Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano

Barry speaks with Lawrence Calcano, chairman and CEO of iCapital about how he helped build the company into one of the globe's leading platforms for alternative investments for wealth managers, advisors, bankers and other financial professionals. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Brookfield, we believe you can own wealth that's measured in generations. Because true ownership looks beyond today and beyond cycles. For 125 years, we've built long-term wealth through expertise, discipline, and a clear vision for the future. Providing investors access to alternative strategies built for what's next. Brookfield. Own what's next. Learn more at Brookfield.com/own. This is not an offer to sell or investment advice. Investing involves risks, including loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative nor a guarantee of future results. Please review performance and offering materials before investing.

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  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

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  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

• 2:47Barry Ritholtz?

  This week on the podcast, wow, another great conversation. Lawrence Calcano really has built iCapital since 2013 into what's become the dominant financial technology platform for alternative investments, for wealth managers, for advisors, for banks. I found this informative and really quite interesting, and I think you will also. With no further ado, my discussion with iCapital's CEO, Lawrence Calcano.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  Thanks, Barry. It's great to be here.

• 3:20Barry Ritholtz?

  It's great to have you. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Before we get into your time with iCapital, I want to sort of work back through your career, starting with you get a bachelor's from Holy Cross and an MBA from Dartmouth Talk. What was the original career plan?

• 3:40Speaker 05

  Boy, I don't know that I had one coming out of the gate. My, you know, my dad was raised in an orphanage. His dad had died when he was two. And, and so he was in an orphanage, orphanage till he was 18. He went into the army and then he came out and he had to sort of put himself through school and so. He didn't have a regular sort of path that would sort of lead him to say to me as a teenager, here's the way to do it, you know, and so we were, he was learning and I was learning a little bit. I was a hockey player and I did get recruited to Holy Cross to play hockey. And when I was there, I was an economics major and a theater minor. Spent a lot of time doing theater there as well. And then I went off to Morgan Stanley and

• 4:23Speaker 05

  that was a really interesting decision because I was in a professional play and had sort of been asked to be in a second play. And I had a little bit of a career crisis, if you will, early on in terms of-

• 4:35Barry Ritholtz?

  What was the first play?

• 4:36Speaker 05

  It was called The Murder Room. It was a James Sharkey slapstick play and I played a young Texas millionaire who was engaged to a wealthy British woman. And we were, the play takes place at her father's manor in the UK. It was full of sight gags and jokes and so forth.

• 4:54Barry Ritholtz?

  On Broadway or off Broadway?

• 4:56Speaker 05

  Off Broadway.

• 4:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  Anyway, it was, it was a lot of fun. I was offered a role as Peter in The Diary of Anne Frank as a follow-up. And I had also, at that point, gotten an offer to go to Morgan Stanley. And, and I was sort of in an early trade-off mode and ultimately figured I needed to eat. I had a lot of student loans. And I decided to go off into the world of finance.

• 5:18Barry Ritholtz?

  So you spent a few years at Morgan Stanley. What were you focused on while you were there?

• 5:22Speaker 05

  I was at mortgage finance. So we were both helping SNLs raise capital, do M&A, and also structuring some of the new products like, you know, some of the Ginny Mae Securities, Fannie Mae Securities, REMEX, CMOs, things like that. A lot of the structured type investments.

• 5:38Barry Ritholtz?

  This is late 80s, early 90s?

• 5:40Speaker 05

  This is late 80s. Yeah. 85 to 88. And then I put in one application to business school. A good friend of mine who was an analyst before me, left and went off to Tuck. I visited him. I had an offer to stay on at Morgan as an associate, but decided that after my weekend at Tuck, that would be a- A good thing for me to kind of stop, reassess, figure out what I wanted to do and I went off to Tuck.

• 6:09Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so I have to ask this obvious question. There's a whole industry helping students figure out which is the right schools for them.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:17Barry Ritholtz?

  Their first school, their safety schools, their reach. It's a whole side industry. You apply to one MBA school.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  I applied to one MBA school and part of the reason for that is I had accepted the job to become an associate. And I went off to, to the visit, as I mentioned, and I just had this sort of feeling like I was making the wrong decision.

• 6:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  I, I just staying was the, I, I loved Morgan, it was a fantastic firm, but I just had this sort of sense that maybe that wasn't sort of the right thing to do and going off to business school for two years would be the right decision.

• 6:52Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh-huh.

• 6:53Speaker 05

  And I loved it. I mean, it was an incredible two years. I'm on the board of Tuck.

• 6:56Barry Ritholtz?

  But, okay, but why just apply to one school? If you're deciding, hey, this path isn't exactly how I, I want to get an MBA. Uh, if you're applying at Dartmouth, you could apply to Stern, to Columbia, to wherever.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:12Barry Ritholtz?

  Why only one school?

• 7:13Speaker 05

  You know, I just was sort of wrapped with it. You know, I went up there. It's a small school. When I was there, there were 160 or so in the class. Um, is very focused on team, you know, study groups and teamwork and so forth. And I, it's hard to say. I just felt really like it was the right place for me. And, you know, I, I wasn't too worried about it. If I didn't get in, I, I was going to become an associate at Morgan Stanley. So it wasn't like I had, you know, it was putting all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

• 7:43Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, really, really interesting. How did you end up at Goldman Sachs? Was that at, uh, while you were in business school or afterwards?

• 7:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. So when I went to business school, I sort of said to myself, I'm going to think about all the different things I can do. And after about, you know, two months, I said to myself, you know what? I really did like finance a lot and I want to go back there. And so I applied for summer internships and had a few offers.

• 8:07Barry Ritholtz?

  More than one?

• 8:08Speaker 05

  I did. I applied to all the summer internships and obviously coming out of Morgan Stanley was pretty helpful to my candidacy.

• 8:15Barry Ritholtz?

  Sure.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  Ended up getting an offer to be a summer associate at Goldman, which I took. And was fortunate and pleased to have an offer to come back on post-graduation, which I did and spent obviously a long time there and had a very, very good experience there.

• 8:31Barry Ritholtz?

  So I'm really curious, they're such large and yet such different firms. What was the culture differences like? What did you learn from each?

• 8:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, so they are different and by the way, you know, there are a lot of different ways to skin the cat, right? Goldman had a very team-oriented culture and I think Morgan Stanley does too, but Goldman, it's sort of right there in front of you. You know, they've got 14 business principles, the first of which is our clients come first. By the way, you think about what are the things you learned early on in your career? There were several things from that experience that really stuck with me, starting with business principle number one, your clients' interests always come first. And then secondly, broadly, just the importance of working as a team. And I, you know, my wife used to make fun of me because I would be in the office early

• 9:24Speaker 05

  and if there were a party or some social event, I was always the last to leave and she would say to me, dude, you don't have to actually be there till the end. And but it was just, I was, I just, I loved it so much and it, you know, I just thought that camaraderie was so, it was powerful, you know, smart from a business perspective, but mostly as a person, it was just fun. I mean, it was really fun being in that group of folks.

• 9:49Barry Ritholtz?

  So you end up co-leading Goldman's global technology banking group. Was your focus on tech and financial technology deliberate or did that just evolve organically over time?

• 10:01Speaker 05

  It just evolved. I was a generalist in corporate finance, it was then called global finance, actually. And my Morgan Stanley friends used to make fun of me and call it intergalactic finance. But it was global finance and I did that as a generalist for a couple of years and then I was asked to start the East Coast Tech Group, which I did.

• 10:21Barry Ritholtz?

  This is mid to late 90s?

• 10:23Speaker 05

  This is early 90s. I was a third-year associate. And I did it and it was great. It was sort of late 92, early 93. And, you know, we started to win some business. And as you recall, the internet started to really kick in with Netscape's IPO in 95. And we went from having a really good business to being on fire and drinking, you know, from a fire hose, given all that was going on with the internet.

• 10:52Barry Ritholtz?

  Really, really fascinating. So, so you're there right through the dot com boom and bust. Probably the most transformative technology of the last 30 years, at least before AI. What did that teach you about how capital markets operate, the way investors behave? That had to be a wildly instructive era.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  It was wildly instructive. And, you know, it was all go, it was all happening so quickly. And as you recall, people were trying to figure out, how do we even value these companies? You know? But there was one thing, we used to, we had a great team of folks, the research team, the salespeople, the bankers, we all worked really well together. And we would go out and we'd sort of make presentations to potential clients. And we'd always talk about where we saw the market going. Apart from valuation, so what did we think the adoption was going to look like? And we had these, what then was viewed as wild assumptions about internet adoption.

• 11:54Speaker 05

  You know, at the time, people were afraid to put their card numbers in a computer, you know, for, to buy anything, right? But what, what happened was, for a while, technol, the valuations sort of kept pace and at times exceeded the, the sort of hysteria, if you will. But even though the valuations came back at the end of, sort of mid 01, the internet valuations came down, mid 02, the comtech valuations came down. The reality of what was happening was even wilder, if you will, than what our projections suggested, i.e. the adoption rate of the internet and how it would fundamentally change

• 12:36Speaker 05

  people's lives, the way they bought things, the way they reviewed things, the way they communicated with each other. It was so powerful. And, you know, we, we saw that wave, you saw the communications equipment wave, now we're obviously looking at a different wave. And, and for me, there are several, like, massive lessons there, one of which is you're never safe. When I started, the big technology companies were called DEC. And Wang, you remember those companies?

• 13:00Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, sure.

• 13:01Speaker 05

  Probably most of your-

• 13:02Barry Ritholtz?

  Wang, uh, Computer, uh, not, not Wang who owned Computer Associates, Wang Computers.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  Wang Computers, not Charles Wang.

• 13:09Barry Ritholtz?

  Right, that's right.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  So, those companies all got replaced, you know, first by client server. Then a lot of the client server companies got displaced with the internet. Um, and now you're seeing another interesting potential risk of displacement. And, and I think one of the big things is you cannot be afraid of new changes in technology waves, you've got to adopt it. You can't, by the way, some, some companies, i- if you remember back when, when Amazon was growing and, you know, many of the Borders, the bookstores, the music stores, et cetera, you know, hope is not a strategy, right? You can't hope this is gonna go away. You've got to adopt it, even if it means you've got to change your business.

• 13:54Speaker 05

  Even if it means your, your business model has got to sort of change and, and, and maybe your margins aren't gonna be the same as what they were, you've got to adopt to new technology. Now, the one thing I would say is this always takes a little longer than people think. You know, it's not like you snap your fingers, the, the hype is always ahead of the reality. I think there's a little of that right now. But AI is, is a massively important trend. Uh, we're spending a lot of money on it, uh, as are lots of companies. Um, but I think you've got to be willing to sort of adopt or run the risk of, of dying.

• 14:29Barry Ritholtz?

  You know, if, if there's any lesson to be drawn from Elon Musk and Tesla, it's either, or, or maybe the lesson comes from, uh, Amazon and Jeff Bezos, that you, your margin is my opportunity. And if you don't pivot hard, they're gonna come along and eat your lunch. It, it happens so regularly.

• 14:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:51Barry Ritholtz?

  The, the cycle never stops, never stops turning. Um, so, so at what point did you decide, hey, I could do a lot with this technology and various platforms? What led you to move from Goldman to-

• 15:07Speaker 05

  Helping to build and lead iCapital. Well, the real story is I left in 07 and with one of my former partners, we were going to start a technology buyout fund. You may remember there were some events in 07 and 08 that were not too pleasant. Don't really recall. Something like the GFC. Everything's kind of blurry. Oh, that. Yeah, it reminds me of the Leslie Nielsen joke in Airplane, "I picked a bad month to stop stiff and glue." So, it was a little of that. We went off to start a private equity fund in the middle of the GFC. So, you should have started a distressed asset fund. Probably. We weren't smart enough to figure that out. But we, so anyway, so we put that in pause and, you know, actually, it was a little

• 15:48Speaker 05

  bit of an unplanned cleansing in a sense that I coached my kids' football teams and lacrosse teams and, you know, I worked kind of from home and it was, it was actually very exciting. Did a few entrepreneurial things, but then with, with a great group of folks, we looked at what was happening in the independent space, a space you obviously know quite well. We saw a lot of firms, a lot of advisors sort of going off and starting their own firms. And, and that trend was significant. There were, you know, hundreds of billions or early trillions of dollars that were now being managed by these independent RIAs. And one of the things that we, we looked at was, almost by definition, the biggest

• 16:33Speaker 05

  firm, the firms who were leaving were the firms with the largest asset bases and generally speaking, the largest clients. And those clients typically invested in alts. And so, as we thought about it, we thought- Meaning like family offices, ultra-high network? Yeah, like think about some of your clients and, and what types of products they're interested in buying. So, when you leave, the wirehouses did a phenomenal job and still do of providing outstanding products, support, services, they do a great job. And so, when somebody leaves to be independent, they don't have a platform. So, we felt like we could create a platform to help advisors have access to alts in the right way.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  And, and it's different because at that moment in time, there was no technology. Investing in alts was a highly manual process.

• 17:24Barry Ritholtz?

  To a large degree, for a lot of firms, it still is. It doesn't seem like the various funds all play well together.

• 17:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there's a big, and we'll come back to this experience point, but we felt like firms that were independent really needed a technology chassis. They needed access to product. They needed education, diligence, and they needed a technology platform. We felt like we could build that, end to end, not just the diligence or not just fund sales or whatever. It was the whole end-to-end solution. And we started to build that out and we realized that it was something that clients really needed. The other really interesting thing that we found out along the way, and I would say this was not a pivot as much as an expansion. We had assumed that the wirehouses had absolutely everything they need

• 18:18Speaker 05

  because they knew every manager in the world, they had close relationships. What they didn't really have at the time was much technology. They had a lot of people who were doing a great job, serving advisors, but they didn't have technology. And so we felt like we could offer them a full technology platform. And we basically sort of rethought our role, if you will, in the ecosystem to be one where we were going to serve advisors. Wherever and however they choose to practice, we wanted to be able to serve them end to end. And that's allowed us, I think, to be able to serve advisors at the wirehouses, advisors who are RIAs or at IBDs, and really help create a great experience for them and for their clients.

• 19:02Barry Ritholtz?

  Coming up, we continue our conversation with Lawrence Calcano, CEO and chairman of iCapital, discussing how he built the firm out to a trillion-dollar platform. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  At Brookfield, we believe you can own wealth that's measured in generations. Because true ownership looks beyond today and beyond cycles. For 125 years, we've built long-term wealth through expertise, discipline, and a clear vision for the future, providing investors access to alternative strategies built for what's next. Brookfield. Own what's next. Learn more at Brookfield.com/own. This is not an offer to sell or investment advice. Investing involves risks, including loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative nor a guarantee of future results. Please review performance and offering materials before investing.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 21:28Barry Ritholtz?

  I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Lawrence Calcano. He is the chairman and chief executive officer of iCapital, where he has been helping to build the firm since 2013. They now service over a trillion dollars in client assets on behalf of advisors and other professionals. So, how should a traditional 6040 investor, thinking about some allocation to private equity or private credit, how do they access your platform? Is it directly through their advisor? Tell us what the process is like.

• 22:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's really, it's very much an advisor business. We are very focused on helping financial advisors serve their clients. It's not a B to C model. It's a B to B to C model. And so, really, all the clients at iCapital are advisors, and/or obviously the GPs that are trying to reach those advisors. And so, for financial advisors, if they're large, we can build a whole white label capability for them, so they can, in effect, have an operating system to run their alts, structured investments, or annuities business, as well as the data aggregation that they have to do for clients with information that's everywhere.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  For advisors that are maybe a little smaller, that don't have a persistent need, they can come to our marketplace and see a menu of hundreds of funds where they can avail themselves of those funds for their clients.

• 23:06Barry Ritholtz?

  Really, really interesting. So, I like the description of iCapital as the world's alternative investment marketplace for advisors and wealth managers. When you joined in 2013, what problem were you trying to solve?

• 23:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, we were trying to help the advisors who had left, as I mentioned, left their homes to start off their new businesses, and we felt like we could actually create for them an investment platform to allow them to be able to service their clients, consistent with how they had previously served them.

• 23:44Barry Ritholtz?

  The part of the problem we've seen with alternatives over the years, they all seem to be a slightly different widget. They don't all fit on a platform easily. Especially you have to onboard the assets and align the capital with it. You have to go through subscription documents and capital calls and custodian and performance reporting and then all the analytics. They all seem to be a little different and it's a big lift. How have you addressed this issue at iCapital?

• 24:17Speaker 05

  So we think technology is essential to actually creating an experience that allows you to deal with all of those things effectively and in a way that will be encouraging to you to do the business with your clients where it makes sense. So everything from what happens before you make any decisions. Education, maybe you as an advisor on the asset class. Maybe education for your client. The tools to help you build a portfolio. Research to help you learn about funds. And then, once you've worked with the client and developed a portfolio perspective, tools to help you subscribe. And then automation to help you manage all the things that happen post-investment. Capital calls, distribution, redemptions, transfers, reporting, et cetera.

• 25:02Speaker 05

  And help create an experience that, as an advisor, will give you time back to serve the client and spend time with the client. We feel very strongly about going through advisors because we feel like, you know, there's so much about a client that an advisor will know that a platform will never really be able to know. You know, what is their real feeling towards illiquidity? You know, I think one of the issues the industry is dealing with today is the question of illiquidity and people's expectations about that. Advisors have a better perspective and a deeper perspective on how a client really feels about that. So we want to make sure we're partnered with advisors in bringing the solution to them.

• 25:43Barry Ritholtz?

  So I'm glad you brought that up because every time there's some issue with illiquidity, it seems that people don't seem to really... Understand what a lockup means. It should be fairly self-explanatory. We saw this a couple of years ago with BREIT where which part of seven-year lockup was confusing to you? It's always, and I know what happened in 2022, the Fed raised rates and people thought, hey, let's get out of illiquid real estate before the marks reflect the reality of pricing relative to rates. But that's not how private investments work. How do you educate investors and their advisors as to what illiquidity means?

• 26:28Speaker 05

  So, look, I think it's a, it is a journey. It's not, there's no one answer to that question. And by the way, we do, we spend a ton of time and energy on education and as do most of the GPs in our system. When you, when you look at the documents around some of these funds, it isn't on page 98 in small print. The sort of liquidity rules, if you will, are on the front page, right? So it's, you know, I think the reality is, people want to hear what they want to hear, right? These are illiquid securities, whether

• 27:07Speaker 05

  illiquid investments, whether they're wrapped as a, as a 3C7 private fund, which are clearly illiquid, or they're wrapped in an evergreen wrapper, you know, registered fund, the underlying investments are still illiquid. Now, some are, are shorter duration than others. Private credit is shorter duration than private equity or real estate. But the fact is that private credit investment is still an illiquid investment. The problem, I think, is you, when they get wrapped in a wrapper that says you can sell up to or redeem up to 5%, that confuses people. It confuses people. And I think when the industry uses terms like semi-liquid,

• 27:54Speaker 05

  It's really, I don't even know what that means, semi-liquid.

• 27:57Barry Ritholtz?

  I always, I always think of that 5% gate as the widows and orphans clause. If somebody is suddenly no longer a suitable investor for this due to the person who made the investment passed away, now the wife and kids can get out of it. It shouldn't be, "Oh, I could sell 5% a quarter for as long as I want."

• 28:17Speaker 05

  People should buy these, make these investments because they think they're going to provide, you know, medium to long-term positive impact in their portfolio. If you're buying it to get return this quarter or next quarter, it's probably not the right investment. You're, I'm not a financial advisor, but, but you need to buy these things with the right duration in your mind, and that's not a short one. The, the products do provide what I think of as liquidity features, opportunities if things change in your life to potentially either redeem all of it if there's not a big Q, or redeem up to 5% if you need to.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  I think that's a flexibility and a liquidity feature in the wrapper, but it doesn't mean that the product is, is liquid. And, and people should invest thinking that these products are going to solve an investment need they have that's medium to long-term, not short-term.

• 29:16Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so let's talk a little bit about the demand for this product. We've seen, at least on the institutional side, flows into alts now exceeding a trillion dollars a year. As that scales, what do you think are some of the challenges and bottlenecks for advisors to allocate more to privates?

• 29:35Speaker 05

  So, I think education is, is still a very important issue for advisors. And if you think about where we are, a lot of the, the advisors in the mix have been doing it for a while. There are still a lot of advisors who haven't really gotten into these products yet, and so they're going to need more education, point one. Point two, how they invest is probably going to be different. So, for example, a lot of advisors use models. With respect to their liquid portfolios. We believe that that models will be a very important way in which people invest in alternatives. And that might mean models of just alternatives that get married to an otherwise liquid portfolio,

• 30:19Speaker 05

  or models that include both liquid and illiquid investments together. We have brought both those types of products in partnerships with some managers into the market, as well as partnerships with the infrastructure players. But I think models will represent an important way in which advisors allocate client assets to alternatives.

• 30:38Barry Ritholtz?

  So I've been hearing more and more about interest overseas in a global alternative platform. What do you think is driving the demand internationally versus what's driving the demand here? Is it the same thing, or is it a sort of different approach?

• 30:54Speaker 05

  I think it's the same thing. You know, the adoption's a little bit behind the US adoption. On our platform, you know, in the alt space, we have over $65 billion of alternatives allocated from investors who live outside of the United States. We, half of our 20 offices are outside the United States. We think it's a really important growth area for the market and our business. But I think a lot of the same things that drive advisors to introduce these products to clients, potential for incremental return, portfolio diversification, et cetera, are the same types of things that drive international interest as well.

• 31:33Barry Ritholtz?

  So let's talk a little bit about end-to-end technology. I know this is more than just a menu of alternative funds. Tell us a little bit about your whole tech stack and what it provides for any of your clients.

• 31:48Speaker 05

  So I think a lot of, you know, a lot of what people want help with out of the gate is just how do you build these portfolios? And we talked about education, but how do you build the portfolio? How do you construct portfolios that help match what an advisor's, what a client's goals and objectives are? So we've built technology to do that, which include all structured investments, annuities, along with all the liquid products that they might need. And then the ability, you know, one of the things we've tried to do as an organization is not only build an end-to-end solution out for alts, but do the same thing for structured investments, because those are important products for advisors and clients, as well as annuities and insurance.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  And what's happening in the market today, which I think is a really interesting and ongoing trend, is people are sort of looking at the different types of wrappers. They could be ETF wrappers, insurance wrappers, et cetera, you know, wrapped around things like hedge funds or private equity funds, credit funds, et cetera. And so being able to help advisors think about how the products should be structured, how could they address client needs, is a really important part of what we're doing. And then, as I mentioned earlier, just being able to automate the whole workflow is really critical. I'll make one other point as it relates to tech, and that is, I think, one of the issues for the industry is around data management.

• 33:16Speaker 05

  When you think about, we live in an ecosystem. When we first started the company, people used to say to me, "Oh, you guys are so disruptive." And I would always sort of very politely correct them and say, "We're not trying to be disruptive, we're trying to be enabling." You know, there are a lot of infrastructure players out there that we're trying to help sort of achieve their goals, we're not trying to, like Amazon did to Borders, we're not trying to push them out of business, we're trying to enable them to participate. And I think one of the things that has to happen now in the industry is all the different big constituents have to work together to help support clients. That means administrators, transfer agents, custodians, firms like iCapital, advisors, GPs, we all work together.

• 34:00Speaker 05

  And I think if we can get all of our systems to be better connected, things like tokenization and blockchain will help with that. It'll end up paying huge dividends for the advisor and for the end client.

• 34:12Barry Ritholtz?

  So it's funny, you mentioned disruptive in 2013.

• 34:16Barry Ritholtz?

  There was nothing to disrupt. It was just a series of private offerings and nothing really, no umbrella, no platform that really pulled everything together.

• 34:27Speaker 05

  That's right. It was really a green field, which is why I say we're sort of enabling, not disruptive. And the truth is that, you know, we're still scratching the surface. I mean, you know, BCG does a report every year and they look at global wealth. So last year, late in December, they put out a report that said there's 153 trillion dollars in wealth owned by individuals. Okay? That's a huge number. It rivals the size of the institutional market. So there is a massive number of dollars that today, you know, in the US, I think the estimates are something like 2%, 2.5% allocated to alts. Outside the

• 35:07Speaker 05

  United States, it's even less. There's a significant amount of wealth that is going to be looking to build even more sophisticated portfolios. So tools, technology, AI, tokenization, all of these things have to evolve to create a great experience for advisors and clients to make the best decisions they can in the asset allocation world.

• 35:30Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh. Really interesting. So let's stay with technology and innovation. You guys have built a number of fairly innovative technologies. You've bought, you've partnered. What is the calculus like? How do you decide whether you're going to buy something, build something, or just partner with a provider in the space to build out the platform?

• 35:51Speaker 05

  It's a combination of things. It's time to market, it's culture. You know, everything that we have purchased, we've made 24 acquisitions. Everything that we've purchased, we've integrated. And to me, that's really important because if the goal is to provide an integrated solution for advisors and GPs, if you don't integrate the things you buy, you're not really doing that. Point one. And point two, if the people who join aren't integrated, then it doesn't work either, right? It's not just about technology. It's actually more about the people. And so spending a lot of time on culture and trying to figure out how do you bring

• 36:32Speaker 05

  things together, how do you create what I often refer to as one eye capital is really critical. And I would say as as as time has evolved, you know, I I was always very focused on culture from the very start when we were a couple of people. It's even more important than ever, and it probably continues to to to to occupy a very significant percentage of my time in trying to get people working together, put people in the right seats for them to be successful, and creating simple ideas that people can rally around. I mentioned this earlier, clients come first. What is it we need to do to help our clients succeed?

• 37:14Speaker 05

  And everything we do, we have to do together. Those two things are really unifying to our culture.

• 37:20Barry Ritholtz?

  So you guys did a big capital raise in 2025 that valued you at a pretty substantial multi-billion dollar level. What are you looking at for further raises? How are you deploying that sort of capital? Is it just build, build, build, and eventually you become the the biggest player in the space?

• 37:41Speaker 05

  So we've made, we've, we've announced a couple of acquisitions since then. We we're about to close our acquisition of Hekshire. Hekshire provides an e app for annuities. So as I mentioned before, kind of the complete verticals. So that helps us complete our annuities vertical. So M and A will continue to be, you know, important sort of use of cash. And we continue to sort of actively look at what's out there. We continue to grow organically, but the the the model is self financing. So we don't need outside capital to run our business. I'm a believer, though, when you think about, we talked about the duration of these assets. When we talk to financial advisors, financial advisors have to know that we're financed to be around for a long, a long time. And so we we've

• 38:26Speaker 05

  tried to finance ourselves in a way that our our partners can look at us and say, they're going to be here to support me. And so a lot of it is just making sure we have a strong balance sheet to support our clients.

• 38:37Barry Ritholtz?

  It's always interesting when we see these big private entities go public in the alternative and private space. How do you think about that? How do you think about, you know, the Blackstones and Carliles of the world and Apollos and whoever else.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  Well, look, I think, you know, going public allows firms to have access to capital, to have, you know, growth, you know, leverage their growth, provide sort of secondary markets, if you will, for employees and other investors.

• 39:13Speaker 05

  You know, I think, you know, for us, we spend very little time actually thinking about that, other than wanting to make sure we run the company with the discipline of a public company. We get our quarterly reports turned around, our monthly reports by the second day of every month, quarterly reports by the third day of the new quarter, and we turn the year end results in a fast period of time as well. And so, you know, public, the process of being public creates some disciplines that we want to make sure we have, but it's not, you know, it's not something we're that focused on. There's two sides to every coin.

• 39:56Speaker 05

  You know, when you go public and the stock is going up, everyone's really excited and everyone's really happy. When you go public and you have massive corrections, which we live through pretty regularly, I'd say, and the stock goes down, now you've got to deal with the opposite of motivation. There's concern and so forth, and so you've got to make sure your employees aren't staring at the, I was going to say Quotron, but only you and I would know what that means.

• 40:23Barry Ritholtz?

  You know, it's so funny, I had a buddy whose firm got bought by Yahoo in 96, and he was telling me in 99, people just refreshing the screen constantly, it's all they did.

• 40:34Speaker 05

  It's so, I think there's an element to it that's super unproductive, so that's why we're in no rush to do that. You know, we want to make sure, as I said, we have a strong balance sheet, strong capital structure, you know, equity is an important part of our compensation for everybody, you know, 100% of the employees have stock at iCapital. To me, that's a big cultural point in terms of bringing people together, but you need to, if you're going to Provide that as part of someone's compensation. There needs to be some opportunity for people to get some liquidity. So over our our history, we've provided for such opportunities for people to get a little liquidity. And as long as we stay private, we'll continue to try to find a way.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  It's it's limited, of course, but we try to find a way for people to get to get some liquidity from their from their equity holdings.

• 41:22Barry Ritholtz?

  Really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Lawrence Calcano, CEO and chairman of iCapital, discussing how he built the firm out to a trillion dollar platform. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs. And hands on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 43:16Barry Ritholtz?

  I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Lawrence Calcano. He is the chairman and chief executive officer of iCapital, where he has been helping to build the firm since 2013. They now service over $1 trillion in client assets on behalf of advisors and other professionals. So, so let's talk about what's going on today. Obviously, alts have been very hot for the past 10 years or so, increasingly so. They've been in the news for other reasons the past few months. But, but let's talk about the underlying structural shift

• 44:00Barry Ritholtz?

  before we get to any of the noisy stuff that's going on. How are advisors and individuals changing the way they access alternative structured investments, annuities, any of the products on your platform?

• 44:14Speaker 05

  Sure. So, I think for the, if I can maybe make some divisions by wealth, the wealthier clients have tended to, you know, buy the private funds. You know, perhaps they'll invest either directly if they can make a $20 million investment. Or if not, you know, if they're a million, five million, or whatever, they'll usually come through a vehicle that, that we'll set up for them to access. And then we aggregate that capital and we look like one large investor to the institution, to the, to the GP. So, the wealthier clients tend to invest through those private vehicles across the board. And we think from a platform perspective, the way, you've got to build these portfolios.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  You know, if you have a credit in equity portfolio, debt and equity portfolio, and you want to build them or rebalance them, you can do that with a few mouse clicks, right? With alts, if you target an allocation, it's 10% or 15% or 20%, you've got to build that. So, it's really important that you...

• 45:12Barry Ritholtz?

  It takes time, in other words, to allocate.

• 45:13Speaker 05

  It takes time. You need to make sure that you have sort of persistent access to quality product across all the strategies. So, equity, credit, real estate, infrastructure, et cetera. Hedge funds, and so our platform tries to provide that. But that wealthy individual will probably use private funds to build it. For the accredited investor, they'll probably use the registered funds to be able to build that, and they will either buy individual registered funds, or they might buy registered funds wrapped together. That's something that we're seeing a lot of the market do today, where they'll wrap three or four or five different funds together to give people an exposure to, maybe it's

• 45:57Speaker 05

  equity, maybe it's a growth-oriented product where there's sort of a buyout, a growth, a venture kind of component, or maybe it's an income-oriented product where you've got, you know, credit and real estate, or maybe it's multi-asset, where you've got all of that sort of wrapped together. We think there's lots of different ways. Every individual has a different set of needs and objectives, and so we think it's really important that there's a lot of flexibility in the system so people can allocate precisely what's important to a given client.

• 46:26Barry Ritholtz?

  So what you're describing sounds fundamentally different from how portfolios used to be constructed. How significant are these changes compared to, I won't even mention the 90s, but the 2010s?

• 46:40Speaker 05

  Look, I think what's happened, which is a good thing, is clients have access to more products to potentially meet their needs. Doesn't mean these products, by the way, are right for everybody. They're probably not right for a lot of people. But for those that have the ability to make these investments, the willingness to tolerate the illiquidity we talked about before, these products provide more opportunities to build the right portfolio. If you think about the public markets, I mean, you spent a lot of time thinking about them, I know. You know, there are probably 150,000 private companies with sort of EBITDA or revenues

• 47:22Speaker 05

  greater than $100 million, like, and there are 5,000, 4,000 public companies. There are, the private markets are so much larger than the public markets, as you know, the public market Are increasingly dominated by a small number of stocks. And so accessing the private markets gives you access to a much broader set of possible investments. Again, not right for everybody, but for those who are looking to build, you know, more involved portfolios, there's an opportunity that the private markets enable you to pursue that you just don't get by buying just stocks and bonds.

• 48:00Barry Ritholtz?

  So that's one compelling reason. You can access companies you wouldn't get otherwise. What are some of the, sell us on the other reasons. Why else should an investor or an advisor who is alt curious, why should they explore this space?

• 48:17Speaker 05

  Well, look, I'm decidedly not trying to sell anybody on anything, to be clear. But I think, you know, it's like anything else in life, you know, when we're all better off and we have some more choices. Now, by the way, there's a way in which those choices can be bucketed to make it easier for you to go through that decision-making process. But I think if you have more choices to build a portfolio where you're seeking, you know, longer dated returns, you're seeking more portfolio diversification, these products provide you with more flexibility to create a diverse portfolio, potentially have a higher returning portfolio. But ultimately, you know, every person's got to make a decision that they can, they can live with the products.

• 49:02Barry Ritholtz?

  So during the 2010s, we had 0% interest rate, ZERP and QE and all that fun Fed stuff. And I think that's where private credit really caught the attention of a lot of investors and a lot of advisors. What do you mean my bond portfolio is yielding 3% when, all right, you're trading off a little liquidity and you get 5, 6, 7, 8%? That's pretty attractive relative to the alternatives. Okay, you got to deal with a K1, which nobody likes, but still. Your accountant will will deal with it for double the the yield you're getting in in traditional treasuries or corporates.

• 49:46Barry Ritholtz?

  How has that moved from just straight up credit to private infrastructure, private equity, private real estate? It seems like that whole world has opened up dramatically.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  It it has, and you know, I would say that a lot of the private credit investments you could look at are floating rate.

• 50:05Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  And so they still can provide opportunities for, you know, for excess return, real alpha, because of the way they float. In fact, it was interesting in, you know, in the early part of the century coming out of COVID of this decade, you know, you had people, to your point, very actively buying private credit. And then when interest rates went up to like 5%, some people were earning like 10 to 12% on their private credit investments. And so they were then looking not about private credit versus public credit, they were looking at private credit at 10 or 12% versus private equity. And and and it being shorter duration, was that the right, you know, mix for them?

• 50:47Speaker 05

  And then, you know, right now, we're seeing a lot more people focusing on equity as well. But but you definitely had a period of time where private credit was was very, very attractive. And I think where we sit today, I think a lot of people are very anxious to understand what the underlying credit quality is in these products. And I think, you know, there's certainly disruptive forces from AI that that we've talked about, the industry talks about every single day. It's not clear to me that it's the the existing portfolios are are are really in in in bad shape. I actually think the portfolios are likely in better shape than people think.

• 51:30Speaker 05

  I've spent a lot of time trying to talk to various managers of both equity and credit as to what they're seeing in terms of adoption. And while everybody is working on how to implement AI, it's not like existing software vendors are seeing their businesses dry up. That's not happening. And a lot of those are the borrowers of of these private credit assets. So we'll we'll we'll need to get more information over the next several quarters on where we are with private credit. But my guess is the portfolios are in a lot better shape than people think.

• 52:04Barry Ritholtz?

  So we could talk about navigating some of the headlines, but you mentioned AI. And now I'm legally obligated to ask you a question. What are the most meaningful near term applications of artificial intelligence within the alternative space? Is it administration and workflow? Is it identifying better or less great funds? Is it all of the back office? How is iCapital using AI in your business?

• 52:35Speaker 05

  We're actually, we have pilots going on across what we do. So if you take our tech stack, there are really two ways to think about it. One of which is the tech we use to empower clients and the technology that clients engage with. And the second is the technology we use to run our business. And there are big applications in both. And to give a couple of applications, when a manager comes to iCapital to raise a fund, we sort of build a subdoc. AI can build that subdoc for us very, very quickly. When a client comes to the site and wants to, they come to our marketplace and they want

• 53:14Speaker 05

  to describe to us what they're interested in and they hit toggles, et cetera. They go through a few steps to kind of inform us what they're interested in. AI can do that really, really quickly. There are a number of ways, the way we collect data. One of the services we provide to clients is we help advisors aggregate client data because a client might have held away data in lots of different places that you want to aggregate so you can present a holistic picture to your client. How we get that data, how we retrieve the data, how we extract data from documents, and then how we reassemble, AI can help drive a lot of that. So the applications of AI are sort of significant across our entire platform.

• 54:02Barry Ritholtz?

  Really, really interesting. And we've been dancing around some of the negative headlines. How are you helping advisors navigate that these days? For the most part, it's a relatively small handful of companies. Everybody knows their names, but the cockroach theory has people waiting for the next GFC to unroll. We haven't really seen much like that.

• 54:27Speaker 05

  Well, I think this is such a smaller magnitude than the TFC. I don't think that we're anywhere near those types of concerns. You know, we're big believers in communications. I made a point earlier about how the ecosystem needs to work together. It really needs to work together now in terms of helping people, you know, understand what's happening. I think, generally speaking, that the industry, and when I say the industry, I mean the asset management industry, has to be even more transparent today than ever before. And I think, by the way, that's a good thing going forward. I think the alternative asset managers probably need to be more, more disclosive,

• 55:09Speaker 05

  more transparent to clients over time. But I think the being out in front of clients, helping them understand, you know, the landscape and what's going on has been a big part of how we've spent a lot of time. And one of the things we're doing now is to help, is trying to bring the, organize the industry to get people on the GP side working together. I talked about transparency, getting information, educational material, not promotional material, but educational material, to try to help create, again, a better and deeper level of understanding about these products.

• 55:44Barry Ritholtz?

  So I've been hearing a little bit about convergence lately between public and private markets.

• 55:49Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 55:50Barry Ritholtz?

  You're known as dealing with the private side. Do you ever see a day where private and public both ends up on your platform completely? Full wallet share, et cetera?

• 56:02Speaker 05

  I think for us, you know, we're really focused on helping people have very successful journeys with their private investments, their structured notes and new etcetera. And so I think the way in which we will interact with the with the public markets will be more around these model portfolios I talked about and collaborating and partnering with the GPs and other sort of more the public company, people who either provide models or have public company public investments and helping to create these model packages for for investors to be able to invest holistically in a portfolio. I think that's probably how we'll play the public space

• 56:44Speaker 05

  in in partnership and in concert with people who are experts in that area.

• 56:49Barry Ritholtz?

  Makes a lot of sense. Last question before our speed round. Given all these major technological shifts, what do you think is going to help redefine asset management going forward? We talked about, you mentioned tokenization, we hear about blockchain, AI, data analytics. What's the next big thing?

• 57:07Speaker 05

  By the way, I think the next big thing is the is the the deep implementation of those technologies. We're still scratching the surface. Tokenization hasn't even hit private markets in any meaningful way yet. AI, same. So I think there is significant application of those technologies that will be will be meaningful. And I think really for the for the financial advisors, this reminds me, you know, 10 years ago, when when all the robos were coming out. And there was this big debate, robo-advisors versus human advisors. And and I always thought that was a false choice. I always thought the best answer for clients

• 57:47Speaker 05

  was a great financial advisor who leveraged technology to create an incredible experience for their clients. And I think the same is true today. The best financial advisors are going to not be afraid of technology. They're going to adopt it and they're going to embrace it to create an incredible client experience. And that's sort of how I think the market will will evolve in a constructive and positive way.

• 58:11Barry Ritholtz?

  All right, so let's let's jump into our speed round. These are really just quick answers, so people kind of get a flavor of who you are. Starting with, who are your mentors? Who who helped shape your career?

• 58:23Speaker 05

  Well, I I had a lot of mentors growing up, you know, and and I think I always tried to watch people and and see what they did. There were several senior people at Goldman Sachs that I learned learned things from. I remember the the head of investment banking once told me when I was like a young associate, he said, "The loneliest job on the planet is the CEO's job."

• 58:43Barry Ritholtz?

  Uh huh.

• 58:43Speaker 05

  So if you want to be a successful investment banker, make a friend of the CEO and be a sounding board, and you'll have a good career." That was pretty good advice. But I I remember the other piece of advice I got from another senior partner in in banking was, you you always have to be intellectually honest. And a lot of people are afraid to be intellectually honest because they they're they're calculating what's happening in the room versus, you know, being true to what you think and saying it and and and not being afraid to do that. And and I've tried to to to really do that in in all the things that I've done as I've as I've grown in my career.

• 59:23Barry Ritholtz?

  Really, really interesting. What are you reading these days? What are some of your favorite books?

• 59:27Speaker 05

  I'm I'm overwhelmed with with work reading right now between, you know, what we're doing in our business and and client and client stuff. I'm reading a lot of stuff on AI that sort of if I were to admit the the honest thing is is I keep reading new AI books about, you know, AI and technology, AI in general. There are a lot of incredibly positive things about AI. There are a lot of risks with AI. And and a couple of the books I've read recently were were really focusing on the risks around unemployment, around control and governance. And when you get to natural intelligence, when AI reaches sort of human intelligence, what happens then?

• 1:00:12Speaker 05

  So there's there's a really exciting and bright side, and there's really a dark side that's going to need a lot of governance to to protect all of us.

• 1:00:18Barry Ritholtz?

  Lot a lot of guardrails. So if you don't have time to read. You have time to listen to podcasts or watch anything? What are you streaming?

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  One of the, so that I'm married 33 years and

• 1:00:28Barry Ritholtz?

  Same.

• 1:00:29Speaker 05

  And honestly, you know, the, my wife and I are just binge watching a series of shows. We've, we've gone through the whole Yellowstone saga, you know, the prequels and

• 1:00:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Did you get to Landman yet?

• 1:00:39Speaker 05

  Finished Landman, love Landman, looking forward to watching the Peaky Blinders movie, which we haven't seen. But probably, you know, when I get home, when I'm sort of, when I put the work down, my wife and I tend to watch shows together.

• 1:00:53Barry Ritholtz?

  That, that sounds fun. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in alternatives or investing?

• 1:01:04Speaker 05

  I would say, you know, the world owes you nothing. This is, by the way, what I say, I have several kids, you know, who have graduated college. And, and what I said to them, and I'd say to anyone at I Capital or generally, the world owes you nothing. And what you get in this life is a function of what you work for. And, and I think that people need to be flexible. They need to have an open attitude. And, and that to me, you know, at a given level of intelligence, you know, that's what attitude makes the difference. You know, it's funny, we, we all went through this work from home during COVID and now, you know, some people want to continue to work remotely. And I, when you asked about mentors, like,

• 1:01:49Speaker 05

  a lot of the mentorship that I got, probably a lot of people got, was just being in the office, watching people, listening to people. How do they act? How do they treat other people? You know, how do they behave in meetings? Like, that stuff, that's super valuable, the osmosis learning, you don't get when you're sitting in your apartment on a Zoom screen. This Zoom screen is, is one dimensional. Life is multi-dimensional. And so I'm a huge, my, my, some people in the company love this, some people don't, but I'm a huge work from the office person because I believe that that multi-dimensional experience is much more powerful and it's better for every individual from a learning perspective.

• 1:02:30Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Although I do love those Fridays from home. No, no doubt. And final question, what do you, what do you know about the world of alternatives and investing and technology today? Might have been useful back in the mid 1980s when you were first getting started.

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  I, I think I think probably, I'll generalize that a little bit, is patience. You know, I was sort of young and just, you know, hard charging and so forth, and as a lot of us are. But you just, you have to be patient, you know? It's funny, we sponsor golfers, and I watch golf, I love golf. And you see people, they bogey holes. Jon Rahm won the Masters a few years ago, he double bogeyed the first hole. I remember I was standing there watching it, and I was like, "It's over." It wasn't over. It was one hole. And it reminds me, my youngest daughter graduated Dartmouth a few years ago, and Roger Federer was the speaker.

• 1:03:31Barry Ritholtz?

  I recall that, that speech, and it was really amazing coming from him.

• 1:03:37Speaker 05

  It was an amazing speech. And one of the things he said is, in his career, he's won, and I may get the number slightly off, 80% of his matches, and 54% of his points. And his point was, "It's just a point."

• 1:03:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 1:03:54Speaker 05

  You know, and I think that's a huge lesson. It's just a point, it happened, you lost it, you won it, you lost it, you move on. I think that's great advice, and advice I wish I had had when I was younger.

• 1:04:05Barry Ritholtz?

  Lawrence, this has been absolutely fabulous. Thank you for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Lawrence Calcano, CEO and Chairman of iCapital. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the 650 we've done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Apple, Spotify, Bloomberg, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn't thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer, Sean Russo is my researcher, Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I'm Barry Hulce. You've been watching Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

• 1:04:54Speaker 06

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• 1:05:54Speaker 08

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