Adam Torres and Adam Campbell discuss the Jets and Capital event.
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Jets and Capital event coverage In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Adam Campbell, COO at Fund Launch Partners, explore Fund Launch Partner and the Jets and Capital event.
About Adam Campbell
Adam W. Campbell, CPA brings over 20 years of experience in accounting, finance, and business intelligence including 8+ years in family offices and 13+ years of work in PE backed real estate companies focused on multi-family, commercial, debt and seniors housing developments. He was a founding employee for a real estate fund in Salt Lake City, UT that managed over $5 Billion of AUM. He has played key roles in scaling accounting & finance departments from the ground up in privately held and VC/PE backed operating companies. Adam also has extensive experience transportation, waste management, hospitality, industrial mining, and new venture finance industries.
About Fund Launch Partners
Fund Launch Partners is a GP Stakes / GP Seeding firm that partners and invests in emerging fund managers.
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Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right. So today I am in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m at the Jets in Capital event. My first time here.
Let me tell you, it has been absolutely amazing. And my guest on the show today, Adam, man, you can’t go wrong with Adams. Adam Campbell, welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. Alright, so, first off, I’ve been really enjoying this event. It’s my first time to the event. How did you get involved? Like, how many times have you been here?
Oh, I’ve actually been to about three events now since since it started. And some of the original founders of the organization were great friends of mine. I’ve known them for almost 15, close to 20 years now. So I’ve been following and watching and they just put on such fantastic events and have great opportunities to network and connect with people that I don’t miss out on a chance to be able to jump in and kind of enjoy the community and the crowd.
Yeah. What’s your favorite part about attendee? Favorite part is the community organizers have a great opportunity to bring people together from all walks of life. So they’ve got people who are fundraising, people who are allocators, family offices. A lot of people are going through and doing IPOs for companies.
And the cool thing is they’ve just got good people overall. So a lot of people that just want to want to socialize with other people in the community. Yeah. So your company, Fund Launch Partners, like tell us a little bit more about what you do. Yeah. So Fund Launch Partners came about from an incubator of emerging manager funds.
And what the founders found years ago is if you ever wanted to start a fund, you kind of had to go from like a Blackstone huge allocator and be able to peel off and have your Ivy League degree and do something to it. To be able to pull all that money and start a fund. Yeah, but if you’re a really good asset manager you done You know multi family or different private equity or venture capital or even if you’re a great hedge fund trader There’s like no school to be able to start off and actually launch a fund.
Hmm, so they they went through figured out some some different opportunities and built a program called fund launch and fun launch today It’s been around about five years It’s been able to help hundreds of clients been able to put together a fund and effectively manage a micro startup fund and hopefully get To the point where you’re not just an emerging manager.
You’re You’re a larger allocator in the area. Where’s the, where’s kind of like the base level on something like this? I’m curious. So you’ve helped hundreds at this point. Like, what does it start at? What is like, obviously the goal is as much as possible, but like, where does it start? It usually starts with somebody who’s got probably a decade of experience.
They’ve done three or four full cycle deals. They’ve gone out and fundraised from their friends and family. It’s kind of a, we see that a lot that there are people who are willing to go out and. Ask grandma or uncles or friends or neighbors and just say, look, I got a great deal and I got to share it and I know I can do that with your guys’s help.
And so they’ll bring in a lot. So a lot of these people have raised three or four or five million they’ve done it for a decade. They’ve got experience and they, they, they’re willing to work with a team. They understand that there’s stuff they know and there’s stuff they don’t know, which is very different than a lot of asset managers.
You see some that just, they look at it and go, I’m the shiz and I’m just going to run this. These guys look at it and go, I think I’m missing something cause I can’t raise any more money from friends and family, but I don’t, I don’t want to deal with like security compliance. It’s almost like they hit a.
Ceiling on knowledge and what they’re doing. And they were successful at that. They demonstrate it. And they’re like, how are these other people doing it? Like, what are they doing? Or what do they know that I don’t know? Am I off on that? I’m no, that that’s spot on. So usually what happens in kind of the progression of it is they hit that wall.
They look at it and say, I don’t want to deal with securities and investors and reporting, or just want to do the asset. And when they come into FunLaunch, it’s kind of nice because FunLaunch puts everything in a box for them. So, like third party admin, accounting and finance, fundraising, like investor reporting, and they look at it and say, look, the best thing we can do is help you do more assets.
Like just, just do what you love doing and we’re going to take all this stuff that’s systematized and processed, kind of can it, and help pop it in your pocket so that you can run a successful fund that’s working with assets rather than doing these individual one off deals. And that’s where FunLaunch came.
And I mean, now they’ve helped over 4 billion come into different assets from all their different clients that they’ve had. So it’s been a really successful endeavor over the years. It’s, it’s quite big. Where do you see it going? Like, give me some next steps. I know, I know. Where do you see it going? They have about a hundred, 150 clients come through on an annual basis.
So that’s, that’s a lot of them. How many apply? I mean, like it’s probably much more, quite a bit. A lot. I mean, Bridger Pennington, who’s the founder of the group, him and his partners, Mason Brands and Lincoln Archibald, they’re fantastic guys to work with are fantastic partners. They built a pretty good system for it.
And what we realized over the years. I think four billion, I mean, come on. Something’s working, like I’m saying. Yeah, it definitely is. Well, what ended up happening is, for FunLaunch, they helped all these managers launch, and there were many times that the managers would come to FunLaunch and say, you know what, I’d love for you guys to stick around, you know, I’ve got it launched, I need some more pricing.
Maybe a little piece of their business they didn’t quite have nailed down. They said, will you guys just step on and be advisers? You know, we’ll give you some minority interest and some shares, but we just want you to keep working with us. And FunLaunch said, nah, we’ll pass a little bit. And then, you know, you’d get a 200 or 500 million client pop out of that.
And they’d be like, hmm, and another one would pop out and they’d say no. And after a while, and you start getting a couple hundred million, a couple billion, they’re like I think we should have said thank you, yes, and just rolled with it. So fund launch partners, where I’m primarily working with, that was the evolution of being what they call a GP stakes fund and a GP stakes fund basically invests into emerging managers.
And we have a kind of a niche where we, we see the emerging manager market that everybody knows is 2 billion or less. And that’s a lot. That’s calling like a sports car is anything with four wheels. You’re like, actually, it’s not, it’s a little. little more niche. So we started looking and realized FunLaunch produces micro funds and these micro fund managers are usually from 10 million up to 50 maybe even 200 million.
Yeah. So it’s almost like you’re grooming them at different levels and one day at some point they hit the, you know, the major leagues. Like that’s the goal. Yep. That’s exactly what it is. And there’s, there’s vendor selection, there’s information reporting, there’s like costs associated with legal and third party and audits.
That as a 20 million fund is not the same as a 200 million fund. And investors wouldn’t expect that. But if you look historically through the returns, these early micro funds in their first and second and third fund, they outperform their peers by sometimes double digit percentages in the same industry.
Wow. And if you think about it, these are the guys that are proving themselves. They’re taking, you know, They’re hungry. Yeah, they’re hungry. They really want to do it. And not only are they hungry, but they’re achieving. They’re proving it. Yeah. So our goal with FunLaunch is to democratize Wall Street, to get a lot of this money that’s coming from huge allocators and portfolio allocations going from 20 percent in alternatives up to 40, 50, 60 percent of people’s portfolios.
So we know there’s going to be a lot of alternative capital in the market, and it just seems like a shame that it goes right back up to Blackstone or, you know, some of these big allocators. Because there’s tons of fantastic alternative managers that might be atypical because they’re just really good at assets and we can bolt on the rest of the machine to say, you know what, you’ve been good you’re good at doing and Exactly.
Just, let’s just add an extra zero to it. Let’s help you build the machine that can pump out more assets more efficiently and quicker. And that’s FunLaunch Partners. What are you looking for in the managers? Like, give some of the attributes of what you’re looking for. Sure. So, in our selection criteria, there’s, there’s a couple of things that we see.
The first one’s that they’ve got probably 10 years of experience in the area they’re launching a fund. This isn’t like a dentist who bought a couple buildings and he’s like, 30 years a dentist? I think I’m a multifamily guy. We’re like, yeah, maybe rethink that a little bit. So experience in where they’re operating.
The second one is they’ve got some kind of experience doing fundraising. They’ve borrowed money. They’ve went to investors. They know how to carry a conversation and talk about those returns. That’s a very key one. The third one is just making sure they have a unique thesis. That competitive edge. If you think you’re going into multifamily against KKR to buy big multifamily, you’re going to get crushed.
But if you’ve got a specialty niche in, you know, multifamily real estate that you’re doing some kind of twist or. Like industrial sectors or we got a few guys that have some competitive oil and gas and energy sector plays like if they found out a way to be, you know, competitive in their space or their niche and you’re like, what they’re doing, what exactly what kind of wait a minute, how they think of that, like if they, I got it.
That’s exactly what, and the cool thing is these are the asset managers that are more technical. Yeah. They’re more analytical. Yeah. They’re usually more niche specialty. And when you look at it and say, who do I want to trust my money with? Is it the big allocator that’s got half a billion of assets or the guy who actually goes out into Texas in the oil fields and is a geological engineer?
Yeah. You know, at some point I’m like, if I could put it with the geologist, I’d, I’d totally put it with it. But you know, he’s not a fund manager. Well. He is now. Interesting. And we help enhance those guys opportunities. So that, that competitive edge is really a key one. And the fourth one, it seems intuitive, but there’s a lot of different specialties with a lot of mind frames and skill sets.
So, we look at it and say, you’ve got to be able to work with a team. And private equity microphones are there. Wasn’t expecting that one. Yeah. Yeah. So, if you have a single guy that comes and says, Hey, I do assets, I raise funds, I’m an accountant in the back office, and I can cover all the administrative work.
It’s like, what do you need us for then? Yeah, we’re kind of like, that’s a lot of, we just pick one. Let’s find some other guys that help you out, but pick one, do it well. And let’s see if we can round the other. So being able to work in a small group specialty team is actually one of the core requirements for us.
Makes a lot of sense. Well, Adam, I know there’s a lot of out here. You got to go do with this at this conference right now. So Jetson Capital, last thing I want you to do. I want you to look at the camera and tell everybody how they can learn more and how they can follow up. Sure. Well, we’re always looking for additional fund managers that want to grow and develop faster.
So the easiest way to reach out to us is look us up on fun launch partners. com or you can also pull up on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram and follow us there. And we’re more than happy to just bring you along for the ride. And we’d love to see more managers out there. Fantastic. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put those links in the show notes.
So that you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Adam, man. Appreciate you coming on. Awesome. Thank you, man.