Robert Blabey

I feel like family offices are the only sort of large industry, I'll call it participant, that I'm aware of that you can't sort of evaluate the business from the outside.

What we saw when we started Align was that oftentimes there was a mismatch between what the family hoped to get from their family office and what their goals were.

and what their internal resources allowed for.

And so I come from an institutional background originally, and a lot of these groups, quite frankly, have institutional-level capital, and they don't always have institutional-level resources.

And so were it to be a commercial business, I think they would probably run themselves very differently.

And these are intentional decisions that are made by the families, and it's not to say that there's a negative to it, but there is a business opportunity, we felt, in that context.

And so that's what we started Align to address.

And now that was 2014, so a while ago.

Align started out originally, I'll call it, as an adjunct or sort of a specialist in that category between where family offices had desires and lacked the resources to accomplish their goals.

And so that's really where we started.

And the way Align now has evolved and starting in 2019 evolved very like in a very deliberate fashion was

through now an investment platform fund business that currently has just three limited partners, myself, my partner in Align, and another family.

And we started that business in 2019.

with the explicit goal of looking for, you know, sort of absolute return opportunity in an opportunistic world.

And so that was, that was our, our goal in starting the sort of fun business.

And we got to there because we had worked with the family that was our, our anchor for that business, as well as a bunch of other families in quite, quite a diverse cross section of unique investment opportunities.

And, and they spanned everything from traditional assets to alternatives, but,

tended to to tilt more in the alternative category and uh as you'll see with with families they they typically have a most of them have a quite a broad uh i'll say spectrum of investments but the things that they tend to be most interested in spend the most time on i found are most sort of uh excited about tend to be alternative uh investments and so that can be managed for whatever

That's a great question.

I, you know, for what we do, I still really like the private credit space.