In June, about 75 ultra-wealthy people and others who work for them gathered at the delectable Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, for Institutional Investor’s European Single Family Office Symposium.
Much of that conference is closed-door, but two sessions dedicated to changes in governments and to foreign policies, and their economic impacts, stirred family offices more than any of the others, attendees said. Geopolitics was a top concern for family offices last year and those worries seemed to remain present in the summer — at least in Europe (where most attendees were based).
The same can’t be said about II’s Family Office Wealth Conference this week at the Montage Hotel in Laguna Beach, California, where the sessions about venture capital and sports team ownership seemed to be discussed well after those panels concluded.
Has something changed? Was the family-office crowd in Laguna that different? Did the luxury hotel on the better beach, coupled with the axiom that SoCal is more chill, change the vibe?
Given the European conference’s attendees and location, many people wanted to discuss the war in Ukraine and other conflicts, and what they mean for markets. Among the topics discussed in formal meetings and in line for espressos were how European nations were arming themselves and other states. The impact of that militarization on the defense sector and other stocks, and whether those changes were already priced in, was debated. Those conversations rage on so perhaps, on the other side of the world, they weren’t as top of mind this week.
The conference in California is also bigger and draws a different crowd, at least marginally. There were 150 family-office principals and executives; about 40 percent are worth between $150 and $500 million. The rest of the offices are worth anywhere between $500 million and as much as $10 billion. The percentage of them in Europe worth more than $1 billion was lower. Like in Europe attendees spanned generations; many are first-generation wealth creators but some come from, or work for, families that have been exceedingly rich for two, three, four generations or beyond.
In Laguna, it seemed like the conference sessions overall that had the best attendance and engaged people were the ones dedicated to venture capital and to investments in sports teams. Lauren Feldman, a managing director, the head of Wealth at II, and the one in charge of the family offices events in the U.S., agreed.
“A bunch of people came up to me and said ‘You need to do that VC session every year, with those people,’” Feldman said about a discussion panel that included Lara Banks, managing director at Makena; Patrick Hop, CIO at single-family office Draco Ovo Holdings; and Ken Goldman, president of single-family office Maya Capital.
All things considered, the buzz about venture capital, sports teams and other alternative investments might have just been a result of scale. The family offices that gathered in California were wealthier — and more likely to have CIO-led investment teams allocating to alternative investments.
