Alt Goes Mainstream: The Latest on Alternative Investments, WealthTech, & Private Markets Michael Sidgmore

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
We have a special episode today – it’s a collaboration between Alt Goes Mainstream and Venture Unlocked: Samir Kaji, the Co-Founder & CEO of Allocate and the Venture Unlocked Podcast, and I have a back and forth discussion about the future of private markets and venture. 
If you are an allocator to private markets or a VC fund manager, you won’t want to miss this.
Samir co-founded Allocate to enable the wealth management community to be able to access high quality venture funds in the same way institutions have for years.
He draws upon a background of 22 years in venture banking at First Republic and SVB, where he worked closely with and advised over 700 venture capital and private equity firms. He completed over $12B in structured debt transactions and has invested in a number of funds and companies.
Samir completed the Kauffman Fellows venture program and is an active writer and podcaster with Venture Unlocked.
We cover:

Where is venture now and what the future looks like.
Alpha vs. Beta in venture.
Why VC should be included in many investors’ allocations.
How LPs can approach venture in this dynamic market.
How VC funds have turned into platforms, much like private equity, and what this means for the industry. 
Note that the podcast was recorded before the Silicon Valley Bank news, so we did not cover the topic of the banking system and its impacts on the venture ecosystem on this show.
Thanks Samir for collaborating to have a rich conversation on the complexities of venture capital and the current environment. 

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
On today’s podcast, we have an expert in alternative assets and fund accounting. We welcome Gareth Hewitt, a fund accounting veteran and co-founder of LemonEdge, to the show.
Gareth is the CEO and Co-Founder of LemonEdge, where they are building a better, more efficient fund accounting software platform.
With backing from Blackstone, Lauren Iaslovits, the founder of pioneering fund accounting software Investran (acq by SunGard), Sidekick Partners, and others deep in the PE and alts world, Gareth has been building a next generation fund accounting solution for GPs, fund admins, and investment platforms.
LemonEdge’s solution has a modern core infrastructure, full multi-currency partnership accounting, system-aware fund structures and integrated waterfall technology. They've built a platform that is already used by a number of the industry's largest GPs and asset managers.
Gareth is an expert in alternative assets — he was Head of UK Product Development & Sales for eFront, a unicorn focused on software for alternative investment funds, which sold to BlackRock and he then founded and ran a fund solutions business.
Gareth and I had a fascinating conversation about private markets. We discussed: 

Why innovation in fund accounting is so critical to the evolution of private markets
How LemonEdge is on the cutting edge of the transformation in fund accounting.
How to take a problem that’s historically been solved by spreadsheets to a low code / no code platform.
How the fund accounting space can be digitized and customized.
When and how strategic investors can be valuable in the alts space.
Thanks Gareth for coming on the show to share your wisdom and experience in private markets and let everyone know about the exciting business you’re building at LemonEdge. 

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
Today’s episode of Alt Goes Mainstream features someone who is building a vertical SaaS solution for fund managers and LPs.
Today’s guest is Michel Geolier, the Co-Founder and CEO of Betterfront, a b2b vertical SaaS company dedicated to private markets. He’s building a comprehensive solution to enable fund managers to more efficiently and effectively fundraise trade secondary market fund interests.
Betterfront’s mission is to transform the way alternative fund managers engage, win, and retain investor by using technology, data, and analytics. Betterfront is already trusted by a number of top European VCs, including Cherry Ventures, Partech, Episode 1, and more.
Michel comes at the problem of fundraising with a very unique perspective. He was previously on the LP side, where he led due diligence and fund manager selection for the Siemens’ pension fund in Germany. And he started Betterfront out of frustration for poor solutions for analyzing alternative investment funds.
Michel and I had a thought-provoking conversation about the current challenges that GPs have with fundraising and how Betterfront was built to provide better solutions for GPs. 
We discussed how much of private markets technology is ripe for disruption and why it’s historically been difficult to build modern specialized software for private markets. 
We then look to the future about how Michel believes that the placement agent and secondaries businesses can be disrupted with technology and data.
Thanks Michel for coming on the AGM podcast. We hope you enjoy.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast and Welcome to Wrexham.
On today’s show, we go to Wrexham, the town in North Wales that has become a football (soccer) mecca due to a blend of its rich history as home to the 3rd oldest club in the world and a recent injection of Hollywood with Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buying the club.
We talk with Shaun Harvey, the Advisor to the Board at Wrexham AFC, and a highly experienced football club and league CEO to discuss how teams can have success on and off the pitch.
Shaun is the CEO of Wantaway Limited, where he advises football clubs, organizing bodies, and companies on all things related to the business of football. His current clients include Wrexham AFC, FIFA, Inner Circle Sports, and Macron.
He’s taken his experiences as the MD at Bradford City FC, which he led to Premier League promotion, the CEO at Leeds United, and the CEO of the English Football League to Wrexham AFC, where he and the team are working to secure promotion back into the Football League and bringing a successful club back to the town of Wrexham.
And they are well on their way to building a global brand in a number of respects – they are performing well on the pitch, they have created a show, Welcome to Wrexham, that has been a hit on Hulu, and their recent FA Cup home match vs Sheffield United was the most followed soccer game across ESPN’s website and digital platforms in the US.
Shaun and I had a fascinating discussion. We talked about:

How clubs balance on the field performance and off the field business success in a world where the evolution of entertainment and social media have turbocharged the concept of monetizing engagement.
How important it is to think about the community when investing in a sports team
Why Shaun believes “the Wrexham effect” has been a huge driver of success for their club.
How lifting up a club financially and on the pitch can create tremendous economic and social benefits for the town that they play in.
Thanks Shaun for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast to welcome us to Wrexham - and share why this is such an exciting and impactful project that we can all learn from.
It’s always sunny in Wrexham.
Thanks Steve Horowitz at Inner Circle Sports for the kind introduction to Shaun to make this episode possible.

On the latest episode of Alt Goes Mainstream, we talk with one of the pioneers of the online investment space.
Today’s guest is Ben Miller, the Co-Founder and CEO of Fundrise, America’s largest direct-to-investor alternatives investment manager.
Ben has tremendous experience and expertise in both the real estate space and in building innovative alternative investment technology solutions. Prior to founding Fundrise, Ben was a Managing Partner of WestMill Capital Partners and President of Western Development Corporation, where he was responsible for acquiring, developing, and financing more than $500M worth of property.
In Fundrise, Ben has built a company whose aim is to use technology to build a better financial system for the individual investor, which is simpler, lower cost, more reliable, and transparent. They build software that enables the company to develop and manage investments uniquely well-positioned to grow and preserve their clients’ capital in any economic environment.
Since launching America’s first online real estate investment platform in 2012, Fundrise has now become one of the largest direct-to-investor alternatives investment managers with more than 1.6 million active users, more than $3.3B of equity under management, and $7B of real estate transacted. From private credit to real estate private equity to growth-stage venture capital, Fundrise offers investors exposure to various asset classes.
Ben and I had a fascinating conversation. We discussed:

Fundrise’s evolution from real estate to broad based alternatives investment manager and how they got there. 
The evolution of the real estate market and current investment opportunities in real estate. 
The importance of technology in building a more efficient and low cost way for investors to access alternatives and how Fundrise has focused on this to grow their platform.
Thanks Ben for coming on the AGM podcast to share your views. We hope you enjoy.

We have an exciting episode today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

We are joined by Mathias Pastor, the Co-Founder of Semper, a London and Paris based company that uses liquidity to align the interests of private companies, employees and investors.

Mathias and his co-founder Balthazar de Lavergne created Semper after observing that private companies are staying private longer and employees and founders need ways to unlock liquidity in a systematic, recurring way. Working at The Family, a European VC fund, Mathias saw that employees at some of their largest and fastest growing companies were paper-rich, but didn’t have the liquidity that reflected the value of their shares.

Mathias and Balthazar have created a liquidity financing platform to help fast-growing private companies run recurring, end-to-end secondary transactions. They believe this can enable teams to retain talent while enabling investors to access high-quality private companies.

Mathias and I had a fascinating conversation about how and why they have started with liquidity solutions for private companies, how they are approaching secondary market liquidity for both companies and investors, why recurring liquidity programs make sense for companies and employees, how employee retention for companies can be an important feature of private secondary transactions, what is beyond secondary market liquidity for a platform like Semper, and why Europe is an interesting place to start.

Thanks Mathias for coming on the AGM podcast to share your insightful views on private markets.