[David Senra]
How do you describe what you do?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, I'm a partner and the CEO of Corient, which is the largest multifamily office in the world and the largest non-bank wealth manager serving ultra-high-net-worth clients. So today, we're managing about 525 billion dollars of assets on behalf of clients across 15 jurisdictions globally.

[David Senra]
We hung out in Miami a few weeks ago, and at the end of that meeting, I was like, "Damn it, I wish we would just rerecorded this." It would have been one of the best episodes I would be capable of creating, because it's not only that you're the largest in the world, you have 525 billion of assets under management for client assets, right? But it's the fact that you came from almost the outside and re-engineered the incentive structure of an existing industry, and the way you thought about doing this was fascinating. I would step back, too. It's like, at 39 years old-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Mm-hmm

[David Senra]
... I don't think you'd ever been a CEO at that point.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct.

[David Senra]
Correct? So, can we start the story from you're 39, you're getting recruited to be the CEO of this Canadian company, and then bring us up to where you are today?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Sure. So, CI was a publicly traded Canadian asset manager, trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange, had been public for about 25 years at that point in time. The primary business was Canadian asset management,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
and essentially economically... And there was a small wealth management business in Canada, or small relative to the size of the asset manager. But economically, the entire

[Kurt MacAlpine]
profitability of the firm was derived effectively from the Canadian mutual fund business.

[David Senra]
And they were making how much at the time?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Several hundred million dollars a year of EBITDA.

[David Senra]
Okay. And so why did they need a new CEO?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
The mutual fund industry, like all industries, kind of go through ebbs and flows. And I think that the

[Kurt MacAlpine]
go-forward growth prospects for mutual funds as a structure in particular, rise of ETFs, increasing importance of alternatives, just the expected growth or the growth, kind of the trends around growth that we were seeing in mutual funds started to taper off relative to other areas. So, the company was looking for a new strategic direction for the business at that point in time, decided to do an executive search. I was fortunate enough to be the candidate they had selected as part of that search process.

[David Senra]
But you come in with a rather aggressive plan. Where did that aggressive plan come from?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
A couple of different things. One, I had an opportunity to spend... I spent my entire career in the industry through a couple of different lenses. So, I spent 10 years in an advisory capacity working as a management consultant. Spent about four and a half years, post that, four to four and a half years as an operator inside of an asset management business. And through that, you kind of build points of view and perspectives. You see things that work really well, you see things that you think are ripe for improvement. And in the case of this particular business, I saw tremendous benefits towards globalizing and diversifying the company, and I had a very strong point of view that I wanted to do that by launching an ultra-high-net-worth wealth management business first in the US, hopefully generating enough success to be able to globalize that business.

[David Senra]
Why was that the most interesting idea to you?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It was interesting for a few different reasons. So, I think that there were really kind of three things that stood out to me. The first one was in wealth management, in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management in particular,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
industries have headwinds or tailwinds. Obviously, I believe wealth management has a tremendous amount of tailwinds. There's more wealth being created today than ever. That wealth is more concentrated than ever. There's more complexity tied to that wealth than ever. It's transitioning generations faster than ever, and it's more global than ever. All of those things support the underlying need for advice. So, that was kind of the first piece.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Second piece was, I felt like it was an industry that was ripe for disruption along a couple of different dimensions. So, the first one is around the industry structure. So, think of it as our industry as a giant barbell. So, on one end of that barbell, you have large banks that theoretically can do everything for clients or certainly have the resources to do so. But whether it's governance, bureaucracy, internal conflicts, in my opinion, they give back a lot of the scale benefits that clients should ultimately be benefiting from.

[David Senra]
Wait, what does that mean?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
From a size perspective, they have access to capital, they have access to resources, they can theoretically make strategic investments. It's challenging sometimes to align and mobilize all of those things where clients ultimately benefit. So, companies over time, whether it's the governance, whether it's internal policies, whether it's bureaucracy, just prevent clients from getting the full underlying benefits of the firm. That could be as a result of how the business is structured, how compensation plans work, which I'll come back to, or just how information flows or how teams are ultimately constructed.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
On the other end of that barbell, though, you have small local firms that exist all throughout the country, literally all around the world. Many of those firms are doing exceptional things for clients. The challenge is scale becomes a challenge, because that may limit your ability to get access to world-class managers that have capacity constraints. It may limit your ability to negotiate purchasing power on behalf of your clients, and it may limit the services that you're ultimately able to provide to them. So, you start to run into limitations around what you can do for clients as a result of the scale. In between kind of these two ends of the barbell, there's a tremendous amount of white space that just creates opportunities for disruptive new entrants. So, that was the second piece. And then the third piece is,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
I felt very, very strongly that the industry was built on a flawed structure. And I'll explain to you what I mean by that. So, effectively, regardless of the firm, regardless of the market, almost all advisory businesses are built the same way, wealth advisory businesses. Advisors are independent contractors sharing somebody's brand, somebody's technology, and somebody's office space. Those advisors not only compete with one another for next new clients, but they can literally take clients from one another inside of the same firm, which creates a tremendous amount of isolation, not collaboration.

[David Senra]
So, if I'm a customer of JP, or I'm just using example, JP Morgan Wealth Management-

[David Senra]
I'm tied to one person, right? But I'm actually a customer of that person, not JP, because they're not working as a team, correct?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct, in the sense that depending upon the firm,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
the client's experience is tied to the advisor that originates the relationship with them. So, think of it as most wealth businesses are built to serve advisors. We wanted to build a wealth business that was built to serve clients, and the advisors and the firm and the resources support

[Kurt MacAlpine]
the underlying clients.

[David Senra]
Yeah, and there's all this incentive misalignment. When we were talking in Miami, you were saying, let's say you need an expert to come to a meeting.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And that expert, one hour of that expert's time is $10,000. Can you tell that story?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. So, the first piece is you have this advisor-to-advisor tension, which creates silos or isolation. So, that starts to limit the expertise that can be delivered to the end client just due to the structure of the business. The second piece is the advisors and how the other front office capabilities or services

[Kurt MacAlpine]
work with those advisors. That could be tax professionals, it could be financial planning, it can be wealth transfer, it can be family office. And in most instances, those services act as a cost center to the advisor. So, where ideally the client would benefit from the full expertise, there's a limitation around the advisor sitting there saying, "Do I need to bring this person? Because it's going to have a negative impact on me personally to bring them to the conversation, or can I work around that conversation?" Right? So, there's tension, in my opinion, between the advisors and the front office staff that ultimately supports them. And then the third area of tension is effectively you have advisors who are paid effectively for doing two things: generating as much revenue as they can or commissions as they can from clients. That's the first step. The second step then is how much of that you can hoard and not share with other people. Because when you're paid under those structures, you're incented to not only aggregate, but the more that you share, the less that you ultimately earn. So, that creates obviously the tension, as I mentioned, between advisors. But everybody that supports the advisors typically gets paid on the financial success of the business, and often those two things don't converge, and it creates a lot of underlying tension. So, my whole view was if you step back and say, "Your advisors have tension, your advisors in front office have tension, and your advisors in middle and back office have tension," the big loser is the client. Because the client doesn't get access to the full benefits of the firm. The client is marginalized down to the individual person or team that originated the relationship with them. The second big loser, in my opinion, is actually the firm, because these businesses don't end up becoming companies. They become platforms where individuals plug into the businesses for some sort of period of time. But you're not really building a team, a culture. You're not collaborating and problem-solving together across the firm. That's limited based upon the silo that you ultimately work in. So, when I step back and look at those three things, tremendous amount of tailwinds, an industry with a barbell-like structure that's ripe for disruption, and an operating model, call it, which I believe to be fundamentally flawed. It just creates an opportunity, in my opinion, for somebody to come in and disrupt that, with the goal of doing more things for clients.

[David Senra]
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[David Senra]
So, before we get back to going into this existing structure with these ideas and this understanding, where did this flawed...

[David Senra]
Like, the difference between you're not building a company, so you have a platform. What is the history of this, then? Where did this come from? Why was it set up that way to begin with?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It's a great question, and I don't know the answer to why it was set up that way to begin with. But it's the business model that all large wealth managers seemingly have taken. And when I look at that, and if I step back for a second and say- Put aside the structure of wealth management, but what are wealth advisors ultimately doing for clients, and what service are you providing? And I think about the role that wealth advisors play as kind of the ultimate human capital business, right? In order to be good at the job, you need a tremendous amount of EQ, a tremendous amount of IQ. How those advisors pair that together to work with clients is ultimately what defines success. So, if I park the structure that the industry has chosen and look at, well, how are other human capital businesses structured?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
They all kind of have the same underlying structure. So, as I mentioned, I was a partner at McKinsey & Company. Every single management consulting firm's a partnership, every law firm's a partnership, every accounting firm. Many of the most successful investment businesses, advisory businesses, operating companies are partnerships.

[David Senra]
But wait, the wealth managers weren't.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Weren't. So effectively, to wildly overly simplify the Corient structure, we created the first true professional services partnership and applied it to the wealth management industry. And the goal was to use that structure to create a fundamentally different experience for clients, and ideally, a much more attractive collaborative environment for colleagues, and given it's a partnership, ultimately owners of the business as well.

[David Senra]
Okay, so let's go back. You have this idea. You're like, "I'll take the job, but I have a super aggressive plan."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
What's the response of the company?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, that was part of my pitch as part of the interview process to the board, was they had asked my opinions, obviously, as part of that, on the future, how I saw the future direction of the company. I outlined a strategy. Probably one of the core pillars of the strategy was to effectively launch the business that's Corient today. Fortunately for me, I had a phenomenal board. The board was comprised of significant owners of the business who had a tremendous amount of vested interest in the company, but were also great at delegating, but also collaborating and providing advice. So, it was very welcomed. And because we had such a transparent conversation around what the strategy will look like as part of my interview process, we were able to hit the ground running from the day that I started.

[David Senra]
Weren't you running a similar idea or playbook to the original founder of that company too?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, it's interesting. So, you're probably referring to Bill Holland, who was a previous CEO, who was the chairman of the company.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, Bill and Ray Chang, and Ray's daughter was on the board with us ultimately as well, had done a tremendous job of effectively building scale in the Canadian asset management industry. So, at the point in time, they saw an industry that was subscale, ripe for disruption, and took advantage and built-

[David Senra]
They did that through acquisition?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Through acquisition, through a series of acquisitions in the Canadian marketplace, focused on the mutual fund industry, and did an amazing job with it. And a lot of that kind of put CI in the privileged position that the company was in at that point in time.

[David Senra]
And so, something you repeated when we spoke previously is like, I don't remember the exact line, but basically, you think the most dangerous thing that you can do is stand still.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Mm-hmm.

[David Senra]
And like, the biggest risk is taking no risk.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
So, they're in a dwindling, what sounds like a dwindling business.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
So, what are you going to just sit here and just take less money every year, or are you going to do something drastically different?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah, and I think that, to me, I always tell people, oftentimes people get comfort when things aren't changing. That's when you should be the most uncomfortable. Look at the business you're in, right? It's just everything is changing around us at all times. And so, I'm the most nervous when things aren't changing. And ideally, the change is happening. So then the question is, are you leading the change, are you participating in the change, or are you disrupting the change? And I think you're always better to be the one pushing the change forward on behalf of the firm or the industry.

[David Senra]
Before we get into how you go from CI to Corient,

[David Senra]
you seem wildly ambitious. Every time I talk to you, you say, like, you want to be the best in the world at what you do.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
You had never been a CEO up until 39, right?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Right.

[David Senra]
Did that ambition come later in life? Were you like that younger?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
No, I've always-

[David Senra]
That's very unusual to be like, "Hey, I've had two decades of professional experience, and I'm going to jump in and like Genghis Khan try to take over this industry."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
No,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
I've always been personally ambitious. I'm also a huge proponent of doing things you're genuinely passionate about. I love the wealth management industry. I love human capital businesses. Again, I thought there was a tremendous opportunity for disruption. So, my whole thing is, as you mentioned on change, is one, you should feel uncomfortable if you're not changing, if you're not constantly pushing yourself. The other firm belief that I have is people really benefit from deep specialized expertise. I think in that, just think of all the folks that you're interviewing and having conversations with. They have positioned themselves to be deeper and better at something, whatever that ultimately is, and that typically leads to outsized

[Kurt MacAlpine]
returns and outcomes for them.

[David Senra]
Incredibly.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
I think in many instances, human nature guides people towards optionality, right? So, people get a little more comfort in optionality. "I want to be able to do this, this, this, and then this." And you can be fine at a bunch of those things, but it's very, very hard to be world-class ultimately at something. So, really, the focus was how do we push ourselves to build the best business for clients in ultra-high-net-worth management globally? And that's been the aspiration for the business since we started.

[David Senra]
Okay, so you become CEO of this company. You have this plan. You've clearly thought about all the, like, what you want to do, which you just laid out for us.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
What are the assets that you have? You have a couple hundred million in cash flow-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep

[David Senra]
... that you can deploy, and then your idea is like, "We're going to essentially empty the tank. We're going to take all that money and lever up." Day one on the job, what are you doing?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
There's a couple things that I guess you're doing. So, as it relates to building the Corient business, so I had this point of view around both the opportunity set in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management, and then call it the disruptive structure that we wanted to put in place

[Kurt MacAlpine]
from an industry perspective. So, really, the first thing, I guess like any idea or business that you're trying to get off the ground is- ... is what you're proposing going to resonate? Does this structure... It is fundamentally different how we operate the business from other wealth managers. Is this going to resonate with great entrepreneurs in wealth management who see and align with this vision? So really kind of the first objective is, is this really filling a void in the marketplace, both for clients and wealth advisory professionals, that is going to resonate where this business is ultimately going to generate success? And then, on the back of that, as the concept starts to take off, then you start to think about capital prioritization trade-offs and things like that.

[David Senra]
Actually, you know what? Let's talk about the way your business is structured around, and then we'll talk about how you did it.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Sure.

[David Senra]
Because this is what I was like, "Well, why..." You were explaining-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... all these little, the barbell strategy to me before, and I was like, "Well, why are all these..." Because you're growing by acquisition. It's like, "Why would they sell anyways?"

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Right.

[David Senra]
And you were explaining the benefits and then-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... what you do. So if you just want to lay out, like, you had a disruptive idea. What is that disruptive idea?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And you can explain that.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. So again, I thought there was a tremendous opportunity for somebody to come in and disrupt the ultra-high-net-worth wealth management industry. And the way that we sought out to

[Kurt MacAlpine]
achieve that was, effectively, we wanted to get the structure right. Again, I've said, I felt like the industry was built on a fundamentally flawed structure that does not facilitate the best outcomes for clients, nor does it facilitate collaboration internally. So I felt like if you could get the structure right, then you could actually start to optimize the business in a way that starts to make sense for clients and ultimately employees. The way that we want to position ourselves to be the best is we want to be the most comprehensive provider of wealth management services to ultra-high-net-worth families globally. So, shortly after launching the business, as we were kind of trying to prove out the structure and the concept around the partnership model relative to the industry norm, we were thinking about, what does this business look like as we ultimately start to scale? And, you set a high bar for yourself around, we want to be able to do more. And anyone who's joining Corient, I have this conversation with them.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
By you joining, you should make us better, we should make you better, and we should collectively be able to do more for clients than both of us running on our independent paths. So the way that we kind of set out to build that was we wanted to build this more comprehensive service offering for ultra-high-net-worth families. And so, just very quickly what we've ultimately built out. So we have a wealth advisory component, or function, which is the individuals that oversee and manage the client relationships, so think of those as the relationship quarterbacks. They are supported by the following capabilities. We have global financial planning capabilities. Think about planning for everything associated with your lifetime. We have a global wealth transfer capability, so think of that as everything that extends beyond your natural life. We have 175 people in our investment team, split about 70% on traditional investments, 30% on alternative investments.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
We own and operate several trust companies. We use South Dakota here in the US, but lots of different jurisdictions around the world. We have a tax practice. We have over 100 full-time accountants working at Corient that not only do tax advice for clients and tax implementation, but we literally embed those experts on the wealth advisory teams. So they're working on everything from the financial plan, the wealth transfer conversations, the trust structuring. They're actively involved in the investment conversations around harvesting losses.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
And it really starts to show how when you mobilize these resources, you can ultimately do more for clients. We have a full family office. We pay people's bills. We do outsource CFO. We do customized reporting, concierge lending. We manage complex residential real estate projects. We have an aviation business. We have an art management business. And really, the goal was, how do we do more for clients across the firm, given that we have no limitations to collaboration internally? And I think it's a huge competitive advantage for us.

[David Senra]
Say more about the aviation business. We were talking about this before we started recording.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
As I mentioned, we're serving ultra-high-net-worth clients across a variety of different markets around the world. So we have tremendous scale in terms of the size of the business, but also the relationships and the families that we ultimately have access to. And we thought that there was an opportunity for us to provide a service to them, or multiple different services, aviation being one example, where through just the size and scale and the relationships that we have at Corient, through perhaps taking a different approach, we could provide them a relatively unique service. So we effectively have an aviation business where we own aircraft on behalf of our clients for their collective use. So think of it as we take the balance sheet risk from buying the asset, we take the

[Kurt MacAlpine]
risk associated with the monthly manager fee, and then clients effectively pay

[Kurt MacAlpine]
for the use of the aircraft,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
depending upon how they use it. So it's really given us a unique opportunity.

[David Senra]
But this is not a profit center for you.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct.

[David Senra]
This is the most interesting thing, because I was trying to wrap my head around all this the last time we met, and the model I had in my mind was like, you have this Costco shared economy scaled to what you're doing.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
So if you can go into that a little bit.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
The way that I like to position the business is,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
I think that we've built what I deem to be the only truly conflict-free business in wealth management. But let me define that. I think businesses get conflicted two different ways. The first way that they get conflicted is based upon the structure of the business or how they ultimately govern themselves. So think of it as two different standards of care. Fiduciary standard of care, you're operating in the client's best interest at all times. You are obligated to do so because of that standard. Or a suitability standard, which is effectively, is the product or the service that you're offering good enough to extend ultimately to the client? We have built the entire business to be a fee-only fiduciary business, so operating essentially at the highest standard of care. We're the largest business in the world that operates under that standard of care. So anyone larger than us has the ability to operate at a lower standard of care. So that's the first piece. Second piece is-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
... in terms of the business model that you ultimately put in place, and this ties to how we ultimately serve clients and how we work together. And so, the goal when we launched the business was I wanted to make sure that there were no structural impediments to collaboration from the onset. So, if you think about every possible decision that you could make that would prevent something from collaborating, we've effectively, in my opinion, removed it at the launch of the business. So, I'll give you two examples. So, we have about, give or take, 3,000 people inside of the Corient business today. We have one compensation plan. We have no exceptions to the compensation plan. And the reason for that is once you start to put exceptions in place, let's say you and I work together, you're paid one way, I'm paid another way, it is very, very hard for us to objectively serve a client with different outcomes or different objectives. And that is kind of true across the different elements of the business. The second example I'll give is, I run one P&L across the firm, and I don't do any form of chargebacks. So again, you think about getting great experts in front of clients as quickly as possible with relevant expertise. Once you start to put silos in place, once you start to segment your P&L, once you start to run chargebacks, you're inherently creating underlying friction in the business. So effectively, by operating the business that way, fee-only fiduciary standard, a structure in place that maximizes collaboration with no restrictions towards it ultimately happening, it allows you to think about delivering services for clients that are different and outside of, call it, the norm of just traditional wealth management or wealth advisory services.

[David Senra]
This is what I was trying to get to, where it's like, you're not concerned about what other people in your industry are doing. Your North Star is like, "We just want to keep serving clients better."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct. Exactly.

[David Senra]
And so, if we can offer a service that ultra-high-net-worth people would benefit from, it doesn't matter if other people in the industry are not doing that.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct.

[David Senra]
That is the only thing we're focused on.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Absolutely. We want to be the best in the world at serving ultra-high-net-worth clients, and we think we can do that through deep specialized expertise. So the advisors, again, I mentioned, people love to play on optionality. I can serve a tech entrepreneur, I can serve a small business owner, I can serve a corporate executive. Those are all very different skills. So, we push ourselves, deep specialized expertise that starts in terms of the clients that you ultimately serve, and I'm always encouraging people, be as specialized as possible. The more specialized you are, the more relevant you are, the better advice that you can ultimately

[Kurt MacAlpine]
give to your clients. And then it extends beyond the service offering, and the goal is by pairing all of these pieces together, we can do more for clients because we're helping to connect the dots. Like, a lot of the services that I had mentioned are services that clients need or want or ultimately use, and if we're not piecing it together for them, we're putting that burden ultimately on them. So, by being able to manage somebody's financial plan, somebody's wealth transfer, managing their investments, overseeing their tax, executing their trusts, by thinking about that as a collective problem as opposed to five or six individual decisions, I think it leads to meaningfully better outcomes. But again, you can't do it if you have a structure in place that prevents you from being able to achieve that. And that's why it was so important,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
launch the private partnership to align objectives and create a fundamentally different experience, and then audit every possible area of the business model to ensure that there's nothing internally that would create these tensions or silos or conflicts that would limit the client experience.

[David Senra]
Okay. I'm glad you said it, because it's like 45 minutes into our last conversation where I was like, "Oh, shit." I started to

[David Senra]
grasp this flywheel that you have. What I found interesting is like, okay,

[David Senra]
I'm going to extend this shared economy scale-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... metaphor. You're doing that for your customers. It's like, I'm taking care of your aviation or art management or all these other things that you can go to other places for. It's like, I don't need to make money off that.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Right.

[David Senra]
Like, I just want to serve you better, and I know-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct

[David Senra]
... that you'll stay with me, and therefore, the compounding effect of that. Not only there's very low turnover, like churn with customers.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
In some cases, it goes into the next generation, which is very interesting.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Multiple generations, yeah.

[David Senra]
Multiple generations. But then you also do shared economy scale with the wealth managers that you're acquiring.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Mm-hmm.

[David Senra]
Where it's like, if you're a little boutique, explain the benefits of how you're taking the scale that you have at Corient, and you're approaching somebody that there might be two guys or three guys in an office, but you want to acquire them. Why would they come and agree to do it with you?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
A lot of different reasons, I guess, that people would contemplate transacting. If you're looking at it strictly from a client perspective first, and then you can kind of work your way back. So, from a client perspective,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
scale creates benefits if applied in the right manner. So, our scale creates a number of different things for us, so I'll just give a few examples. Access to certain managers, right? So, you think about some managers are capacity constrained, they're harder to get access to. Having scale and being a more meaningful investor for them creates opportunities and access points that otherwise might not have existed.

[David Senra]
I don't think I understand that point.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
On the investment side, there's kind of two things. One is, are you able to get invested in the best managers in a respective discipline or asset class? And the second piece is, does your scale create purchasing power benefits? So, literally the volume under which you're investing, does that allow you to negotiate better rates on behalf of your underlying clients? As a fee-only fiduciary, on that second point, whenever we negotiate better rates for our clients, we pass those rates on to the clients for their collective benefit. And then that extends a lot of different ways. The lending rates that we're able to get for clients tend to be better because of the size and scale and the broader institutional relationships that we have, the services that we offer. So,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
if you're a five or 10 or $15 billion wealth manager, your ability to offer things like tax and trust and family office and aviation and art management at scale, virtually impossible. So, clients will then ultimately benefit as well.

[David Senra]
More products and services to give to their client.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And a way better cost structure than they can get themselves at the business level.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Pricing. Correct.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, you're getting better access, ideally better access, better pricing, and more services. And then if you're sitting in the- ... shoes of the entrepreneur running the business, like what's in it for them, the way that I think about Corient, because I don't think of it as us buying people's firms. People are coming to be partners at Corients. They're coming to own and operate the business alongside myself and the other equity partners of the firm. So this is about

[Kurt MacAlpine]
founders continuing on the entrepreneurial, or partners, continuing on the entrepreneurial journey they've already been on. It's just we're doing it together than us doing it independent of one another.

[David Senra]
Do they see everything? Like, let's say you want to acquire me, correct?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And we're going through this conversation. Like, I see access to all your books, I see everything?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yes.

[David Senra]
Okay. There's a great historical equivalent. I think I mentioned this to you when we spoke previously, but Rockefeller essentially built a company of founders.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Mm-hmm.

[David Senra]
Like, if you look at the partners in Standard Oil, he did largely through acquisition.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And part of it was just like opening up his books, and he's just like, "This is what I can do."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
"They're obviously superior to what you can do. You can enhance this, and I'm willing to exchange your stock for mine."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
"What would you rather have?"

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Right.

[David Senra]
Is that a similar situation here?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It is. Yes, it is. And also, there's a natural inflection point that businesses hit, right? So, I think you can, and I'll make up the numbers, but just, I think you can scale a wealth business to

[Kurt MacAlpine]
three or four or five billion dollars with a limited set of services. And by limited, it's not overly limited, but it's wealth advisory and investment services. Once you start to

[Kurt MacAlpine]
push kind of through that scale threshold, clients start to demand more services from you, which start to create real challenges, right?

[David Senra]
Let me interrupt you real quick. Is the demand for more services tied to an increase in wealth?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It is in many instances, yes, and also expectations of clients grow as the firms continue to grow and evolve. But a lot of it is tied to increase in wealth.

[David Senra]
Okay. Continue.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, once you start to hit this inflection point, and then the investments that you need to make. So think of it as this. You can grow and scale your business up to a certain level. Let's just say it's three or four or five billion dollars. Then the required investments to get that three or four or five billion dollar business to a 50 billion or 100 billion dollar business require a significant amount of investments. So in my opinion, for many entrepreneurs in the space, that's where the risk-reward trade gets out of balance, right? The incremental risk associated with building all of these services on the hope that the assets will ultimately come in the future creates the imbalance. So for us, someone can continue on that same entrepreneurial journey that they've been on, continue to have a phenomenal wealth creation event for themselves and their families, while immediately benefiting from all of these underlying services that we've already ultimately built together anyway. So literally on day one, instead of someone saying, "I'm going to stay on my own path, make these investments, and kind of see how it evolves over the next one to two decades,"

[Kurt MacAlpine]
tomorrow, I can literally have access to all of these services, extend them to my clients, and continue on that journey myself. So as a result of this, we skew as a business very, very young,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
from a wealth management perspective. So yes, we're doing M&A, but we're not doing M&A to fund effectively retirements. We're doing M&A to bring on partners to continue to grow the business.

[David Senra]
That's an important distinction. Say more about that.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. So, from our-

[David Senra]
What would typically happen, and then what's actually happening?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. So from our industry, I don't have the exact number, but I think the median advisor is probably in their early 60s. Our median partner, so our most senior title, is in their mid-40s, and our median employee age is in their 30s. And so when you look at that, and you'd say, "Well,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
how did that come to be?" A lot of that's deliberate on our part in terms of who we're targeting, but it's also deliberate on the part of the individuals that are joining us, because they're joining us with a long runway, right? They want to continue to be owners, they want to continue to operate in what I think is a fun, dynamic, unique environment, and spend the next couple of decades collaborating with great clients as we all build the business together. So there's a bit of a self-selection bias that is kind of present both in the structure that we've put in place via the partnership relative to others, and then also in terms of who we're targeting inside of it.

[David Senra]
But isn't it beneficial to you as the owner of the company? I know that everybody-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... has equity in this, because if they're younger, you know you have low churn in your customers, and you want to build a business that compounds.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Right.

[David Senra]
Like, I know you well enough, you're not stopping here at 525.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Right.

[David Senra]
You're like, "Oh, no, we're cool, guys."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
"We're going to stop here."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
No, you want to compound this thing for decades.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct.

[David Senra]
And I think the age of the people providing service-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... assuming they're going to continue to do that, will allow the compounding to happen more effectively, correct?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct. So it's a combination of, call it the runway that the individuals have, and then also the ambitions around building, right? Because again, the industry is almost entirely oriented one way.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
We're oriented a different way. So there's this natural, if I'm having a conversation with somebody who's interested in joining the business, it's really, the way I would describe it is, we tend to be someone's first choice or their last choice, right? Do you believe in partnership? Do you want to be an owner of the business? Do you want to collaborate with your colleagues for the ultimate benefit of our clients, or are you looking to recreate kind of the silo that you have at whatever firm you're ultimately contemplating leaving from? So, when we're having conversations, think of it as like the ultimate screening mechanism, is people will understand and gravitate toward it and latch on, and we'll be their absolute first choice, or they'll say, "That's just not for me," and we're not going to be their first choice. But it's rare that we would come in second, just given the structure is so different, which is fantastic, because it creates this ultimate selection bias or this mechanism around who's interested in joining. And again, because we're oriented and structured the way that we are, like, I need strategic, cultural, and financial alignment across the business in order for us to be able to achieve the ambitions that we've put in place for the company.

[David Senra]
That decision is so important, because it fuels every single other advantage that you have moving forward.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It does, and one of the challenges is, again, I think people get comfortable in optionality, right? So just as an example, we have a fully integrated business.

[David Senra]
I find optionality disgusting, by the way.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah, but it starts to create complexity that people, I don't think, understand. So, if you're ... proposing to acquire a business, and then you start to compromise in terms of the structure, the service offering, how people collaborate. You are effectively, over time, compounding a lot of smaller problems that create a lot of underlying complexity. And at some point, businesses get too complicated where it's very, very hard to reset. So we've been very, very disciplined, again, the structure, the compensation model, how people operate. It all has to naturally fit together. And my view is that if we're not advancing towards achieving our objective of being the best in the world at serving ultra-high-net-worth clients,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
I don't want to create optionality to get there. I want to focus on, well, what's not resonating and how do we continuously improve those areas so we can get on that pathway? So, call it all of our complexity that we create is how advisors serve clients. It is not in terms of how we govern ourselves internally. Hence, the one compensation system, incredibly important. One P&L, no chargebacks, incredibly important. Partnership structure, everybody important. One brand, one offering. So, as you really unpack all of these decisions, there's a lot in the structure and the design that I think

[Kurt MacAlpine]
positions us well to achieve what we're trying to do.

[David Senra]
Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world, so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deel is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deel.com/cenra. That is deel.com/cenra. I think we have an overview of Corion now.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
We'll come back to, there's a couple other things I want to talk about, which again, is this, the day you do the acquisition, the branding, everything is completely integrated.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct.

[David Senra]
But the story of how you built this is so wild. I want to go back-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Sure

[David Senra]
... to when you took over the company, and then we're going to launch into Corion.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
The acquisition you did, the fact that the stock market hated what you were doing-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep

[David Senra]
... and you were just resolute in the face of this drastically falling stock price.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yes.

[David Senra]
So if we go back, it's like, okay, I laid out this plan to this sleepy Canadian company.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
I'm going, "This is what I want to do." Then can you bring us from that point until, and basically how you've been building Corion?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah, so there's a couple things. So one,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
the first thing is you have to have conviction in the business and the idea, as we've talked about a lot. I had a tremendous amount of conviction in both the opportunity for the business and in tune ultimately what we could do for clients. The second piece, as you mentioned, is volatility. So, you have to kind of put that a little bit in context as well, is can you... Public companies don't typically love transformation stories.

[David Senra]
Well, hold on. We got to define volatility.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Sure.

[David Senra]
How volatile was your stock when you're doing this?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Sure. So, in 2021, we were, I think, the best or second-best performing financial services stock in North America. 2022, the second-worst.

[David Senra]
Right. Yeah, that's volatility.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
And so you see a lot of tremendous volatility. So then you can start to unpack. So, there's a couple of layers to that, right? So, one layer is public markets don't necessarily love transformation stories. Now, to be fair to the public markets, we were taking effectively a Canadian asset management business and using the cash flow to build and launch a new ultra-high-net-worth global wealth management business. So, pretty meaningful-

[David Senra]
That's a hard right turn.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It is a pretty meaningful departure. Now, if you think about the underlying benefits, you're effectively creating diversification. You're diversifying from asset management to wealth management, from more mass affluent to ultra-high-net-worth, from a single country to multiple different geographies. So, the merits of doing it make sense, but kind of call it the journey from the starting position around the conviction of the idea and how public markets ultimately respond take

[Kurt MacAlpine]
different turns and different courses. The second thing is, when you're looking at public markets, a lot of it ties into the underlying composition of your shareholder base, right? And I'll tell you what I mean by that. So, we had a series of strategic investors, let's just say somewhere,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
15, 16, 17% of the entire float. We had a very small index inclusion, just given the company that we had, the market that we traded in. So let's just say 25% of our float was, call it, locked up by strategic investors that didn't have intentions of selling, and then indexes that effectively had to hold the stock. And that creates 75% of your float that's active. That is an unusually high active share. So you say, "Well, so who comprises the active share?" It's hedge funds, and it's mutual funds. So, hedge funds obviously are looking to optimize performance, so a lot of the volatility comes... The reason 2021 was such a good year from a share price appreciation standpoint is obviously had a lot of hedge funds piling in. 2022, a lot of the hedge funds ultimately leaving, and that creates a tremendous amount of volatility in the stock. And then on the mutual fund side, so the mutual fund holders of the public company tended to be value-oriented mutual funds that have been in net redemptions from a, call it a category, for a number of years. So think of it as every single morning, people wake up having to sell your shares to fund redemptions in their underlying mutual fund.

[David Senra]
Because there's headwinds in that industry.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Inside of the underlying mutual fund.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So again- There's a lot of different factors you can attribute to it, but the reality is, you have a series of things happening at once. Building a brand new business, creating a massive transformation story inside of a public company, and then calling it, having a composition of your shareholder base that doesn't... It's not like you have 85% of your shares locked up in a small float that dampens volatility. You kind of have the opposite. But look, you have to stay true to the convictions that you ultimately have. And the part that gave me a lot of confidence was I had a tremendous conviction in the opportunity. I was able to see the business and the strategy taking off relatively quickly. So, once you start to launch the story-

[David Senra]
What do you mean you were able to see it taking off relatively quickly?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, just kind of to walk back from it. So, I launched Coriant in approximately April of 2020.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Fast-forward six years, north of $500 billion of assets. We have 3,000 employees. We're operating in 15 different jurisdictions. And so, the underlying strategy resonated really well early on. It was not tracking with the share price appreciation. So, if you kind of think about it, you're seeing

[Kurt MacAlpine]
all of this progress in the underlying business, right? The partnership structure that we put in place starts to resonate. People want to join. You're starting to build momentum. So, you're seeing the business itself start to form in a way that you had hoped that it would, but the share price ultimately isn't tracking. And then at that point, you just have-

[David Senra]
And so, you're just focusing on the internal metrics.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
On the business, because you can see the business evolving.

[David Senra]
So, but this is what happened with Bezos, because I forgot the number. It was like his stock in the early days of Amazon went something from like $180 to like six or something like that. And he talks about in his shareholder letters, he's like, "Yeah, the stock is dropping, but all the internal metrics of the business-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... are fine." And then he would quote Ben Graham.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And he was just like, "I'm just focused on this. Eventually, the stock will be where it needs to be."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct.

[David Senra]
"But I can't worry about this short-term drop."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. And then you get confidence again in just seeing the business evolve. And obviously, as your business continues to evolve, your expectations on success ultimately change, and you constantly continue to push yourself.

[David Senra]
Okay. But are you strangling the earnings of the company?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
I was using the cash flow and leverage that the business generated to build Coriant.

[David Senra]
So, the market did not like how much debt you were doing? What was going on?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. Look,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
the part that I think people didn't understand is, in my opinion, the business needed to change and transform, right? And a business that was entirely focused economically on Canadian mutual funds was an incredibly vulnerable business. Given the historical success

[Kurt MacAlpine]
of the company in building a Canadian mutual fund franchise, it was very meaningful earnings, right? So, in order to make a dent in those earnings and drive diversification, it required a pretty meaningful pivot. There was a period of time at CI Financial where a lot of strategic investments ultimately weren't made. So, in my opinion, there was an incredible run of the company. There was a challenging period of time. I was coming in during that challenging period of time with ambitions to ultimately transform it. So, in order to

[Kurt MacAlpine]
achieve the objectives that we saw, in order to capitalize on the momentum that we were building, we were doing two things, using the free cash flow that was generated from the Canadian business and putting debt on the business.

[David Senra]
How much debt on the business?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
We ranged probably three to three and a half turns of debt.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Look, so depending upon how you think about it, our industry, from a public market comp perspective, so we would be comped as an asset manager. Most asset managers, kind of the rule of thumb for debt is about two turns of debt.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Wealth managers tend to have more debt than asset managers. It's less about the debt that you have on the business, and it's more about the composition of the underlying debt. And this is the part that I would have conversations with investors on. It's not like we were having floating rate debt with covenants. We were having fixed rate debt without covenants, right? And typically long duration. We had debt extending out to 30 years. Thirty years fixed coupon, no covenant debt. So, how you think about debt composition, in my opinion, was we weren't

[Kurt MacAlpine]
creating a lot of vulnerability from a business perspective. Yes, we were locking up the leverage, but that was very deliberate to capitalize on the opportunity that we saw

[Kurt MacAlpine]
in terms of building Coriant. So, I was comfortable. At all times, I was comfortable with where we were, both from a capital allocation policy perspective and where we were from a debt capacity.

[David Senra]
But when you read about this part, that's where you hear, it's almost like you're being hated, but you're right, where your comfort level seemed to not change.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct.

[David Senra]
Right? Were you surprised at the blowback that you got, or did you go into this like, "I know they're going to be pissed off"?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It's a good question. I would say I would have assumed that the underlying business success and the benefits of diversification would have been recognized faster in the share price. But at no point during the journey did I change my conviction on the opportunity.

[David Senra]
This is what I find one of those admirable things about you.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
And what you can see in the M&A and the sequencing is we've kind of continued to stay and hold the course. And look, I think looking back on it now, we're still very early in our journey, but I think the diversification benefits that we've been able to generate for the business are tremendous.

[David Senra]
How many years into this are you like, "Hey, maybe we should

[David Senra]
find a partner and go private"?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, we were always going to go private, which I was very, very transparent about with the market. And the way that I was assuming we were going to go private was through a share buyback program. So, during the course of my entire tenure at CI, we were doing two things. We were building Coriant, diversifying and globalizing the business, while at the same time reducing our share count. And again, I thought, and the way I've described in the media many times, is I felt like our shares were, in my opinion, criminally undervalued. I thought there was a tremendous disconnect between the underlying value of the company- ... and what we were ultimately trading at. Part of that, like I mentioned, was tied to these underlying dynamics. Like, if every single morning you wake up with somebody having to sell your shares,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
for things outside of your or their control, that creates a tremendous buying opportunity. And then the question is, do you have conviction or not in yourself and what you're doing to actually transform the business and buy the shares? And we did, so that's what you saw, us buying a tremendous amount of shares back while at the same time as transforming the business.

[David Senra]
What was the financial

[David Senra]
outcome of those share buybacks?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, we took ourselves private, so-

[David Senra]
No, I know, but like how much?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It depends. We were buying over a period of time, but it was a significant return, and we were buying a lot of those shares back at $12 or $13

[Kurt MacAlpine]
a share, right? So, it was very, very meaningful return from a shareholder perspective.

[David Senra]
The reason I bring that up is because my friend Adam, who's the founder of AppLovin and one of my biggest partners-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... he was sitting in that chair where you are today, and he has the same kind of conviction that you do. And his whole thing was like, he went public, told the story on the podcast, I think every day for like 200 days, his stock price just dropped.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I think it went from like 28 billion down to three.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And then he's just like, "Well, I'm not running a $3 billion company."

[David Senra]
I think at the time he thought it could be like a 100 or $200 billion company.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Now I think he thinks he can get to a trillion. But he's like, "Either this thing is 100 or 200 billion, or it's nothing."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Right.

[David Senra]
Then he's just like, "This makes no sense. My stock price is three billion. We're doing a billion of EBITDA."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And so he winds up taking all the cash flow from that, buying back the stocks, and I think he borrowed like another five billion or something.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And everybody around him was like, "You're fucking crazy, dude."

[David Senra]
And he says very nonchalantly on the podcast, he goes, "Yeah, that worked out very well for the company. We made like 50 or 60 billion from that share."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
But here's the interesting thing between the disconnect between public and private markets.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, what you're describing in a public market, people have this visceral reaction to. If you describe that to a private equity investor, they would say, "That is the standard blueprint under which we operate business and extract value." So, it is amazing to see the underlying disconnect between how people think about the business as an owner and an operator of the business, versus how people think about the business through, "Am I going to buy some shares of this public company or not?" as well. And oftentimes, when you're going through these transformation stories, you have to think about the end game, right? Again, we were sitting on, in my opinion, very vulnerable earnings, entirely driven by the Canadian mutual fund industry.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yes, it was a lot of earnings, but as a very, very-

[David Senra]
But it's not going to be a lot of earnings in the future.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct, and that's the thing. So then the question is, everyone wants it to instantly be diversified without the time or the investments or the capital required to do it. That's just not practical.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Right? So, you need to effectively, like the example you just described, you just need to have conviction in yourself. So for us, we said, "Look, we want to do two things. We think there's a tremendous opportunity in building Corin, while at the same time,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
we're not letting these shares trade the way they are without buying them. There's no way." And so we were buying and buying and buying and buying. So, the notion of, back to your initial question of going private was, so I was approached about two years ago right now, actually, by Mubadala Capital. In fact, we received an inbound call, and the message was, "We love the business. We love the strategy. We understand exactly what you're doing and why you're buying the shares. We think it's going to take you about nine years to effectively buy the shares remaining that you ultimately want to buy."

[David Senra]
Did you also think that at the time?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
And so they said, effectively, "We think it's going to take about nine years, and we think along that journey, there's going to be trade-offs around your ability to execute the Corin strategy, just given the capital requirements on both sides." I had agreed with 100% of that. And so we really hit it off and had conversations from there, was around how do we take this business

[Kurt MacAlpine]
out of the public markets, deliver a great return for the shareholders of the business, and then put the business in a private context where we could kind of own and operate it outside of a public company? And I felt like, see, I never belonged, even before I showed up, like a Canadian mutual fund company never really belonged in the public markets anyway, and this just created a phenomenal opportunity for us to do it. The context by which we went private, I think, is also equally unique. So again, that was kind of the message. So, we took ourselves private with no incremental debt on the business. There was actually deleveraging or an equity infusion tied to it. There were no cost synergies, no change of strategic direction. In my opinion, I picked up the best strategic partner on the planet with an equal amount of ambition to see this thing forward. And I think from their standpoint, look, if you take a look at

[Kurt MacAlpine]
the Mubadala Capital or just Abu Dhabi Inc. more broadly, it is an incredibly ambitious place, right? They have done a phenomenal job of creating wealth, building wealth, diversifying wealth. And fortunately for me, the entire team at Mubadala saw what we saw from a business perspective, saw the end game, saw a lot of similarities, I think, in terms of how they were building Mubadala Capital. It was effectively started inside of Mubadala Investment Company, a sovereign, built it into this phenomenal business, and just saw, I guess, a lot of

[Kurt MacAlpine]
us in them strategically and ambition-wise, and it's been absolutely amazing. So, we took ourselves private. We announced it in November of 2024. We completed it in August. We completed it on August 12th of 2025. On September 3rd of 2025, September 2nd or September 3rd, we announced we were buying, on the same day, the largest ultra-high-net-worth wealth manager in Europe and the second-largest ultra-high-net-worth wealth management business in Europe. And as an example, if we were still a public company, back to how people respond, in a public context, that would have been an impossible transaction to execute, just given a lot of the dynamics that you've mentioned. In a private context, in my opinion, it was the best possible thing we could have done for the company. And the reason I say that is, everything that I said about the opportunity in US ultra-high-net-worth wealth management is equally true in the rest of the world. I firmly believe that there are no global ultra-high-net-worth wealth managers that exist in the world today outside of Corin. And to me, that was a tremendous opportunity for us to go capitalize on.

[David Senra]
Why do you think no one else pursued that strategy? Because it seems obvious in hindsight.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So, I think people would potentially disagree with my statement and say, "Well, of course there are other ultra-high-net-worth or global wealth managers that exist." My pushback would be, they're not. There are a handful of multi-jurisdictional wealth managers that exist. By that, I mean banks that operate in multiple different jurisdictions. The reason I say multi-jurisdictional, not global, is if you think about it through a client lens. So, let's just say you're a client of a firm that has offices in multiple different jurisdictions.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Those are all a series of regional P&Ls, right? So, the client relationships get mapped into an underlying region, and the compensation system and the structures that people have in place

[Kurt MacAlpine]
create or limit or eliminate the ability to collaborate. So, I'll just give an example. Let's just say there's a billion-dollar family that exists, and they have money across four different jurisdictions, and they happen to have those assets at one firm. And the family says, "You know what? I'm going to take all billion dollars, and I'm going to consolidate those assets in Miami." So, what happens in practice internally is three of those P&Ls that are losing assets inside of those organizations are negatively impacted. One of the P&Ls is very positively impact. And then at the individual advisor level, almost all of those people tend to be commission or revenue share generating advisors. So, three of them, pay goes to zero on serving the client. One person's pay probably quadruples on the back of serving the client. So, the thought of saying that they are putting all of that aside and serving clients, regardless of those internal tensions or conflicts,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
makes for an impossible situation. So, a lot of the stuff that we touched on earlier, the private partnership that we initially built for the US marketplace, we've globalized it. Again, I have one compensation plan that is not only true for the US, it's everybody around the world, and one P&L. So, instead of thinking about clients in terms of what regional silos do they access us, we think about clients, how do we serve them all around the world, anywhere?

[David Senra]
Okay. The way I think of you in my mind, tell me if you disagree, is like you're kind of obsessed with incentives.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
I'm obsessed with alignment. So, if I think about it this way, again, it's very simple what we want to do. We want to be the best in the world at serving ultra-high-net-worth clients.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
In a human capital business, it is imperative that I have strategic, cultural, and financial alignment to achieve that. And so, incentives are a huge component of that. Incentives drive a lot of behaviors, a tremendous amount of behaviors.

[David Senra]
Charlie Munger has this great line, which is like, "Incentives rule everything around us."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. So then, if you think about that, once you start to create fractures in the incentive, like I feel very strongly that every single client of Corion, regardless of where you live or how you've entered the business, should have the same opportunity for an equal elevated experience. So, similar to clients, I want to make sure that all of our employees have the same opportunity regardless of how they've entered the firm. So, as an example, if you were entered via direct hire in Seattle or an acquisition in San Diego, I want to make sure that every single person here is treated fairly. And you need to make sure that in order to treat somebody fairly, you should be paid for what you are delivering for the business, not whatever historical entry point or position that you ultimately had. It's equally imperative that you are paying people for things that drive collaboration and better outcomes, as opposed to things that drive personal or independent or siloed behavior. So, we've been very, very adamant to ensure that, one, clients can always get the elevated experience, and in turn, every single employee of Corion is treated fairly. So, by having one compensation plan, I can literally walk into any one of our offices in the world, and every single person knows that for an equal level of performance, they're going to be treated exactly the same as all of their colleagues.

[David Senra]
Okay. I love how you summarized that. You're obsessed with alignment. So, I want to talk about acquisitions. Since you started, you've done how many acquisitions? There are about 20? More?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Probably closer to 50.

[David Senra]
Closer to 50.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
As you have more AUM, does the size of the acquisitions have to keep going up or no? How do you think about this?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It's a great question. So, I'm not looking for scale in acquisitions. I'm looking for exceptional people who align, again, I keep saying the same thing, but it's important, strategic, cultural, and financial alignment. So, whether that is a $50 billion acquisition, a $500 million acquisition, or anything in between or on either side of those parameters, that's less relevant for me. In a partnership model like the one that we have, I need those strategic, cultural, and financial alignment things to be true. So, we don't never look at it from AUM, we never look at it from scale. We're looking at it, how is this additive to the business that we're ultimately aspiring to build? And look, fortunate for us, I think given the scale, what we've built is at least currently resonating really, really well, and we're excited to take advantage of. But again, it's an ultimate screening criteria. So, if someone sees our model and they're looking for something totally different, they're not going to come here. So, it's great for us because we're able to filter through the structure, and it's great for them because they have total clarity in terms of what they're looking for.

[David Senra]
So, let's go back to this obsession of alignment. Explain, you acquire my company.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
What happens the very next day?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Sure.

[David Senra]
You told me the story in Miami, I thought it was very fascinating.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. So, the business is about six years old, a little more than six years old. There's kind of really called three phases of building the business to get to the state that we're in. So, the first phase was acquiring enough scale. Again, this is a proof of concept. I thought there was a tremendous opportunity. The question is, was it going to resonate and take off? And so, there was, call it a period of time, let's just say the first 18 months, where we were focused on accumulating the scale. And the reason that's important is because the scale drives how you think about integration, the services that you're going to integrate, the providers that you use. If you're going to build a $5 trillion company versus a $500 billion company versus a $50 billion company, how you think about integrating is very different. So, there's a period of time where we were accumulating the scale to start the integration journey. Second piece was effectively starting down that integration journey. So, we had scale, and it was a matter of now how do we pick- ... or make the various decisions that ultimately drive integration and morph the organization. So, some things come faster than others. And then the third piece was where we're at now, which is a fully integrated state. And I think that's really, really important. And if you had asked me when I started, again, because people love optionality, which of those three phases would people be most comfortable with? I would have said people would have been most comfortable with the first phase, right? Because it's the least amount of change at the start.

[David Senra]
Yeah.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It's actually not true. People are most comfortable with the current state because they know exactly what they're getting into, which is interesting. So, you know, like if you're selling a firm to us, here's exactly what life is going to look like on the other side. You're going to know it two ways. One, because I can tell you what it looks like from the conversations, but also there's a ton of people now, 3,000 in total, that you can reach out to and interact with, what is life like here? And the people who've been through the journey with us

[Kurt MacAlpine]
tend to be the greatest ambassadors. And I think a lot of our success, or the reinforcement of the success, comes from people who've come. The clients and themselves have had a great experience, and they become great ambassadors for the business as we continue to grow.

[David Senra]
But what does total integration look like?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Everything. So, on day one, you're on our brand, you're using our technology, you're working in our offices, you're collaborating together across the firm. The collateral's been changed. You're on our comp, you're on our benefits. So, it's effectively a full integration. With one caveat, though. This business is all about continuous improvement. And so, I'm a huge proponent of, again, constantly changing, constantly evolving, constantly pushing ourselves. So, while that state of being integrated is true, every single acquisition that we make, every hire that we make, every conversation we have creates an opportunity for us to think about how we continuously improve the business. So, we're benefiting as well from these acquisitions in the same way that the acquisitions are benefiting from us. And to me, that's the-

[David Senra]
Hey, explain a little bit more about that.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
How you benefit.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Because, I mean, if I think about, like, if I'm looking at... Again, if you have a business in this space,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
the only reason that we should work together is if two things are true. I make you better, and you make me better. If those aren't true, in my opinion, then it becomes a financial transaction. And that's fine, but that's not ultimately the objective that we have in place. So, we're looking, what are you doing for clients? How do we benefit from that? What expertise do you bring? How does that expertise translate to better outcomes for clients that we have? Same thing, there's hopefully things that we're doing that benefit you. So, it becomes immediately this mutually beneficial experience. I'll give you an example. So, when you grow up in management consulting, right, a lot of the work that you do as a management consultant tends to be high-level strategic work that often skews more confidential in nature. And so, you tend to do a lot of work, let's just say, in a vacuum to some extent, and then there's an implementation phase. So, there's a lot of pros to that. There's a lot of challenges to that around driving adoption. So, I'll just kind of tell you a story which is, I think, relevant to how I think about integration. So, we're building the company. I need to pick a brand. And you need to pick a brand for the business. That can be an emotional thing for people, right? Entrepreneurs oftentimes will name the business after themselves, right? So,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
it extends beyond just the name. It actually becomes personal. So, there's really kind of a lot of different ways you can handle it, but let's just say two extremes. One extreme is you pick a name and tell people what the name is, right? So, call that the fastest pathway to an outcome, but the least collaborative possible way that you can do it. Or the other end of the spectrum would be, how broad can you go? So, I'll just tell you exactly how we picked the name Accordant, which I think is a pretty neat story. So, I did a town hall across the firm and said, "Look, we're at a point now where in our integration journey, we need to name the firm." And I have no idea what the name's going to be. I don't actually care what the name's going to be. But it's really important to me that everybody here who wants to be involved in the naming of the firm has a voice in ultimately doing so. So, I said, "Look, we're going to hire a third-party firm to help us with this. Our chief marketing officer and I are going to facilitate a series of focus groups. Anybody who wants to participate in a focus group can put their hand up." And the goal is ultimately taking an infinite list of names and narrowing it down to finalists. So, firm was a lot smaller at that point in time. We had like 75 people participate in these focus groups. So, we get all the way down to a list of finalists. We then had a firm mock up the finalist names. I ran a town hall across the partner group. My chief marketing officer presented the names. And branding's kind of fascinating, right? Because if you like a certain type of... If you like golf and you have a logo with a golf course behind it, you're more likely to vote for it than if you don't like sailing and you have a logo with sailing behind it. So, we mocked everything up under the same brand. I did a partner town hall, we presented it, and I did a live vote, and we named the firm together. And the reason that was important was, on day one, every single person who wanted a voice in the process had a voice. It was totally transparent. Everybody knew where we were going. So, on day one, when people were calling and telling their clients about the firm, anyone who was here had an opportunity to name the firm and be a part of it. So, those little decisions, one, it changes how people think about and embrace change, and I try to take that concept and apply it wherever we can. I think it leads to way better outcomes because you're just getting more people providing input. And people embrace the change better because they can see their input reflected in whatever you ultimately decide.

[David Senra]
Okay. I love that you just told a story about branding and marketing, because that's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to tell you,

[David Senra]
like, give some background on how I actually found you, which was kind of hilarious in a twist of fate.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
It involves our mutual friend, Rick Gerson. So, I get all these inquiries into my website all the time.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
Obviously, there's huge demand for corporate speaking.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
So, people always... I get a bunch of inbound, "Well, will you come speak at this company, XYZ?" And I'm like, "I don't do any of this." It's like I have a very tight partnership with my partners. It's like, there's one way to work with me. If you want to work with me, it's through the podcast, and it's like comprehensive. It's not just ads on the podcast, it's events. So, that's the way to do it, right? And so, I got a few from ... this company called Corient. And- ... they like, "Hey, we listen to your podcast. We're in Miami too. Would you do this?" And I never responded. And then, I'm essentially embedded into Michael Dell's merchant bank.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
And I'm close friends with Greg Lemkau-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep

[David Senra]
... who's one of the co-CEOs. And I fucking love Greg.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
I just absolutely love him. We hit it off from day one. And he sent me... They don't do much media, and so he sent me this interview. He's like, "Hey, check out this interview that me and Byron did," the other co-CEO.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
"Tell me what you think, because we don't do much media." And I think it's CNBC's Wealth. I think the program might be called Wealth or something like that.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And so I'm watching it, and I watch the whole thing, and there's four ad breaks, one sponsor-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep

[David Senra]
... the entire time, and it's Corient.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
And I

[David Senra]
was like, "I know that name." I searched my email. I was like, "Oh, this is the same company. That's interesting." So then I'm having breakfast in Miami with our mutual friend, and I had already met you at this time, but I didn't know that.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
And obviously, Rex and finance, so I was like, "Hey, have you heard of... It's a very interesting choice to have four ad breaks, one sponsor." I actually like that a lot. I think it's really smart for other reasons we don't have to go into. And I go, "You ever heard of this company called Corient?" He goes, "Yeah, you met the CEO at my house when we were doing jujitsu." I was like, "You're like a brown belt or something, right?"

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
It's like the guy choking Gee.

[David Senra]
Gee is our mutual instructor, me and Rex that is. And I was like, "Oh." And then he was telling me that you're in Miami and everything else, and then that's how you got connected to. And then now, ever since I saw that, I see Corient on Bloomberg-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... and everywhere else. So, I'm very curious, one, why sponsor that program?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Sure.

[David Senra]
How do you think about it? How do you think about branding? How do you think about advertising and marketing,

[David Senra]
and how does it tie into your entire mission of trying to build this company?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah, it's a great question. Again, the brand, by brand standards, is new. The company's six years old. The brand's not even six years old. So, part of it is just creating awareness, right? Awareness for clients, awareness for potential colleagues, awareness for potential partners. And there's a lot of different ways that we think about that. So one is, we do lean into marketing. We think it is a very incredibly impactful and powerful tool. How we choose to lean into it is, call it three or four different ways. One is the advertising, which is a lot of the stuff that you've mentioned. And, just given, again, every industry's changing, right? How people consume television, how they watch things, how they engage with things is so totally different. So,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
we're kind of trying to respond and reflect to that. So we're trying to advertise either in places where people are watching something live, which is why you see us on business television and sports,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
areas that people ultimately choose to engage, where they're sitting in a structured and focused setting. We do a lot around digital marketing, so really trying to be micro-segmented, targeting individuals that we want to build and establish relationships with. And we do a lot around experiences, around client experiences and convening people across the business and collaboration. And I don't think of them as individual silos, right? Because there's lots of different ways that people come across Corient. And for me, it's maybe the ad introduces them to Corient, maybe it's a friend or a mutual connection, maybe it's a referral,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
maybe it's a business partner. And the goal is to help bridge the gap between who is Corient, what do we do, and how can we be helpful to them and their families, ultimately as quickly as possible. And I think we've taken, by wealth management standards, or at least independent wealth management standards, a relatively kind of unique but ambitious approach to advertising. So today, we're advertising in every market that we're in globally. You'll see us on ads in the US, Canada, UK, Paris, France,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
across the world. And we intend to continue to do that. And again, it's really kind of helped to short-circuit the discovery process from people saying, "Hey, you're a new company. Yes, you have all this scale. Learn about us as fast as possible, and then hopefully we can start to engage and provide value to you and your families."

[David Senra]
It's shocking because these are not new ideas. These ideas have been documented for at least 120 years. I've done-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... I've read every single biography on all the great copywriters, the great advertising agency founders. They all say the same stuff. It's like repetition, repetition, repetition.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
The idea that I didn't just see Corient in one-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Correct

[David Senra]
... segment of the Greg Lemkau interview. I saw it again and again and again. By the time you get to it, I may not use your services, I might not sell my wealth management firm, but at least I know you exist.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Exactly.

[David Senra]
And so this is what we're doing with our partners, because in addition to all my partners on both of my podcasts, I also run the podcast strategies for these companies.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
And it's just because I'm obsessed with it and I like to do it. And it's just like, you

[David Senra]
know where your customers are paying attention to?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
It's very simple.

[David Senra]
We just pulled the numbers. There's 446

[David Senra]
podcasts in the business category, I think 300,000 and something that are still updating, and there's five in the world that matter.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yep.

[David Senra]
There's your strategy. It's very simple, how to do this. And then once you partner with them, you stay with them forever.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. But it comes back to the theme around conviction, right? So a lot of times, advertising is one of these areas where, at least on a relative basis, you're investing a tremendous amount of capital in advance of any sort of underlying tangible benefit. And I think you're right. It is a proven strategy over time, but it depends upon how people are thinking about their business. The reason we have the ambitions we do, the reason we built the business in the way that we have is, I think this should be the forever business in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management. So if you think about it as a forever time horizon, you're going to think about brand building very differently than if there's a temporary-

[David Senra]
Exactly

[Kurt MacAlpine]
... kind of lens or a temporary owner to it. And look, in a lot of areas, a lot of industries, financial services in particular, wealth management specifically, there's a lot of temporary owners. So they're thinking about the business in 18 to 36-month increments. They're not thinking about it across generations. And if you're thinking about it in that period of time, you're optimizing for a return and an exit. You're not optimizing for a client experience, an employee experience, building a forever brand. And I think that's probably how-

[David Senra]
That's the only thing I'm interested in.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah, and how a lot of the... So if you were to kind of segment- ... who you ultimately engage with from your business. It's probably people agnostic of industry that meet those characteristics.

[David Senra]
My friend Sam Hinkie has this great line. He's like, "The person with the longest term view in the room wins."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Because it also goes against human nature. I got another question for you. You were in Chicago for the majority of your career, like the last like-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Mostly New York. So born and raised in Canada.

[David Senra]
Okay.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Most of my professional career was in New York, and then I moved to Miami.

[David Senra]
I want to get to Miami.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Sure.

[David Senra]
Like, why-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Sure

[David Senra]
... you're so bullish on it? Why you, the headquarters, you have crazy office space-

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah

[David Senra]
... that I went to.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah.

[David Senra]
Why Miami?

[Kurt MacAlpine]
It's a great question.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
So again, I launched the business, so if you think about the timing, I literally launched the business at the start of COVID.

[David Senra]
You said April of 2020.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
2020, yeah.

[David Senra]
I was like, "Oh, shit."

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Yeah. So, look, that creates a tremendous amount of challenges, but also a tremendous amount of opportunities, because effectively, the world stops. Everything about everybody's normal schedule and agenda halted in March of 2020. And that just gives, so either, do you let that impact you or do you take advantage of that? So that allowed us to really accelerate the building of the business, starting to have those conversations and laying a great foundation for the company. So as we're building the business, again, Corigin is a separate, distinct, independent entity from CI. So I needed a headquarters for the business,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
but because of how I built the business, I had totally

[Kurt MacAlpine]
free reign in terms of where do you ultimately put the headquarters. So there was no kind of particular transaction, no corporate historical ties to any one particular area. So if you think about it with a totally clean slate, where do you want the headquarters for the business ultimately to be? I picked Miami. I picked Miami for a lot of different reasons. I would say one of the things about Miami that really stood out relative, I think it makes Miami unique, not only in America, but in the rest of the world, is how engaged people are locally around creating positive reinforcements for building a community. So,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
one of my good friends, one of our good friends is the mayor, or former mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez. Francis was the ultimate ambassador. I don't think that I've ever seen a better ambassador for a city than him. Take personal involvement, create connections, build relationships. So, you think about it, there's a decision around where do you want the business to be, and then there's a secondary decision, well, how do you actually establish the business once you've made the decision? And I find a lot of times people will sell the ambition and leave the second part up to the individuals. And I think what Francis in particular, and it's true for the Miami ecosystem that he really created under his tenure there as mayor, is it just created this very incredibly welcoming environment. So I chose to pick Miami as the headquarters, moved to Miami myself, and effectively built the business. And it's been absolutely amazing, because we were by no means a pioneer of moving to Miami. I picked the headquarters at the end of 2020. But we were a little bit early relative to the flood of movement that's happened on the back of us. So the worry that I had at that point in time was, was there going to be enough local talent to hire as the business continues to grow? And the answer was yes, even in its current form when we moved, but it's even more true now given all the great migrations that we've ultimately seen on the back of it. And you know this from your time in Miami, once you get there and spend time there, the quality of life is unbelievable as well. So it becomes, again, you build momentum around something and continue to reinforce the momentum. And, I think we're still in the early days of what we'll see in South Florida. So it's worked out,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
significantly exceeded my expectations across the board, both in terms of how we've been able to establish a presence and operate the business, the employee, and the colleague satisfaction, and what we've been able to do.

[David Senra]
I love how when I asked you where'd you pick your headquarters and then how you designed your business, it was the same exact idea. I started from a blank sheet of paper.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
You have to. You have to. I mean, look, again, at some point, businesses,

[Kurt MacAlpine]
you end up too far down the path and it's very, very hard. So you have to push yourself, right? Is, if you're going to build something from scratch, how do you avoid pitfalls? You have to learn and study mistakes you've made, mistakes other people have made, just successes you've had, successes other people have had. How do you really kind of draw on the best of it? We didn't really cover it today, but we talk a lot about the partnership. One of the things with the partnership, when I launched the partnership, the goal that I had set out for ourselves is, I wanted the structure and features of the Corigin partnership to be better than the structure and features of any partnership that had come before us. And the reason I wanted that to be true is, we're building this thing from scratch.

[David Senra]
Mm-hmm.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
And you want to be able to say, "Look, I've drawn on all of these lessons learned from all these other great partnerships that existed in other industries. How do I take the best of them, improve on the areas that I think are ripe for improvement, and really kind of use that as a catalyst?" So not only was it a partnership, when people actually get in and audit the partnership, they're like, "Wow, this is really built in a way that's friendly." And it's done that way because, again, you just become a student of all of the things that have come before you and try to use it to influence your decision-making.

[David Senra]
And it should be if you're going to do this forever.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Exactly. Exactly.

[David Senra]
Perfect place, Dan. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Thanks, man.

[David Senra]
Awesome.

[Kurt MacAlpine]
Appreciate it.

[David Senra]
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, "Founders." For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through "Founders."

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