Investing Billions - E248: The Institutionalization of GP Stakes: What Comes Next

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

What makes a GP interest valuable — and how do you evaluate a manager beyond the fund they’re raising today? In this episode, I talk with Mark Wade, CAIA, Partner at CAZ Investments, about how his team assesses GP interests, private-market managers, partnership structures, and long-term durability. We discuss why GP transactions have evolved, why some firms seek outside capital, and the practical differences between investing as a GP versus an LP. We also touch on evaluating leadership succession, LP base diversification, liquidity considerations, and why sports franchises continue to attract investor interest.

Mark, it's good to see you. Hello, David. We're here at the Future Proof Conference and Huntington Beach. It's good to have you back. It's good to be here. It's good to see everybody. What of you? I've never been here before.

I've never done this. This is my first time. So go easy on me. I'll try. No promises. So let's start with CAS. So for those who might not know what CAS is, what is CAS, and tell me where you are from an AUM standpoint. Describing where we are today is largely a function of where we've come from.

I started at the firm about 10 years ago. we were less than $300 million in AUM, and I think I was like number 11 or 12 in the office that day from an employee headcount. And fast forward, we're over $10 billion and probably about $100, $110 from the team member count. So we've grown quite a bit. All that's focused in the private markets, we don't really invest a ton publicly. And you guys are the most active investor in GP stakes in the world. Tell me about why you guys are leaning on so heavily into GPs.

GP stakes and maybe tell me a little bit about what a GP stake is. To understand why we like GP stakes, you really ought to understand the theme. So if you've read anything from Kaz, we talk about being a thematic investor. And people use that phrase, thematic or theme-based, and it means different things to different people. So I'll just explain what it means for us. What it means for us is we identify a trend, something happening in the world that we want to take advantage of from a big picture standpoint, something that has a tailwind behind it.

I'm not talking about a short-term thing. I'm talking about two years, five years, ten years, or even more. And so thematically speaking in GP stakes, what we're really talking about is the growth of private markets as an asset class. So it's pretty well documented over the last five, ten, twenty years that the private markets have grown at a pretty significant compounded growth rate. Different numbers quoted out there. I'll let people go find their own data on that. And it's going to continue to grow. It's going to be very hard to win an argument saying to be the manager of those funds, to be the GP, the beneficiary of this capital coming in, isn't a good thing with all the

capital coming in. So we want to be in that position. We want to take advantage of it by owning a broad-based portfolio of GPs, private equity, private credit, real assets, and then selectively, just thinking about our firm's broader strategy, very selectively picking where do we want to be an LP in these underlying funds of these managers. So double click on that. So you're investing in a private equity fund and private credit fund. How are these GP stakes structured and why is that more favorable than just being an LP in the fund? On the structuring side, this market has changed quite a bit. 10 years ago, when I first started at CAS, I was a 29-year-old associate right out of business school. I didn't know really what anything was in the world. I just had my first kid. Now I've got

four. And so a lot's changed for me personally and a lot's changed in GP stakes. It used to be these firms were just basically selling common equity interest, profits, interests in the business to capitalize them to move forward. That's changed to today. There's a lot of different structures out. There's lots of different firms that are trying to do different types of structures to invest in common equity, preferred equity, NAV loans. There's a lot of different words for it. We remain focused on earning the equity of these businesses.

We're not really a lender. We don't want to be a lender. I don't participate in the full up side. If I'm just a lender, I want the equity side of the ledger. And then, and so transitioning from that, thinking about why these GPs are selling, what the opportunity is, it's growing. They need capital to grow.

They need to finance these opportunities. that are coming to them, they largely face the question of, okay, if I, if I want to grow my business, if I want to increase my AUM, GP stakes requires capital, right? You have to, you have to invest a lot of money as the GP in your underlying funds. It's not like traditional asset management. Why is that? Well, think of it this way. I'm sure for the folks sitting in the audience here today, one of the first questions they ask a GP what they're investing in is how much is the GP investing, right? The GP commitment. Blackstone is the biggest private equity firm in the world. They manage over a trillion dollars. Black Rock is probably the biggest traditional asset manager in the

world. Well, who asks how much of Black Rock's money is actually Black Rock's money, right, that they manage? Not a lot. It's a big question in private markets. So they need to help finance that growth. We can help be a provider of that capital in order to do so. Cynical people will look at the GP stakes and they say, well, you're misaligning incentives, you're letting managers take money off the table. Why are you not being adversely selected as investor in GP stakes? That's a common one. That makes a number of assumptions that I think aren't correct. First off is it assumes that these are secondary transactions, simplistically meaning if a GP is selling a stake, they're not taking any capital into the business. They're taking money

out of the business. And for the vast majority of transactions, that's not the case, right? It's primary capital or a combination of primary and secondary capital. And so if it's primary capital and it's dilutive, Well, I'm a cynical person, right? I think people are going to do, especially in the financial world, whatever's in their best interest. And what that means is, in this case, if a GP is taking primary capital into their business, they're being diluted. Why would they do that? There's really only one reason. They think they can make more money for themselves by using somebody else's money.

GP stakes, I think, is a misnomer. We did a podcast, and we had Michael Reese on from Blueout, it's a big partner of ours, and we love those guys. You put a billion dollars into Fund Six. a big, big fan of what they do there. And we talked about how we shouldn't have called a GP stakes. We should have called a GP growth capital because everybody invest in venture capital. Everybody invested in growth capital of technology companies out there. And nobody worries when a company sells a stake in itself to finance their growth, right?

That's not a problem. But when GPs do it, it's like, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute. What's going on here? They're growing, right? And so the primary capital is accretive. It needs to be accretive to the GP. otherwise it doesn't make sense for them to do it, right? You just wouldn't do it.

So I think from that standpoint, it's really just math, right? It's math around, can I take the dollar from somebody else and go turn it into more? And the sticking point here is, do I want to have a slightly smaller piece of a much bigger pie? There's really two kinds of people in the world. Pie people or slice people. People who are sliced people, meaning how much is my slice of the pie? They're more worried about this. They typically are not going to sell a piece of their firm because they don't want partners.

They want to keep it all for themselves. Pie people are focused on making the pie as big as they can be and looking for partners to help them do that with. And at this point now, just on the adverse selection side of it, there's a lot of data out there about this, about GPs that have sold a stake in themselves. It used to be thinking, okay, if this GP is selling, what's the problem, right? They're selling because they don't want to own it anymore. Well, they're selling 5, 10, 15%. They're not selling 55%, 60%. That's not what I'm talking about.

That's not really what we do. So in that case, you know, you can't really make the argument that there's an adverse selection because if they're selling a minority piece and then afterwards you get to observe what happens to the firm, how fast do they grow, how fast do they not grow? It actually is the opposite. The top performing GPs are the only ones that end up get to sell a piece of themselves, particularly institutional buyers because there's a wide selection of GPs out there. Many of them are right up and down this, you know, wealth walkway, I think as it's called.

What exactly are you buying? And what are the two or three most common uses of your investment capital? Yeah. When we invest in a GP, what we're looking for is clear, visible cash flows. So hard stop. Somebody should invest in GPs, GP stakes, GP growth capital if they want cash flow, right? It's a cash. It should be a cash flow investment. Where does that cash flow come from? It comes first from management fee profits, right? Everybody's familiar with the 2% management fee or whatever that number is, one and a half. 2%. We get a very consistent yield from that management fee component. And then there's this upside that comes on cash flow from carried interest when the GPs do a good job of investing the dollars and see your return on it. And then there's additional upside in the growth of the enterprise value of the business, what you bought it for versus what you can sell your interest for or what the GPs sales for down the road by how much money they raise. So it's really about fundraising and it's about investment performance. When you're deciding to invest into the

versus as an LP, how do you look at that differently? A lot of people in the audience are familiar with being in an LP and a fund. How's it different when you invest in GP? Are there certain cases where it makes sense to invest in GP and not the LP and the LP and the LP and how do you kind of disentangle that? Absolutely. There are situations. You probably have heard the saying, I'd rather be an owner of the business than a customer, right? That's true here as well.

When you acquire a GP interest, you're underwriting many of the same risks, but not all of the same risks. And frankly, there's different ones. It's easy to observe investment performance, the track record. It's easy to observe the partnership. Is it stable? Do they have a longevity there? But it's more so than just what the next fund's going to be because when you're an LP investing in that fund, all you really care about for the purposes of that decision is what does that fund look like? What are they going to do?

Who's the team that's going to manage it? What are they going to buy? that sort of thing. You're not really thinking about a vintage past that. You likely maybe from an underwriting standpoint because you want to stick with the team through time. But for the purposes of that decision, it's really just what's happening there. As opposed to when you buy a GP interest, you're thinking about three, four fun vintages from now. You're thinking about 10, 15, 20 years down the road. Because presumably, if I'm buying the interest and I want to sell it, I need to think about who am I going to sell this to?

And if somebody else going to want to buy this from me. So you really have to look out into the future. So you're not just looking at who's the partners at the firm now, but who's the second tier going to be and who's the third tier going to be and how is the partnership thought about bringing those junior folks up and elevating them within the organization. The one that also nobody thinks about, because it's just not top of mind, is the LP base and the quality of the LP base. When you invest in a GP, what you want to look at is you want to see the LP base and you want to see how sticky is that LP base, how diversified is that

LP base. If one LP is 30% of the capital, there's a lot of risk around that. If you're going to make an investment in that firm, you better know about that relationship and understand what are they plan to do, right? And what are the alignment of incentives there? Otherwise, a diversified LP base, lots of different channels, not just the wealth channel, institutional, insurance, sovereign wealth. There's a lot of different factors that go into it. An LP decision, and this kind of gets into, you asked the question earlier, I think I remember now, why is it like a, why is it a better way to invest in private equity? When you make an LP commitment, you may not realize this, but you're actually making a very specific bet. You're saying, I'm going to pick this strategy in this asset class,

in this vintage with this manager, right? That's a series of very specific bets. And that's not a bad thing. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There's a time in place for that. If you think you're really good at that, I would love to talk to you in the ground, right? Because we have a very high-paying job for you at CAS investments, right?

And I mean that. But it's hard. That's a very hard thing to do. I would rather diversify those risks away by picking the right GPs and owning an interest in their business because I get exposure to all of their underlying assets or almost all of them. when typically these investments are made across the entire platform, not just cherry picking one fund at one point.

It's kind of like investing into a tech startup versus investing in an entrepreneur. You know that this entrepreneur is going to be special. It might be this startup. It might be the next one. But here it's kind of in the company. There's a lot of downside protection in these investments. Talk to me about that and specifically talk to me about the CAS case that you guys have popularized. Contractually obligated management fees, right?

That's a saying we have, and I'm pretty sure my wife has heard me repeat that in my sleep a number of times. When you buy into these private equity firms, it's locked up capital. It's the same reason why we don't really like doing it in hedge funds. Because in hedge funds, they have liquidity. If an investor doesn't like the experience they're having with a hedge fund, they can redeem the... You don't get to do that in a private equity firm, right? You invest in that fund. You sign that subdoc.

It's typically 10 years that you're in that investment plus two one-year options. and then you get into the period of time when you start haggling with the GP about when are we going to end this, right, 12 years down the road. So we think that the private asset management business has inherent downside to it that's very uncommon because of that management fee that's paid for capital commitments. It's very stable. You can run your business at a very high degree of profitability because of the predictability of that management fee, right? So that's the downside. So you can get that wrong, right? You can overpay for those fees, right, like any other asset.

But if you do it right, if you diligence it right, you're going to get a return of your capital back, typically from those management fees alone. And then the upside comes from investors. Often times you're getting 1X in contractual management fees. Yeah, you talk about the constitutional LP, like the endowments and pension funds, very good creditors to have as an investor. And you're getting the 1X downside. And yeah, so tell me about the CAS case and how do you go about seeing whether that exists?

One of the things I think that separates CASS from a lot of other. firms out there is our alignment of interest with our LPs. We talked about this, you know, earlier this summertime. You know, we've got collectively now our team and our shareholders have about $700 million of our own money invested in our own vehicles. And GP stakes is the biggest piece of that. Of the 10 or so billion we manage, six of it is in GP stakes. So we have a lot of our money invested in this. My money, right? Hard earned money that I never really thought that I would have at this point in my life, but I do. So what's goal number one? Don't lose it. Don't lose it. So the CAS case goes like this. We ask, and if you were to pull aside the leaders of the firms here that we invest with, say, okay, talked about this CAS case. What we asked them to do is show a model that says, okay, this GP that has a very successful track record of investing the last 20, 30, 40 years of raising more money, investing well, generating a profit for investors. They raise one more fund after we invest, one more fund. And it's at a fairly substantial size, not huge growth, but at a

nice size relative to their last fund because if you don't think they can do that you shouldn't invest at all period right that's like a hard stop so they raise one more fund and that fund exits at cost meaning there's no carry off of that that next fund so you just get the management fees that come in from it and their existing portfolio you circle it and say it everything exits right where it's marked nothing goes up nothing goes down right where it's marked and if you do the math of what i've just described this firm that has this great track record over time they stop making money for investors. That day we invest, meaning there's no more profits generated for investors. They just get the fees from the existing portfolio and everything else that's in the

ground. And in that case, we feel pretty confident that we're going to lose a little bit of money, but not like anything else. Because what you're basically talking about is this business, if you invest in any company out there that makes widgets, they don't make any more widgets or every widget that they make breaks for the people who bought it. That's a pretty bad case, right? And in that case, we get back somewhere between 20, you know, we lose about 20 to 40 percent of our capital. And that's our downside. wanted to explore the world of online trading but haven't dared to try, the futures market is more active now than ever, and plus 500 futures is the perfect place to start.

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plus 500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500. It's trading with a plus. That's a base case when you look at a deal. What are you trying to do if everything goes right? Ultimately, this comes back to underwriting. And underwriting is a very simple exercise that says, what are my given assumptions that those assumptions then generate an outcome? And in this case, well, we want to underwrite from a, there's really two key risk factors. I said them already. One is fundraising growth, right? So how much money does this firm raise and two is investment performance? Well, let's talk about the fundraising growth. We see some

based cases from various sponsors that want us to invest with them, and they say, okay, this firm is going to grow fee-paying AUM by a 17, 18 percent compounded growth rate over the next five to 10 years, and their investment performance is going to be consistent with what they've done in the past. And in that scenario, we generate a 20 percent internal rate of return and a 3x multiple on our money. And we go, trash. No, thank you. Why? Because that's too aggressive. Your assumptions around what's going to happen in order to generate that target return, they're too aggressive. We want to see a very moderate growth rate in fee-paying AUM and investment performance actually below where it's been, historically speaking.

Because ultimately, if we're thinking about the downside, we have to plan for things to not go as well in the future as they have gone in the past. And so that's really what our base case looks like. And in that scenario, we want to see a high teens, low 20s, internal rate of return, and a three to four times multiple on our money. that's three or four true base case and then yes and then there's always the management case right it always looks a lot rosier than that um and and really what you're trying to get a sense of if things go wrong what's going to happen and if things go relatively right what's going to happen knowing it's really you're going to be wrong on both of those it's going to be somewhere along the spectrum i mean our we have a famous now saying at least internally for us of the downside we if we get comfortable with the downside the upside takes care of itself we just need to to be focused on seeing a return of our capital, particularly in the GP stakes world. It's got an inherent level of downside protection that we think is uncommon. One of the biggest criticisms over the

last five years in the GP stakes industry is the lack of liquidity. When do you actually get your money back? There's been a lot of evolution around this in the last even couple months. Tell me about that. Yeah, so one of the other things about our business that I think is attractive is as investors ourselves so we think about how do we want to deploy our own personal capital and then invite you good people to join us with us is structure right many of the investments that we would want to make we like the investment but the structure around it i'm sure folks here i've seen that there's just something about the structure that makes it challenging right that you can't get comfortable with and the one in gp stakes the one attribute has been this illiquidity right this

this thought that you have a very long dated investment that has no defined end date, no term to it, because many of them don't, and no way to get out. And so we've pioneered new structures to help investors get that liquidity via tender offers and secondary processes and things like that, that we manage ourselves as opposed to forcing LPs to figure that out by themselves. What does that mean practically? So I invest in CAS, it's 10 years from now. I want to take out the money. What are the options? Yeah. So one of the benefits of our model is that we have about 7,800, so like 7,800 individual investors, about a little under 500 investment advisory firms in all 50 states and about 40 countries around the world now. That is a very fragmented LP base, right?

And if you are a market participant, having that wide and fragmented of a market participant base is actually your friend because there's a lot of different ways that you can think about getting liquidity, right? So we run an annual secondary process every year for our funds. and they can, if people can opt into that, they can buy, they can sell. We actually have built it into the tech, the architecture specifically of some of these vehicles where they can raise their hand and say, hey, I want to take out all of my money, some of my money, in addition to the inherent levels of liquidity that come with GP stakes, which is a current cash flow yield. So the way I think about it is, okay, I'm going to get my money back on the average GP stake deal

in probably seven or eight years, right? You're getting the management. In just cash flow, right? All that comes out. So I got my principal back. And then from there, it's okay, how long do I want to hold? this for all the while you should see a capital account that's appreciated along the way and heads you're happy and you're getting a nice yield i would say if you're getting a 10-12

percent yield at that point what else are you going to go do with that money right to go replace that cash flow but if you want to then you can say hey i'd like to take some of this money out i'd like to rebalance you can do that so i i agree wholeheartedly on gp stakes i have my own a lot of my own money in gp stakes the next topic sports i disagree with you on so we're in lakers country right here in Huffington Beach. They just sold for a record $10 billion. Why is that not the top? Give me the bull case.

Well, time will tell. I think if you look back at history, that's been said many times. Many times people have said, surely this is the top, how much more valuable can sports franchises get? There's really, ultimately there's one reason why any asset

goes up or down in value. There's one. it's supply and demand, right? I don't care what anybody talks about from market fundamentals and operating profits and all this type of stuff. That's all a secondary factor to

somebody else thinks that this is going to be valuable and there's more of those somebody's and the people who want to sell it and therefore the price goes up. Now, that applies in the sports world in a number of different ways because it's about capital.

If you look at the, I'll give you guys an initially statistic here. If you go back to the year 1990, There were 102 franchises in baseball, hockey, football, and basketball, right? Those four leagues, 102. There were 270 billionaires in the world. Okay. So that's about 2.7 billionaires for every sports team.

Fast forward to today, there's 152, excuse me, 124 franchises in those same four leagues. Add in soccer, you get it to about 152. there are 2,700 billionaires. So the rate of growth of the number of billionaires in the world to the number of sports teams is significantly different. There's about 17 times the number of billionaires as there are sports teams. So when you think about, so that's like the money side of it,

and we'll use that as just a simple proxy. Then you get into the actual fundamentals of this business and you look at how they make money and whether or not they're profitable and all these different factors. Go back to your final. finance classes, 101, Markowitz, Sharp, Miller. They won a Nobel Prize in 1990 for modern portfolio theory, right? And the basics of that say something like this. Okay, you should only

invest in an asset. It doesn't matter what it is. If you remove the fandom out of this, right, because that's a whole other premium that you would put on all of this. But if you remove all of that, find me an asset that will generate excess return. So I want to, if I invest, I make more money, right will decrease the volatility of the portfolio and we'll decrease the correlation of the portfolio to itself increase returns decrease vol decrease correlations those three things it is very hard to find those three things gp stakes does it sports does it if you think something else does it i want to know about it because we want to invest in it okay and i mean that you could buy t bills you're going to decrease your correlation you're going to decrease your vol because you're

going to decrease your returns i'm from houston i don't have my boots on because i'm at the beach but but you could buy energy stocks right you're going to decrease your correlation, you're going to increase your expected returns, but your vaults going through the roof, right? Because those things are all over the place. It's hard to find two out of the three. Sports says two out of the three. So this is getting your question of why do they keep going up in value?

They go up in value because if you're a billionaire, forget about if you're a fan or not. Larry Ellison gave a bunch of money to the University of Michigan, right, for whatever reason. I'm not talking about that. Bryce Underwood is the reference I'm making. They're quarterback. Somebody in the crowd got that's from Michigan. Yeah, there we go. Thumbs up.

Yep. So I think it's working out, right? Your first game was pretty good. All right. So, so. Anyway, they do it because, okay, here's an asset I can deploy scaled capital into that is generating very, very attractive returns on average with private equity. So if you look at the North American index, right? You've got about a private equity has done about a 16, 17% internal rate of return. Sports, if you bought every control deal of every franchise for the last 25 years and just held it, that's what you would have. made for the whole index. So you've got equal index returns, equal betas there, no alpha overlay, none at all, no structuring, no nothing, no security selection, just the average. I have very attractive returns. They do it with a quarter of the leverage, because you can't borrow a bunch of money in North American sports, and a correlation ratio to the S&P, to the Russell 2000, to the NASDAQ, to the U.S. private equity of about a point one. Where else can you get that? And you get a tax benefit that still has held up in this country, even after the most recent attempt at it.

where you get this, like, offset of tax income along the way. I kind of, I would summarize your thesis, almost like a Bitcoin-like thesis where it's a, it's a scarce asset. There's only so many printed, and there's a billionaire. I think that's the bold case. The bear case is there's a finite amount of attention. So the first principal, sports is competing with every other form of entertainment, even this podcast. But even more so is the world today, right? Vinod Kosla, world famous venture capitalists.

one of the earliest investors in artificial intelligence understands where this is going from an entertainment standpoint about all the clicks and all the images online and how it changes all the time. He just bought a stake in the 49ers. Why? As a hedge. Because you cannot AI this type of content.

Nobody cares about the video game necessarily that somebody came up with. They want to go watch the 49ers play in person. There's an argument that if people start working, working four days a week, they'll have more time for entertainment. That's going to go up more than population growth. In terms of when you go about investing in sports teams, are you only focused on the NFL, MLB, NBA? Do you see any up-and-coming leagues that are catching your attention? How do you look at kind of the different sports leagues? Yeah, that's a good question.

We are not focused on these startup things. That's not to say that you're not going to make money on them. We want the predictability. If you're hearing a theme here with us, it's a predictability of an outcome. It's downside protection. It's about certainty, right, to the degree that you could have it in the investing world. And it's very hard to get, and there's never perfect certainty, but we feel pretty confident in the big four North American leagues. The reason why is because they're regulated and controlled and managed in a very different format than anything else in the United States from other leagues like volleyball or pickleball or whatnot. And certainly international football soccer. It's handled very differently. There's a really good article at Point to the Wall Street Journal. Last year, they ran an article that talked about American socialism and sports versus European capitalism because it's sort of inverted and how much better it is for the Americans because of that. It's effectively a cartel.

When you think about it, the way these leagues are managed is they're a cartel. They sell the same product, right? They collectively bargain with their suppliers, which I would put as the players, right, and the coaches and whatnot. And they collectively bargain with their distribution networks, which would be the media, right at different media outlets to enhance their outcome. And so long as everybody does what they're supposed to do and stays in their lane, everybody makes a lot of money.

Well, Mark, I don't know if your wife knows, but we were talking before and you're like, I have all my money in GP stakes. I don't have a single dollar in public investment. So it's not all like GP stakes, but it is all invested in. Okay, Sarah, you're a man of your word, and that's why I love talking to you. So thanks for stopping by. Thank you, David. That's it for today's episode of How I Invest.

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