How I Invest with David Weisburd - E2: Jordan Stein | How Cresset Partners Raised $40B, Invested in Andreessen Horowitz + Founders Fund

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

David Weisburd sits down with Jordan Stein, Director of Venture Capital at Cresset Partners. a large multifamily office with over $45 billion in assets under management and a prolific limited partner and storied venture franchises, including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and Founders Fund.

And oftentimes, these emerging managers have chips on their shoulders, which I think is a really good thing, right? They're very, very hungry. And there's data that shows that funds ones and twos and even threes often outperform later funds. And I think this is a part of it. They have that killer instincts, and they're really trying to make a name for themselves and build something. Welcome to Limited Partner Podcast, where we talk about venture capital through the lens of limited partners. I'm your host, David Weisberg, co-founder and head of venture capital at 10X Capital, one of the most active venture capital firms in the world. The world of LPs is notoriously secretive and private, but on this show, influential limited partners and investors

speak candidly about the venture capital ecosystem in 2023 and how they go about investing and navigating the space. Joining us today, we have Jordan Stein, Director of Venture Capital at Crescent Partners, a large multifamily office with over $45 billion under management. Crescent Partners has invested in storied franchises such as Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and Founders Fund. Today's episode will touch on how Crescent Partners was able to secure these allocations, why access is essential to being successful as an LP, and what Jorn thinks about the rising role of emerging managers.

Without further ado, here's Jorn Stein. Jorn Stein Well, Jorn, I'm excited to chat today. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Excited too. So let's go from a bird's eye view. You mentioned venture capital. Tell me exactly how you think about allocating in the venture capital space.

Yeah. So, you know, venture capital is really interesting for a few reasons. So number one, if you look at VC returns over the last 20, 30 years, they've outpaced every other asset class. But they also have the widest dispersion. So the difference between top quartile, median, bottom quartile is bigger than any other asset class. And unique to venture, there's also this concept of persistence. A professor of mine at Booth, Steve Kaplan, did a lot of work on this, and I've talked to him about this a fair amount. Venture is the only asset class where there is actual persistence, which means that if you are a manager that has a

top quartile fund, you are relatively more likely, about 45%, to have your next fund be in the top quartile and about 70% likely that your next fund will beat the median. We don't see that in any other asset class. VC is also very capital constrained, right? And there are some funds that are growing and have gotten a lot bigger, but generally speaking, there's only so much capital that can be appropriately put to work at the earliest stages. And so accessing these top firms that year in, year out are producing these top quartile, top decile results is really difficult. And if you don't have access to that because of the dispersion and the adverse selection or sort of anti-persistence among the non-tier ones, we don't think it's really worth doing. And so then it all comes back down to, okay, well, how do you access those funds? And for us, we waited to launch any sort of venture strategy until kind of late 2021.

We felt like at that point, we had crossed the threshold in terms of our scale. And we had the ecosystem where we could actually get warm introductions to lots of the top firms on Sandhill and beyond. And that's not necessarily an easy thing to recreate. You know, GPs are really looking for LPs that can contribute significant amounts of capital consistently fund after fund after fund and hopefully have some other interesting element that diversifies them or differentiates them from the rest of the LP base. You know, for us, when we launched Vent venture, we were at about 20 billion, growing really quickly. We've doubled that in the last year and a half since then. And so we had that scale. We've got the Crescent Catalyst program, which is very aligned with the entrepreneurs that are in the later stages of portfolio companies within these VC funds. Our average client is about 45

years old, CEO, founder across a variety of different industries. And so we sit in a pretty unique position and that made us an attractive LP and it allowed us to enter and get access to a lot of funds. I talked to a lot of other family offices who struggle with this and they'll talk to GPs. And even if they get an intro to one of the top tier one GPs, that GP will say, well, we don't really have individual investors unless they're a former portfolio company CEO, or unless there's huge strategic value if it's a figurehead on Silicon Valley or whatever. And so generating that access is really hard, which means that if you're subscale,

if you don't have that differentiator or some really unique ability to get into a number of these firms, because I don't think investing in just one or two or three is the right strategy, then you kind of need to look elsewhere. And it's really hard to find that elsewhere. And so for us, we were really trying to create that entry point for our clients as well as outside investors where they could participate in these top tier VC firms, these tier ones, through us and are able to generate that access. But we didn't do it until we knew we could. And I think that's really important. I've talked to a lot of other family offices who have invested in a fund here and a fund there and a fund somewhere in the middle, and they don't love the way that it's gone. And it's because of all those dynamics I mentioned

earlier around you really need to be able to get into the top funds to make it worth doing. So, you know, I took a look at our friends at PitchBook. I saw you're in Andreessen, Lightspeed, Founders Fund. Not asking you to confirm that's public knowledge. But you mentioned some sort of critical mass. How did you go about building your book and what does it mean? Did you invest in all these funds at once? Can you take us mechanically through how you were able to access

these great names? Yeah. So we started really thinking about this kind of mid-2021 in a programmatic way where basically we went through our entire ecosystem. First, we identified, you know, here are all the firms that we want to talk to, and we were very exhaustive. We then went to our ecosystem and we said, okay, who knows someone at these firms who can just get us in the door? No VC firm had heard of Crescent two years ago, unless they knew someone at Crescent personally. And so we just needed that intro to crack open the door and then hopefully we could tell our story and get the access. But the truth is, we tried that before we launched the fund because it was not a guarantee that we would be able to generate that access. And so once we got those intros, doors started

opening. We told our story to these GPs and the truth is, to some degree, it would be a successful story if they had invested in us early on. We're just over five years old. We started from scratch. We ended our first 12 months at about $3 billion AUM, doubled to six, then 12, then 25. And as we sit here today, we now manage over $40 billion in capital. And so they love the way that we kind of approached this, the differentiation within the space that we have given our focus on private investments and how aligned we are with Catalyst and everything else. You know, entrepreneurship is kind of a part of Crescent's ethos. And so that story resonated. The more funds we talked to, the more the flywheel started to work.

And so, you know, we would talk to Andreessen and say, hey, what are some great emerging managers that you really like or some of your peers that you really respect? And would you mind making an introduction? And as that kind of compounds and scales, over the last two years, we ended up talking to about 700 different venture capital firms. We've invested in 15. So very disciplined, it's very high bar. And the goal is really to have a mix of both established blue chip kind of household names, as well as really exciting and under the radar, sometimes under the radar, emerging managers, or those who have been around for a while but aren't in that sort of blue chip household name category.

The plan is to create sort of annual access points for our clients and our external investors so that this is not just one and done for us. This is very much a part of our broader allocation that we work through with clients and believe should be a key part of any portfolio in terms of that long-term maximizing of value. And then you just start to get more involved in the ecosystem. You're going to events, you're meeting different people. It's funny, I was talking to someone else the other day, and I think some of it is just kind of showing up and being likable and responding.

And so, you know, put all that together. And we're really excited about the portfolio we've been able to build. We're humbled by the access that we've been able to build. We're humbled by the access that we've been able to generate, but it's from the ground up kind of brute force effort and then trying to use every conversation as a way to learn more and meet new people. So in terms of the 15 out of 700, clearly the Andreessons, the Sequoias of the world, that's all about access.

Tell me about how you go about evaluating emerging managers and ones that might not be obvious to our listeners. Yeah, I think emerging managers are a really, really interesting category. And so for us, and I think this is true kind of emerging or established, but we got a lot of subcategories. But mainly we're looking for venture capital firms or people within those firms that have edge, right? And how does that work? Well, we want it to be people who are going to see the best opportunities, see the best founders. Part of that persistence I referred to in venture is because the founders know who the best GPs are. They know what brand names they want to work with.

They know what individuals are particularly good in the area that they're trying to build, they will go seek those out first. And if that group passes, they will go to the next level. And if that group passes, they'll go to the next level. And so it's kind of the circle that continues to happen. And so is this emerging manager going to participate in this circle? Is it going to be someone who's going to get in front of those best opportunities, best founders? And then secondarily, okay, that's great. You can source all the deals in the world that you want. What leads me to believe that you're going to be able to pick the best opportunities and also win investments into those opportunities?

These can be very competitive deals. Are you going to beat Andreessen heads up? If so, why? Are you competing against Andreessen or are you looking in some other, fishing in some other pool? And if so, what does that strategy look like? And then across those different lenses, how do you prove that? Right. And there's a few different ways that we look for that proof. So number one is, you know, if a track record is available, that's certainly something that we would want to see and we would want to evaluate. It can be a track record from a prior firm. You know, I think there's a lot of emerging managers who are spinning out of great institutional names. We've invested in, for example, Wes Chan,

spun out of to start FPV. Tomas Tungus, who spun out of Redpoint to do Theory. Lu Zhang, who spun out of Sequoia to do Sunflower. And that's great for a couple of reasons. Number one, there is some track record that we can go and attribution is not always easy, but we can at least understand the deals that they were involved in. We can talk to the GPs at the places that they formerly worked to understand that. One of the signals is our LPs following them. So in a lot of those cases, LPs from Redpoint and Sequoia kind of jumped and joined in on these new firms, which is great signal value. You know, and then it's a lot of

referencing. I think referencing is probably the most important piece when it comes to emerging managers relative to established managers. And so, you know, proving out, are you seeing the best deals? Well, let's go talk to the people we know are seeing the best deals. Have they heard of you? Right? Are you relevant in the VC ecosystem from a GP perspective? If a great venture capital firm is looking to bring in another investor in a round, are you ever going to get that call? Founder networks, we're going to go talk to the founders you've invested in. How did that work? How did you source that opportunity? How did you win that opportunity? How have you worked with that founder? Have you delivered on what you said you were going to do? And most fundamentally, as that founder, is this a group that you would recommend? Obviously, the better the founder, the more

important the network, the more powerful that is. But if there's a firm that we talk to, we go talk to founders and they're like, yeah, take it or leave it. But if there's a firm that we talk to, we go talk to founders, and they're like, yeah, take it or leave it. That's not going to be a good signal. So those are kind of the ways that we go about evaluating it. It's not as clear cut as an emerging manager who's been around for 10 years doing the exact same thing. But that can make it a lot more fun and a lot more interesting too. And oftentimes, these emerging managers have chips on their shoulders, which I think is a really good thing, right? They're very, very hungry.

And there's data that shows that funds ones and twos and even threes often outperform later funds. And I think this is a part of it. They have that killer instincts and they're really trying to make a name for themselves and build something. And so, you know, we're definitely looking to see that that person kind of has that agenda

and that killer instinct as well. What are the main mistakes that you find first-time LPs into venture capital ecosystem do on a routine basis? So I think it definitely depends on the LP, but I think it's very easy to get wooed by venture capital firms. I think venture capital firms are really good salespeople. I think it's critical in what they do. Relationships are everything. And again, going back and being able to win investment opportunities is everything. And so there's a lot of funds out there that I've looked at that on the surface look pretty interesting. And then as you peel back the layers, they haven't taken markdowns

where clearly they should. They say that they add all this value for founders and you talk to founders and they don't add any value. But until you really dig deep, it looks really attractive. And I think pattern recognition helps over time. The more funds you talk to, the more that you can recognize these things. But it's so easy to get wooed by a venture capital firm and say, well, wow, I mean, this is really good. Or maybe they've got one killer fund, but it's all driven by one company that they got lucky because it was their brother's cousin or something, whatever it is, their cousin.

And so we're really trying to understand that. I think a lot of first-time LPs will just kind of get blown away pretty quickly and believe all the things that some VCs are telling them and probably not be resourced well enough to actually go spend the time and talk to 50, 100, 200, 500 firms to really understand some of these nuances and some of these differences. And so I think with VC, you really got to do the work. There are so many venture capital firms out there. There's probably over more than 4,000 at this point, a lot of which have popped up in the

last couple of years. And it's really easy to kind of get sold something. And so I think a lot of the mistakes that I see first-time LPs making is they're not able to get into some of the funds that we have. They're not able to get into the entries into the world, the Sequoias, the founders' funds. But someone shows them a fund. They say, well, it's venture. So, you know, there's some risk to this anyway, I might as well roll the dice with this fund without really going deep on the diligence or understanding sort of the broader VC ecosystem and the impacts that might have for that individual

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That's AngelList slash TLP to get started. Back to the show. You're clearly a bull on the venture space. What concerns you the most about venture capital in 2023? I think there are people out there who I would disagree with who might say, VC's had the best boom run ever for the last decade, for the last 20 years. And like, it's going to get crowded. Competition is going to start to crowd those margins. And it's not going to have the same type of return profile that it's had. And I think people have probably said that every step of the way for the last 20 years. And if you look at what's happened in technology markets, right, with the internet and then the iPhone and then,

you know, cloud computing and how much that decreased the cost of starting a new company. And now AI, which I do think is going to have a tremendous impact in both reaching users as well as actually cheapening the cost to start a business. Acceleration of technology is here. It's a thing. And so I don't believe that returns are going to be kind of just generally speaking lower in the next 10 years, 20 years, et cetera. I think we're going to see a pretty big boom cycle again. And I think technology has become ubiquitous in every type of company. You're going to see this with AI as well. And so the venture capital groups are the teams who are going to be able to sort of participate in the accrual of that value. And investors,

by their nature, are going to be able to participate as well. And so I think, while AI might be a little bit, I'm not going to say a bubble, a little bit frothy right now, and I think people have general concerns around like, is VC over as an asset class in terms of its outperformance? I don't think so. I'm not worried about that. I think that, you know, A, innovation is secular. So in all markets, you're going to see continued advancement and great companies get built. You know, if you look at the best vintages in history, 2008, 2009, 2010 are among them for VC. And so it'll be cyclical. Everything is cyclical.

But I think VC is a really attractive asset class going forward. And I've seen nothing that leads me to believe otherwise at this point. One of the things I find fascinating is the range and all the allocations, both for alternatives and then within alternatives. How should LPs think about, let's say that they have a long-term horizon and endowment nation type effect. How should they think about venture capital and the pros and cons of venture capital versus private credit versus secondaries versus growth equity versus hedge funds?

How does VC rest in that ecosystem? Yeah. So I think it's important to recognize a couple of differences between individuals and endowments or sometimes large institutions that can be taxable status and that can also be liquidity needs. And so for us, we've kind of bucketed everything into three sort of sections. The first is we call diversified income. So what capital do you actually want in terms of, you know, a cash yield every year for the next however many years, right? And how do we create something that helps with that? You know, we did a music royalty business, which was a really interesting way. You know. We've got an evergreen private credit fund, which right now is an incredibly attractive asset class because you

can get low double-digit type yield for first lien, senior secured, sponsor backed private credit. It's floating rate and right now, obviously, that's a very good thing. And so that would contribute to that bucket. And then the next bucket we look at, okay, what do you need? And then call it four to six or four to seven years, right? And we call that kind of the growth bucket. And that might be more traditional private equity, which has, call it a four to seven year type hold and time horizon. That might be direct investments in general. And then we call everything outside of that. So kind of after seven years, we put that into the aspirational bucket. So that's money that you don't need for the next seven years or so. And we're trying to maximize the absolute return on those dollars. And in that bucket, I would

lean more heavily on venture capital than any other bucket because venture capital takes a very long time. You're investing in the earliest stages of a business. It used to take six to eight years. Now, I think it's more than 11 years in terms of the average time for a business to go public. And so it's important to participate there, but it takes a while. And so we really take kind of a bird's eye holistic view is, all right, how do we maximize those buckets? What's the kind of utility function of our client here or our investor. And that will lead to that asset allocation model, right, across those different segments. And then there's some customization depending on what a client might be interested in. But generally speaking, you know, diversification is really important. It's really important to have more than one VC manager in your portfolio.

It's really more important to have more than just VC in your strategy. And so we believe in that holistic cross-asset class approach that many endowments use, many high net worth single family offices use. And so then it comes down to, okay, what are the percentages? You should be investing in private equity. You should be investing in venture capital. You should be investing in private credit and you should be investing in secondaries. And collectively, what is that basket? What are the right allocations? It's going to depend on the client. It's going to depend on the needs. It's going to depend on the investor. I don't think venture capital should be an overwhelmingly large part of that pie. I think it's important to have balance. But if you're someone who has a little more risk appetite and has a longer time horizon then you would increase the exposure you have there but again with all of

these strategies if you don't have the resources or the skill set to be able to execute them in a high quality way it doesn't necessarily make sense to try and do that and there are different nuances with each right so you know venture capital as i mentioned has this really wide quality way, it doesn't necessarily make sense to try and do that. And there are different nuances with each, right? So, you know, venture capital, as I mentioned, has this really wide dispersion. So that's obvious. If you can't get into the top funds, it's probably not worth doing. Private credit has a very, very small distribution in terms of, you know, that bucket I was talking about, that kind of first lien senior secured, right? So the difference between great and good isn't as big, but part of it is generated by scale. So for our fund,

for example, we're working with great managers and we're coming in with huge checks that do two things. One, it gives us preferential terms on fees. And two, allows us to do a lot of co-invest, which further blends down those fees. And in an asset class like private credit, those extra bits really matter. They start to add up. And so if you don't have an advantage in the ability to utilize your scale to do that, then you might want to look at participating with groups that can. But going back to your question, I think it's very individualized, but broadly speaking, you're trying to understand, what do I need to solve now?

What do I need to solve for the next five years? What do I need to solve for the next five years? What do I need to solve for the next 10 years? Let me diversify in a way that tries to maximize the value within each of those buckets. Matching liabilities to cash flow, similar to an insurance company. Yeah. You brought up the term, you brought up co-invest. It's a controversial subject, especially in venture capital where allocation could be small. What are the best practices on co-invest and what do people routinely make mistakes in?

So I think I'm going to flip the way I answer these and start with mistakes. Co-investment is really hard in venture and even hard in growth equity. And so, you know, for us right now, just looking at the dynamics of our team and everything else and being in the wealth preservation business to a certain degree, you know, we're not planning to go and do a lot of early stage co-investment opportunities. It's just it's very difficult to do that and do it well. Again, the people who do really, really well there, these firms that year over year have top quartile performances like they have a very unique edge. If you don't have that edge, it doesn't make sense. At some point in the future, might we do that? Yeah, I think that would be great. So where does it make sense to co-invest? It's also hard at the Series A,

and it's hard at the Series B and C and D and E. Again, if you don't really have the access to either A, the funds that are leading these opportunities that you can co-invest alongside, or B, groups that are sponsoring SPVs to the extent that that makes sense. But the hardest part is really doing the work to understand, is this a good opportunity or not? Especially if you don't have a skill set within or being able to underwrite venture capital or growth equity. And so, you know, for us, the system that we kind of use and we tell everyone that we're looking for co-investment, which we are. But because we've talked to these 700 firms

and our position in the ecosystem, we're able to leverage them not just for sourcing, but for diligence. Right. And so we looked at an opportunity of a pretty complicated business a few weeks ago that we needed some help understanding. It was a complex kind of machine learning hardware business. And within five days, we were able to talk to Founders Fund, Riot Ventures, Cosla, and a handful of others to kind of get an initial view. Again, there aren't that many groups out there who kind of have the ability to do that. And I think that's why you haven't seen that many people be really successful with a co-invest model. And so, you know, for us, I don't think it's different than buyout either. I mean,

what you're trying to do is really leverage the resources available to you both inside and out to generate deal flow and then to understand how to pick winners within that flow. And unless you're kind of in the market, right, in the ecosystem, going to these events, having relationships with these firms and investing in these firms, it's going to be really hard to do that in a consistently reliable way. If you're a family office that's made a lot of capital from some SaaS business that you built and sold, like, yeah, you're a family office that's made a lot of capital from some SaaS business that you built and sold, yeah, you're going to have edge there, then you can do that. That's not most people. And so I think that's really important with co-invest. I think a lot

of people look at it and just say, yeah, I mean, sure, I'll just go invest in whatever that they show me. The VC funds aren't always going to show you co-invest for their best deals. And so there's some adverse selection there, too, that you really got to get to the bottom of. And so unless you're really able to do that diligence yourself in understanding the business and getting outside opinions from the other experts in the space, the other tier one VCs, I think it's really hard. And you're probably going to get lucky in a few cases and you're probably going to make a lot of mistakes. Who or what kind of co-invest programs have you found work the best? There's plenty, there's a lot of bad examples of practices. What do you consider the best practices? If you were giving advice to a GP, how would you ask them to present co-invest opportunities to you and maybe other LPs? So I think what's difficult with co-invest can be timing. This was super pronounced

in 2021 where deals took a week to close. It's evened out a little bit, but there are still some deals that move pretty quickly. And I've talked to a lot of GPs who, A, it's such a headache to be able to every deal announce, all right, I got to spin up the engine here. I got to go talk to and have all these conversations, talk to these lps um i think one recommendation i might have is is up front to understand are you someone who's interested in co-invest are you not and then okay cool i recognize you're interested in co-invest let's talk about the types of co-investments that you're interested in i'd love to have that conversation and i proactively have it with many of the managers that we've invested and then they can kind of develop that roster and be able to immediately know, okay, I've got this really

interesting kind of series B fintech in Latin America. Oh, Crescent told me that they were super interested in Latin American fintech, which is a really random example. That's not something we're specifically interested in, but just go with it. And great, I'm going to know that they're going to reach out and we're going to be prepared for that. We're going to know that, okay, fund X is going to send us deals that look like this and it'll allow us to get up the curve faster. The other thing that we're trying to do is proactively identify what co-investments might be interesting to us. And I think that can be a partnership with the GP, right? And so we'll get fund reports from these GPs.

We'll know what their underlying portfolio companies look like. We'll be able to dig in and see, okay, who's growing the quickest? Who's got the strongest LTV to cax? Where do we think the real money is being put in in terms of doubling down, tripling down, et cetera? And we can say to a GP, hey, you've got this really interesting company. It's at series A right now. It raised one year after the seed.

It's absolutely knocking the ball off the cover. It's still a little early for us, but we're super impressed with the company. We'd love to learn more. And when they raise a series B, please think of us. And if that proactive conversation gets had sort of ahead of time, if you do quarterly reviews of managers

or something like that, that's another way that I think strengthens the partnership and also should make it easier for the GPs, right? Like they're already just well ahead of it. And so it's not quite as big of a headache every time they go and have to do that. There are some GPs who also are doing just full co-investment programs, right? Where it's like, okay, invest $20 million in my fund and then we're gonna have a separate sleeve that's $10 million that is just gonna be kind of sitting on the side for co-invest. And you can have veto rights, but it's a pool of capital.

It's a lot easier to set up. We can draw from that. I think depending on the makeup of your LP base, that can work. I've seen people do webinars. I think the webinars are really powerful. If you can get, you know, the company to speak on a webinar, I think that's even more powerful. And it allows a broad-based Q&A opportunity for those LPs so that they're not, you know,

sending lots of separate questions to the GP, which can also just get overwhelming. So I think, you know, the more kind of out in front of it, you can be by establishing the desires of your LP base early on, working with them sort of in real time to identify where there might be opportunities in the next 6, 12, 18 months, two years, because these really are long-term partnerships, these LPGP relationships, especially in venture. And then being able to actually do kind of a one-to-many type format where you can explain the opportunity, you can have someone from the CEO or someone from the management team

walk through the opportunity and answer questions. To me, I think those are kind of all the ingredients in a really strong co-investment program. We have thousands of LPs, GPs, and aspirational GPs and LPs across multiple platforms. What would you want them to know about Cressa, both today and in the future? So that's a great question. I think, you know, one of the things we say, and it sounds a little corny, but I think it's really true, is when you look across the wealth management space, they're optimizing for wealth and that's it. We like to say that we're

optimizing for wealth and for life. I mentioned earlier on, one of the things that Avi and Eric did not like on their search was they felt like it was super transactional. It was very siloed and there was nothing beyond that sort of just wealth management relationship. We have structured ourselves to be decidedly different from that. And it starts with our ownership. We're actually about 70% owned by our founders and our employees, and we're 30% owned by our clients. So we've gone out and raised hundreds of millions of dollars starting at Seed from our clients, which has created incredible alignment.

It's a phenomenal feedback loop. It's great from an ecosystem in terms of referrals and whatnot. And it's something that we honestly haven't seen elsewhere out there. In addition to that, we've also curated specific events, a lot of them. And so we hired Jessica Malkin, who used to run Chicago Ideas Week, which is kind of like a TED Talk, a version of a TED Talks based in Chicago, to run our marketing and events group.

And we did over 100 events last year. Our bread and butter is a speaker series where we've had people like, you know eric schmidt ray dalio mark rubenstein or david rubenstein excuse me um uh you know lindsey vaughn on skiing matthew mcconaughey uh and it's just a way for people to get together and engage in something that's productive and thoughtful and you know we have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people who attend those events uh we do events in different cities. We always think the more the merrier. So if anyone's interested in those, always feel free to reach out and we can see if we can get you added to the list. But we're really from day one

built by clients for clients beyond just wealth management. And so I think when you think of Crescent, our goal is to be a multi-generational, 100 plus billion dollar firm that cares about or that obsesses about our clients beyond just their wealth. And it's there for them both in that regard, as well as hopefully an engaging partner across the board. And our whole goal is really to try

and democratize wealth management, right? And that democratization is across both our client profile, allowing people like our Catalyst clients to have the high level of service that many of their high net worth and ultra high net worth peers have, but at an earlier point, as well as democratizing access to private investments, right? And so we would love to continue to build our program, you know, external to Crescent, about 60%, about 55, 60% of the capital we've raised is from our clients,

but about 40% of that is from other family offices and other iNet worth individuals who, you know, maybe they like the setup that they have, but they don't know how to execute in one or two or many of the different areas where we have solutions. And so, you know, our goal is really to continue to further democratize that and allow more people to participate in this ecosystem that we think is really attractive and participate in the value creation that takes place in private markets, but is really hard to do

without the resources. Well, it's high aspirations, but you guys have had incredible success. I've been following you guys for a while. How should people keep in contact with you and how should people follow you, email, anything you'd like to share? Sure. I'm always available, so you can definitely reach out to me. I'm jstein at CrescetPart.com j-s-d-e-i-n at crescent partners.com um always happy to chat i i love talking about this stuff uh very passionate about it um vc probably the most passionate about but but private markets in general are super interesting so uh if we can be helpful to you in any way shape or form feel free to reach out happy to just chat happy to answer any questions questions or serve as a reference if that's helpful.

Thank you, Jordan. Thank you for letting me grill you for a bit and enjoyed the conversation and look forward to chatting soon. Likewise. Thank you, David. Really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Limited Partner Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like and subscribe below and share with your VC

friends. Please follow Eric and I on Twitter at Eric Turnberg and D Weisberg, linked in the show notes below. Thank you for your support.