How I Invest with David Weisburd - E284: Why Family Offices Invest Differently w/Robert Blabey

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

How do family offices approach investing differently from institutional capital? David Weisburd speaks with Robert about building Align, identifying gaps between capital and resources in family offices, and why downside protection shapes every investment decision. Robert discusses private credit, opportunistic investing, shorter-duration strategies, and how collaboration among families creates a distinct and disciplined investment ecosystem.

So you were the CIO of several family offices before starting a line. What gap did you see in the market that lets you to start a line in 2014? I feel like family offices are the only sort of large industry, I'll call it, participant that I'm aware of, that you can't sort of evaluate the business from the outside. What we saw when we started a line was that oftentimes there was a mismatch between what the family hoped to get from their family office and what their goals were and what their internal resources allowed for. And so I come from a institutional background originally. And, you know, a lot of these groups, quite frankly, have institutional level capital and they don't always

have institutional level resources. And so were it to be a commercial business, I think they would probably run themselves very differently. And these are, these are intentional decisions that are made by the families. And there's no, it's not to say that there's a negative to it, but there is a business opportunity we felt in that, in that space. And so that's what we started aligned to, to address. And now that was, you had 2014, so a while ago. And how we should describe alliance value proposition in a sentence or two? What is it that Align does exactly? Align started out originally, I'll call it as an adjunct or sort of a special wist in that category between where family offices head desires and and lack the resources to accomplish their goals.

And so that's really where we started. And the way Aline now has evolved and starting in 2019 evolved very like in a very deliberate fashion was through now an investment platform fund business that currently has just three limited partners, myself, my partner in a line and another family. And we started that business in 2019 with the explicit goal of looking for, you know, sort of absolute return in an opportunistic world. And so that was our goal in starting the sort of fund business. And we got to there because we had worked with the family that was our anchor for that business as well.

as a bunch of other families in quite a diverse cross-section of unique investment opportunities. And they spanned everything from traditional assets to alternatives, but tended to tilt more in the alternative category. And as you'll see with families, they typically have a, most of them have quite a broad, I'll say, spectrum of investments. But the things that they tend to be most interested in, and the most time on I found are most sort of excited about tend to be alternative investments. And so that can be managed for whatever. Now, Alternatives is a big part of the markets. It's quickly going to be the roughly the same size of publics. What part of the market in the alternatives universe do you see as the best risk-adjusted

part of the market, Q4 2025? That's a great question. I, you know, for what we do, I still really like the private credit space. We've been able to execute on a number of transactions over the last geez longer than the fund has been in existence. So pre-2019 where we've done a lot of innovative things in private credit. And these are generally opportunities where we're the sole capital and handling the underwrite for the investment. So this is not typically syndicated private credit. So private credit's kind of like ice cream. It just gets mixed in the big bowl. And there's lots of different flavors to it. So I know private credits had some taken some licks recently. But we've had really good scenarios in private credit. I think that we'll continue to offer opportunity in the future. Other than that, I mean, for us, we tend to be more recipients of deal flow coming in. And so what we look at and what we do are often, they're really predicated or directed by our network of relationships that are delivering us deal flow and offering us opportunity to look at deal flow with them. So we have in the past done thematic things where we've picked a specific theme and sort of gone at it. But that's really in the last seven years, it's really been only one specific theme that we've done that on.

Otherwise, we're recipients of deal flow and we evaluate it as it comes in. One of the hardest things about not being thematic is that you're being influenced by the inbound deal flow. You're getting fed these narratives from these highly sophisticated parties trying to convince you that this is the next big thing. How do you stay disciplined having an inbound for us versus being very thematically focused? Yeah, that's a great question. So I look at it slightly differently. I feel like when you're getting deal flow from families, it's a very different and more curated and unique, quite frankly, deal flow than when you're getting it from the institutional world. And so there's opportunities, by the way, in both. So it's not a discredit to institutional world. But really what we find is that we find families who often are coming to us with ideas, whether they be public, private debt, equity. I mean, it spans. a broad spectrum, but they're coming to us and often inviting us versus pitching us. And so it's a, hey, I'm looking at this or, hey, I've invested in this or, hey, we're considering an investment in this. Would you guys like to rope your sleeves and look at this with us? And so it's a very,

it's a very different kind of atmosphere. And I think that what I've found is that, you know, our funnel is really quite narrow, actually. So a lot of people will tell you they look at 3,000 deals a year to get to their whatever 10 that they choose. Our funnel is much more curated. And so it is a narrower funnel. And so we still do far fewer deals, obviously, than we see. But what we do find is that, you know, there's quite a bit of, I say, sort of interaction and cooperation, quite frankly, that goes on with a lot of these deals. And we, we, I find that really healthy because I like the pushback. I like to, listen, my goal every day is to work around the smartest people and I want to feel like, you know, everybody around me is a lot smarter than I am.

That's what I, that's what the hope is. So, you know, I'm out there looking to learn. And I think we bring value to our partners and have found that, you know, a number of them we've done repeat deals with too, which is great. I've seen this many times these family offices investing with each other and essentially creating almost this consortium. Is that just because the opportunities are too big? Is there other factors? Why are other family offices bringing you opportunities? It's twofold.

Oftentimes, yeah, it's a family deciding that they want to, you know, hedge their bets, if you will, and bring in other capital. it's also an acceptance, I'll call it, of what family's value is and what they can bring and what they lack. So, you know, if you have a family that's a specialist in healthcare and they're looking at a health care deal, they may know the science around the healthcare opportunity and the business metrics and the competitors and the marketing opportunity angles and whatnot, but they may have less sophistication on the capital stack side. And so they may not be as comfortable on how to structure the deal or if, you know, a certain level of leverage is, sort of prudent or whatnot or how to manage maybe the physical side, the real estate side of that health care development. And it's not to say that they're newbies in this. It's just to say that

I find a lot of families are accepting and open to bringing in other specialists and ideas from others on the outside. And so for us at least, that's been, that's been effective. And you know, you see some of the biggest, wealthiest families in the world often co-investing. So I don't think it's it's a capital, a lack of capital thing. I think it's more of a, of a, you know, kind of, hey, two plus two equals 10 or whatever. It's a non-zero some way of both evaluating the deal and perhaps having some economies of scale in terms of negotiating firms. Yeah, exactly. And the other side is, you know, in the institutional world is quite competitive, right? You know, if you have a fund that is, you know, out, you know, performing another fund that the opportunity for them to gather assets in

greater AUM around their performance can be notable. And so it is a competitive atmosphere. Families are different. They're not competing one family office versus another to outgrow the other. Of course, they want to do as well as possible, but they are, in my experience, more collaborative. And quite frankly, you know, family office folks tend to come to the office looking to preserve their wealth and maintain that wealth in the office. You know, institutional investors are paid to invest. You oftentimes look at your investments through this lens of how quickly can we lose our capital or I guess this credit lens. Does that only apply to credit? And if not, why not? Yeah. So this is just something that is sort of our North Star. I mean, we look at every investment

that we do and we approach each investment with how quickly can we get hurt. We have done investments where we have accepted the possibility, I'll call it, that we could lose 100% of our invested dollars. A lot of times when we look at investments and stress tests, them. We look at them as a, hey, what's a dire, dire scenario? What could really go wrong here? How quickly could it go wrong? And when or if it does, what is our possibility for an exit? What would that look like? How would we be impacted? And, you know, how would we kind of plan for the worst? So we're really in the business of preserving capital, quite frankly, at the end of the day. Obviously, we wanted to grow and perform as well as possible. But if you don't lose it first, you have a lot better chance of

making it in the future. And so for us, we're really, really very focused on the downside. And then vis-a-vis your second part of the question, which is, you know, how do you think about, you know, credit versus equity? And is it only for credit that we wear a credit lens? I think of it is this way. If you could invest in credit and have alpha from that is more akin to an equity investment, that's the best, you know, scenario. If you have credit like protections and equity like upside. And so for us, we don't differentiate between, you know, a direct investment in a commodity or credit or real estate or equity or public or private. We look at everything as what's the possibility that, you know, things don't go the way we are forecasting them to go. And when or if that were to happen, you know, what's our plan of attack, if you will?

You love these mid-duration investments, these one to five-year investments. Why do you see an opportunity there? So the only way I know not to lose money in an investment is to not do the investment. And so, you know, you can, if you don't do the investment, you're not going to lose, have the prospect of losing capital. So the best way in our view on managing this risk is to minimize, or for minimized duration. So if you're going to do an investment, not only what do you see this is the life cycle and process on how that plays out, but what is that, you know, a lot of people won't look at something that, for instance, matures in a year or 18 months or or is it likely to

exit in 18 months because it's sort of they won't get enough moik and they'll be more, you know, they'll spend more time on it than they want, that kind of thing and they're looking for multiples. For us, we kind of erase the limited duration side. So we have done an investment that was only six months. So we will look at things that, you know, may only, may only go a few months. but our focus is on what is the risk-adjusted return. And therefore, if you want to moderate risk in our mind, an easy way, I think to do that sort of at a very macro level is to minimize your duration, exposure. And we have a joke around the office.

We say there's a hundred-year storm in the macro world every two years. And so, you know, COVID or a war here or interest rate spikes, it could be anything. You can't predict them. They're going to happen. and you just have to be, you know, sort of in a position where you're hopefully, you know, rotating through an investment or whatnot to take advantage of that. To double click on that. A lot of investors, they don't want to have this, let's say, 100% return in a year and a half

because then they have to redeploy, redeploy investment. I would call that laziness. Other people might call that something else. You don't have that incentive. What makes you different? And why don't you care about that? Well, it's funny. Yeah, it's a good, because we've done a bunch in private credit.

at where we've generated very high returns, but over shorter periods of time, maybe one to two years. And we have gotten pushback from people that we've talked to about, hey, but you know, you're not compounding the dollars enough. Well, you're right. You're not in that example. But if you can layer these and you have confidence that your deal flow is repeatable, then actually whether you invest in something that goes and generates 15% for 10 years or generates 15% a year for 10 years, other than transaction costs and tax. and a few things like that, you know, it sort of doesn't matter to us. And sometimes what we see is in the benefits of that shorter duration, in my opinion, outweigh what I'll call the risks of longer term exposure. That's a philosophy we have. You know, for instance, we were able to take advantage of when Russia went over the border into Ukraine, now almost four years ago, there was an initial sort of dislocation in the public credit markets and things really sort of seized up. And there was some some gapped down trading. And we were looking at some securities that we were able to purchase at a

handsome discount because of that dislocation. And this was something that, you know, again, we have a finite amount of capital. So our opportunity, I'll call it, to rotate capital and to be in and out of things, gives us the benefit, I'll call it, of when there is a dislocation, having capital ready to move and take advantage of that dislocation and sort of make those macro shocks your friend, if you can. And perhaps I was a little bit harsh. A lot of institutional investors also have underlying LPs that don't want the capital back. I've been shocked, frankly, shocked a lot of times if you deliver 1.4X in three months,

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slash invest free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at www. northwest registered agent.com slash invest free. You've compared your approach to the heyday of Soros, Paul Tudor Jones, and David Tapper. How do you see a line falling in the footsteps of these great investors? My first entree, I'll call it, to investing was in the early 90s when I started out in New York and I had the benefit of being around a lot of the earlier hedge fund sort of pioneers

as they were investing. And what I recognized was at the time, they were really focused on this absolute return, sort of opportunistic style of investing. And so they would adjust where they were sort of pointing their guns at any given time and might be in publics one day, privates, equity, debt, currencies, commodities. You know, they were looking at where opportunity existed. And I just always, that always appealed to me personally. I thought it was the smartest way to invest. And so our business model has evolved into, you know, formalizing, I'll call formalizing that. And I think for families, that's a really, you know, smart strategy. And it's where I dedicate my capital personally. But I think it's also just something that, you know, I always sort of laugh. You can pick the best real estate manager, investor, but it could just be a bad vintage or, period to be investing in real estate. And so you spend all your time assessing and evaluating the top real estate manager. You pick that firm or individual, and then you just happen to get a bad vintage. And so through no sort of fault of your own, you may not perform as you had

underwritten your performance to be because of the vintage versus the manager. And so for us, this opportunistic being able to pivot, play in different parts of the cap structure of a business, or be in the public markets when things in the private markets look more expensive or vice versa, to us just makes sense. And so far, knock on what it's, it's proven accurate. What are you doing that other family offices and other investors are onto it? That's a good question. It's hard to know what others aren't doing. What I can speak to more clearly, obviously, is what we've focused on. And we focused on, you know, things that are, you know, that, again, writing to the downside, understanding what, what our sort of risk tolerances are,

has really benefited us. And we've had some very steady returns, I would say. We've had some things, of course, that haven't worked out as we'd hoped. But by far, a majority of what we've invested in has been, you know, successful. And really the best part, I would say, of our track record is that where we have emphasized the most of our capital has been also the most successful. So it's not only where are you investing and, you know, did you pick the right company or the wrong business or the right equity or debt security, but also when you pick those opportunities, have you sized them correctly, right? And so for us, that's a big element of the risk reward, right? If you dip your toe in something and it doesn't work out, that's sort of fine, but you go in a big way and it

doesn't work out that obviously hurt your performance a lot more. Do you see your portfolio as the riskier part of an overall larger portfolio that you're not controlling, or are you just, Are you trying to replicate an entire portfolio for a family? I would say we are good at replicating an alternatives portfolio. So, you know, if somebody has exposure and wants exposure, municipal bonds, for instance, we're not a good solution for that as a comp. But yes, if you're looking, I would say, in the broad alternatives category, now I should I should say that we're not doing venture-oriented stuff.

We're not doing early stage, I don't know, real estate development, where there's permitting risk and construction cost overrun risk and material prices and things like that that are difficult to underwrite. We're really focused, you know, as you noted, on the mid duration, but on things that are more, you know, in an alternative capacity, one to five years of exposure and where we can sort of seek out a theme and poor business opportunity that we see coming in from, again, from our network and helping to sort of, you know, articulate that into a successful investment. And why not venture? I understand why you wouldn't do early stage real estate development might be

a very niche skill. Why not get exposure to venture? I have done some venture in my career, but in my mind, venture is a very specialized, I view it as a specialized category. I think the people that are good at it are very good and people should should go with sort of the best there. I think that for us to feel like we could be the best in the venture category would be much more challenging. And so not only is it a duration issue, but it's something that with a rifle approach, because we're doing two to four deals a year, it's a much more challenging sort of underwrite and prospect, investment prospect for us. We had an interesting conversation last time on your views on uranium and nuclear. Why do you feel like the time has come for those two energy sectors? And what are you looking for specifically in that space in terms of investment?

The AI, you know, boom and theme of growth in AI consumption, you know, energy consumption is, I believe, real. It's obviously well played out in the media and in the financial media. The uranium category is an interesting category to me. I've had some background in mining, not in uranium, but in other, other commodities, you know, been underground many times, seen mines up close, sort of had an opportunity to understand that industry a bit. And as I dug into the uranium story, it's the fuel stock for nuclear power. Nuclear power is the most sort of consistent baseline energy source out there that's available. It's also recently been categorized or labeled as green energy in

parts of Europe and parts of Asia. So it actually is having a little bit of what I'll call a turnaround Renaissance. There are some other elements, though, that speak really to the specifics of uranium. Fukushima, the nuclear disaster occurred in Japan in, I believe, 2011. At that time, or following that disaster, many, if not all, I can't recall now, but the nuclear power plants in Japan, and many in Europe were shuttered. And this was done in a sort of press by these governments to get away from nuclear specifically and to de-emphasize nuclear energy around the risk. Little known to most of the people is that all of these facilities, these nuclear facilities, had two to five years generally of uranium on property.

This is fuel stock so that they had ready available fuel stock. When the disaster occurred, this fuel stock became therefore available into the spot market. And so the fuel stock became, you know, if you will, competitive with the uranium mines out there. And so what that meant was that uranium prices came down significantly. And in addition, they had situations where there was, so there's underinvestment, you had nuclear power, fewer nuclear power plants generating power, so you had less demand. And this sort of de-emphasis on nuclear growth in the future led to like a lot of pessimism in the market. And then you had globally, you had uranium mines underinvest. And this has taken about a decade and a couple years now to play out.

But that uranium stock that was a competitor in the uranium spot market is largely gone and sold out. These countries in Europe, some in Europe and in Japan are reopening some of these previously closed nuclear power plants and talking about growing, actually, their nuclear power generation capacity. And you've had, you know, call it a decade of underinvestment in the mining category. The other issue with uranium is that because it's, you know, a fuel stock also for or an input for, nuclear weapons. It's very heavily sort of monitored on a global basis. You can't just kind of go in your backyard and dig up a bunch of uranium. It's very like heavily licensed and monitored. So permitting of new mines, management of mine expansion, things like that take a long time. And so you have this kind of, you have these colliding factors of less investment, higher regulation, the environmental

issues, you know, this global oversight of where uranium is held, stocked and managed all kind of coming together around a backdrop where I believe nuclear will become, will grow in the future. And certainly in China and Indian places like that, they are growing their nuclear plant count. And I believe the U.S. will soon start looking to grow its nuclear capacity here. And I think there's quite frankly just going to be a requirement that, you know, power be, you know, growing power consumption is sort of a reality for all of us. And where is it going to come from? I think nuclear will be one piece of that puzzle. over the next three or five years, which themes excite you the most in an alternate universe?

I've been working on a sort of position paper memo recently. I believe that there's a reasonable chance that the U.S. puts into place yield curve control in the next three years, call it, during this administration's time and office. And that if yield curve control were to be put in place, you would have a knock on effect that would impact investments. quite significantly potentially. And so there's a lot of elements behind this, but, you know, just big picture in a simplistic kind of fashion, we have large federal deficits. We have a very large, you know, deficit to fund. And interest rates have obviously gone up significantly in the last couple years. If the government were to bring the curve down, I think they would also steep in the curve, which means bring the short end of the curve down even more. But they could suppress the entire

curve versus where it sits today. In an environment like that, if they then opened up banking regulations, particularly for the middle market banks here in the U.S., you would promote more lending into the sort of middle market. This would all fit very well with the administration's goal of opening up and broadening manufacturing in the United States, the whole reshoring play, everything that's gone on. You would depress, I believe, the value of the dollar versus foreign currencies, but this would actually be a net positive for experts. And so now with the growth of reshoring and on sort of on property, we'll call it manufacturing and whatnot you'd have added opportunity to compete in the global export market.

What does that mean for asset values and whatnot? I think that has the potential to benefit certainly asset heavy companies. Any company that, you know, has substantial debt loads would be, would get some relief. I think you'd have discount rates would obviously be lowered, so you'd have a potential for a trade-up, if you will, in the tech space and high-growth equity category. I think in the specialized kind of credit world, whether it be private credit or even the syndicated credit markets, I think you'd find that those probably performed pretty well. Again, I think there would be the risks certainly of inflation. So while inflation's come down a bit, obviously it hasn't been expunged. at all. And so you have an opportunity for inflation to sort of ramp up a bit. And in that instance, you know, you'd probably have gold and precious metals and other precious metals perform pretty well. You'd probably have certain cryptocurrencies perform pretty well in that environment. But I think that that's kind of a backdrop I'm looking at it.

Set another way you see under this administration, there's going to be pressure to decrease the interest rates, which will have this ripple effects throughout all these assets. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. What's one piece of advice you could give an earlier, Robert, when you were starting your career, that would have either accelerated your success or helped you avoid costly mistakes? That's a good question. Managing, developing, and like working with a network is always something that I felt is important. But I think that, you know, you can't, I can't kind of overemphasize that then kind of tending to your network, business, personal, all that is really worthwhile. And that's something that I, you know, strive to do today.

But what are some practical ways you could invest more into your network? Is that just in-person meetings? Is that frequency? It's everything from, listen, I think that it's being curious about what other people are doing. It's being sort of articulate and having things to offer others to. So it's not just one way, of course. It's being, you know, sort of and curious are two things that I kind of. aspire to be. And, and so, you know, what I like most about what I do is that I look at so many

different things all the time. And I've looked at, I've traveled around the world and I've seen a lot of really unique things. And I've looked at, you know, early stage, later stage. You know, I have, and I've gotten the benefit, I'll call it, of being able to, um, to sort of see things, the good, the bad and the ugly. I would say that, you know, one thing in my career, I, I did have to go in at one point early on when I was in my 20s and go and work at an operating company that fell on hard times and that we had made an investment. And it was something that I didn't particularly like doing, but in retrospect, it was a great experience because, you know, now when I'm talking with a sales staff, you know, VP of sales at a company are understanding, you know, financial

projections that in a CFO is talking about or just anticipating what the cost for maybe rolling over a debt or process of rolling over debt or whatnot for a company might be, all these things I had to go through myself. And it was, it's really, really helpful from a diligence standpoint to have lived in those shoes before and to have managed a balance sheet for a business and to have made payroll and to handle legal relationships and sales relationships and dealt with large multinational companies. All these things that I had to do were at the time, you know, not really what I had trained to do and what I had signed up. for, if you will, but in retrospect, really, really beneficial. And I literally have folks from

my network back in the quote unquote corporate years that I have communicated with, you know, not all the time, but I am in touch with folks. And so that, that to me is a really, really, was very beneficial. And I think it's something that, you know, if you haven't, anybody has a chance to do is, is worth getting your hands dirty. Sometimes those side quests could make us significantly stronger in our main quest, which is it's a love. of sophistication or a level of different way of looking at things and relating to people that becomes really useful in our core function. Yeah.

Yeah. And I often say it's, you know, a lot of people that I've never run a marathon, I've done half marathons, but, you know, people that train for marathons, training is often very difficult. Running the race can be quite exhilarating and enjoyable. And so people often, you know, running the race and completing the marathon is a great achievement. You know, getting up at 530 in the morning to run in the cold may not be that much fun when you're doing it. on that note, Robert, this has been absolutely masterclass on family offices investing. Thanks so much for jumping on podcasts and looking forward to continuous conversation live.

Of course, appreciate it. Thanks very much. That's it for today's episode of How I Invest. If you're a GP with over $1 billion in AUM and thinking about long-term strategic partners to support your growth, we'd love to connect. Please email me at David at Weisperd Capital.com.