Kathryn Leaf - CEO of Pantheon on the Rise of Secondaries
Private Capital
Kathryn Leaf is the CEO of Pantheon, a $76 billion private equity firm that has been doing secondaries, among other things, for decades. We had a deep discussion with her about the dramatic growth in the market. Her perspectives on the current state of PE secondaries, as well as evergreen and continuation funds, were fascinating, and the market has a ways to go, she notes: “There has been about $600 billion of capital raised by secondary funds that’s servicing a roughly $15 trillion private market asset class.” We also talk about doing infrastructure at scale, right...
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Avi Kalichstein - GP Stakes at Hunter Point Capital
Private Capital
Today’s guest is Avi Kalichstein, the CEO of Hunter Point Capital. He’s deeply invested in the rapidly expanding world of private equity stakes. We delve into the influence of his father, a renowned pianist, and his early career at Goldman Sachs, where he met Chris Flowers, who significantly impacted his career. Flowers sent him to Japan to work on revitalizing Shinsei Bank, which was an education in cultural nuances. We also discuss his meeting with Bennett Goodman and the decision to establish Hunter Point. The conversation also covers the evolution of private equity stakes, their unique...
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Lawrence Calcano - The Private Markets Revolution
Private Capital
Lawrence Calcano, CEO of iCapital, began his path to finance with a surprising fork in the road, a theater audition on the very same day as his Morgan Stanley interview. That moment set the stage for a remarkable career shaped by both creativity and strategy. Lawrence discovered that the same skills that bring a story to life on stage are just as essential in building successful teams and businesses. From helping to build Goldman Sachs’ East Coast Tech Group in the early 1990s when the internet was a “fire hose” of innovation to witnessing the highs of the Netscape IPO and the...
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Arjun Raghavan - Returns With Resilience
Private Capital
Partners Capital is a $60 billion asset manager that outsources investments for institutions including family offices, foundations, and endowments. The firm was founded with particularly sophisticated clients, most of them private equity partners, which I covered in my previous podcast with founder Stan Miranda. Today we talk to his successor, Arjun Raghavan, who has continued to grow and expand the firm as well as its thought leadership. We talk about his own personal beginnings in India and his consulting and quant background, then talk about how one builds a global...
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Shirl Penney - Champions and Breakouts
Private Capital
Today’s guest is Shirl Penney, founder and CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners, which is a comprehensive platform that allows wealth advisors to go independent and form their own RIA. Shirl’s story starts with a thrift store suit and a bus ticket and leads to the helm of this billion-dollar firm. We start off talking about the inefficiencies and economics of horseracing, Shirl’s passion outside of work. We then go through the formation story of Dynasty post-GFC, their early challenges with technology and data, what the decision is like for a team to break out and start...
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Adam Waterous - M&A Mastery in Oil and Gas
Private Capital
Adam Waterous is the founder of Waterous Energy Fund, the largest private equity fund in Canada’s oil and gas sector. He gives us a masterclass on the past fifty years of oil and gas investing. From humble roots and with no background in oil and gas, he pioneered the competitive sales process in Canada, identified the critical shift in the market and technology after 2012, used a value investing strategy influenced by Buffett to build his firm, and tells us about the importance of finding good rock and the power of consolidation. Adam Waterous began his career in management...
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Roger Ferguson - The Making of a Policymaker
Private Capital
Hello and welcome to the Private Capital podcast. I’m Joe Reilly, head of Circulus Group, a network for family offices based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Our next family office summit is on November 20th in New York. It will feature Jose Minaya, Head of Investments at BNY, and former podcast guest Ken Kencel, president and CEO of Churchill Asset Management. Please subscribe at to stay in the loop. Roger Ferguson, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has had a compelling professional and intellectual career. In our candid and wide-ranging interview, we learn valuable...
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Andy Unanue - Family Culture and Family Capital
Private Capital
Today we are traveling through one of the great family business stories, that of Goya Foods, the formation of their family office, and the creation of a free-standing private equity firm that focuses on family businesses called AUA Partners. Andy Unanue is the founder and Managing Partner of AUA Private Equity Partners, an operationally focused, lower middle-market investment firm with expertise in supporting and growing family-owned and demographic-driven businesses. Andy is a member of AUA Private Equity’s Investment Committee, and under his leadership, AUA has deployed over $600 million...
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Jeff Collins - Care Bears and Cargo Planes
Private Capital
There’s a vast landscape of valuable but unconventional assets out there, but how do you find them, filter them, and properly value them? What frameworks can you use to understand them and how can you integrate them into a portfolio? Jeff Collins of Cloverlay, a seasoned investor in niche assets for decades, loves to explore these esoteric and overlooked opportunities. We delve into various topics, including litigation finance, data centers, the intellectual property behind Care Bears, refurbishing cargo planes, purchasing whiskey barrels, and modeling future revenues for Phantom of the...
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Joan Solotar - Scale as Advantage at Blackstone
Private Capital
Joan Solotar is global head of Blackstone Private Wealth and a member of the firm’s management committee. Joan’s career tracks the fascinating evolution of Wall Street in the past thirty years. Joan worked on three notable IPOs: DLJ in 1995, Goldman Sachs in 1999, and Blackstone in 2007, and we discuss the strategic reasons behind them. She was tapped to lead the development of Blackstone’s private wealth group, which has since grown to $250 billion. We talk about the state of the industry she covered in the 1990s, the challenge of building a two-sided marketplace in...
info_outlineLawrence Calcano, CEO of iCapital, began his path to finance with a surprising fork in the road, a theater audition on the very same day as his Morgan Stanley interview. That moment set the stage for a remarkable career shaped by both creativity and strategy.
Lawrence discovered that the same skills that bring a story to life on stage are just as essential in building successful teams and businesses. From helping to build Goldman Sachs’ East Coast Tech Group in the early 1990s when the internet was a “fire hose” of innovation to witnessing the highs of the Netscape IPO and the lessons of the dot-com collapse, Lawrence has had a front-row seat to the evolution of technology and capital markets.
Now, as the leader of iCapital, he shares how the firm has invested over $700 million in technology to tackle one of wealth management’s biggest challenges: expanding access to alternative investments for high-net-worth investors. Calcano opens up about the early skepticism from fund managers, the “chicken-and-egg” dynamics of building a two-sided marketplace, and how a relentless focus on education, access, and automation helped iCapital reshape the industry.
Lawrence Calcano is the Chairman and CEO of iCapital, the world’s alternative investment marketplace. Since 2013, he has led the strategic vision and guidance that has defined iCapital as a leading financial technology provider iCapital now services more than $270 billion in client assets on the platform across more than 1,760 funds and 106,000 underlying accounts and has 16 offices worldwide Lawrence has appeared on the Forbes Midas List five times.
Prior to joining iCapital, Lawrence was a partner and managing director at Goldman, Sachs & Co. for over seventeen years, including serving as the co-head of the Global Technology Banking Group within the Investment Banking Division. He was responsible for all aspects of technology financing for the internet, digital & e-commerce, software, services & hardware client businesses. He began his career at Morgan Stanley.
Outside of technology, Lawrence’s other passion is mental health & wellbeing, and this has led him to serve as a director of Vibrant Emotional Health (formerly the Mental Health Association of NY) for more than 10 years.
Lawrence received a BA from the College of the Holy Cross and graduated from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College as a Tuck Scholar.
Please enjoy my interview with Lawrence Calcano.
iCapital website: https://icapital.com
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NOTE: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Anything said by the guests or host should not be construed as legal or investment advice. Thanks for listening.
Joe Reilly is the head of Circulus Group, a family office network, and the host of The Inheritance Podcast.
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