E169: How to Build an Enduring Private Equity Franchise w/Alex Robinson

Alex Robinson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Juniper Square, a company transforming the private markets through technology and service. In this episode, we go deep into how he and his co-founders saw the opportunity to modernize fund administration, why the private markets are decades behind the public markets, and how Juniper Square is building for the future with AI agents. We also discuss how the best GPs scale trust with LPs, why the retail channel still hasn’t arrived in full force, and the challenges of building a system of record in a fragmented industry.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
What have been the best practices in terms ofGPs that have been able to scale their trusted

(00:05):
relationships with LPs and build real platform?
They care very deeply about how theirinvestments are portrayed, about the quality of
information they're getting to LPs, about thefrequency, about the timeliness, because they
believe that this represents their brand, andit represents part of the trust building that
they're in the business of conveying.

(00:29):
Today, I'm excited to welcome Alex Robinson,cofounder and CEO of Juniper Square, the
leading investment management platform for theprivate funds industry.
Alex is a serial entrepreneur who has raisedover a hundred million dollars to transform how
real estate and private equity firms raise,manage, and report capital, as well as most
critically build lasting relationships withLPs.

(00:49):
We'll explore his journey from Microsoft tobuilding Juniper Square, his vision for
digitizing private markets, and how he'sdriving innovation to one of the world's
largest markets.
Without further ado, here's my conversationwith Alex.
Tell me about how you started Juniper Squareover a decade ago.
It was my third startup.
So I'd I'd learned what, I I I'd made somemistakes with the first two, which were in the

(01:13):
cleantech field, and I made a little bit ofmoney from my second startup.
And so the genesis for Juniper Square was myexperience as an LP, investing into private
funds.
I did a direct real estate deal, and they senta FedEx truck to my house with a stack of
paperwork, two inches thick.
I invested in a real estate fund.

(01:33):
Same story.
You know, truck coming to my house with paper.
I invested in a venture fund.
Same story.
And I just was shocked that in 2013, summer of'20 '13, I could trade stocks online.
I could do my healthcare online.
I could buy shoes online.
The whole world had moved to cloud and hadmoved to digital, except for the private
markets industry, which was still shufflingpaper around on vans and trucks.

(01:59):
It just seemed to me that it sounded like theindustry was two or three years behind.
It was like twenty years behind where thepublic markets were.
And what was clear to me at that point was theprivate markets were going to come to look like
the public markets.
They were going to be efficient like the publicmarkets, there was going to be the same degree
of transparency, same degree of liquidity, andyou were going to be able to execute these

(02:22):
complex trades, investing into a privatemarkets fund, a venture fund, private equity
fund, real estate fund, etcetera, by clickingbuttons in a web browser, just like you could
do in the public markets.
And the genesis for Juniper Square was reallyme and my co founders, Adam Ginsberg and Jonas
Seha, becoming fascinated with this question ofhow would you go about making that

(02:42):
transformation of the private markets happen?
And, that's been our vision and mission sincethe founding of the company.
Our first foray was building an investorrelations product.
We can talk about why we started there ifthat's of interest.
But since we've grown to also add fundadministration, and we now serve more than
2,000 GPs across all private markets assetclasses, 40,000 funds, millions of investor

(03:10):
positions, pretty good scale in the industry.
You had this thesis that the private market wasgonna be as simple as the public markets.
What was the first inkling or the first kernelthat you saw that things were evolving in this
direction?
It was clear that the industry was growingrapidly.
I mean, even back, you know, you could looktoday, and every market study suggests that the

(03:34):
private markets, which are already huge now,they're $30,000,000,000,000, 40 trillion
dollars of investor capital, depending on whoseestimate you believe.
And and even today in 2025, they're set todouble again over the next decade.
But if you wind back the clock a decade ago towhen we started Juniper Square, it was clear
that there was a lot of growth coming into theprivate market sector.

(03:57):
That's where the opportunity was.
Companies were staying private longer.
And, that's where you could find alpha moreeasily than the public markets.
And so it was clear to me that the sector wasgoing to mature, it was going to become more
systemically important.
And it just seemed obvious that you would needdigital infrastructure to support all aspects

(04:24):
of the investing experience.
And the hard question was just figuring outwhere to start.
When we started the company, the Jobs Act hadjust been passed, and, that lowered the
threshold for investing into private markets.
And there were tons of crowdfunding companiesthat were being started around the time that we

(04:46):
started Juniper Square.
Probably two dozen real estate crowdfundingalone that were started plus minus a year of
when we founded Juniper Square, was February2014.
And the dominant mindset at the time was, ah,of course, the the way the these private
markets are gonna become digital is thesedirect websites of matching a an investor with

(05:09):
a sponsor directly.
And we had a contrarian view on that.
We didn't think that that was going to scale.
We didn't think that the market of retailinvestors who self direct their own
investments, they do their own underwriting, wedidn't think that was a very deep market.
And we talked to enough GPs to know they care alot about privacy, and they care a lot about

(05:30):
control.
And the really good GPs are like a really goodrestaurant.
It's very hard to get in.
So if you're a great GP in venture, you're agreat GP in real estate or private equity, you
don't need to go through the headache ofposting your investments online because you
have a line of people out the door that want towork with you.
So we knew that whatever solution was going tobe created for the private markets had to

(05:52):
respect the foundational role of the GP.
It had to keep them in control.
It had to keep them at the center the process.
No GP was gonna want their private funds airedout in the public markets, all their data
floating around.
That wasn't gonna happen.
So we were not a believer in crowdfunding fromthe very beginning.
And we instead took this very orthogonalapproach, which every everyone thought was a

(06:13):
very dumb idea at the time, which was startingwith investor relations.
I remember going around and pitching investorsfor our seed and our series A round.
So I talked to hundreds of investors, I said,we are going to build toward this big
disruptive vision for private markets overmultiple decades, and we're going to start by
building investor relations software for GPs.

(06:36):
And people laughed me out of the room.
They were like, what a dumb idea.
How small a market is this?
And what we saw was that investor relations wasthis wedge for networking the GP and the LP
together around a common record of fundownership, that if you could help GPs with the

(06:57):
reporting on their funds to the investors, thatthat was giving you sort of the permission to
build the rails for the flow of informationback and forth from GPs and LPs, that it was an
easy bridge to building the complianceinfrastructure, everything that you'd need to
have a much more robust market system.

(07:18):
And so even though it was not an obvious ideaat the time for us, we saw investor relations
as a sort of deeply strategic place to start.
And we've been working on that since.
Which house classes did you start in 02/2014?
And how has that evolved?
Who is Juniper Square focused on today?
We started in the real estate sector becausethat's where I had relationships.

(07:38):
It's you know, in this kind of business, it'sreally hard to get it's mission critical
financial infrastructure.
It's a GP's most sensitive data.
Their investor relationships are their mostsensitive relationships.
You know, a system like Juniper Square housesmillions of records of PII and, you know,
social security numbers, payment records.

(08:00):
So we have to take security very, veryseriously.
So it's a difficult, product area to get acustomer to go from zero to one to trust you.
And so there's a big chicken and the eggproblem.
You have, you know, we scale now, we have 2,000GPs, we have some of the largest asset managers
in the world.
And, so so so the twenty fifth hundred GP orwhatever can look at everybody that's come

(08:22):
before them and say, okay, maybe this companycan be trusted.
But that first customer, second customer, thirdcustomer, fourth, it's really hard.
And so I relied a lot on personal relationshipsand where I built trust as a person to say,
look, I'll look you in the eye, you can trustme, we're not gonna let you down.
You know, we will we will deliver for you.
And those relationships for me were deepest inthe real estate sector.

(08:45):
So that's part of it.
Second part of it is we knew that we needed tomake the problem as narrow and as small as
possible.
You know, so if you're gonna try to go fromzero to one in something, the smaller you can
make that something, the more likely it isyou're gonna have a material impact.
So we wanted to have the most narrow type ofcustomer possible.
And even though the variations across GPs,across asset classes, from the perspective of

(09:06):
investor relations, fund administration, theydon't matter very much.
Obviously, the investing strategy is verydifferent of what it is to be a venture
capitalist versus a real estate fund manager.
But when you talk about the operations of thefund and the accounting and the tax and the
compliance and the movement of money, it's verysimilar across all the asset classes.
So a big part of the reason that we focused ona single type of customer was because, across

(09:33):
private markets, people consider their peer setto be those who invest similarly to them, which
is just to say a venture capitalist does notconsider a real estate investor to be their
peer just because they both invest out ofclosed end private funds.
They consider their peers to be other venturecapitalists that they interface with, do
business with, compete for deals with, etc.

(09:53):
And so if you want to build customer momentum,if you want to build density, if you want to
have a sense of rapid adoption, reallynarrowing down to a single type of customer
where they all know each other, they're goingto be talking helps that.
And that's the other reason we chose realestate.
And then since we've brought in to serve allprivate markets asset classes really except

(10:14):
hedge funds.
So we don't have a current practice of going tomarket in a dedicated way, for for hedge funds.
We do support some, maybe a few dozen funds outof our tens of thousands, but it's not a
current focus area for us.
Otherwise, every part private markets assetclass from commercial real estate to venture
capital to private equity to private credit tocrypto to natural resources like ag and

(10:40):
infrastructure and real assets.
We've got customers across all thosecategories.
There's many lessons there to unpack forfounders wanting to build large organizations
like Juniper Square.
One is you focused on half a product, not ahalf ass product.
That's a Jason Fried quote from thirty sevensignals.
It's the idea that build a great product forone segment of the market versus a pretty good

(11:05):
product for a lot of people.
You want those early users and you want thoseearly advocates for your product.
Although FundAdmin isn't truly a marketplace,you focus very heavily on network effects and
word-of-mouth.
Which market can we gain enough market shareand penetration quickly so that people start
referencing each other?

(11:25):
And even though you might be small by number ofcustomers, you had a certain amount of critical
mass within the industry.
Yeah.
That's right.
So your vision has been making fund admin aseasy as clicking a button on the website, but
it's not yet there today.
You still use a lot of consulting and fundadmins within the organization.

(11:47):
So tell me about the intersection betweentechnology and humans and how that's delivered
to the customer.
We do have many hundreds of fund accountants,investor services, managers, compliance experts
inside of our operation, even though we are atechnology company.

(12:09):
And the way to think about this is, you know, Ialways like to start with the customer whenever
I'm thinking anything.
Who is the customer?
What do they need?
Why do they have a problem?
And and how is your solution unique?
So the customer wants to buy a completesolution when they're buying fund
administration.
Right?
If you're a venture capitalist, what you wannado is focus on investing.

(12:30):
Running a fund, doing the accounting, doing KYCon your investors, this handling subscriptions,
you know, this is not what you wanna be doing.
There's no competitive advantage for you, in inin owning this yourself.
So it's fund administration and really theoperation of your funds, broadly speaking, is a

(12:51):
is a service that you wanna rent versus own.
So you start there with what the customerwants.
Customers still do fund administration inhouse.
Tends to be customers that have been aroundmuch longer.
So if you started your fund in the 80s, therereally wasn't much of a fund administration
industry to serve you.
So you would have had to hire your own fundaccountants and build out your own staff.
But it's pretty much a safe bet to say anybodythat was starting a fund today would go turn to

(13:15):
a third party fund administrator to handle allthe operations for them.
So the customer wants to consume a completesolution.
And the surface area for what you need to do inadministering a fund, especially for a large
complex customer, is vast.
You know, a single fund, might say, oh, this isso and so venture, you know, venture funds fund

(13:35):
ten.
Well, that that fund ten is gonna be comprisedof many different legal entities in many
different jurisdictions, all of which havedifferent types of investors, different logic,
different rule sets, different reporting andregulatory requirements.
And so the work that you have to do for thecustomer to deliver a complete solution is very

(13:56):
vast.
And if you took the approach of saying, we'rejust a tech company, all we're going to do is
write code, it's the only thing that we do.
You spend the next ten years writing code toautomate fund administration, and the customer
is not gonna buy the product for you from youuntil it's complete.
Right?
So it's just not a viable approach.

(14:17):
And and, anyway, this is a industry where whatthe customer really wants is they want an
expert on the other end of the line.
If you are, a CFO of a fund, you wanna be ableto pick up the phone and call the controller at
Juniper Square, who's your fund, you know,controller, and feel confident that they know a
lot about administering fund.

(14:38):
They know a lot about the accounting, aboutthe, all the ins and outs.
And so there's a human to human element of thisbusiness, which is just foundational.
And if you're a tech company and you miss thatand you think it's just about software, you're
missing half the plot.
And so our whole approach was to recognize thatyou need both of these things.

(15:01):
The customer wants excellent service fromexpert practitioners, and they want excellent
tech.
And they shouldn't have to sacrifice betweenthose two.
And this remains true, by the way.
We can talk about AI if you want today, butthis remains especially true with AI, where
even though we see a huge acceleration in theautomation and the total potential for what can

(15:25):
be automated, we still deeply fundamentallybelieve that the human to human interaction
will play a critical role.
That's not going away.
And, so the way to think about this is ifthere's a hundred things to do to deliver a
complete solution to the customer, you gottastart out doing all 100.
And you just start chipping away at it, eatingaway at those 100 with software.

(15:49):
So on day one, you've automated zero.
Maybe day two, you've automated one, and youkeep going.
And you'll never get to 100 out of 100 in asituation.
Why assess?
Because, it you know, you always want to directyour r and d to the next best marginal
opportunity.
And there's a Pareto principle at play here inthis kind of service automation, just like

(16:11):
there is everywhere, which is, you know, itmight take whatever, you know, half of the work
to do the first ninety percent of theautomation.
And then it'll take another half of the work todo the remainder.
And and maybe literally, you know, itasymptotes and you never finish.
And so it'd be very foolish.
You you'd be better off taking your r and d.

(16:33):
You know, we spend $4,050,000,000 dollars ayear on r and d.
You're you're better off once you hit somepoint of Pareto optimal optimization.
80%, ninety %, seventy %, whatever it is,taking those precious R and D dollars and
capacity and directing it to the next big thingto solve for the customer.
Like, maybe you should do AI for them.
Maybe you should help with their portfoliodecision making.

(16:54):
Maybe you should help them with tools that'llhelp them find their next investment.
And that's a better use of your precious r andd dollar than trying to go from 80 percent
automation to 90% automation, especially if youhave this premise as we do, that CFOs are
always gonna want a human expert at the otherend of the line to connect with and and have

(17:14):
that human relationship with.
You mentioned this use case, probably verycommon use case of CFO picks up the phone,
calls the fund accountant.
How does a fund accountant know what's going onwith the fund?
And tell me about how you staff your your fundaccountants?
And how do you make sure that fund accountantsare up to date on every client?
Well, depends on the size and the complexity ofthe client.

(17:38):
And so we have clients ranging from literally,you know, two people in a garage, just using
our tools, our software tools to support theirfundraising process, trying to raise their
first fund.
We have clients that don't even do funds atall.
They just do sort of SPV fundraising, get asingle asset and go raise money against that

(18:01):
single asset, and they aren't comingled into afund.
And so we might have a customer that's donetheir first deal or has 20,000,000 in, you
know, investor capital commitments, all the wayup to customers that have many hundreds of
billions, global platforms, decades and decadesof history.
And so the needs of those customers are very,very different, you know.

(18:24):
And so we sort of set up our operation to servethe needs of the customer based on their size
and complexity.
Then within size and complexity, you have morevariation based on the type of investing
strategy, the type of funds.

(18:44):
So for example, administering a private creditfund that has as its assets, loans, but have a
stream of payments and amortization scheduleand all of that is very different than
administering, you know, the same size fund,which invests only in C corps, like Juniper
Square.
Right?
Where episodically, you might have adistribution from an IPO or something like

(19:07):
that, but otherwise, it's very quiet in thefund.
And then administering an open end fund whereyou have redemption, liquidity, queuing, all of
that, is very different from administering aclosed end fund.
And so you sort of, you know, create thesedistinction based on what the customer needs.

(19:29):
And then the last bit of the kind oforganizational design principle is you want
durable pairings, within the customer.
So even though in theory, let's say, I don'tactually think this is true, but in theory,
it's tempting to think it's true, that youdesign a factory and you completely atomize the
work and everybody does a tiny little bit ofthe work and you sort of shuffle it around.

(19:51):
And all I do is stamp this paper when it comeson my desk, and then I hand it to the next
person, let's say.
And they draw a circle on the paper and hand itto the next person, so on and so forth.
That might be tempting to think that's the mostefficient way to organize.
It's actually not.
But what the customer really wants is a durablepairing.
Customer wants the same person on their accountdoing the same work quarter in, quarter out,

(20:14):
because there's a lot of institutional memoryand knowledge that you build, not just about
the customer's fund, but about the person thatyou're working with.
Know, because we have to support a full rangeof some of our customers don't have a CFO.
It might just be two partners investing.
You know?
And they wanna do a quarterly call, and theydon't know really anything about even

(20:34):
interpreting fund financials.
So you sort of need to educate them.
We have other people that are absolute expertCFOs, peak of their profession.
We have others that are just getting started.
So everybody needs something different in termsof how they're supported, how they're coached,
how they're helped.
And then what we do is we use almost all of ourown infrastructure, almost all of our own

(20:54):
software tooling inside of our operations.
So all of the data, all of the investorinterfaces, all the compliance rails, the
payments rails, all the reporting interface,communications system, every PDF that's
produced, all of it's produced on JuniperSquare Code.
The one exception is our general ledger.
We use a third party general ledger, and thenwe have a very deep integration with that third

(21:18):
party general ledger.
So our accountants are doing their work insideof Juniper Square, and that's their dashboard
for understanding everything about the fund,its metadata, it's it's it's reporting all of
it.
Many many things to unpack there.
You mentioned this institutional knowledge thatgoes with a fund accountant Mhmm.
Associated with a certain fund.
How do you institutionalize that within JuniperSquare?

(21:41):
And is there is there a way to generalize thatknowledge or institutionalize that within
Juniper Square?
You might say, what are the things you want toknow about a fund?
Right?
What's its metadata?
So you'd say, okay, well, I've got hundreds andhundreds of pages of documents written in legal
language, and I need to extract all of thesemantic meaning and the, you know, metrics and

(22:04):
the logic from this form, which is a legalagreement and get it into the software code, so
that I can work with it.
Right?
So for example, one of the things that thelegal agreement will spell out is what's
commonly known as the waterfall in a fund,right?
Which is basically thought of as who gets whatmoney and when.
Right?

(22:24):
So sometimes there's a rate of return that theGP has to clear before profits start getting
split.
Sometimes there's different share classes amonginvestors, and so share class a will get some
amount of money before share class b does andso forth.
And so it's just a piece of logic that explainshow the, profits from a fund flow.
That starts out written as legal language, andyou extract that legal language and encode it

(22:50):
in software so that, you're now doing mathbased on the logic that was established in that
legal agreement.
And so that general property is true across notjust the waterfall, but lots and lots of sort
of rules, so to speak, or logic about how thefund works.
And so we have a lot of software that we'vebuilt over the years that helps with that

(23:11):
extraction, helps with things like waterfallautomation, automates the subscription process
for the investors so that when you're bringingthe investor into the fund, you're gathering
all the data that you need from them.
And then the benefit of seeing the networkeffect that's inherent in private markets is
that, you know, we have 600,000 unique LPs onJuniper Square across millions of positions.

(23:34):
So on average, we have multiple positions perLP.
So this means a typical LP signs into JuniperSquare, and then they have many GPs and many
investments that they're centrally managingthrough one Juniper Square account.
This gives us the ability to understand thisLP, not as a, you know, line of legal language

(23:56):
in an agreement, But as David with the SocialSecurity number, that means that we can do
things like send you through KYC once onJuniper Squared and not have to do it for you
again.
And you get to reuse that across different GPsand across different funds.
That's how you get to this sort of one clicktype experience for the LP is that you're
storing all the metadata about you as the

(24:18):
There are network effects there.
There's definitely network effects there.
And then the other kind of big class of data isabout the fund's investing strategy and its
approach and its asset composition.
Because again, that's going to drive you know,if it's a credit fund, you're going to need to
set it up in a certain way.
If it's an MLP that owns natural gas interests,you're gonna have to set up in a different way.

(24:41):
If it's a venture fund that owns C Corpinvestments, you set up in a different way.
And then the third is really all the knowledgethat you build working with the customer.
Right?
How do they do things inside of their GP?
Because the beauty of the private markets, inthe public markets, you have a regulator, that
regulator serves the dual roles of bothcreating the standards around reporting and

(25:03):
then enforcing them.
And so everybody who's reporting theirfinancials to the public markets, they're doing
it exactly the same way, by definition.
You have to if you want to stay listed.
Same standards, same methodology, sameeverything.
In the private markets, it's totally different.
Every GP does it differently.
Sort of by design, they could set it up howthey want.
They're unregulated, unregistered privateinvestments.

(25:26):
And so every GP has developed their ownmethodology for reporting.
They've developed their own frameworks for howthey like to do things.
And so part of what we're learning when we'reengaging with a new client is all of that sort
of unstructured but very, very importantknowledge of how that GP likes to work.
And so this is why ideally you want reallystable pairings through time.

(25:50):
And let me ask you maybe a somewhat crudequestion, but as GPs scale, they they interact
with institutional LPs.
And most of the time, the LP that they'redealing with, the head of private capital
markets or the head of venture, is not theperson managing the back office.

(26:11):
Why should GPs care about the experience of theperson managing the back office if that's not
who they're interacting with, and that's notwho the person that's making the decision on
whether to re up?
There's a couple ways to take this.
The first, I think most impactful way to takethis is, if you look at the growth expected in
the private markets industry, half of it isgonna come from the retail investor.

(26:35):
And so it's a totally wrong way of thinking tosay there's a front office investor and then a
back office investor.
And I can I can think of those as differentpeople?
You just got David who's writing a check toyour venture fund.
Right?
And so what's David's experience?
Right?
Is it really great, both experiencing all thereturns you're delivering for him, but also

(26:57):
getting the reporting that you're you'resending to him, also making the legal and
compliance and subscription and reportingprocess all really easy?
Are you, you know or or are you creating thishuge cleavage, this this big divide where,
like, it's absolute I mean, I've invested withfunds where I've been stuck in KYC hell for
months.

(27:17):
Right?
No exaggeration, like endless documentfollow-up and just, you know, like because
you're stuck inside of some big bank that'sdoing their fund administration.
And like, that is not a good experience foryour LP.
And so I think what people are realizing isthat these worlds are converging.
And if you want to access the capital, thegrowth that's coming into the industry, you're

(27:40):
gonna have to deliver a consumer grade digitalexperience of the likes that everyone's used to
from the public markets.
And so that's the first most impactful, thingthat that I would say.
The second thing is that we have seen just inthe time that I've been working on Juniper
Square, so a little more than a decade, theshift, you know, if you you look at the

(28:05):
investor that really kind of built the helpedbuild the private markets, It was really the
defined benefit pension plan, public privatepension plans.
Think the California State Teacher RetirementSystem or Public Employee Pension System or the
Big Pensions of Canada.
You know, and then there are obviouslyinsurance companies, sovereign wealth funds,

(28:27):
and so forth.
But these investors tended to be advised byconsultants, a lot of the data that GP was
providing were going to the consultants whowould package it up for like a quarterly report
to the investment committee.
The investor was fairly passive.
They wrote huge checks.
You know, fly to one meeting in Sacramento andcome away with a $250,000,000 commitment.

(28:48):
And that has really changed over the decadethat I've been doing this because every
investor now realizes that information, data onthe underlying performance of the assets is
where the smart decisions are going to comefrom.
Right?
And so it's not acceptable to have this sort ofduality where you've got perfect data coming

(29:12):
from systems like Aladdin, you know, forBlackRock.
In the public markets, you can understand risk,you can understand exposure, you know exactly
what you're investing in.
And then your private markets are just thistotal black box where you have no idea what you
hold.
And a perfect example of this is look at whathappened in the mortgage crisis in a way.
So much of the problem of the mortgage crisiswas that all of these CMBS instruments, and

(29:35):
then all of the credit default swaps that werethe first derivative of them, they all were
packaged up and bundled in these spreadsheets.
Like, literally, that's how it was done insideof the bank.
So you'd have, like, you know, the the assetthe CMBS asset or the CDS would just have like
this list of all these unique identifiers inthe payment stream.
And you'd have no way to actually assess therisk, of the of the of the portfolio.

(29:57):
And so you have to, by default, assume theworst, and everybody marks everything to zero,
and then you have this runaway like we saw.
So there's one way of talking about that story,which is there was a big information problem
here through various levels of a value chain.
Private markets has the exact same issue, whereinvestors have really woken up to this, and the
sophisticated investors, the sovereign wealthfunds, the sophisticated family offices,

(30:20):
university endowments, they are very demandingon the type of data that they want to see from
GPs.
And it's not uncommon at all that an investorwill have their own super complex custom
spreadsheet that they'll send to a GP everyquarter and say, this out asset by asset.
I want all these KPIs.
Thank you for listening.
To join our community and to make sure you donot miss any future episodes, please click the

(30:42):
follow button above to subscribe.
Give give me an example on on some of thoserequests for what these sophisticated
institutional LPs are asking for from GPs.
Well, let's just take, like, the real estatesector as an example.
So let's say you're a big sovereign wealthfund, And let's say that you oversee, you know,

(31:02):
hundreds of billions of dollars in real estatecommitments globally.
And those are distributed across hundreds ofmanager relationships.
And, and you also do direct investing.
Maybe you've got a direct investing team.
Maybe you also have a series of separatelymanaged account, like a programmatic joint
venture relationships with some managers.

(31:22):
Well, if all of a sudden, there's somethingthat happens in the world, COVID, tariffs,
whatever, you're now trying to assess risk.
We own a trillion dollars worth of real estate.
Is it impaired?
What's, you know, what's happening?
What should we do?
Should we sell?
Should we rebalance?
How should we manage risk?

(31:43):
To understand risk, you have to know what youown.
Can't just say I own a trillion dollars of realestate with 100 managers.
You have to know why I own industrial, own, youknow, in North America, I own office in China,
I own.
And then you go down further and say, Well, Iactually want to know the individual assets.
I want to know every building that I own, everypiece of land that I own.

(32:04):
And you go further and say, I really need tounderstand the cash flow on that asset.
Like, what's what's the NOI?
The net operating income, which is a sort ofcash flow term from real estate.
What's the leverage on the asset?
Right?
What's the the last mark?
What's the value marked value of that asset?

(32:25):
How's that roll up to the fund structure?
What's the nav of the fund?
What's the leverage on the fund that owns ownsthe asset?
So you want to be able to start at the level ofan individual building that you own in a in a
multi hundred billion dollar portfolio, andthen you wanna get up to a level being able to
understand exposure, risk, leverage, etcetera,at a portfolio.

(32:45):
And you really can only do that at a portfoliolevel if you understand the component parts.
So the way that that shows up for a GP is ifthey get a commitment from this big sovereign
wealth fund, more than likely, the sovereignwealth fund's gonna put a side letter on their
commitment that says, you have to report in ourtemplate to our standard.

(33:05):
And some of these are extreme.
Some of these are like, they require adifferent accounting methodology that's custom
to that LP in the way that they treataccounting.
So you actually have to, like, run differentmath on the underlying assets.
That's how complex it gets.
And, it's now all of sudden, the GP is facingdown, wait, I've got hundreds of LPs that have
hundreds of different spreadsheets.

(33:26):
And how am I going to manage all of this?
And it's a really becomes a really big dataproblem, but that's sort of the cost of doing
business.
It's a cost of getting access to capital in aworld where investors have woken up to the idea
that they have to manage their portfolios, haveto manage risk.
It's not okay to just have their relationshipwith the manager be a black box that they don't
understand.
The mortgage crisis, the global financialcrisis kind of blew that up, going all the back

(33:50):
to 'eight, 'nine, and we're still dealing withthe ramifications of
And Juniper Square helps with these sideletters.
And talk to me about Juniper Square's businessmodel and how you charge GPs and what are the
are there different packages and and just talkto me about how you align your goals with the
goals of the GPs.
Well, pricing in the fund administrationindustry is pretty standard.

(34:11):
So we we didn't have to invent much here.
We just had to sort of follow, the industry,the industry standard.
And, pricing does vary.
I mean, one it it is a very consultative,collaborative relationship.
So one of the things that we're always doingwith a customer is working with them to

(34:31):
construct a pricing model that's gonna best fitwhere they are in their fund life and and and
how they wanna manage things.
So for example, if you're just starting out asa GP, and you're raising your first fund, Maybe
you haven't even called your management feesyet.
You you might be broke.
You know?
You there's no money in a bank account for youto be paying your fund admin, and so you might

(34:52):
be willing to pay us a lot more if we willshape the curve of your fees to match the life
cycle of your fund and to match your fees as amanager.
Right?
Whereas let's say you've been around for twentyyears, and you know, you've got hundreds of
millions of dollars a year coming in frommanagement fees.

(35:12):
What you want to do is lower the total, cost ofownership, right?
Because you have the money to pay us today.
So we'll work with customers to create a shapefor the fee structure.
And then generally, there's a bunch ofdifferent ways to price.
But generally, the rule of thumb is that you'repricing as a it's an extremely small

(35:34):
percentage, but you're pricing as a percentageof the funds commitments.
Right?
And it's it's usually expressed in, you know,very small number of basis points.
It's essentially the cash flow or the futurecash flow of the manager.
So you might be getting smaller amount in thebeginning and working with them.
Then as they get bigger, you you you get higherfees.
That's right.

(35:54):
Yeah.
Because the manager's business model, you know,the the traditional business model for private
markets investors two and twenty.
You know, this, you know, 2% annual managementfee and 20% of the profits.
And this varies by asset class, right, asmanagers become extremely proven.
I've I've seen two in 30.
I've seen two in 40.

(36:15):
And then oftentimes managers will trademanagement fee for more promote, you know, one
and a half 30 or one and thirty.
And and do find LPs like that?
Lower fees, higher.
Carrie, obviously, there's thousands of LPs,but as a general rule, would they rather have
two and twenty or one and thirty?

(36:35):
It's hard for me to say because I don't feellike I can speak for LPs.
What I what I can say is that, there's agrowing sense of fee sensitivity coming to the
industry, not surprisingly.
That is sort of a part of maturation of theindustry, especially where we are right now.

(36:57):
If you look at where we are right now in thecycle, we are probably in the longest drought
of, venture returns to LPs that the industryhas gone through because there have been no
IPOs and and there's no M and A.
And there was a huge drawdown of commitments inthe run up, sort of post COVID, pre interest

(37:23):
rate hikes.
So, you know, LPs just shoveled money out thedoor into venture funds through the ZERP era
and especially in those years between COVID andthe interest rate hikes.
And then now they've seen no capital returnedto them because there's no IPOs.
You know, there's a big slate of IPOs that werescheduled.

(37:45):
I was just in New York yesterday talking to amajor market maker, and, it's it's, you know,
crickets.
Right?
Everybody's you know, because of the because ofthe Trump tariffs.
There's you know, everybody's pulled theirlisting.
Everybody's sort of gonna wait it out and seewhat happens post Labor Day, which really means
we're into 2026 before much meaningful happens,unless we see some sort of massive change to,

(38:07):
status quo and a lot more certainty arrivequickly.
So now 2025 is gonna be a year without IPOreturns.
And then if you look at the commercial realestate sector, same story.
Commercial real estate was hit really hard inCOVID.
You know, imagine owning hospitality, hotels,you know, when everybody was, you know, sitting

(38:28):
at home or imagine owning office buildings wheneveryone, shifts to working from home.
Retail, got hammered.
We've seen this big structural sort of changein that industry.
And now we're dealing with, you know, movingout of a ZERP era with almost, you know, sort
of, very, very low long term rates.

(38:50):
We're now very stubbornly in this sort of highlong term rate category, which is very
challenging for the asset classes, very CapExintensive.
So a huge wall of maturities coming in CMBS,for example.
And so I can't speak for LPs, but what I cansay is we're at a moment in time where, there's

(39:15):
both this tension that there's a lot of bullishattitude on the asset class in the long term.
Everyone recognizes the opportunities inprivate companies are staying private longer,
etcetera.
And, also, there's an element of, like, show methe money.
Right?
Like, where are my returns?
I've been investing in venture for a decade.

(39:35):
I'm waiting on my returns.
And and so I think all that drives greater feesensitivity.
And the last thing I'd say is just investorscare a lot about alignment of incentives.
Right?
So paying out huge management fees, like allthings being equal myself as an LP, I would
much rather have a manager who's incentivizedon the promote and, you know, who's gonna make

(39:58):
money when I make money, than a manager who'splaying the AUM aggregation game, which is, you
know, if you go look at, like, venture or yougo look at, like, what a lot of big venture
funds are doing, you go look at what a lot ofthe conglomerate multi strategy managers are
doing.
It's that in a world where everyone pays 2 and20.
The you know, some level, you can sort of makea choice and say, okay.

(40:21):
Am I gonna, deliver incredible returns by, youknow, picking one out of 21 out of 50 Googles.
Right?
And then I would get $8,000,000,000 returned toa $500,000,000 fund or something like that.
Or am I just gonna say, I get 2% of, you know,every dollar, that I have in commitments.

(40:43):
So instead of being a $3,000,000,000 manager,I'm going to be a $300,000,000,000 manager.
And you've seen a lot of managers pursuing thatAUM aggregation game, because it's just the two
and twenty business model, maybe other thanGoogle's is like the best business model ever,
right?
It's like totally recession proof.
It's totally recurring.
2% management fee is the commitment is made byinvestors that are the best credit in the

(41:08):
world.
You know, it's giant sovereign wealth funds andso forth.
So it'll be interesting to see how this shakesout over time.
But I think the uncertainty will be more morepressure on fees.
Give me context into your customer base bynumber of customers.
What percentage are in venture, private equity,real estate, or however you delineate?
There's how many GPs do you have?

(41:31):
There's how much AUM do you have?
And then there's how much revenue do you have?
And they actually kind of all have differentmixtures for us.
So the history of the company is in realestate.
So we have more real estate managers than anyother manager.
In fact, I I'm I'm quite certain we have morereal estate managers on Juniper Square than any
other company, full stop.

(41:54):
So we're very, very deep in the real estateindustry.
But because of the history of the company, youknow, when you start a company, you start out
serving small and mid sized customers that arerelatively easy to serve.
They have, fairly simple needs.
And then over time, you migrate to serving theCBREs of the world, largest global real estate
owner, for example, it's a customer of ours.

(42:17):
You don't start out serving CBRE.
So we have a greater number of smallercustomers in real estate, so it's actually a
smaller share of revenue than you would think.
Our entry into private equity and venturecapital and private credit has come later, but
because and so we've got, you know, hundreds ofmanagers in each of those versus thousands.
But because our entry is later, we come in andwe serve much larger customers.

(42:39):
So it's a very significant share, of ourrevenue, in those, in those asset classes.
The way to think about this the way that Ithink about this at the limit is just where is
the capital in the industry?
Right?
And so, private equity, think traditionalgrowth and buyout private equity is the largest

(42:59):
asset class by both AUM and manager count.
Real estate is probably the second largest.
Real estate is always tends to be understatedon all of the kind of PreQwyn and PitchBook
type reports.
Something like 40% of our managers on JuniperSquare don't show up in PreQwyn and PitchBook

(43:19):
as an example.
Because it tends
to Why is that?
Because those are companies that have builttheir datasets primarily by FOIA request of of
public pension.
So so public pensions are required to posttheir, meeting minutes publicly.
And then, in those meeting minutes are all ofthe commitments of those LPs to all the

(43:41):
different fund managers, including theirperformance and everything else.
And so if you just go run a FOIA process onthose, public pension investors or any other
investors that are subject to public filings,then you can go from the minutes, extract all
this data and build this graph of the fundmanagers and who's invested where.
But you're Yeah.
Why?
Why do so many private managers not want theirAUM out there?

(44:04):
What are the pros and cons of having yourprivate fund information out there?
Well, I think to a large degree, it depends onyour strategy.
Right?
So there there are some strategies that and andyou see this.
So let me give you an example.
And we don't really serve hedge funds today.

(44:24):
But, but this is an obvious one to point out.
So let's say you're an activist investor, youknow, and, and then you accumulate short
positions.
And then the way that you like to influencecompanies is you accumulate controlling short
positions, and then you very quietly influencethe board.
But your whole strategy is like, I, my benefithere is like, I don't have big public fights.

(44:50):
I work with existing management teams to drivethe change that I want to see in companies.
Well, you have a incentive to be very quiet.
You don't want people to know how much AUM youhave.
You don't want people to know where you'reaccumulating short positions.
You don't want people to know anything aboutyour strategy, right?
If on the other hand, let's say you're in aventure investor, and you're trying to make it

(45:11):
known that you are open for business and youwanna underwrite, you know, early stage AI
deals, especially focused on developer toolingor whatever, you're gonna be shouting from the
rooftops about who you are.
You're gonna go on every podcast.
You're gonna write blogs.
You're gonna host events.
You're gonna try and, you know, do the completebe very active on Twitter because it's in your

(45:31):
business model's interest to promote yourself.
And so it really it depends on on the assetclass and, and the strategy.
And for the history of the private marketsindustry, it's one where the type of marketing
was one on one relationship building, it wasvisiting people in offices, and there was sort
of like a decorum that grew up around that,right?

(45:54):
And look, people go in, you if you're gonnabecome a really great growth private equity
investor, you know, chances are you love doingdeals, you love underwriting companies, you
love creating operational alpha throughcompanies.
And and you probably don't like you don't lovemarketing, you know, you don't love running the
operations of your own company.

(46:15):
So there's some element of this, which is justpeople in this industry are investors, first
and foremost.
Now this is changing a lot, right?
Like Mark Rowan of Apollo is on record sayingthat Apollo spent more than a billion dollars
over the last three years building out itsretail distribution arm.
They have more than 100 people, focused onthis.
We, you know, Blackstone's doing TV commercialsnow.

(46:38):
So as the industry is shifting to recognizing,okay, the growth is coming from retail, there's
this recognition that you have to change tobecome much more out there with the marketing
and be become much more public.
Double click on retail.
We all see these headlines at the CEO of IACapital, Lawrence Calcano, on the podcast.
These tens of trillions, maybe a hundredtrillion dollars, what whatever whatever the

(47:03):
number of retail Yeah.
Coming into alternatives.
Yep.
You have the system of record.
You see what funds are doing.
How much of that has already started?
How much of that do you expect in the nearfuture?
Yeah.
So it it is a story right now for sure of itbeing on the come.

(47:24):
You know, if we just go look at the data and wesay, alright, the last $100,000,000,000 or
whatever, you know, that showed up on JuniperSquare, what were the sources and what were its
channels?
It's still predominantly institutional.
And so when we talk about the retail channel,it's prospectively talking about its potential.

(47:48):
It's still a reasonably small share of theprivate markets industry as a whole.
Now for the companies that are really pursuingit aggressively, and there are only a handful.
Right?
Blackstone, Apollo, Starwood, Carlyle, KKR.
The for these companies, these handful, it isforming a meaningful share of the total capital

(48:14):
that they're raising, and they they're onrecord talking about expecting it to become,
you know, half of all the capital they raise.
Eventually, I think Steve Schwarzman said amajority of the capital that the Blackstone
raises eventually.
But the thing to recognize is there's a hugepower law in effect, which is if you look at
all the capital raised through, you know,retail and, you know, broker dealer and and

(48:37):
RIA, you sort of aggregate all the the channelsthat represent, you know, ultimately reaching
an individual investor writing a check.
There's a massive power law at play where, youknow, Blackstone and Apollo together are
probably raising 90% of the capital, just thosetwo GPs.
And then, like, the next three or four GPs areraising, like, the next six or 8% of the

(48:59):
capital.
So they account for, you know, so top three tofive GPs account for like 98% of all the
capital raised.
And then you have this long tail of managerswho are trying to raise through the retail
channel, but haven't yet cracked the code.
And one of the challenges is there's a certainset of things that you have to have as a GP to
really be successful raising through retail.

(49:21):
One is a brand and awareness.
People know who Blackstone is, but people mightnot know who some, you know, sharpshooter local
VC is.
Two is you need to have a distribution teamactually taking those products to market.
Three is you have to be patient and willing toengage in a multi level sales cycle where you
have to go sell a broker or sell an RIA, getyour fund on platform, and then you have to

(49:44):
sell it through to the ultimate advisor andclient.
So it's like this multi step, multi year salescycle, very different from flying to Abu Dhabi
to get a $250,000,000 check.
And then the products themselves, what's becomeclear is the product that works in, in retail
is one that is open ended.

(50:04):
It has liquidity.
So these these sort of evergreen registeredfund structures.
So you can't be relying on the traditionalexemptions that private managers have relied on
to be successful.
It's gotta be a a registered, a fund registeredwith the SEC.
And then it's gotta have liquidity, like realmeaningful liquidity, not just like, you know,

(50:27):
up to 5% of the funds NAV.
But if you look at like a lot of products, youknow, think Apollo's done this with State
Street.
Blackstone's done this.
I think KKR is doing this with their balancesheet in some of their evergreen vehicles.
There's like real commitments to backstopliquidity.
And this is, I think, part of what madeBlackstone so successful.

(50:50):
They had a huge run on the bank in their BREIT.
Just crazy amount of outflows, like billions ofdollars of outflows every month.
You know?
And they're getting, you know, some multipleoutflows every month as people were souring on
the commercial real estate industry during therate hikes, and they backstopped that
liquidity.
You know?
They they allowed the redemptions to takeplace, they went and did a deal with the UC
system, to help, sort of backstop thatliquidity.

(51:14):
And so that's what you have to be willing tosign up for.
And for a lot of managers, especially if you'resmall, it's a really tough that's a really
tough pill to swallow.
You know, you do $500,000,000 venture funds,that that's really tough to think go look at
that channel, so I'm gonna suit up and and goattack it.
When we last chatted, you mentioned that GPsmust reinforce at every touch point why LPs

(51:34):
made investment.
What did you mean by that?
Well, I think this comes back to the frontoffice, back office point that you were making
before, which is just that I think the GPs whodo this really well understand that every
interaction with the LP is an opportunity tobuild trust in the relationship.
And that fundamentally, GPs are in the game oftrust.

(51:58):
Right?
Give me your money and trust that I will giveyou more back in the future if you let me go do
with it, you know, what what I please.
And, trust compounds over time.
Trust is built by a collection of of a lot ofinteractions that all sort of aggregate toward
this outcome, which is I trust you.

(52:19):
And so the GPs who really get it recognizethey're in the game of building and maintaining
trust with LPs.
And when you see it that way, you can take thattrust and bridge to lots of different types of
investing strategies.
You know, you could say, because you trust mein real estate, you should trust me in real
estate tech, you know, because you trust me inreal estate tech, you should trust me in tech.

(52:39):
And so you've seen these managers bridge fromone asset class to another, those who really,
really get this well.
A lot of those same players that you mentioned,Blackstone, obviously, InVenture, Andreessen
has gone into a bunch of different stuff.
General Catalyst has gone into credit.
So there's many use cases around that.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.

(52:59):
And so what you want to do is recognize, okay,every opportunity that I have with the LP,
whether it's as mundane as the quarterlyreporting or the subscription process, or how I
answer their ad hoc questions or how responsiveI am or, you know, how frequently I see them.
These are all opportunities to build trust.
And the more complete you can build a system ofinteraction with the LP that facilitates that,

(53:24):
the more successful ultimately you're going tobe as a firm, because you're dealing in this
currency.
It's a different way of thinking than thinking,my job is to deliver returns.
Right?
And the good news there is if you frame yourmindset in the right way, then that trust can
survive the vicissitudes of the market, right?
It can survive the dislocations where you'relosing money because even an opportunity where

(53:46):
an investment goes south is a great opportunityto build trust with ELP and how you handle
that.
Right?
I I asked John Gray, who runs Blackstone now,what he did during downturns.
Obviously, it's not the market's not alwaysgoing up, and he said, gets on a plane, meets
with every single LPs, gets in front of thenews, communicate, communicate, communicate,
which sounds obvious.

(54:06):
It's one of those things that is easier saidthan done.
You've seen now since 02/2014, some GPs startsmall, scale, others start small and not scale,
and sometimes not because of strategy, butbecause they fail to build these trusted
relationships with LPs.
What have been the best practices in terms ofGPs that have been able to scale their trusted

(54:30):
relationships with LPs and build realplatforms?
Well, a lot of it comes down to what I talkedabout, which is, those who do this really well
care very, very deeply about things that seemmundane like reporting.
Right?
They care very deeply about how theirinvestments are portrayed, about the quality of

(54:53):
information they're getting to LPs, about thefrequency, about the timeliness, because they
believe that this represents their brand and itrepresents part of the trust building that
they're in the business of conveying.
But beyond that, to answer your questiondirectly, I think the thing that obviously

(55:15):
impacts the investing industry almost more thanany other is just where are you in cycle
timing?
Right?
So if you raise your first venture fund, youknow, in 2020, and you deployed it like crazy
in eighteen months, you know, you shoveled allthe money out the door at, you know, 2020 and

(55:37):
2021 prices for companies, And now you've gotno realizations in your portfolio.
Right?
You've got a portfolio of assets where no onebelieves the marks, right?
Where you've had massive compression in thepublic markets and comparables, where it's
gonna take many years, if ever, for you to getback to the valuations at which you invested in

(55:59):
companies at, it's gonna be really hard for youto raise a second fund.
And I don't care how good your reporting is,right?
So a lot of it has to do with cycle and andmarket timing.
Whereas, let's say, in 02/2009, if you're like,hey, I'm gonna start a fund, I'm just gonna buy
technology beta.
Right?
I'm gonna try and pick winners.
I'm just literally gonna buy beta in techstarting in twenty two thousand nine.

(56:23):
You will look like a genius by 2020, and you'llhave built up such a track record on that beta
strategy that you can survive, payingoverinflated prices in 2021 because people have
been with you since 02/2009.
Might be the exact same manager, be the exactsame company picking skill set, and a lot of it
just has to do with the cycle that you gotstarted in.

(56:47):
If you think of GPs with assets, you know,small number of assets, call it crawling,
midrange, walking, large running.
Do you see this kind of very slow crawl for adecade or several decades and then this kind of
explosion assets?
Or is it more linear?

(57:07):
And what's what's the typical kind of cadenceor growth of a GP?
I can answer it within venture.
It varies a lot depending on the asset class,right?
So like how a GP accumulates and grows in realestate is going be a very different pattern,
from how a venture GP, how a venture GP grows.
And then there's this other distinction too,which is, is someone starting out in the

(57:32):
industry from scratch, in which case they haveto scrape together their first twenty million
dollars seed fund and then raise a, you know,dollars 50,000,000 seed fund and then a hundred
million dollars seed series A fund, and they'rejust sort of slowly working their way up the
food chain?
Or are they a recognized name and sort of astoried partner from one firm who's spinning

(57:56):
out with a track record, in which case they cango out raise a billion dollar fund, you know,
immediately.
And you see both of those patterns, and theyscale differently, right?
But one thing that is observable is that for along time in the industry of venture capital,
there was a fair amount of discipline aroundfund size.

(58:19):
Right?
So so venture managers would have a strategy.
You know, we invest in this type of company andthis type of sector and at this stage, and our
typical check size is X for Y percentownership, right?
And we deploy Z checks per fund, and that's howmany bets we have, and we reserve this amount
for follow on and so forth.

(58:41):
And they had a strategy that was in a fund sizethat was tuned to that model.
And then what we saw in the late teens and sortof the post COVID run up, all of which we're
still dealing with the ramifications of thispost interest rate hikes, is people lost that
discipline.
And people went from saying, well, geez, let's,you know, look at the fees on a 2 and a half

(59:04):
billion dollar fund.
I like that a lot better than a $500,000,000fund.
And if everybody's shoveling cash out the door,LPs are shoveling cash out the door, it's hard
to resist that pull.
And so what you saw was a lot of managers thatgot big, not necessarily in a disciplined way.
And I see a lot of of our customers raisingsmaller funds, both because that's just what

(59:29):
the market allows them to do right now, butalso because in some sense, they're kind of
getting back to their roots and saying, okay,you know, we got a little crazy there.
Let's get back to a smaller, more focused, moreniche strategy going forward.
And that takes a lot of discipline.
It's like really hard to kind of curtail yourfee income and the laws of scaling once you're

(59:52):
on a path.
And so I think it's really impressive whenmanagers have the discipline to do that.
I mentioned General Catalyst went from venturecapital to venture capital and credit, and
you've seen some asset managers successfullyscale from one asset class to multiple asset
classes.
What are some best practices to keep in mindfor GPs are looking to accomplish this?

(01:00:12):
Well, the trust point I've already made, so Iwon't reiterate that here.
But I think the the GPs who are really good,really look at investing from first principles.
And I think a lot of the distinctions thatdefined or delineated kind of one investing
type from another are starting to blur.

(01:00:34):
So let me give you an example.
In the real estate sector, one of the kind ofreally hot sub micro classes right now is what
is called GP stakes investing.
So in real estate, you have a lot of deals thatare underwater.
They need to be recapitalized.

(01:00:55):
You've got a lot of GPs who built businessmodels, anticipating, you know, hired teams and
so forth, anticipating they would raise a newfund every eighteen to twenty four months.
And all of a sudden, that funding is dried up.
Those GPs are in trouble.
They need money, to operate.
Their deals need to be recapitalized.

(01:01:16):
And so savvy investors out there realize thatthere's really great opportunity in, you know,
not only doing recaps and taking seniorpositions in these real estate deals, but also
becoming an owner of the GP itself.
So now all of a sudden, that's like ventureinvesting, you know, like I'm picking David,

(01:01:37):
and I'm making a bet that David is gonna go onto 10 x in his career, and I'm gonna own a
share of of his management company.
So now all of a sudden, what used to be thisbig delineation or distinction that real estate
was about buildings, you know, and NOI and cashflow and foot traffic and things like this, all
of a sudden, in GP stakes investing looks a lotmore like venture.

(01:02:01):
Early stage venture, betting on a foundingteam, having limited information, trying to
separate the wheat from the chaff and knowwho's gonna go on to succeed.
And the I think the great GPs see this, youknow, and they're not bounded by these
classical delineations of like, well, I investin buildings, you know, and instead they sort

(01:02:22):
of approach it from first principles and say,in this current market opportunity, where is or
in this current market climate, where'sopportunity?
And that's why you've seen this huge rotationinto private credit.
Right?
It's an incredible opportunity right now inprivate credit.
We love love GP stakes.
You have institutional investors, some of themeven register as a completely new asset class
and has different pockets because it has equitylike components, credit like components, and

(01:02:46):
it's semi liquid because it starts payingmanagement fees.
It's fascinating asset class.
You've committed $200,000,000 into r and d overthe next five years.
Presumably, most of that is going into AI.
What are some features that you guys areworking on that you're excited about when it
comes to integrating AI into Juniper Square?
I'm very excited about AI.

(01:03:06):
Very, very.
Okay.
So what we are doing is you could think of whatwe're doing in the end state here is a GP is
gonna have an agent from us for every part oftheir business.
Right?
They're gonna have an agent that helps them doinvestor relations.
And that's everything from helping them withfundraising and finding the right LPs to target

(01:03:30):
and handling all the minutiae around exchangingdocuments and data room invites and keeping the
CRM update and all of it.
All the way through to like, that agent will bethe interface for the GP to the LP.
You know, GP will always stay in control.
But, you know, when I look at the future ofJuniper Square, for example, I think that it's

(01:03:50):
more likely in the future that customers whoreally want to go deep with us on the product,
want to spend hours and hours and hours andhours on they're gonna be doing that with an
agent of Juniper Square, who's a PhD levelexpert on Juniper Square, who's infinitely
patient, will be on the phone or the Zoom withthem at three in the morning, you know,
answering with a cheerful attitude, the mostmundane or detailed questions that they could

(01:04:15):
have.
I think it'll be the same thing in privatemarkets investing, right?
The GPs will have agents that are completeexperts, PhD level experts on their track
record, on their investing history, on theirstrategy, on the returns, right?
And we are the store of all that data for GPs.

(01:04:36):
Millions and millions of documents in JuniperSquare, we've got all of the investment track
record, the portfolio data for these managers.
So we can work with our customers to tune andtrain those agents, keeping the customer in
control because it's not like you wanna let anagent loose to hallucinate and say anything.
But very clearly, this is where the technology,is going.

(01:04:59):
We'll build an agent for the CFO to manage alltheir fund admin relationships, to be absorbing
all that data from the fund admins, makingsense of it, doing QA on it, looking for
internal consistency, etcetera.
We'll build an agent to help GPs with portfoliomanagement, portfolio decisioning, agents to
help GPs with investment decision making.

(01:05:21):
The actual construction of agents is not hardonce you have solved foundational fundamental
problems.
The foundational fundamental problems are, doyou have the unique data?
Do you have the source of truth that's requiredto really train that agent?
Right?
Like, one of the foundational model agents, offthe shelf can pretend to be the GP's expert

(01:05:41):
agent on their track record for about twoseconds.
Right?
And then they're gonna gunk out andhallucinate.
And so there's a lot of work to have the agentreally become expert on the GP, the GP
strategy, their data, everything else.
You need to have the domain knowledge, and youneed to have the data to do that training.
So that's one.
Two is, you have to respect the really complexsecurity requirements, data security, data

(01:06:08):
privacy, you know, the actual security of datarequirements that our very large enterprise
customers have.
And that includes the permissions layer that'srequired for these agents to work.
So if you're training the agent on havingaccess to every person in the GP's email inbox,
that might be a great way to train the agent,but you don't want the managing partner's email

(01:06:28):
with some LP to come up and be visible to theassociate at the firm.
So this distinction of training on broad corpusof data, but then keeping this really tight
permissioning is something that we're alreadyvery good at with our customers.
And then the last thing is these agents need tobe operating over real world infrastructure for

(01:06:49):
them to do stuff that's useful.
Right?
You do invite an LP to the data room, you needto move them through the subscription process,
you need to issue a payment, issue payment, youneed to have payment rails, you need to be
connecting the banking system, you need to beconnected to the regulators, you know.
And so, we look at our goal at our job asreally providing that foundational platform

(01:07:10):
that all the agents are built on, we call thatJunie AI, and We're going to be launching that
in a few months here.
And then on top of that platform, we willconstruct essentially limitless agents for the
GP.
We'll eventually give them the tools they canconstruct their own agents, everything from
investment analysts to, you know, IRassociates.

(01:07:30):
But the really hard part here is not agentconstruction.
It's not like the chat interface that's hard.
It's getting the data right, the permissionsright, the fine tuning right, so that the agent
is actually useful.
And that's a big part of what we're focused onas a company.
You guys are a system of record for a lot ofGPs.
Give me a sense for the AUM that you're thesystem of record for today, May 2025?

(01:07:55):
Total AUM is trillions.
So so total AUM of underlying assets would betrillions.
Active investor commitments, I think about atrillion and a half.
And then we probably have another maybe, like,3 or 4,000,000,000,000 of completed investment
history.
Because keep in mind, when we onboard acustomer, they might be on fund seven.

(01:08:20):
Right?
So they're investing out of fund seven, but weonboard all the data from funds one through
six.
That data is very valuable for helping thecustomer train, train models, train agents.
Well, Alex, this has been fascinating deep diveinto fund admin.
Love your enthusiasm and curiosity.
I appreciate it.
It's genuine and and it's real.
How should people follow you and how shouldpeople keep up with what Juniper Square is

(01:08:44):
working on?
Yeah.
So, I'm active on LinkedIn.
That's that's where I'm active, for work.
I'm active on on Twitter too for, I've got awhole bunch of health interests and active on
Twitter there for that stuff.
My kind of cleave my selves into two.
My professional self is representing JuniperSquare and private markets and AI and all that
stuff on on LinkedIn.

(01:09:04):
Alex Robinson, Juniper Square on LinkedIn.
And then, of course, the company,junipersquare.com.
You can find us there.
Thank you, David.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks for listening to my conversation withAlex.
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