Transcription
"Dude, you didn't even wash your hands."
Cuz he was so focused on the opportunity, he forgot to be human. He forgot family offices are people, too.
And building relationships, and building trust, and do Am I reliable? Am I credible? Is there intimacy divided by am I all about me? And if that number on the bottom is lower and the top is higher, trust accelerates really fast.
All the people I like love in my life that I trust are people that can hurt me in some way. Can destroy me. Uh they choose not to.
Um we're going to talk about trust next because everyone talks about the family office space. They talk about how they meet families, how families meet each other. So, if you guys bear with me, I'll tell a quick 1-minute story that will illustrate this unfortunately perfectly.
So, Milken, before COVID, I came over with a friend of mine. We ran a massive panel that focused on family office and film with 60 different uh panelists, all in this room. And I was with my friend Paul. And there was a lot of really good um mocktails and drinks at the event. And then we went to the bathroom. And somebody saw his name tag in the bathroom. And Paul's last name is D'Amore. And his dad, Ray, was going to speak soon after that. And this guy came up as we're washing our hands, just talking with us. And he talks with us. He's trying to figure out if I'm important, if I'm important for Paul, if Paul's going to get the vibe with him. And if any of you have ever met Paul, unless you care about the arts, Paul's not going to have that conversation with you. And we finish and we leave this bathroom. And the guy wants to shake our hands to meet us. And we looked at him and we go, "Dude, you didn't even wash your hands."
Cuz he was so focused on the opportunity, he forgot to be human. He forgot family offices are people, too. And he missed the opportunity because I was the gatekeeper running a company for Ray. Paul had no interest in talking with him but by dismissing me and really disgusting Paul, um, he lost what he thought was his opportunity.
So, with all of you guys, right? Everyone can approach you and go, "I have a deal. I have a deal. I have a deal." But, I want to talk about trust. Um, Randy, I want to talk start with you. What What builds trust for you? Especially with 45 years of doing this yourself to understand that an opportunity the people behind it are something that you're going to spend your time and energy exploring.
Yeah, so let me just say, so I spent 45 years, uh, running a national family office practice for a public accounting firm. I built started family offices. So, I got to meet a lot of people. And like even my family office, we have a we're very formal structure. So, we have an investment committee. The investment committee has set up certain rules on how we establish trust and who we're going to meet with. Uh, but a lot of it is really past performance, um, who we meet from other families, relationships, friends, people we meet at different meetings, um, and also who has, uh, similar interests. The other things is we will also with a family we trust we will co-invest with the family. You know, which is important to us, you know, where people say you got to have money in the game. It's key to us. Anybody we go in they have to have money, you know, they're invested or, you know, they've been involved for a while. But, it's really getting to know the people. You just don't make an investment, meet somebody, and then you make an investment. You have to do due diligence. And to the key to me, which I found very successful, you have to build a relationship. If you don't build a relationship with somebody, it's not going to happen.
Can I Can I jump in if it's all right?
I was going to ask you next, so perfect time.
So, I was listening to your story and thinking about what you had shared and I kind of really spent a lot of time thinking about this question, like this equation for trust, right? Like what is the equation that drives trust? And it's in building relationships. And you know, many of you may know this, you know, I've I've heard this before, but if you think about reliability, credibility, intimacy at the top. And then if you think about self-interest at the bottom, right? Are you reliable? Are you credible? Is there intimacy in the relationship? If you add those up together, and then you meet somebody new and they're not only shilling whatever it is they care the most about, meaning their self-interest quotient is lower, that math equation builds trust really fast, right? And that's something that I think over time has served me really well in building relationships and building trust. So, do Am I reliable? Am I credible? Is there intimacy divided by am I all about me? And if that number on the bottom is lower and the top is higher, trust accelerates really fast. And I found if any other way, it slows down. And so that's something that hopefully again it could be helpful to some of the people in the room. That's been really helpful for me.
Well put, Brent. Thank you. So, Eric, the way the way you present yourself online, you had this reawakening to figure out what really mattered. So, when that shifted in your life, not just the exit, but the focus with your family and health and everything, how did it shift for you in terms of how people approached or what you saw as valuable relationships, whether you're investing in what you call the boring stuff like real estate or you're doing really exciting new defense stuff we can't talk about?
So, for the benefit of you in the room, what I think you're referring to here, David, was the wake-up call that happened to me. So, I was always trying to be the smartest guy in the room and chasing all these things and Silicon Valley all in all. And I was back in in Stockholm and I was hanging out with my friends from my cycling club and I hadn't been racing my bike for a long time and then my brother calls me and he talks to me all the time but I heard something different in the tone. And he said, "Eric, stage four lymphoma." My wife hasn't delivered yet. So, he calls me and he asks like uh pretty good chance of survival but he also had a pretty decent chance of not and that he tells me 6 hour before he becomes a father. It changed me completely and I think that's what you referred to and I just start realizing how precious life is. And in the context of trust building and who you want to be working with, I shifted from trying to be, you know, a decently fast mountain bike racer to actually live my life till I'm 100. And live with a capital l i v e. And this was not like a plot or something for me to try to build my office around and how to, you know, work with better investments and get engaged with really great people but every single time I'm engaged in a conversation with someone that wants to invest with us and join our fund and, you know, invest alongside us, the conversation is always around how do I actually live a better life? How do I take care of my own health? How do I take care of the people around me? And for me that trust building is like very very meaningful. I've helped people and I will never forget when this guy who made $25 million out of an IPO we did in Silicon Valley, he didn't need it. He already had probably a couple of hundred but he was just so excited about that but he literally said "I'm a little chubby." It's like, "How do I get in shape? How do I do this?" And I said, "You know, just do this." And I gave him some coaching on how to change his life and do that. That trust building that comes over human nature where you're actually truly helping people, that's what I think is so important and was it really changed our life and all interactions we have with people that are joining us with this. That's the deeper conversation we have because I don't want to keep talking about AI forever. Everybody knows what that is, but it has changed obviously all analytical cycles down from months and weeks into hours, right? It's all neutralized playing ground. We can all vet the deals. We can all make sure that we do that due diligence, but the deep due diligence diligence that you can do on a more human nature, that only comes when you actually truly can share and you actually have some joint values for doing that. So, that's what I've learned and I find it extremely rewarding and for me it's so cool to see that we have all the tools that is doing all the stuff that used to take time and effort away from that, but we just put that down now. Now it's all about actually getting to know the people behind that and and that's what we are seeing in terms of the trust.
Yeah. Very well said. Thank you for sharing that. Um the man who created what is named after him, the Dunbar number, did research then for the following decade, which showed that even in this current era to build real trust takes between 7 to 10 years.
Wow.
And it is short changed by those that are purposeful, Eric as you're talking about, and uh Randy, you put that time in for decades with all these people to build that. And Brian, you're um the comment on whether somebody is self-interested, uh it's very hard to find somebody who's purposeful who's also incredibly selfish. It's much easier to find somebody purposeful where people can align. But James, the art world is entirely different. You are banking on things that in 6 months could be incredible or in 600 years could be that. And having been in that art world for years myself, there's such a fakery and pretension with so many people. So, how do you build trust in a space where you're backing people who you believe in and people also expect a return or a different valuation in their assets?
Um by by being vulnerable. Which um thank you for sharing that story. Also that when we I I feel like just family offices, investors, maybe as people in general, we get in our own way of allowing us to trust others. And I think it's vulnerability that's a key component to that. Um all the people I like love in my life that I trust are people that can hurt me in some way. Can destroy me. Uh they choose not to. And I like to think they choose not to in the moments when they can probably do it and get away with it. So when we as investors, let's say when we trust people with our capital or our time, uh our thoughts, um at for for personal relationships, our hearts, when we give that to people and they actually cherish that and they don't use that against us, that's when we know that this is a person that we can trust. And we can actually do that really fast. And we can do that quite nominally. Um so uh that's uh when it comes to artists, we uh you know, we we act first, they need the money, they need the time, they have questions, whatever it is, we give it and we see how it's returned.
Great. And I appreciate you sharing that because vulnerability is key.
Hi, I'm Richard C. Wilson. Our community has closed over 1 billion dollars of transactions. We have over 16 million registered members across 100 plus LinkedIn groups. And I own billionaires.com and run Family Office Club. Over 19 years, we've hosted 300 live events, I've built 50 of our own AI tools, and between the billionaires I've interviewed, the centimillionaires who have spoken on stage, and over 1,000 decamillionaires who have presented, we found there's three things that really can build your wealth: proximity, super intelligence, and scale. That's exactly what we provide at Family Office Club. We host 30 events a year, including five large summits for wealthy founders and investors, dozens of workshops and masterminds, including 12 artificial intelligence laptops out implementation workshops, so you leave with AI implemented. To learn more, please go to familyoffices.com, and I look forward to personally meeting you at our next live event.