Pod Insights How I Invest with David Weisburd E183: How to Raise Institutional Capital w/iConnections CEO Ron Biscardi About this episode Ron Biscardi is the Co‑Founder & CEO of iConnections, a fintech platform reshaping global capital introduction. With 25+ years in the alternative investment space, Ron has facilitated 36,000+ LP/GP meetings since launching iConnections in April 2020. He previously co-founded a boutique seeding firm, deploying over $600M in capital via 20+ deals.
From a philanthropic start—with Funds4Food raising $1.9M in 2020 targeting pandemic relief—to anchoring flagship “Global Alts Miami” events, Ron discusses the strategy of building trust, technology, and community in capital formation.
Transcript 10,446 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 David Weisburd? So tell me about Rahul Mudgal.
0:03 Speaker 01 So Rahul is a very good friend of mine and in my opinion, one of the, if not the best fundraiser in the alternative investment world. Rahul has raised just south of, I don't want to get the number wrong, but I know he's just south of about $100 billion, which in, for the size fund he's working with, that's a pretty incredible number. And what I love really is the ethos with which Rahul kind of approaches his work. He pays it forward all the time and he's incredibly
0:43 Speaker 01 good at just helping his friends in a million ways, especially when it comes to understanding what else is happening in the market and, and just educating people by way of sharing information in a systemic way that I've really never seen any single marketer do as effectively as Rahul does. But you know, that combined with the fact that he is, he's just one of the best human beings I've ever met. It, it becomes really a deadly combination when you put it all together.
1:21 David Weisburd? I had to look it up. $100 billion is the larger than GDP of both Uzbekistan and Bulgaria. Pretty good for one guy. And you mentioned that he's systemically helpful. How does he productize his value add to LPs?
1:39 Speaker 01 He has access to an incredible amount of research. And if you become part of his network, he's incredibly generous in that he shares all of this research with his network. It's a fairly exclusive email club that I'm a part of, but he is very, very disciplined about taking in information and sharing it with this group he's created on his, in his email thread. And it's
2:10 Speaker 01 You know, it's research related sometimes broadly to categories like hedge funds or private equity. Sometimes it's extremely narrow about subsectors that those particular funds are investing in. It's a really wide range of things that he's supplying data on. He's built this little machine that he manages himself and it's incredibly valuable stuff. I mean, it's really, really useful. I've never, in my career, I've never come across anyone who's doing this across such a wide swath of topics as systematically as Rahul is. If you know Rahul, it's not really that surprising that of all the people I've met, he's the one doing it.
2:51 Speaker 01 He's just incredibly generous with his Rolodex, with his time, with leads in terms of trying to be helpful to people, whether it's an LP looking for an interesting strategy that they need to add into their portfolio, or someone in his network who maybe is in the middle of a job change and is trying to figure out where they're going to go next. Rahul is just really always there for the people in his network and that's his main focus. He's never really focused on selling. He's mostly focused on how he can be helpful to the people around him and then the selling just takes care of itself. It's very impressive.
3:29 David Weisburd? We both know a lot of generous people. Not everybody I've been able to translate into such, such large businesses. Is Rahul just playing a mid and long-term game? Or is he fundamentally doing something very different that other marketers are doing?
3:43 Speaker 01 What I described is fundamentally different than what most marketers are doing. And it is 100% the long game. It's not even the mid game. He's always really thinking, if I'm helpful, if I'm good to the people around me, I'm helpful to the people around me and I take care of my network, my network will take care of me. And I think that's the philosophy with which he approaches not just his work. I think that's how Rahul approaches life. Is it different than other marketers? I think it's dramatically different than the vast majority of marketers.
4:23 Speaker 01 I think the best marketers in the world are probably doing something that is closer to what Rahul is doing. It's a tough business. There's a tremendous amount of pressure. Fundraising is hard. It takes, you know, it's one of the longest sales cycles in our economy. You don't have a meeting and get a ticket the next day. It just doesn't work like that. It takes a long time of getting to know people, building relationships. And LPs want to track you generally for a period of time. They wouldn't really get to know you. It's definitely a long sales cycle, but I have found too many marketers are really
5:05 Speaker 01 focused on what you can do for them instead of spending time understanding what is the LP's real need? What is it that they're looking for? I think some of the best sales advice I've ever gotten is to really approach selling more like how a doctor approaches diagnosing a problem. They don't go in and say, "Well, here's everything you need to know about me. Here is something I think you should be doing," before they ask you any questions. A doctor starts with questions. And I think that the best salespeople in the world approach it more like a doctor than starting with their pitch. It's, "Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your firm.
5:50 Speaker 01 What is it that you're trying to accomplish? Where are you having problems?" Understand what the LP's situation is first, and then you can find out, "Do they even need what I do?" It's very likely, in most cases probably, they don't. So you're spending all this time pitching when you should be spending that time understanding. And that is definitely core to who Rahul is, and I think it's the piece that a lot of marketers really miss. And it takes a certain amount of courage to do that because when you do that, you're oftentimes going for the no, as they say. You're selling a hedge fund and you hear an LP say,
6:31 Speaker 01 I'm really, right now, the holes in my portfolio are in private credit or private equity. Well, those are things hedge funds don't do. So you probably don't have a solution for what they currently need. But if you at least knew what it was that they needed, you could then offer to make connections and be helpful to them, which will pay dividends down the road. And look, everyone's portfolio is constantly evolving. So they may not need you today, but it's great to have that relationship already built and solidified so that when they do have a need in an area where you can be helpful, they're thinking of you. That, in my opinion, is really the right way for fund managers and fund marketers to think.
7:14 David Weisburd? I think a lot of human behavior can be explained through evolutionary biology lens. There's a famous capuchin monkey study where they were giving capuchin monkeys cucumbers in order to create, to complete tasks. And then they started giving half of the monkeys grapes and the other half of the capuchin monkeys would not actually eat the cucumbers. They revolted and they said, I'd rather not eat than be treated unfairly. So it's not, it's even more than a human trait of fairness. It's even deeper. It's even more evolutionarily wired in us than even at the homo sapien level.
7:51 Speaker 01 It's really biological. That's very interesting and not really surprising.
7:55 David Weisburd? We talk about this game selection, the game that Rahul plays, the game that top allocators play. What game are you playing as the founder and CEO of iConnections?
8:04 Speaker 01 The game iConnections is in is helping in as many ways as possible, GPs and LPs build and scale their businesses. And the thing that we are best at, and it's where we started the business, is this cap intro area. Because fundamentally, cap intro is where
8:27 Speaker 01 Everything starts in relationship building for GPs and LPs. First, LPs are interested in meeting GPs who can run money for them because they're trying to generate returns. And for GPs, they're looking for AUM to add to their fund because their business is running the money that's in that fund. So that's where it started for us. What we're now evolving into is a full-blown investment platform. So we are constantly thinking about ways that we can help the LPs build and scale their business. And same thing on the GP side. How can I help the GPs build and scale their business?
9:07 Speaker 01 And throughout this process, throughout the investment process, there is a tremendous amount of interaction that takes place between these two parties. So we're trying to find ways to just really help both sides make that process run more efficiently in whatever it is they're trying to do, whether it's additional meetings that are now taking place outside of events. We started with a core focus on physical events. But we have a whole roadshow module, for example, that helps the community get together outside of events when they're traveling around the world trying to meet each other. We have an investor portal that enables them to share information and follow each other
9:50 Speaker 01 as returns are generated and as reports are created and they're trying to educate each other and share information with each other. We have a meetup area within our system that enables GPs and LPs to just bring a group together. We have this community of thousands of people now. So as a center, a hub of this community, we're in a really good position to help people create educational moments, marketing moments, and bring them together on the fly in virtual settings. That's what our meetup area of the platform is about. So everything we do is really about helping these two primary constituents build their businesses.
10:35 David Weisburd? And when you started Eye Connections, you had this large rolodex of LP relationships. And you did what everybody is afraid to do, which is you basically gave them to the market and you started to compound that. How difficult was that? And what was the initial thesis on kind of giving up all of your relationships to the community?
10:54 Speaker 01 You know, I never, I never really thought of it as giving up our relationships. I, I always thought of it as paying it forward. That if we, if we created a community that enabled people to meet each other in a way that was useful to everyone in the community, that, that would evolve into a good business. And I, I think we were right about that. Actually, this guy right here, this little tombstone, is the tombstone from the event that we used to start the business. We started Eye Connections through a large global charity event in the height of the pandemic. This was June of 20.
11:35 Speaker 01 And we brought together about 400 LPs and about 300 GPs. Collectively, they did about 3,000 meetings. And we did it all for free and donated all of the proceeds. We did it free in terms of our time. We charged the managers. But the, what the managers paid, 100% of that went to benefit food banks around the world. And I'm sure you remember, food insecurity was a huge issue in the midst of the pandemic. So it was great to start that way because not only did we give away our relationships in the way you described it, but we also gave away all the money to the food banks.
12:17 Speaker 01 But it was, it was such an amazing way to just make a bang in the industry really fast, really effectively. It was done at a time when the industry was in desperate need of a new way to connect because it's such a face-to-face business and that opportunity didn't exist, you know, especially at the start of COVID. So it, it was a huge pay it forward moment for us. And I just can't tell you how much that came back to us in spades. A few months later, you know, on the back of that event, we realized, wow, there, there's definitely a business opportunity here because the industry can't get together in person.
12:59 Speaker 01 They clearly need a virtual platform. They had great experience in the Funds for Food event. How can we now turn this into a business? We were able to go right back to that community and we got a ton of great feedback as we built out our platform and a ton of early subscribers to the software. So for us, it's very much the Rahul way of thinking.
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14:10 David Weisburd? To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/invest. Our link will give you four extra months on the two-year plan and you could try NordVPN risk-free with NordVPN's 30-day money-back guarantee. Once again, that's nordvpn.com/invest. That's N-O-R-D-V-P-N.com/invest. You can also find the link in the show notes for this episode below. And I want to double-click something because I think it is actually a midterm game in that you have to have a long-term perspective, but the fact that you've been able to scale this much in five years shows how quick, quote-unquote, "quickly" long-term games compound. It's a paradox. If you play long-term games, they could compound much more quickly than people realize.
14:54 David Weisburd? It might not happen in six months, it might not happen in 18 months, but it could happen in three to five years. It's not like it's a game that could only be played in decades.
15:02 Speaker 01 A hundred percent. You can't see the connection of the dots moving forward. I think in a famous Steve Jobs talk, he kind of went through this and he said, "You can't, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. You can't really connect them moving forward." Thinking about how to be helpful and...
15:27 Speaker 01 You know, just in, in, in general, playing the long game leads to opportunities that you could never possibly predict. Playing the short game, you kind of always know where that's going to get you because it's just, it's more obvious.
15:44 David Weisburd? It's a transaction. So you know how much you're going to make. You sell something for 10 million, you know you're going to make 500,000. That's the, the ceiling of what you could possibly make.
15:53 Speaker 01 That's absolutely right. And like another example of where we played the long game, as the tech platform began to, you know, sort of take hold, a lot of other groups needed a tech solution for their events. So we quickly pivoted and created a way for our tech platform to be used by other industry events. And we thought, hey, here's an event that's there, you know, and again, in the midst of COVID, all of these events were going through a really, really tough time, you know, for some it was a near death experience for sure.
16:35 Speaker 01 Having a tech platform that enabled them to do a virtual event really fast was a game changer for a lot of them. I, I don't think we charged anyone, but I, I'm trying to think back, but I, I can't remember any of these events where we actually tried to make money on it. We basically thought, hey, the event needs the help, our community wants to connect. There's pretty big overlap between whatever that event is and our community. Let's just find a way to do this and do it to them, give it to them for free because they probably don't have the budget for it. Everyone's going through a tough time. And again, it's just helpful to everyone and we can do it pretty, probably better than anyone else and do it fast.
17:21 Speaker 01 It's not worth trying to figure out how we're going to charge XYZ event to do this. That became a whole element of the business that when we made those first few decisions, I never would have known where it was going to lead. Well, fast forward, you know, five years, we are on the cusp now of rolling out an annual meeting element to the platform. So think about it, we have about 1,100 funds who are, or managers who are members of the platform. A huge number of them are doing annual meetings and, and the annual meetings. AGMs. AGMs, exactly.
18:02 Speaker 01 Those AGMs post-COVID are more complex because there's a huge virtual element and there's the, the in-person element. Well, before COVID, there wasn't a lot of video at an AGM. You showed up at the AGM, you attended, everyone attended in person. There wasn't usually, maybe they did a conference call, but it was terrible. Now these things have a much bigger production element to them than they did in the past. People want to be able to attend virtually if they can't be there in person. And they want to have close to the same experience that you would have, which means you need multiple cameras, you need decent quality, you know, staging
18:45 Speaker 01 and lighting and audio and, you know, all the elements that go with creating a high-quality production, which of course, you know, we do at all of our events. So we thought, okay, we have the tech platform, we've done a lot of third-party events now, we're really good at AV. Why don't we create a, a business line to support AGMs? Because we know, you know, it's probably close to 50% of our fund clients that are doing AGMs every year, or at least every other year, if, if not every year. That's an opportunity that we would, we would not be in a position to do that had we not supported third-party events.
19:25 Speaker 01 And if we hadn't, you know, kind of paid it forward and, and looked at doing that largely as a way to just be helpful to the community, we probably wouldn't be in a position to launch this thing that we're about to launch. So again, it's hard to know where, how it's all going to come together, but. In my experience, playing the long game is always, it's really the only game.
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20:31 David Weisburd? Once again, that's incogni.com/invest, I-N-C-O-G-N-I.com/invest. You can also find the link in the show notes for this episode. Your data belongs to you. Take it back with Incogni. It's, it's the brand, which I like to say the brand is the brand promise. The successful kind of cycle with the customer of providing something, them being pleased with it, and then wanting to come back. And oftentimes, if you're doing the right way, customers should be asking you for product extensions and should be saying, "We would love to partner with you guys on the AGM." Sometimes they're not able to conceptualize that, but it's the first product that you serve and having a wonderful experience for the customer that gives you this optionality of providing new products.
21:14 Speaker 01 And what you just said is literally what happened. We, a, a client who heard, had experienced the event, saw how, how well we run the Miami event in particular, and had their AGM coming up and thought, "Hey, why don't we ask iConnections to help with this? We know they do third-party events. They have the tech platform. They have the event know-how and operations internally."
21:40 Speaker 01 Why don't we approach them and see what they say? So they did. And we said, God, we'd love to do this because it'll give us a really solid pilot that we can build a whole new business line on. So yeah, we are very, very good at staying close to our customers. We are in incredibly good contact. And the events that we do also create moments in time when we really get incredibly good face-to-face time with our customers, you know, over a couple day period. Our New York event that we just ran earlier this month, it was 45 or 50 demos/surveys with customers
22:22 Speaker 01 where we're really like clicking through screens and getting their input and saying to them, what do you like? What do you not like? And what isn't even here that you wish we had? All of those moments are incredibly valuable when you're trying to build something that's ultimately going to serve your clients in a more strategic way. And that, like, all of that is not transactional at all. It's really, we're really trying to build as tight a relationship with that community and as useful a relationship for the community as possible.
22:58 David Weisburd? One of the trends that I see is basically the podcastization of conferences and conference leaders and conference organizers realizing that that's essentially content. So the panel, instead of just making it kind of this traditional panel, making it interview style. Are you finding that in iConnections? And is that one of the trends that you foresee in your future?
23:25 Speaker 01 It's funny, we have a lot of content because, you know, we probably ran 50 to 60 sessions in Miami. We probably had 25 to 30 in New York. We'll do another 25 to 30 at our event in Singapore. And even with all those, I find myself wishing we had more. There seems to be an insatiable demand for these educational moments. And you know, we're in a, we're in an interesting spot in that we really have the smartest people in the world onstage at our events. You know, the last event, the one person who really comes to mind as, as a huge name
24:09 Speaker 01 in our industry is Cliff Asness. You know, so Cliff did a little private session with a group of maybe 15 or 20 LPs. And then he did a session onstage, incredibly well received. And, you know, he's a brilliant guy. The, the idea that if you're, you know, a kid in school and you're majoring in finance and you're interested in getting into the fund business, and now you can go to YouTube and listen to what Cliff thinks about what's happening in the market today. And there are so many of those moments now available, like the, the amount of education you can get compared to when I was starting in the business. I mean, it's really night and day.
24:52 Speaker 01 The only place you could have that opportunity is if you went to the conferences, which of course, early in your career, they're very expensive. It's hard to do. You probably can't even afford the flights and the, and the rooms, let alone the tickets to the event. But now YouTube has made it possible to share, and you know, lots of social media platforms, but YouTube in particular, has made it possible to really share this. So for us, it is an absolutely critical component of our brand building and our growth. We want the market to see our association with the smartest people in the world in this industry.
25:32 Speaker 01 So definitely, I mean, I, I am not personally a podcaster and I am, but, but the event is absolutely providing a form of what you're getting.
25:44 Speaker 01 From the podcast industry. As a matter of fact, and you should take advantage of this in Miami, we have a whole podcast studio that we set up at our Miami event. We had a small version of it in New York, but in Miami, we have it fully blown out, a desk, multiple cameras, beautiful background, TV screens. And we're encouraging people who want to create content at our event, take advantage of the fact that you have someone like a Cliff who's speaking at an event. If you can convince him to jump on your podcast, the setup is right there. You can just get in the seats and get right down to business.
26:27 Speaker 01 We feel like there's just such a demand for all of this. Anything we can do to help facilitate more of it, it's good for us, it's good for our clients. So yeah, we're definitely leaning into it in a big way.
26:38 David Weisburd? I got to spend two hours with Cliff on a podcast that I did a couple of months ago. I've been collecting questions for a second shot. One thing that comes to mind is the TED case study where they were a private organization, very high end, very expensive. And then they did this paradoxical idea of posting all their TED talks online. And a lot of people thought it was a very risky move and they ended up getting hundreds of millions of views and growing the platform considerably. So people don't just go to conferences for the content, they also go for the community aspect as well.
27:14 Speaker 01 For sure. And what we're seeing is that the number of views taking place after the event is dwarfing the number of people who were watching the event live. Many of our sessions have been posted online and gotten anywhere between 30, 40,000 views all the way up to half a million views, depending on what the topic is and how pertinent it is to current events. But it's really an incredibly powerful mechanism that I think if you're at all in the content game, it's kind of crazy not to be leaning into it.
27:57 Speaker 01 TED obviously was way ahead of everyone else.
28:01 David Weisburd? So I want to really double click on value add to LPs. You had an interesting conference in 2022.
28:10 David Weisburd? Around crypto craze at the time. So tell me about how LPs leveraged iConnections to learn more about crypto.
28:17 Speaker 01 So when we think about content, what of course comes to mind for everyone is who's on stage? Is it a fireside chat? Is it a panel discussion? Is it a keynote presentation? What we learned over time was that LPs really were viewing their one-on-one meetings. And we do a tremendous number of one-on-one meetings. Our events have world-class content on stage like many others. But what's really unique to iConnections is the one-on-one meeting element of our events where we're running thousands and thousands of these at each event. The LPs are using those meetings to educate themselves in like every imaginable way.
29:02 Speaker 01 They're using it to educate themselves on the market. They're getting educated on specific investment strategies, referencing back to '22 and what we saw in the crypto area. Crypto was exploding in late '21, early '22. Our event in January of '22 saw we only had 17 fund managers that were in, you know, digital assets. Those 17 funds collectively got over 800 meetings, meaning LPs agreed to meet with them, even though this was not at all considered to be an institutional category yet. And I think even today, it's still not really an institutional category.
29:45 Speaker 01 It's a whole lot closer, but it's not quite there yet. Well, back then, it was viewed as the Wild West. LPs were not telling us they wanted digital assets, but then when we looked at the meeting counts and we saw that concentration, and we had never seen anything even close to that level of concentration with such a small number of funds achieving such a huge meeting count, it became obvious to us that LPs were using those meetings to learn everything they could about Bitcoin, about meme coins, you know, back then, NFTs were still all the rage. So they were running through these meetings absolutely, just coming up to speed on how it all worked.
30:28 Speaker 01 And we thought, wow, that's really, really interesting. And we actually... Quickly did a survey of LPs and said, hey, if we did a dedicated digital assets event, would you attend? And the response was overwhelmingly yes. And we actually ended up doing one for that year. Unfortunately, you know, later in the year, the bubble burst in crypto and then you had the whole FTX mess. And so that was all a big setback. But I think digital assets has absolutely rebuilt. And now it's also being built in a much better, more sustainable and stronger way. I think this administration is very focused on getting the right regulations
31:10 Speaker 01 in place so that you can invest safely and invest in it in ways that's much closer to how we all invest in stocks and bonds. And I think that's the right way to go. Our ability, because of this meeting element, to see where LPs are headed as opposed to what they looked at, you know, retrospectively, is very powerful. And we're working on multiple data products to really bake that into the iConnections platform so that we can be more helpful in predicting where the LPs are going next. There's lots of platforms that will tell you, hey, here are the mandates that exist out there because LPs have said, yeah, this
31:55 Speaker 01 is something I need in my portfolio. Those things could be six to 12 months old. They're not good indicators of what's coming up next and what the next mandate is going to be. But when we see how they behave in these meetings, it's very often that the meetings they take are different from what their mandates are at a given point in time.
32:16 David Weisburd? You had 800 LPs, 17 managers, and I bet a large amount of those 800 LPs, like you mentioned, didn't have a mandate or couldn't even write a check. And yet, many of those ended up probably investing into some of those managers a couple of years later, to kind of go back to the long-term aspect of it. And also, probably some of them that didn't even have a mandate somehow magically found a mandate if there was a compelling enough meeting. One thing that I've learned from talking to hundreds of investors, founders, and business leaders is that planning for the future isn't just about growing assets, it's also about protecting the people who matter most. Life comes with a lot of important milestones. Maybe you're buying a home, starting a family, planning for college, or simply thinking more intentionally about your financial future.
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33:44 David Weisburd? kind of with smaller investors. There's just, you really have to focus on the large check writers and really focus on, you know, putting in the time with those investors.
33:52 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And those are the check writers who can completely change the trajectory of your business. If you get, even if the check isn't the biggest check, just, they're so well-regarded in the marketplace, just getting any size check from them pretty much creates, you know, it's a vote of confidence on your business and on your investment strategy. So I completely agree with you there. Look, there is a place for getting the small checks. So I'm not, I'm not anti focusing on the small checks. And kind of a combination of them is what I've seen work the best, where you're, you're building that long-term relationship with the larger firm.
34:36 Speaker 01 And it's great to be able to say to them, hey, our AUM went up by $5 million in the last quarter. Hey, it went up by $10 million in the last quarter. And that can be coming through small checks. All of that good news helps to influence that bigger player to continue to spend time with you, take you seriously and, you know, hopefully you can get something across the line.
34:57 David Weisburd? There's a nuance there. A lot of people say, don't worry about the size of the check. But of course, if you take that to extreme, if you have a $100 million checks, it's just a difficult business to run. Double click on what the most effective GPs do at iConnections that a lot of GPs do not do. We'll get right back to interview, but first, we're looking for the next great guest. If you or someone you know is a capital allocator and would make for a great guest, please reach out to me directly at [email protected] .
35:25 Speaker 01 So the number one thing is they put in the time. This is an event where you're doing, the average fund did about 20 meetings at our event in Miami this year. And collectively in that event, we ran about 19,000 meetings. So, you know, it's an enormous event. The funds that do the best are the ones who put in the time in the lead up to the event. So the event was in late January. We opened our software, making it possible for GPs and LPs to see each other in the software. That opened in like mid to late November. The GPs who got the most meetings are generally speaking, the ones who as soon as the system opens,
36:10 Speaker 01 they are already completely set up in the system. They purchased access to the event a month ahead of time. They loaded their returns and all their materials into the system so that when that system opens, they're ready to go. And then as soon as it opens, they're in there looking at which LPs are coming, using the filters to determine, okay, who are the ones that are really a fit for me? And then sending meeting requests to those LPs, hoping that LPs will see those requests, confirm meetings with them, and then they get to go make more requests. We, we limit the number of requests, so LPs aren't overwhelmed. But you basically, once a request is either declined or confirmed,
36:53 Speaker 01 a GP gets that credit back, if you will, and they can go make another request. So they, they are generally working with like 50 to 100 of these at any given point. It's there, you'd be shocked at how many GPs spend. This is not an inexpensive proposition. Our software is expensive. The event is expensive. A lot of them don't really spend the time in the system doing the work, sending the meeting requests. And then in early January, we start to get the panic phone calls. Hey, I don't have any meetings. And then we go and look and we say, well, you sent five requests. You have 100. Go send the other 95 and then we'll take a look at where you are.
37:37 Speaker 01 And of course, you know, we have a client success department that helps people to navigate the software and we want people to come and have a good experience. But it's ultimately on the GPs to do this work. Now, the LPs are in there doing their own work as well. And the LPs may also go through the system and say, hey, you know, here are the 20 people that I want to meet. They send their own requests. Most of those requests, of course, are going to get confirmed because people are always happy to get a request from an LP. But, but this is like, this is not rocket science. It is not complicated. It's really just a matter of staying on top of it.
38:19 Speaker 01 It's the hard work of the lead up to the event and making sure that you're organized and every day you're in the system looking at, okay, who accepted my request? Who didn't accept my request? You know what? These requests are now a week and a half old. They feel stale. I'm just going to withdraw them all and send a whole new batch of requests. The marketers who are really on top of all of these elements, they're the ones who leave having gotten 20, 30, 40 meetings. I mean, we had some funds last year who achieved 50, 60 meetings. And at that level, you're having to send multiple teams usually because you can't possibly do them all in two days.
39:02 Speaker 01 The cap intro element is just two days long. So it's, it's really taking it, the lead up to the event very, very seriously. If you do that, you're going to have a great experience. I mean, we, there's too many LPs for you not to have a great experience. If you come and you do the basic behaviors and you really try and you don't get meetings, it's almost always because performance has really been bad. If your performance Is just not good in your peer group. It can be tough. There's no, you know, there's no denying that. But if you, if you come and you do the basics more often than not, you're going to leave this event pretty happy because you've got,
39:47 Speaker 01 you know, we always make sure there's more LPs than GPs. Last year, we had 25% more LPs than we did GPs. So it was a very healthy, you know, ratio between the two groups. And, uh, and GPs came away thrilled. I mean, the number of positive comments, emails, text messages that I got coming out of this Miami event was off the charts. I mean, very, very few GPs came away feeling sad. But I'm telling you, 95% of the time, when a GP is sad, it's, it's always because they just didn't do the basics.
40:23 David Weisburd? You go to iConnections, you have a great first meeting. Let's say it's 10 out of 10. What's the right cadence and strategy to build that relationship post-conference?
40:31 Speaker 01 My advice would always be move at the pace that the LP is comfortable with. If you're using our software to, if you're using the investor portal, you can keep your information in front of that LP. Because if you've had a meeting with them, you, the LP now has a folder in their side of the investor portal for your fund. So every time you load a market update, a performance update, whatever, whatever information you think is useful for LPs to see, you can put it into the system and it will stay in front of the LP. That's like the bare minimum.
41:12 Speaker 01 At least quarterly, you want to be trying to get in front of that LP again. They're not going to meet with you quarterly, but I think it's important that you're at least trying to get in front of them quarterly. It's definitely a business where you should never, ever be offended. People are super busy. LPs in particular are being approached from so many different angles. It's really hard to break through that noise. And, and also every time you come back to another iConnections event, if it's someone that you really clicked with, do another meeting with them at the next iConnections event. Some of the bigger funds who attend our events. Like a third of their meetings are usually existing investors.
41:54 Speaker 01 The process of getting together is so efficient because everyone gets, you know, we do the calendaring for you. Every meeting is a half hour long. It becomes a great moment to just touch base with an audience that you're trying to stay connected to. So it's not all new relationship discovery. I mean, that's the biggest component, but every event you should absolutely be trying to reconnect with people that you thought you had a good moment with. So I would say definitely use the investor portal to keep your materials in front of them. Absolutely try and get together with them in person quarterly.
42:33 Speaker 01 We have a roadshow module in the system which you can use to help you organize any, any meeting around the world. These can be virtual, they can be in person, you know, it can handle both. But that feels like a reasonable cadence and then don't ever get upset, no matter how much you feel ignored. That's just the nature of the beast. And I, there are lots of stories of folks who thought, God, this is never going anywhere. But then the moment was right for the LP's portfolio. And then you get a call because you've really made an effort to stay in front of them. And you never get upset when they're too busy to, to meet with.
43:12 David Weisburd? Try not to have any of your follow ups be sales. Try to make it be as educational as possible. To, to your point about Rahul, even if it isn't directly in your space, try to make some connections or some other useful thing that rewards the LP essentially for taking that meeting.
43:27 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
43:28 David Weisburd? I'm sure you're thinking about AI these days. How does that impact the business?
43:34 Speaker 01 I, I don't think there's a business on the planet that won't be impacted by AI.
43:41 Speaker 01 For sure, AI is going to have a huge impact on this market. I think when it comes to manager selection in particular, AI is going to be hugely helpful. We're working on a variety of things to make it easier. I mean, one of the more basic things that we're trying to do is really to just create a chatbot interface so that you don't have to become an expert in how to use the filtering side of the platform. So you could just talk to the system and say, you know, show me private equity funds from this size to that size, this long a track record, et cetera, and it'll give you that result.
44:21 Speaker 01 That's a much more user-friendly way than having to know how to filter on each one of those things. It's the filters, we have like 90 fields you can filter on, but it's kind of complicated to do it. So that's one way we see it, you know, where we intend to use AI to make the system better. The one idea that comes to mind is if we could get clients comfortable to put their portfolio data, or at least part of their portfolio data into the system so that the system knew, okay, here's the mix of funds you have. We could use AI to analyze that and then say, okay, based on who's attending the next
45:03 Speaker 01 event, you should consider meetings with these 20 firms because here's how they might be able to help your portfolio. I haven't seen anyone do that yet. Now, it's harder to do because you have to get, you have to have the confidence of the LPs that they're comfortable sharing their portfolio data. Some probably will just never share their portfolio data because some are really, really protective of it. But others, you know, depending on what kind of organization you are, your portfolio might even be in the public domain. So you're probably less concerned about it. Of course, all of this is going to be done with like high levels of security and protection.
45:47 Speaker 01 But it's still an area where I think it's going to take LPs a while to get comfortable with it. We, even on the GP side, by the way, we have Begun to use AI to create summaries of the fund manager for the LP to make the LP's life easier when they're coming in and looking at managers. But we asked the managers' permission before we loaded any of their data into the AI tool. Just knowing, you know, there's a high degree of sensitivity. We wanted to make it clear we weren't training anything on any of their data.
46:26 Speaker 01 A big challenge in our industry is the way in which the data is presented to the investors is really, really important, you know, especially for alternatives. When you fall into the unregulated category like most alt managers do, there are really serious rules that you can't, you don't want to run afoul of. So the way your information is presented to investors is really, really important. We're working on building tools to deal with all that so that the GPs can feel, not feel, but actually be in control of that. You couldn't just throw your stuff into ChatGPT and have ChatGPT present it however it wants
47:11 Speaker 01 to, to prospective investors. That would be really, really bad in the world of investing because the regulators are going to look at you and say, wait a second. The, okay, great, you tried to use AI to make this whole experience better, but it said things to investors that you should never say. You know, you can't do that. So in other industries that aren't as heavily regulated and where the impact isn't as big financially for people, you could definitely experiment more. There's no question there is huge value that can be added, but we have to be really careful about how it's done because we can't, we can't put GPs or LPs in a situation where we're really on the edge.
47:58 Speaker 01 From, you know, in terms of complying with the regulations. The regulations are here for a reason.
48:04 David Weisburd? There's a lot of really interesting data sets with, whether it's Burgess or Adipar and some even like PreQuin and these platforms are trying to kind of predict where LPs are trying to invest in. Have you ever looked at partnerships with those service providers?
48:18 Speaker 01 We've definitely thought about it. We have a lot more partnership interest now that we're bigger and we're so dominant in the cap intro, you know, phase of the investment cycle. It was a lot harder in the beginning. And, you know, I find with partnerships, it's really tough to partner with firms who are very different in size. Partnering with groups that are comparable size, it just feels easier to me because everyone has a vested interest and there's not one player who feels super dominant over the other player. Look, we, we could be an amazing partner to a number of these firms because the thing
49:01 Speaker 01 we have that no one else really has is an unbelievable amount of meeting data. So, you know, you can, all of those systems you mentioned can look at clicks and search data, things like that, but we can tell you which GP met which LP for the last 100,000 meetings. I mean, that's really, really unique data that I can't really think of another organization that could possibly have as much of that data as we do in the institutional world. You know, there are probably groups that might have it in retail. We don't play in retail at all. We're really institutionally focused, but, you know, institutions are where all the
49:46 Speaker 01 money is in alts and retail, not to diss retail, it's an exciting growth area for the, for the industry, but. You know, the vast 90% of assets, probably 95% of assets are really institutional assets.
49:59 David Weisburd? The meetings are the leading indicator, are just slightly upstream to actually investing. And that's one thing that I always tell GPs is that if an LP keeps on taking meetings with you, it's a very strong signal because they're so constrained in their time. It's arguably their most valuable asset, especially for the larger organizations, almost more valuable than than a small check. What do you wish that people in the industry would better understand about iConnections? And what misconceptions do you wish people didn't have about about cap intro about iConnections?
50:32 Speaker 01 So I think we're starting to make real progress on this, but the, we started in COVID as a digital platform because you couldn't do an in-person event. So all the connections that we were that we made over those first two years were mostly through our platform. Well, when the world reopened, there was such pent up demand to get together in person. Our event series just exploded like right out of the gates. Our first event, we ran 8,000 meetings. This was in 22 at the Fountain Blue. We ran 8,000 plus meetings. We had 2,300 attendees, a load of speakers, super high quality.
51:16 Speaker 01 It was an event that it was not normal for a first time event to look the way that event did. You know, fast forward to today, our event this year, 5,500, 5,200, somewhere in there, attendees. We ran 19,000 meetings. We had 50 trillion in assets represented in that event. Just leaps and bounds bigger than the first one. Super exciting, but the the success that we've had with the event means a lot of the marketplace thinks of us purely as an event business. And we're really not. The reason we are where we are. Is very much the software.
51:57 Speaker 01 If we didn't have the software platform making it possible for this size audience to orchestrate all of these meetings and really facilitate these meetings, the events would never be as successful as they are. We a lot of times have to educate the market on the fact that we are not just an event business. We're really a software business at the core. And what we're starting to make real headway with is demonstrating to this industry that we can become and we really are becoming a full blown investment platform. Ultimately, if we can get you in into that first meeting moment, the cap
52:42 Speaker 01 intro moment, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to keep you throughout the investment lifecycle. We then want to help you with diligence. We want to help you maintain that relationship ongoing through things like roadshows and meetups and the investor portal. We want to help you with your transactions by digitizing your subdocs and help you through redemptions and quarterly updates, annual updates, you know, however frequent you want to do them. So we have the customer base, right? We're starting from a position of real strength because we have so many GPs and LPs, and these are the most prominent GPs and LPs.
53:24 Speaker 01 I mean, the folks who are members of the platform who are attending our events are running, as I said, it's a huge asset base and they really are regarded as the best in the world. How do we carry that success in the first phase of the investment cycle all the way through the balance of the investment cycle? Sometimes it can be frustrating that people associate us so much with events, but like, let's face it, this isn't the worst spot for us to be in. Having the best firms in the world already on our customer list is a huge advantage. So then, because really the problem we have to solve is really one of adoption.
54:08 Speaker 01 I already have them as customers. Now I just have to figure out the right way and the right moment to expose them to other things we can do for them and help them with. And that's totally happening. Like, we have Somewhere between 500 and 1,000 LPs are in our software every month regardless of events. So it's totally happening where the the client base is starting to see other things that they can do in the software.
54:39 David Weisburd? Well, it might be the wrong time to ask, but what events do you have coming up that people should be aware of?
54:44 Speaker 01 That's hilarious.
54:47 Speaker 01 That's I will never walk away from a moment to plug our next event, David. So all good. So the the next big event for us is Singapore in November. So in that event, we're we're really excited about the Singapore market because there is so much wealth creation in Asia. And, you know, knock on wood, hopefully, the Trump administration figures out a way to resolve the trade dispute with China. And we we get to a good place for both countries.
55:20 Speaker 01 Assuming that happens, there is no doubt in my mind that our event in Singapore will someday probably be bigger than the event we have in Miami. As it stands today, there's no question the US has the biggest base of investors in the alt world. But with all the growth in China and Singapore and Vietnam and Japan, Japan has actually become a really popular place in the last six months.
55:51 Speaker 01 This event, we we are trying to educate that region on how a cap intro event works and why GPs and LPs should attend. We've made huge progress, by the way, with the LPs. The LPs in Asia love the event. They love the format. They get the joke, you know, they're coming now and they're using it the same way the LPs in the US are using it in Europe. The GPs have been a harder sell, but we're starting to see the ice thaw there. And I part of it, too, was, you know, China has gone through a tough couple of years. A lot of the strategies in Asia really have been out of favor.
56:31 Speaker 01 China, you know, obviously dominates Asia and Chinese-based strategies just haven't been in favor with with US investors. I think as all of that starts to change, we'll start to see more Asian-based GPs come to this thing and.
56:51 Speaker 01 There's no reason why we can't be doing 20,000 meetings with firms in Asia as well. I mean, there are plenty of them. And we're also seeing, you know, in the early days, the investors in Asia were really liquidity focused. They didn't want illiquid strategies. We're starting to see that change, but it's a process. You know, for sure, they still value liquidity and I expect that's probably going to be that way for a while longer. But we're completely 100% committed to that part of the world. And I suspect in a few years, you're going to see big movement on the numbers there.
57:33 David Weisburd? Can emerging managers raise in Singapore? And talk to me about kind of raising money in a different geography.
57:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would say in our experiences, Asia is very open to all size fund managers. We have a really broad cross section of fund managers coming to the Asia event. Much more so if I have to compare it to a region, I'll compare it to the Middle East. The Middle East, I find, is still much more brand focused than Asia is. In the Middle East, the flows, in my opinion, are still skewed towards the biggest brands in the world. And, you know, it's also very much a relationship part of the world. It's, you know, relationships are the big driver in the Middle East.
58:24 Speaker 01 And the biggest funds have been there longer and they've spent the time to build those relationships. Asia, I find, to be really entrepreneurial and very open to, like, I think all size of funds have had a good experience at our event in Asia. I don't know if that would have been as true in the Middle East. Now, if you're a small fund based in the US and you're mostly focused on a US investment strategy, until you're, call it, 400, 500 million, I don't think it's really a good use of your time to spend the time and money to go over and do an event in Asia.
59:05 Speaker 01 But if you're Asia based or even Europe based, Middle East based, it's more accessible. You know, from a time zone standpoint, you're just, it's easier to deal with investors in Asia from those places. So.
59:19 Speaker 01 I would feel more comfortable recommending it to firms in those parts of the world. Once you cross 500 million, it's a real business. You've got real traction. You're considered, you're definitely on a path to be institutional grade. Once you're at 500 million. And I think everyone is starting to take you more seriously. So at that point, I think it becomes worth it and definitely over a billion.
59:45 David Weisburd? The principle that I've always applied is if, if you go to geography prepared to commit to it for a minimum of 10 years. And until you penetrate that is, do you agree with that?
59:56 Speaker 01 A hundred percent. I think you probably could say be prepared to commit for at least five years. You're going to start to see progress in five years. If you have, if you have a solid strategy, a solid business, you've achieved critical mass of AUM. You're north of 500 million. I would expect you to make some headway in five years or less.
1:00:22 David Weisburd? And then presumably as you scale, you could bring in IR folks or capital formation folks to kind of take over the relationship. But in terms of the founders of the firms, you know, minimum five years, ideally 10 years per region.
1:00:33 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I, I think you start by just going to a handful of events and see how it clicks for you. And, and your strategy, see if there's an appetite for it. But once you've established that there is, it's not really that hard to add people. I mean, we're all so used to working remotely now. You don't even necessarily need an office in a region to, to penetrate the region and make some progress. So many people are working from home now. You could add a person in Asia, a person in the Middle East, a person in, in Europe. That's not a huge investment.
1:01:14 Speaker 01 You know, you can do that and make enormous progress compared to everyone being based, you know, in New York.
1:01:23 Speaker 01 Twelve, you know, twelve time zones away from Hong Kong or Singapore.
1:01:28 David Weisburd? We have an LP relationship. We're gonna spend the weekend with them and we talk about kind of the scalability of once a year, like memorable experiences. We're going to like a football game and doing dinner with the wives and every, everybody. But I think people underestimate what once a year trip to a Singapore and meeting, having dinner, you know, I know you guys put on like a concert and special events, going to one of those, like how quickly those could scale, although they feel very unscalable because you're spending twenty-four, thirty-six hours, but doing that once a year can be quite powerful.
1:02:03 Speaker 01 If you, if you're not doing that, you're probably not gonna make any progress. I mean, at our events, we have different elements. The one-on-one meetings are, you know, that's the thing we're best known for. But there are a ton of dinners, a ton of parties. Some of them we're helping to facilitate, some the clients are just doing on their own. We do the, you know, we did the concert in Miami. We've done smaller versions of it in Singapore. Those are all moments for people to just spend time together and hang out in a less formal, you know, less work-oriented way. It's just a chance for people to hang out
1:02:44 Speaker 01 and get to know each other and become friends. If you're not on a tour annually where you're touching base with your relationships in a region at least once a year, where you're grabbing dinner, lunch, things like that, you're, you're probably not gonna make any headway. If you're not willing to make at least that commitment to it. And in the beginning, it's the founders who need to be there. You know, once, once you've achieved more critical mass, you know, when you're over a billion, you can probably get away with the founders doing it less. But, but someone has to be dedicated to really building those friendships. And that's really how I think of it. It's like, once you have friends in a region,
1:03:29 Speaker 01 you can start to make progress. But if you don't, if you don't do the work to make friends... It's pretty unrealistic, I think, to assume you're going to somehow build a business there.
1:03:41 David Weisburd? Ron, this has been a masterclass on how to build networks, how to, how to literally attract trillions of dollars in LPs. Thanks for jumping on the podcast and look forward to, maybe not Singapore, but maybe Miami next year.
1:03:57 Speaker 01 Sounds great. We'd love to have you there. And David, thank you again for, for the invite. It was great to be with you today.
1:04:02 David Weisburd? Thanks for listening to my conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow. Also provides the very best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thank you for your support.
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