot of really fundamental activities that these asset managers are undertaking.
And as we think about the asset class, and as we think about how do we evaluate the individual
managers, probably one of the most important things we think about is what impact do they
have on their portfolio during this sort of active management period? What are they actually doing
to improve the revenues and profitability of a
company? And while they can generate some return, maybe with leverage or multiple expansion,
the real value and the differentiator, the alpha, if you will, is in what they do with the companies
and how those companies grow and improve their financial characteristics over time. So when you're looking at high net worth investors today,
Q1 2025, what are they looking for? So right now, people are beginning to shift their interest back
to equity. Over the last two years, I would say credit has really dominated the calendar.
And what's been behind this interest in credit?
So if you go back to 22, it's a great question.
If you go back to 22, the markets were in a bad place.
People were expecting the Fed to raise interest rates.
And in a rising rate environment, people are looking to be hedged, right?
So they tend to be more risk off.
They want shorter
duration. And with respect to private credit, most of the private credit structures are floating rate.
So if you think the Fed's going to raise rates, it creates a hedge for you. And over time,
as the Fed did in fact raise rates, at one point rates were maybe 4% or 5%. The absolute return to private credit was 10% to 12%.
So even the absolute return was attractive.
Now that we're seeing rates begin to come back down, we're seeing more of a sort of
reopening, if you will, of private equity into the market.
Right now, if I look at this year to date, actually, if you go
back to the first half of the year, private credit was roughly 45% of the flows and equity about 35%
of the flows. That reversed in the third quarter, and we had equity at close to 50% of the flows
and private credit in the low 30s.
So we're already seeing that shift in extension
into the private equity strategies,
which we expect to continue.
And to double click on the equity dispersion,
what asset classes are we talking about?
So it's growth equity,
bio-equity,
technology is one of the themes
that people are very interested in.
But it really is across the board.
I think one of the important things about our platform is all of the different strategies
and underlying sort of industrial focuses are on the platform.
So you can get private equity, private credit, private real estate, private infrastructure,
all the hedge funds.
You can get funds that are focused on financial institutions or technology
or energy or healthcare, et cetera. And so the important thing about the platform is
that any advisor can build a portfolio for their clients irrespective of the market environment.
So if we're back in 22 and people are risk off and they expect rates to go
up, they can buy a full cadre of private credit products. If the market's rallying and rates are
coming down and people are focused on equity, there's a full menu of equity products they can
buy. And being able to provide that over time is really critical for advisors to serve their
whole client base.
You've made a bet on the Wealth Channel. You've also made a bet on alternatives. Tell me about the future of the alternatives industry. We think it's a good bet. I mean, if you look today
and you do a survey of where the wealth manager CIOs are suggesting allocating to alts,
you'll find ranges from 15 to as high as 40% suggested
allocation to alts. If you then look empirically and see where people are actually allocated,
what you'll find is low to mid single digit allocations. So we think there's a very substantial
amount of room to grow into the allocations.
In fact, I like to think about two phenomena as a way to think about where we are in the
market cycle.
The first is the participation rate.
And that speaks to how many financial advisors are actually doing the business, right?
And today, you probably have 20% of the advisors driving close to 80% of
the volume. So the participation rate is still quite low. If you then look at the allocation
rate, as I was just describing, it too is way below the sort of targeted allocation suggestions
by the CIOs. So I think both those dynamics, as the participation rate grows and as the allocation
rate grows, you've got significant potential flows into the asset class. I think you could
also look at it from what is the efficient, what should you be efficiently allocated to alts versus
what's the reality. And if you look at what is efficient, you have to look at the endowment
world, right? Probably some of the sharpest investors in the world, the Yale model, specifically the
David Swenson model, most endowments are roughly 35% to 40%, and sometimes up to 50% of their
entire portfolio.
And then you go to the wealth channels and you see the low single digits.
What's the reason for that dispersion?
So first of all, I played golf over the summer with the CIO of an Ivy League school that has
a 60% allocation to alts. So your point is exactly right though. And I think the issue,
there's multiple reasons. And I think probably to start, the most significant is just access.
You know, institutions have been buying these assets or investing in these assets for 45, 50 years when the industry first really started. And individuals, except for the wealthiest
family offices, you know-
Talking about billion dollar plus families.
Yeah, real family offices that frankly are just like foundations and endowments in many respects.
Many others, however, haven't really had that systematic access I was talking about to alternatives.
And so that has changed a lot, and now people do have access.
But what's needed is the automation I talked about and also the tools and education. And I would say probably
today, if you looked at one of the biggest reasons for the alts allocation where it is broadly,
education is still really what's needed. There's still a lot of advisors that are newer to the
asset class. And obviously, most responsible advisors aren't going
to suggest products that they first don't totally understand and understand the applicability of
those products for their clients. And so as that education process happens, and as advisors get
more comfortable with the asset class, and it's really happening, I think you'll see those numbers
start to grow. Whether they get to 40,
50, 60%, I'm not sure they're going to get that high. But fundamentally, the reasons why
institutions invest in these assets are every bit as germane to individuals, right? They have
long-dated liabilities. Retirement is a long-dated liability that you have to save for.
They have other events in their life they have to save for.
They want to protect their portfolio.
They want diversification and assets that aren't totally correlated with their liquid assets.
So all of the things that drive institutions to invest are the same types of things that are attractive from an individual's perspective as to why they should invest as well.
How do you know that the wealth channels are not being adversely selected when it comes to these
funds? You have a large fund, they want to go to endowment or pension fund. Why would they want to
allocate to a wealth channel? So it's a super question. And before I answer that, I'm going
to make one observation that strengthens the question further, which is to say, within alternatives, you take private equity again, the difference
between the top performing manager and the fourth quartile could be over 1,000 basis
points, 10 plus percent.
You're in a totally different asset class if you're not in the right managers.
We'll be right back.
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Some say venture capital is the best asset class,
but also is the worst,
depending on which core value you're in.
Which depends who you're with, right?
If you're with the top in venture,
the pool is even smaller, I would argue.
But with respect to really all of these alternative strategies, you've got to be with the best
managers.
And part of what we're trying to deliver as a platform is access to those managers.
I think historically, when people haven't really had robust access, you really have
the adverse selection problem because they
have a friend who's running a real estate fund or they know someone who's in a private equity fund.
If you don't have robust access and you don't have robust information to understand how any
given fund performs, it's hard to make a relative decision about who the top performer is and who's
not. And so information- Is that also the standardization of information?
Because I think that's one of the difficult things.
Some are not even RIAs.
I'm assuming you work mostly with RIAs,
but sometimes it's hard to even standardize
and look at different asset classes.
I think access and standardization,
knowing that you have all the relevant material,
is really important. We try to provide that. We try to provide due diligence for many of the
funds on the platform. So there's another lens, another analysis for an advisor to talk about
with their clients. I talked about how the best managers generate returns. That's one of the
things, for example, in our
diligence reports, we're really focused on which of the managers are driving underlying portfolio
company growth and improvement. Again, the alpha- Where's the value add?
Where's the value add? Exactly. iCapital has both the platform, but also you have a curated set
of managers. Talk to me about that. The underlying thought as we were building this company
is we needed to build the full automated platform.
And I talked about that in terms of how important that was
for people to be able to really drive and grow the business.
But there was also, as we're discussing now,
a lot of importance around making sure you have access
to the right managers.
One of the things as we go to market is that we don't require people to use all of what we offer.
We simply say, here's what we have to offer, an end-to-end technology platform,
access to great managers, research around great managers, and you choose what components of the
offering is most valuable
or important to you to achieve your goals and objectives. For many of the independent RIAs,
they use both the full platform from an automation perspective, and they also use the products that
we've curated and made available to them. Many of the large banks, for example, that have their
own historic access and incredible set of relationships might just use the technology or some of the services that we offer around managing the business.
Same for the GPs.
And that's part of, you know, sort of meet the customer base where they are in terms of providing the solutions they need and not requiring people to take things they don't.
There's a saying in private equity and alternatives that nothing takes more time to manage than
a $25,000 check.
You make an exception for a friend and family and you end up spending more time than the
$25 million check.
How do you obfuscate the investor relations pains of dealing with small check writers
and how does iCapital help?
Good question. And this really speaks to one of the important services that we provide for GPs,
in addition to technology, is this aggregation. And so if you look at the infrastructures of most
general partners, because of where they've always raised money, they're tuned to getting a very small number of really large
commitments. The high net worth space, however, is the exact opposite, a really large number
of smaller commitments. And so their infrastructures aren't tuned for that new reality.
So we step in and we aggregate in lots of different ways all of these smaller tickets.
And so we look to a GP like one large institution.
And so we can interact and connect to their infrastructure a lot more seamlessly than $2,000, $50,000 or $100,000 investors. And that's a big part of the service offering to the GPs, as well as
helping to create access to this fragmented group of people in the first place.
You mentioned earlier in the interview, something that surprised me that the wealth channel is
sticky. A lot of managers would look at high net worth individuals as the last one on the boat,
first one off. Why is the wealth channel sticky? Well, I think it's like anything else in life.
If people are having a good experience with a manager
and the manager is delivering what they've promised
and what they promise beyond just,
I'm going to invest in these strategies in this way
and it's going to generate X returns.
It's also, and I'm going to report to you,
I'm going to have transparent reporting. The user experience matters as much as the objective.
Yes. And I think in a lot of cases, there's a relationship that forms with the manager
and delivering consistent returns, being transparent about your investments, your
reporting, your fees, et cetera, is how you
go about building that relationship because it develops trust. And just like institutions that
have good experiences with some managers and they grow their relationship, and maybe with others
they don't, and they probably shrink or eliminate those relationships. This channel is the same way.
And I think it represents an incredibly long-term channel for GPs. And I'll tell you, going back to 2014, running around talking to GPs and having many GPs say, you know, why would I ever need
to be in that channel, as we talked about. Today, I would say almost every GP that we talk to understands my comment from the Bain report, the size of the market, and now they't typically change that often. So you almost have to, if you're an emerging manager,
you almost have to go after that channel. Yeah, I think you're right. I think a lot of the
newer managers tend to have sort of a friends and family sort of origin to their capital base.
And then as they create track record and they have demonstrated success,
then they tend to go out and raise more institutional money. But I will tell you,
the decision-making, having spent a lot of time with these advisors, whether they're
on a bank platform or independent RAs or IBDs, they're very smart and they're very discerning.
And what no manager should think is that this channel is any less discerning,
any less shrewd and thoughtful as the institutional channel.
And as you see, one of the big trends in wealth management is this sort of growing aggregation.
The RIAs are combining,
creating much larger entities. And as they do, they represent more dollars. They've got, you know,
mature, built-out staffs. And they will look to the GPs like the banks look to GPs today in terms of their size, their reach, their breadth, et cetera. And so it's a very exciting market. And I think we're going to see, as we talked about earlier,
a growing amount of allocation to this asset class.
I think every top 100 private equity firm will have a head of private wealth
within the next five years, is my sense.
They most already do. And it's coming down the
line. One of the really interesting things in the earlier days is that as people started to
embrace this channel, they asked some of their institutional fundraisers to kind of manage the
channel off the side of their desk. And that's not the right way to do it. And you don't have
focus. This channel
needs focus just like any other channel. How does that scale? How does focus scale
in the wealth channel? So it's building relationships with certainly the wires
create lots of scale because they represent- The large banks, the JP Morgan.
Yes, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Morgan Stanley, B of A. They represent very large pools of money.
And over the years, the banks have done a lot to educate advisors on how these assets fit
into the portfolio. So they represent very attractive places for the GPs to invest.
But as we were just discussing, the RA channel is also quite attractive, particularly as we were just discussing, the RIA channel is also quite attractive, particularly as we've seen
the M&A trend that has created larger and larger entities, which now therefore represent more money
and have the sophistication and the interest. The economics are very attractive in rolling
up these RIAs. They pay for themselves very quickly. It's a great trade.
Yeah, that's the thought. And they continue to grow. And I think the more M&A we see in the RIA space, the more integration and automation
we're also going to need to see. Because they need to take disparate platforms and integrate them
so that not only do they have asset growth, but they also have margin growth. And by the way,
the private equity space is investing very actively in this trend. So it's really interesting
how these worlds are coming together in a powerful way. Exactly.
So how do you invest your portfolio?
You know, somewhat conservatively, you know, I have a significant allocation to alternatives,
you know, both in terms of the funds I have, as well as, you know, iCapital is a private company,
and I own private equity, if you will, in my equity in iCapital.
You own essentially a small piece of each fund through your ownership of the parent company.
No, iCapital doesn't own its funds, right? And so there are a handful of funds
that I have invested in. And then obviously, iCapital is a big position. And then a lot of
what else I do is invest in municipal bonds, private credit. And so I have a bit of a barbell.
And what are some mistakes that you made early on in your investing career that drive how you are as an investor today? Probably the biggest thing is investing in things I didn't
understand. And in my life growing up in investment banking, we had a number of chances to invest in
certain things. And in some cases, they sounded good. And I did a cursory review and invested and didn't really understand how it was going to perform under different market environments.
And so I would say probably the biggest mistakes was investing in things I hadn't fully taken the time to really dig into, which is why, frankly, with iCapital, we're so focused on making sure people are understanding what they're doing.
Not everything works out the way you expect, but if you really understand, then when rates go way up, you'll have an expectation of what's going to happen to your portfolio. If they go down,
the market goes up, it goes down. You should have a set of expectations for what's going to happen
to your investments. I think that's one of the things that makes Warren Buffett so good,
his buy box. He's one of the most disciplined investors ever. And I've that's one of the things that makes Warren Buffett so good, his buy box.
He's one of the most disciplined investors ever. And I've had a lot of people that complain about this and say, you can't move him from his buy box.
Yep. So you've been building iCapital, but alongside it, you've been building a large
organization. What are the lessons learned from building such a large organization?
The most important thing is creating a cohesive culture.
You know, I grew up at Goldman Sachs and culture was really important there.
And it was something that was very obvious.
And I would say sort of one of the most significant unifying principles in that culture was that our clients' interests always come first.
And I would say here at iCapital, you know,
I write a letter to the company every weekend. I've been doing that for nearly a decade.
And it's so that people understand what we're trying to do and why we're trying to do it,
and they get a readout or a report on what's happening. And in every one of those, I make two observations, which is that,
you know, everything we do has to help our clients succeed. And the second thing is everything we do,
we have to do together as a team. We're offering a, I think, a very valuable and complex service.
And you need to work together lots lots of different people with different skills
coming together to provide that service
and or technology to help our clients
meet their objectives.
And I would say that culture
is a differentiating thing in companies.
Because companies-
Is it for retention, for recruiting? Yes. Where does it help the most?
Everywhere. Everywhere. And does that mean you have to be anti-something to be pro-something
in your culture? No, no. You need to be pro-team. You need to understand that your success
is a function of the whole team's success.
And if you are the type of person
that needs to do things on your own,
this may not be the right place.
We have incredibly talented people here
who understand that by working
with other incredibly talented people,
they'll get a lot more done.
And so I think that that desire to work together as a team
is a really important thing. And I think always understanding that the only reason any companies
exist is so they can deliver something of value that somebody else will buy and use to achieve a
goal. And keeping that sort of end customer in mind, I think is really critical
in everything you do. It's like a roadmap. You know, as you get bigger, and you know,
when you're small, and you can have line of sight managed, you can see what everybody's doing, and
everybody can hear everybody, you know, what's happening. As you get to be 1700 people and
beyond, you know, people have to know what are the things that
are important to the company.
So that while they're making the hundreds or more decisions they make every day on their
own, they're guided by these two things.
I've read a lot of leaders of organizations, the bigger the organization, the more pithy
the sayings and
the fewer there are. They go around and say kind of the same two, three, four things.
How do you make your culture stick? I think it's a thousand little things,
right? It's how you compensate people. It's how you promote people.
It's your behavior more than what you say. It's your behavior. What you say is interesting, but what you do. But I do think that
there's value in consistency
and repetitiveness, right?
So if, I remember, you know,
at Goldman we had 14 business principals
and they were all incredibly powerful.
When we were smaller,
the first thing that occurred to me is that's a lot
of things for people to remember. At least as we've thought about it, you know, what are the
handful of, what are the most important things that we never want anybody to forget? And so
what's happened, you know, is we've really distilled what we're doing to those two things as the root of our culture.
I mean, excellence is important.
Integrity is important.
But the way I look at it is
if you're focused on your client's success,
then you're going to be excellent.
You're going to have integrity
in terms of how you deal with your colleagues
and your clients.
And so repeating the same things over and over again, it just reinforces what matters to the company.
If you're successful, what will iCapital look like in 2030? built out the infrastructure for the global wealth managers and asset managers to scale
very large businesses, either as consumers of or managers of these private assets across all the
different strategies. And what we're really trying to do is create that operating system,
just like a major stock exchange creates a platform and a mechanism for people to buy and sell stocks, for example, very efficiently and easily, we want to create a platform for people to be able to learn about, buy and sell and manage alternative assets of all different strategies.
What do you think the biggest challenge is facing the
alternatives industry and iCapital? I would say probably the biggest thing today is sort of
education, right? You've got a lot of advisors who are newer to the asset class. We've talked
about the allocation rates being low. And so that next wave of advisors, which is a really big wave,
by the way, is just by definition less familiar with the asset class.
And so making sure that they're educated in a way they really understand the product and can represent it and show it to their clients kind of one by one.
And I think this is, frankly, a multi-year journey that everybody needs to be involved with. And I would say that when there's
a lot of excitement around something, there's often a tendency to rush, move quickly, et cetera.
And I think this is one where the opportunity is so large in terms of what alternatives can become
relative to these client portfolios,
that everybody is better off just making sure that the investment is made in the education.
All the GPs are doing what they can to help educate advisors and clients. We certainly need to be doing that and others so that people invest in a really thoughtful and knowledgeable
way. You guys are investing heavily into technology.
What are the problems you're solving with your technology for your clients?
Sure.
So we're looking at a couple of different things that are important.
One is around decision making, right?
Two is around data collection.
How do you, as you grow your business, as you make more alternate investments, as you
do more M&A, you've got data in lots of places.
How do you bring that all together and turn it into useful information?
Three is how do you connect the ecosystem, right?
So you've got managers, administrators, tax preparers, iCapital, wealth managers.
You've got lots of different people that are dealing with information,
often with an old or different version. Are we going to be getting our K1s before September?
That's a harder question.
That's a hard one to solve.
That's a hard one to solve, but a very good one.
That's 2030.
I do think that using technology,
using technology like AI to help automate how information is collected, extracted, aggregated is really important.
Using AI to help people get to the types of products and strategies they want to get to more quickly is really important.
Using the distributed ledger to be able to connect the ecosystem in a really powerful and automated way so that people aren't reconciling.
I'll give you an example.
In a typical private fund, all of the constituents, six different constituents in that private fund, are going to reconcile every transaction that happens.
So there's an onboarding, there's a subscription,
there's a capital call, a distribution, a redemption, a report.
The GP, the wealth managers, the administrators, the tax...
A lot of repetitive work.
A lot of repetitive work in different systems.
And so what we're trying to do is leverage the distributed ledger
and have people connect into the APIs
so that whenever
there's a change in the main system, so maybe an administrator has an update, everybody's system
can consume that update immediately. And you don't have people keying in that information in separate
systems, which obviously leads to some mistakes. And so bringing the industry together is a powerful
part of where we're
investing and how we think we can improve the experience for the whole ecosystem.
You have people like Christopher Zook and Tony Robbins lobbying Congress to allow more people
to become accredited investors through the accredited investor rule. What are your thoughts
on this? So we had a rewrite or an expansion of the rule, you know, a handful
of years ago where people who, you know, may not have met the wealth test can meet the test with
experience, their place of business, et cetera. I think that was a smart thing to do because it
allowed people who were truly qualified to invest to have a chance to invest, even if they weren't,
you know, at a certain wealth level. I do think that, you know, it's about people understanding
what they're doing, right? And you can have some very wealthy people who don't fully understand
these investments, and you can have some people who aren't as wealthy who understand them really thoroughly. And so I think that behind that definition needs to be an understanding,
a true understanding of the products and how they work so people can make thoughtful decisions.
You could have a university professor that is not an accredited investor,
maybe even a university professor in finance.
Right. That's exactly my point. investor, maybe even a university professor in finance. And you have a third generation
wealthy person that doesn't even know what an alternative is that is accredited.
Yeah, exactly. And so I think whatever the rules, however they evolve, they I think should be based
substantively or fundamentally on what people understand about what they're investing in.
Absolutely. Well, Lawrence, I've really enjoyed the podcast. Thanks for jumping on.
Thank you. Great to be here.