How I Invest with David Weisburd
E284: Why Family Offices Invest Differently w/Robert Blabey
16 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So you were the CIO of several family offices before starting Align. What gap did you see in the market that led you to start Align in 2014?
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.
Chapter 2: What unique gap in the market led to the creation of Align?
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.
And how would you describe Align's value proposition in a sentence or two? What is it that Align does exactly?
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.
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Chapter 3: How do family offices differ from institutional capital in investment strategies?
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
Alternatives is a big part of the markets. It's quickly going to be roughly the same size of Publix. What part of the market in the alternatives universe do you see as the best risk adjusted part of the market Q4 2025?
That's a great question. I, you know, for what we do, I still really like the private credit space. We've been able to execute on a number of transactions over the last decade. longer than the fund has been in existence. So pre-2019, where we've done a lot of innovative things in private credit.
And these are generally opportunities where we're the sole capital and handling the underwrite for the investment. So this is not typically syndicated private credit. So private credit, it's kind of like ice cream. It just gets mixed in the big bowl and there's lots of different flavors to it. So I know private credit's had some
taken some licks recently, but we've had really good scenarios in private credit. And I think that will continue to offer opportunity in the future. Other than that, I mean, for us, we tend to be more recipients of deal flow coming in.
And so what we look at and what we do are often, they're really predicated or directed by our network of relationships that are delivering us deal flow and offering us opportunity to look at deal flow with them. So We have in the past done thematic things where we've picked a specific theme and sort of gone at it.
But that's really in the last seven years, that's really been only one specific theme that we've done that on. Otherwise, we're recipients of deal flow and we evaluate it as it comes in.
One of the hardest things about not being thematic is that you're being influenced by the inbound deal flow. You're getting fed these narratives from these highly sophisticated parties trying to convince you that this is the next big thing. How do you stay disciplined having an inbound for real estate versus being very thematically focused?
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Chapter 4: What is Align's value proposition in the family office ecosystem?
And we we I find that really healthy because I like the pushback. I like to listen. My goal every day is to work around the smartest people. And I do.
want to feel like you know everybody around me is a lot smarter than i am that's what that's what the hope is so you know i'm out there looking to learn and and i think we bring value to our partners um and uh and have found that you know a number of them we've done repeat deals with too which is which is great i've seen this many times these family offices investing with each other and essentially creating almost this consortium is that just because the opportunities are too big is there other factors why are other family offices bringing you opportunities
It's twofold. Oftentimes, yeah, it's a family deciding that they want to hedge their bets, if you will, and bring in other capital. It's also an acceptance, I'll call it, of what family's value is and what they can bring and what they lack. So if you have a family that's a specialist in
healthcare, and they're looking at a healthcare deal, they may know the science around the healthcare opportunity and the business metrics and the competitors and the marketing opportunity angles and whatnot, but they may have less sophistication on the capital stack side.
And so they may not be as comfortable on how to structure the deal or if, you know, a certain level of leverage is sort of prudent or whatnot, or how to manage maybe the physical side, the real estate side of that healthcare development, you know. And it's not to say that they're newbies in this.
It's just to say that I find a lot of families are accepting and open to bringing in other specialists and ideas from others on the outside. And so for us, at least, that's been effective. And, you know, you see some of the biggest, wealthiest families in the world often co-investing. So I don't think it's a capital, a lack of capital thing.
I think it's more of a, you know, kind of, hey, two plus two equals 10 or whatever.
It's this non-zero-sum way of both evaluating the deal and perhaps having some economies of scale in terms of negotiating firms.
Yeah, exactly. And the other side is, you know, in the institutional world, it's quite competitive, right? You know, if you have a fund that is, you know, out, you know, performing another fund, that the opportunity for them to gather assets and greater AUM around their performance can be notable. And so it is a competitive atmosphere. Families are different.
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Chapter 5: What investment opportunities does Align focus on in private credit?
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My first entree I'll call it to investing was in the early 90s when I started out in New York. And I had the benefit of being around a lot of the earlier hedge fund sort of pioneers as they were investing. And what I recognized was at the time they were really focused on this absolute return sort of opportunistic style of investing. And so they would
to adjust where they were sort of pointing their guns at any given time and might be in publics one day, privates, equity, debt, currencies, commodities. You know, they were they were looking at where opportunity existed. And I just always that always appealed to me personally. I thought it was the smartest way to invest. And so.
Our business model has evolved into, you know, formalizing, I'll call formalizing that. And I think for families, that's a really, you know, smart strategy. And it's where I dedicate my capital personally. But I think it's also just something that, you know, I always sort of laugh. You can pick the best strategy.
real estate manager, investor, but it could just be a bad vintage or period to be investing in real estate. And so you spend all your time assessing and evaluating the top real estate manager, you pick that firm or individual, and then you just happen to get a bad vintage.
And so through no sort of fault of your own, you may not perform as you had underwritten your performance to be because of the vintage versus the manager. And so So for us, this opportunistic being able to pivot, play in different parts of the cap structure of a business or be in the public markets when things in the private markets look more expensive or vice versa to us just makes sense.
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