E169: How to Build an Enduring Private Equity Franchise w/Alex Robinson
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What are the best practices for GPs to scale trust with LPs?
What have been the best practices in terms of GPs that have been able to scale their trusted relationships with LPs and build real platform? They care very deeply about how their investments are portrayed, about the quality of information they're getting to LPs, about the frequency, about the timeliness, because they believe that this represents their brand and it represents part of the trust building that they're in the business of conveying. Today, I'm excited to welcome Alex Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Juniper Square, the leading investment management platform for the private funds industry. Alex is a serial entrepreneur who has raised over $100 million to transform how real estate and private equity firms raise, manage, and report capital, as well as most critically, build lasting relationships with LPs.
We'll explore his journey from Microsoft to building Juniper Square, his vision for digitizing private markets, and how he's driving innovation to one of the world's largest markets. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Alex. Tell me about how you started Juniper Square over a decade ago. It was my third startup. So I learned what I'd made some mistakes with the first two, which were in the clean tech field. And I'd made a little bit of money from my second startup. And so the genesis for Juniper Square was my experience as an LP. investing into private funds. I did a direct real estate deal and they sent a FedEx truck to my house with a stack of paperwork two inches thick. I invested in a real estate fund, same story, 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 2013, I could trade stocks online. I could do my healthcare online. I could buy shoes online.
The whole world had moved to cloud and had moved to digital, except for the private markets industry, which was still shuffling paper around on vans and trucks. And it just seemed to me that it's not like the industry was two or three years behind. It was like 20 years behind where the public markets were. And what was clear to me at that point was the private markets were going to come to look like the public markets. They were going to be efficient like the public markets. There was going to be the same degree of transparency, same degree of liquidity. And you were going to be able to execute these complex trades, investing into a private markets fund, a venture fund, private equity fund, real estate fund, et cetera. By clicking buttons in a web browser, just like you could do in the public markets.
And the genesis for Juniper Square was really me and my co-founders, Adam Ginsberg and Jonas Faseja, becoming fascinated with this question of how would you go about making that transformation of the private markets happen? And that's been our vision and mission since the founding of the company. Our first foray was building an investor relations product. We can talk about why we started there if that's of interest. But since we've grown to also add fund administration and we now serve more than 2000 GPs across all private markets, asset classes, 40,000 funds, millions of investor positions, a pretty good scale in the industry. You had this thesis that the private market was going to be as simple as the public markets. What was the first inkling or the first kernel that you saw that things were evolving in this direction?
It was clear that the industry was growing rapidly. I mean, even back, you could look today and every market study suggests that the private markets, which are already huge now, they're $30 trillion, $40 trillion of investor capital, depending on who's estimate, you believe. And even today in 2025, they're set to double again over the next decade. But if you wind back the clock a decade ago to when we started Juniper Square, it was clear that there was a lot of growth coming. into the private market sector. That's where the opportunity was. Companies were staying private longer. And that's where you could find alpha more easily than the public markets. And so it was clear to me that the sector was going to mature.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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