Preferred Return

Season 3 of the Preferred Return podcast is here! We are thrilled to kick off the first episode with a special edition featuring a Salesforce celebrity guest.

Being purpose-built atop force.com, Altvia’s platform benefits from Salesforce’s powerful infrastructure and ecosystem, which allows us to focus on solving the daily workflow challenges that plague alternative asset professionals. It also gives us access to Salesforce thought leaders and partners to better understand how to properly leverage the powerful platform.

We are excited to share that we had the privilege of sitting down with one of the more well-known name in this arena, Salesforce Ben, for a conversation about how we are leveraging Salesforce to provide a best-in-class experience within the private capital market. The conversation between Salesforce Ben’s founder, Ben McCarthy, and Altvia’s Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Williams, explores the ethos that has driven Salesforce Ben’s success today, the power of the Salesforce ISV and OEM ecosystem, the crucial role of domain-specific providers with industry expertise, and, of course, the hot topic of AI.

Listen to the recording of Altvia and Dakota's, "Data-Driven Excellence," webinar that showcases the seamless integration between Altvia and Dakota. The powerful integration provides fund managers with proprietary data to accelerate their fundraising efforts.

Whether you’re an institutional investor, fund manager, family office professional, or an aspiring dealmaker, this webinar will equip you with the knowledge and strategies needed to unlock deal flow success and stay ahead in today’s competitive investment landscape.

In this episode of Altvia’s Preferred Return Podcast, Jef Rice (aka 1 F Jef), Altvia’s Head of Engineering, sits down with podcast host, Jeff Williams, to discuss the significance of data in creating a better customer experience and fostering innovation. They discuss the potential of data-driven solutions solving complex challenges, which unlocks a world of positive change for not only GPs and LPs but for the world at large.

The two explore the flexibility of data lakes, emphasizing experimentation over upfront structuring and how to leverage data to improve strategic decision-making. By doing so, businesses can save time, reduce costs, and focus on deploying capital in meaningful ways that drive positive change. Tune in to learn how centralized data drives customer experiences, fosters innovation, powers meaningful investments, and maximizes the most valuable commodity of all - time.

In this episode of Altvia’s Preferred Return Podcast, Gui Costin, founder and CEO of Dakota, returns to discuss Dakota's upcoming partnership with Altvia, integrating Dakota Marketplace with Altvia's Private Equity CRM: AIM.

Gui also offers his insights on the current market trends, how leveraging a CRM for private equity and venture capital can grow your pipeline, and the limitations of AI in alternative investments.

Welcome back to Altvia’s Preferred Return Podcast! In this episode, our host and Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Williams, sits down with Tim Flannery, co-founder and CEO of Passthrough, to discuss our recent launch of OnboardingBridge powered by Passthrough.

Tim and Jeff also discuss some of the last industry trends: investor onboarding integrations with private equity CRMs, AI's use in sourcing lookalike investors, and the new SEC regulations.

This is a must-listen episode introduces, OnboardingBridge, the first solution to fully integrate a CRM with an investor onboarding solution — leveraging the power of Passthrough and Altvia combined.

Welcome back to Altvia’s Preferred Return Podcast! In this episode, our host and Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Williams, sits down with Gui Costin, founder and CEO of Dakota, to chat about the strategic partnership between Altvia and Dakota and the importance of providing premium customer service.

Gui and Jeff also offer up some industry projections including: technology automation advancements, delivering higher quality investment strategies at lower investment minimums, and increasing efficiency for transaction facilitation.

This is a must-listen episode that shines a light on how both Altvia and Dakota leverage data and a customer-centric ethos to establish a competitive advantage.

Hear tips and tricks (learned by experience) from industry vets, Tim Friedman, Founder of PE Stack, Edward Albrigo, COO at Paladin, and Jeff Williams, CSO at Altvia, on how to differentiate your firm’s data with operational technologies purpose-built for private capital markets.

• Tips & tricks on how to properly evaluate private capital market platforms for your firm.
• How to enter a software demo prepared so you can effectively compare vendors.
• Why leveraging technology and data is crucial for firms to differentiate.
• What red flags to look out for when evaluating vendors.

Welcome back to Altvia’s Preferred Return Podcast! In this episode, our host and Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Williams, sits down with Kevin Kelly, Altvia’s founder and former CEO, to discuss the importance of understanding data and technology and how to transform that knowledge into premium solutions for the private capital market.

Jeff and Kevin’s relationship dates back to 2010, where they bonded over technology, data, and innovation for the private capital market. Tune into the episode to hear Kevin and Jeff reminisce about their relationship, Kevin’s transition from CEO to client, and their shared journey of building Altvia into the company that it is today.

Welcome back to Altvia’s Preferred Return Podcast! In this episode, our host and Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Williams, sits down with Altvia’s VP of Client Solutions, Ray Grant, to discuss their passion for helping clients optimize their strategies and data to drive firm longevity and success.

Working together since 2018, Jeff and Ray both take pride in building meaningful client relationships and discuss how that sentiment is emulated by the larger customer success team and even in the Altvia culture more broadly. Hear how Ray has built not only a technically sound and industry-savvy team but also a team that genuinely and intuitively cares about their client’s success.

Tune in to hear how Altvia values being true partners, offering a level of advice, technical expertise, and support that cannot be replicated by any other private capital markets vendor.

Hear from Altvia’s President and CEO, Brie Aletto, on a multitude of topics from cultivating meaning in the workplace to embracing a culture of personal and professional growth.  Join us for an inside look into the strategies for success for our organization and what’s to come in 2023.

Hear from Julie Newman, Managing Director at Altera Investments, and Jenna Greenspan, Capital Development Director at Redesign Health, moderated by Altvia’s Jeff Williams, Chief Strategy Officer, discussing the role of data and technology in unlocking powerful relationships. Topics include:

• Improve response time to LPs, and even anticipate needs!
• Gain prospecting insights to make the biggest impact at the right time.
• Build meaningful relationships with the power of an industry-specific database.
• Streamline communication across your broad base of LPs.
• How to fundraise smarter.

Welcome back to season two of the Preferred Return podcast, focused on the transformative power of data and technology within private equity and venture capital firms.

In this episode, our host Jeff Williams, Chief Strategy Officer at Altvia, sits down with Matthew Le Merle, Managing Director at Blockchain Coinvestors. Founded in 2014, Blockchain Coinvestors investment thesis is that digital monies, commodities, and assets are inevitable, and all of the world's financial infrastructure must be upgraded. As the leading blockchain venture fund of funds, they are invested in more than 400 blockchain companies and projects including over 60% of blockchain enterprise unicorns.

This vision is not dependent upon crypto and Bitcoin; instead, it has everything to do with how blockchain technology will enable eight billion people to digitally transact - much like how we currently communicate and share content in natively digital ways.

Matthew is no stranger to this world of digitalization having over thirty years of experience working and investing in the financial and technology industries, including having worked on the Big Bang at the London Stock Exchange and the creation of the iShares exchange-traded funds (ETFs) family at BlackRock as well as assisting in rolling out the Internet at Cisco, eBay, Google, Microsoft, PayPal and others too.

Join us for a conversation with Kelli Fontaine, Partner at Cendana Capital. Cendana is known for progressive data and technology strategies that have established them as an elite FoF, while generating admiration from their GPs. In this live event, we will sit down with Kelli to discuss data and technology strategies for standing out in today’s LP market.

Isn’t it strange that a startup’s likelihood of failure hardly changes as they mature from Series A to Series B and beyond? You would think the odds improve as a firm matures and achieves significant milestones…

Kjael Skaalerud, CRO at Altvia, is joined by Mark Roberge, Co-Founder of Stage 2 Capital, a venture fund focused on enabling go-to-market (GTM) execution for early stage firms. Stage 2 is fixated on reducing failure rates as a firm scales by leveraging an LP base made up of renowned GTM leaders to inform when to scale, and how fast. Mark himself is the former CRO of Hubspot, where he helped lead the firm from pre revenue to IPO.

Tune in to learn more about Mark’s story, the thesis for Stage 2, and perhaps get a sneak peak into a venture operating model that challenges a range of conventional thinking, in an industry that hasn’t changed much the last twenty years.

I have an interesting deal for you all, who’s interested?

Angel communities have  been held back by manual tools and workflows that prevent collaboration on deal flow, slow down investing decisions and, ultimately, prevent broader participation from those that would like to invest in the start-up asset class without the typical constraints of investing in a VC fund.

Jason Burke, Founding Partner at TBD Angels in the Boston area, decided it was time to take matters into his own hands by building software to solve the challenges he was experiencing first hand. Thus, All Stage was established to provide investment ecosystems with a modern technology platform. Tune in to learn more, the future for All Stage and angel investors everywhere appears to be brighter than ever.

How do you invest in high-growth startups? A chance to participate in the next unicorn……

Kjael Skaalerud, Chief Revenue Officer at Altvia, is joined by Matthew Klein, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Sweater Ventures, a firm set on providing the everyday investor access to one of the most exclusive asset classes in the world—venture capital.

As the Chief Experience Officer, Matthew is focused on giving retail investors courtside seats to the VC game. Not only will you learn more about the world of venture, but you'll also see the need for evolution and the democratization of alternative assets.

Sweater has 60k people on the waitlist, and at the end of this episode, you’ll want to join too.

We are ecstatic to sit down with Renee Niemi and Iris Chan from Mighty Capital, a VC firm that gives its portfolio companies exclusive access to >300,000 PMs and a playbook to turn them into customers. Airbnb, Amplitude, and BlueCedar are among some of their highly curated portfolio companies.

In this episode, we discuss the ever churning world of product management in the digital age. You will soon see that strategy is wonderful, but it ultimately comes down to implementation.

We sit down with Jeff Williams, Chief Strategy Officer, and Brie Aletto, CEO at Altvia, to take a look at what’s new in Q4. From Preqin integrations to improved ways to visualize data with Tableau CRM, we will take a deep dive into features designed seamlessly for your workflows. This webinar will serve as a demonstration of these integrations, and how they can support your firm. We will also look at the product roadmap, and what’s on the horizon for 2022.

Investor onboarding is all the rage right now — the manual, time-consuming process by which limited partners subscribe to private funds is moving in haste to become yet another part of the digital transformation of private markets. We’re thrilled to be joined by Tim Flannery, a co-founder of Passthrough — one company taking an interesting approach to solving this problem. 

We discuss the basic mechanics of digitizing the subscription process, who the constituents and beneficiaries are of doing so, and the opportunity to provide identity resolution to private market investors.

Join us for a discussion on how to Future Proof Your Private Equity or Venture Capital Firm, with thought leaders and bright minds from across the industry.

It’s widely accepted that private capital firms are slow to adopt technology. The appetite is there, though leaders lack the frameworks to understand the role technology can play in the firm, and the action plans that deliver a reasonable path toward a modern, tech-enabled operating environment.

There are few records yet to be broken in 2021, from VC dollars invested to buyout activity and beyond. Technology is a mostly underexploited lever in the industry and it's proving to be a core source of competitive advantage for firms that are open to challenging the status quo.

In this episode, we’re joined by Steven Greenberg: Co-Founder & CEO of Totem VC, a modern operating system for fund managers. Steven started as an Associate at ff Venture Capital and was also the Co-Founder & CTO at Unroll Me. In 2015 Steven and his co-founder set off to build Totem VC to solve the pain points that arose on a daily basis.

Steven is a visionary, having founded his first company at age nineteen, and he’s got some amazing views on things going on in the markets today, but also what’s in store for the future.

We’re thrilled to be joined in this episode by Conor Smyth (Founder & CEO) and Melissa Maleri (CMO) of TritonLake, a boutique placement agent that partners with private fund managers and deal sponsors to raise capital from its network of investors. Founded by a team of former software executives, TritonLake is a forward-thinking, technology-driven placement agent, and naturally, we have a lively discussion on technology’s role in the future of matchmaking between GPs and LPs in private markets. 

There’s been some buzz in the market about “Tinder for PE”, but TritonLake is confident that private market matchmaking will always be made up of a healthy balance of human-based relationships supplemented with technology, and few placements agents have embraced technology’s role like TritonLake has.

Join us for a discussion on The ‘Digital Collision’ Coming for PE & VC, with thought leaders and bright minds from across the industry.

We are joined by Charlie Orr, Stone Connell, Bruce Sinclair, Tim Friedman, Jeff Williams, and Kjael Skaalerud. The discussion focuses on: the current state of PE/VC, the potential digital transformation presents, and what the winners / future landscape of PE/VC might look like.

By the end of the session, you'll have a better sense of macro trends in digital transformation and actionable ideas you can implement at your firm to establish a more modern, tech-driven operating model.

Mike Abdella is a one-man force. The Founder and Managing Director of Mauve Capital Partners — a search fund — is laser-focused on finding a business to buy and operate. The problem is finding that business puts him in competition with much larger private equity firms that have access to far more resources, both in terms of people and technology spend. In this episode, we’ll talk through Mike’s process and technology components, and by the end you’ll have learned that it’s technology’s role in Mike’s process that creates his edge. 

The technology components he puts to use don’t typically scale up to solve the same problem for larger firms, but the spirit of these components in this process does. If you’re not following a similar process, let it serve as a warning that Mike is probably sneaking up on you, too.

In this episode, I’m joined by Holden Lee: a strategic leader and investor focusing capital to drive meaningful change in the world. His career has been a methodically intentional attempt at developing the unique viewpoint that he has on the next major opportunity in capital markets: Impact and ESG.

Having first seen the opportunity in 1992, he explains how he has orchestrated his career to develop the expertise that he has, having spent time at TPG, Cambridge Associates, and now through his current role as CFO & CIO of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco.

He helps define terms like “Impact” and “ESG”, makes a compelling case for why it’s so interesting, shares what market leaders are already doing to be ahead of the curve, provides help on how to develop an ESG plan, and we marvel at the role technology is likely to play in the transformation into a modern, multi-dimensional investment management continuum that — in his own words — is mind-blowing. Listen to me agreeing with him as — with actual mind blown — I realize we’re talking about something completely different and much bigger than I could’ve comprehended, even having heard him say it before.

Private Capital deal management and business development teams allocate a large portion of their time originating new opportunities and expanding the firm’s network. The majority of firms today understand the importance of a well-defined process, however with the transformation of private equity technology, there are new ways to enhance business development processes and improve efficiency.

Private Equity and Venture Capital fundraising looks a lot different these days. With both LPs and GPs social distancing at home, the usual process of fundraising requires Investor Relations teams to take a new approach. As firms evolve, most strategic questions center around maintaining investor engagement and the most effective methods for courting new investors, when the traditional means for building trust and communicating are no longer available. This session will share insights from top firms on how they have embraced technology to fundraise virtually.

"Own Your Edge", as I sit down with Kjael Skaalerud, SVP of Revenue at Altvia to discuss what’s top of mind among PE firms that are currently shopping for technology, and how cutting edge technology used for modern sales organizations translates perfectly to raising capital and finding investment opportunities.

Topics covered include:

- Trends from the front lines of PE firms looking for technology
- Helpful ways to frame the components of technology in PE firms
- What the most innovative PE firms are doing with technology
- How, despite their differences, raising capital and deploying it is actually more similar to a sales process than it may seem