After Fed I wanted to focus more on venture capital firms so worked in a bunch of VC firms. Then I was a minority GP at a small TMT fund which we sold to NFLA, and Advaita Capital started because we were initially part of a very large private equity fund and then we separated out and started on my own as a founder. Specifically focusing on areas that are close to my heart: decarbonization and also ESG and DEI, especially in growth equity side, late stage. I also run something called SheVC that was running for quite some time. It was from my own pain point. I was like, where are the female fund managers and institutional LPs? I call it my own personal therapy, but it goes out to a lot of institutional LPs and family offices. And when we decided to start Advaita Capital the biggest focus was: how can we add value specifically at late stage?

Late stage is a different environment, a different beast. 2020–2021 we saw everybody investing, and now we are seeing very few people investing. So we’re happy to go through all those details but excited to be part of this panel.

Kyle MacDonald: Great. Really interesting background. And maybe I’ll sort of pass over to Marina, if you want to tell us a little bit more about the exciting work you’re doing.

Marina Hajipateras: Sure, that sounds great. And I also wanted to thank Simple for having me today and really happy to be here with all our panelists and your moderator Kyle. In terms of my background, I’m the co-founder and GP at TMV. We’re an early-stage VC fund. We invest in seed and Series A stages of companies within logistics, supply chain, transportation, climate, and healthcare industries. Prior to starting TMV in 2017, I worked for my family business which is maritime shipping. I started in 2005. I got my seaman’s license at the Merchant Marine Academy after graduating and moved out to South Korea where we were building ships at the time to get real ground-up experience of the industry. I lived at Hyundai Heavy Industries where we built ships, sailed on them, and then lived between Greece and London overseeing operations.

Ultimately I moved back to the U.S. in 2014 when we decided to take part of the company public. That was a part we had started in 2005—it’s a 200-year-old family business. I led the in-house IR roadshow for the IPO on the NYSE. We raised a little over $135 million for about a billion-dollar valuation. I joined the environmental committee and I’m still the vice chair now. About 15 years ago I knew that shipping wasn’t seen as environmentally friendly. I wanted to be part of the shift within the industry. That now shapes how we invest at TMV.

I started making direct investments, met my business partner (we had gone to college together), and we started the VC fund we’re on our third fund now. I focus on supply chain and shipping. That’s what led me to VC—because of the experience I had in the industry I’m passionate about. I never planned to go into VC either!

Kyle MacDonald: What a fascinating journey. Which we’ll get to dive a little bit deeper into shortly. Let’s go with Chris. Let’s hear a little bit about what it is you’re doing.

Chris Shen: Also thanks to Simple for having me this morning in the Bay Area. Similar sort of trajectories like Gayathri and Marina—kind of stumbled into what we’re doing now. It’s basically a manifestation of experiences and sort of things that were missing, and you want to build a solution. So I’m originally from Texas and then did the unorthodox thing of moving to Asia, Beijing in 2006 when everyone was kind of leaving or flying in. I decided to move out there for a year. As the story goes, a year turns into two turns and then, and eventually I was in Asia for 13 years. Corporate finance lawyer with the global law firm of Baker McKenzie, and then moved over to the buy side for a Forbes China list family office that I co-founded and ran external asset managers for from 2015 to 2019.

It was during that experience where I found that the big brand name VCs—and I think we’ll talk about this today—they’re not open to most people. They’re open to endowments, pensions, sovereigns. So we had to go about getting tech and early-stage tech exposure in different ways. Fast forward to today, after moving back to the United States, I co-founded Revere with my co-founder Eric Woo, and it’s a manifestation of our experiences. Me from the family office side—not having good access, bandwidth, and resources to invest in this very important asset class—and my co-founder was at a couple of fund-of-funds, essentially running their emerging managers book.

We do a couple of things. Revere basically exists to let a wide range of allocators—ranging from ultra-high-net-worth family offices all the way up to the largest endowments and CBCs of the world—do two things: get better data around emerging managers such as Gayathri and Marina, who are doing really exciting things that are going to outperform the brand names that everyone’s known and heard of. They’re not going to be able to do shipping and they’re certainly not going to be doing the things that Gayathri is doing. That’s one.

Two, given the market volatility and what’s going on in the world, where it’s not going to go away in the next six to eight months—but will start smoothing out—we do portfolio management software. If you think about it, if you’re a funds investor, fund-of-funds, etc., and you’re looking for transparency at different levels in your portfolio, we give you the tools to unlock that data and the risk management that everyone needs, given the blowups that we’ve seen in the last six months, etc.

So we do data up front, portfolio management in the back, and we help people build what they want to do in venture capital. Everyone here I’m sure is interested in VC. We just give you the tools to access and do it better.

Kyle MacDonald: Brilliant. And Kensin, let’s hear from you.

Kensin Lowe: Thank you, Kyle. And thank you Simple for having me here today. Excited to join the panel. Interesting to hear all the background from all the panelists. Chris moved to Beijing in 2006—exactly. I’m originally from Hong Kong and moved out from Hong Kong to the U.S. in 2008. I spent about eight years in the U.S., went to business school, started my career as a trader and then portfolio manager.

Then I moved back to Hong Kong, working with family offices—pretty much dealing with two things: portfolio structuring and deal sourcing for private market opportunities. And then opportunity took me from Hong Kong to Germany, where I spent another four years working with a few family offices doing similar activities. I kind of firsthand witnessed the opacity of the private market—private equity, venture capital. Chris mentioned it: all the big brand name funds are only available for institutional investors. So the access, the knowledge, the tools are not available for smaller family offices. Even if you are $100, $200, $300 million AUM, there are gaps.

So it brings me to London. I’m based in London now. I founded DOT Investing, which is a private market platform offering diversified portfolios in private equity, venture capital, private debt—all kinds of private market funds. What Chris does is a lot of collecting data and knowledge base. For us, we provide access and a solution. We go out to do all the due diligence. We have a network of GPs focused on mid-sized managers—private equity, private debt, venture—and we build diversified portfolios, hard-to-find hidden gems for family offices, wealth managers, and HNWIs.

The second thing is we build a technology platform to streamline the whole investment process. We lower the minimum investment barrier and create a feeder fund structure to aggregate smaller tickets into underlying funds. So for family offices, we provide access, structuring, knowledge, and the full investment process.

Kyle MacDonald: As you can see we have a fascinating panel today in terms of being able to explore your opportunities up front all the way through to secondaries and beyond. I think I’ll start with a question direct to Chris—particularly around, obviously right now is quite an exciting dynamic time for the venture capital market. How are you seeing family offices are beginning to approach, or should be thinking about approaching, their investments within venture capital?

Chris Shen: Yeah, I think someone brought up a really good point earlier. If there’s a takeaway from any of this, it’s that the four or five of us have been in this game for a while. We know that almost all risk-on or riskier assets are affected by interest rates. Interest rates have been telegraphed around the world by most countries to stay at a certain handle, and that’s going to impact what we see in the world now.

In the last five to ten years, you were able to see companies like ByteDance, SpaceX, Klarna, and others—those valuations were pretty crazy, right? Let’s call a spade a spade. People were investing very late, throwing money into the wind, and it would blow back 2x. Everyone would be happy and move on. Call it VC. That’s different now.

If you’re playing in that space, you should rely on experts like Gayathri who actually know what they’re doing, instead of just punting on names. But I also posit that venture capital as an asset class has matured. You have idea stage, seed, early growth, late growth, pre-IPO. It’s a mature asset class now. Like real estate, you need exposure across all stages to get a balanced portfolio. If you’re doing too much of one or the other and you’re not an expert, it’s going to be painful—we’ll be honest.

Right now, you can log into Robinhood or Interactive Brokers and buy any flavor of Japanese bonds, European growth, U.S. long/short. There’s going to be a day where you can log onto different platforms or do research and buy venture capital exposure across different slices and flavors like you would in public markets.

Kyle MacDonald: Yeah, really interesting. And I think on that topic of emerging managers—Marina, in your scenario, you’ve worn both hats: been in the family office space and you’re very much a shining star in the emerging manager space within VC. Why right now is the right time to bet on the right type of emerging manager?

Marina Hajipateras: I think access is a huge part of it—and diligence. For us as early-stage VCs, and with the specific industries we look at, we are honing in on those industries and putting ourselves in every place possible to meet entrepreneurs. Or, because of shipping, they’re coming to us—there aren’t many VCs with that background.

And I’m excited that the industry is ready for that now. As a family office, we were operating the company at the same time, and there wasn’t time to go out and find these entrepreneurs. And if we did meet one, we’d just choose that one—not knowing there were ten others out there. But we can do that. And then we maintain relationships—my business partner was in VC for a long time and maintains relationships with top firms that go in later. So we have that access too.

It’s the right time because of our industries and because we’re doing all the work for everyone, as we should be doing in this early stage.

Kyle MacDonald: Great. And Gayathri, flipping from that more early-stage lens to late-stage—how should family offices think about their relationship with emerging managers at that stage?

Gayathri Sarkar: It’s a great question, and Marina gave such an amazing answer. Venture capital is an access industry. We’ve been in the industry for a long time. These relationships go back to the founders. Same with late-stage. My founders at late stage are paper billionaires, and these relationships go back five to ten years.

At our firm, we invest in two areas: 1) advancing the human race—technologies like AI, machine learning, life sciences that change who we are; and 2) decarbonization—battery storage, nuclear fusion, future of food. It’s difficult to convince people on these areas; they look shiny, impact-driven, and sustainable—but not many people are interested.

For family offices, when it comes to late stage, many of the companies we invest in may be available on the secondary market—but that’s where the problem lies. You don’t always have enough financials or data to do due diligence. And sometimes those opportunities aren’t even legal. I’ll give two examples. We’re working on a deal where we got exclusive cap table approval from the CEO. That same company appears on other secondary markets—but those deals aren’t company-approved.

That’s why, especially when you’re paying $5, $10, $25 million, it’s important to know who you’re working with. Venture capitalists aren’t just connected to the ecosystem—they’re close to founders. They understand the diligence, the internal information that’s needed. That’s important for any family office—even sophisticated ones.

And most VC firms give amazing co-investment opportunities. I think LPs should absolutely take advantage of that.

Gayathri Sarkar: I remember when I first started my firm, Soraya told me, “You need to go and find the family offices.” I was like, where can I find these family offices? Because most of the rich people I know, they’ve already started their own family firm—like a VC firm. It is interesting. I’ve seen the rise of so many VC firms coming from family offices in 2020 and 2021. Now they’re getting very conservative because we participated—along with everybody—at very inflated valuations. And with the market correction happening, we’re seeing the distributions and returns are not that great.

So it’s important to understand that this relationship matters, and this is where we act more like a partner. If you’re new in this industry—or even a mature family office—I would always recommend working with a VC.

Kyle MacDonald: Brilliant. On that topic of a market correction—if you’re sitting in a family office right now as a CIO or CRO, there are some meaningful opportunities out there. But you’re also asking, how do you manage fees, find the right information, and manage deal flow?

Kensin, how are you seeing clients beginning to look at management fees or rethink the research and assets they’re engaging with?

Kensin Lowe: Yeah, it’s an interesting point. What we’re talking about today is how emerging managers can benefit venture capital and family offices. A lot of family offices are now operating like venture capitalists. But for many, they have limited resources—maybe a team of five to fifteen people. All VC managers know that managing one portfolio company is really time-consuming. Imagine managing a portfolio while still going out to seek new investments, do due diligence, and gather information.

Managing funds—like venture capital funds—can help outsource deal flow and due diligence and give access to underlying opportunities. That’s key. In today’s market, I believe emerging managers are offering better risk-reward than many branded funds. But what matters is specialization. A lot of general VC funds don’t have specificity. Marina, for example, has shipping expertise. Niche fund managers have those skills and can outperform larger firms.

Many emerging managers spun out from established private fund investment companies. They know how to identify opportunities in inefficient or overlooked niches. But for family offices, the hardest part is getting access to qualified funds. There are so many emerging managers now that tracking them requires the same rigor and discipline as evaluating direct deals.

That’s where Chris comes in with data, and where DOT provides due diligence—not on individual deals, but on the fund level. What kind of data? What kind of management? What kind of diligence do they go through?

When looking at fees, it comes down to net returns. And how many resources do you need to generate those returns? How many people would you need to hire in-house?

Kyle MacDonald: Chris—jumping off from that and also thinking about ESG and impact—how should family offices begin to baseline what “good” looks like and how they can deliver impact with capital allocation?

Chris Shen: Yeah, that’s almost one step before you do your asset allocation. When we get inbound from family offices—especially those that just had an exit—they’re usually overexposed to the sector they came from. A real estate tycoon, a tech entrepreneur, etc.

I give the example of one of Sam Altman’s investors. He comes from an equity derivatives background. He wasn’t a VC. He didn’t touch any of that stuff. He’s not going to tell Sam how to invest—he’s there to balance everything else out.

So family offices should be aware of what their plans are. Some aren’t going to follow the Swensen model. They want to see returns in three to five years. That’s fine—it’s their money. But that changes what fits their window.

Let’s assume the family office has done the allocation and IPS and wants to pursue venture capital. From there, you think about what you care about. If it’s battery technology, because you’re concerned about energy independence—or enterprise SaaS to support your business—then go deep in that area.

Throwing money at direct deals to get on the cap table—that was the trend in the past decade. But it’s not for everyone. That’s cocktail party stuff. Instead, understand what you’re investing in.

We work with 250 emerging managers. We rate them across 20 metrics—tell them what they’re good at and where they can improve.

If a family office is focused on co-investments and the manager doesn’t offer them—it’s not a match. If you want someone from the shipping industry and you’re investing in logistics—go to Marina. You won’t find anyone better.

Right now, family offices are over-brokered. They go to one event and start getting pitched on private credit, hedge funds, litigation finance. You need to sift through the noise and find your signal. It’s your money.

Kyle MacDonald: There’s a great question from the chat—what opportunities do you see in Africa for VCs? We’ll return to that. But first, Marina, how should VCs and family offices think about this new relationship? What could be done better?

Marina Hajipateras: For us, we operate small enough that we can cater to what our family office LPs want. Co-investments, direct deals, seeing every maritime startup—we have some ports investing in us because they don’t have time to build databases. Same in healthcare—my partner’s focus.

There are different levels of engagement that LPs want. Co-investments are huge. SPVs and direct investments too—especially at the growth stage. We build relationships with founders for 9–10 years and can access later-stage deals.

Some LPs also want impact. We’re not an “impact fund” by label, but we comply with UN SDGs each year and track how we support purpose-driven founders. Visa Foundation is one of our LPs and required that. So we do it—and believe in it.

At this stage, we can work closely with each family office to understand what they want and try to match that. We’re very engaged—or not—depending on their preference.

Kyle MacDonald: Brilliant. That makes sense—adapting to the family office’s needs. We also got a question about shifting appetite—from tech toward more illiquid assets like real estate or fractional ownership. Thoughts?

Chris Shen: If I may, I’ll tee that up. We’re in a high interest rate environment that will likely hold into the U.S. 2024 election year. People are seeking yield. Even Bitcoin shot up with SVB and Silvergate collapses.

Nimble investors like Kensin can find yield. But family offices are long-term thinkers. Shipping is a 200-year-old business—you’re not thinking about the next quarter.

Same for VC. If you’re augmenting your portfolio with VC, you’re doing it for the long term. Valuations have reset. Founders are more disciplined. Less perks, more focus on profitability. Now is the time to start doing the work.

Kensin Lowe: Exactly. Doesn’t matter if it’s VC or trading. Buy low. Now is a down cycle—so it’s a better price. Look at vintage years like 2008–2009—they outperformed. Same with 2023 and 2024 vintages.

More innovation comes out of tough times. The best VCs right now are supporting those companies—not just throwing money at inflated valuations. Work with high-quality emerging managers. You’ll find better risk-adjusted returns.

Gayathri Sarkar: Yes—and we’re in an unprecedented market. $30 trillion went into the system since 2008, and now it’s being unwound. COVID created dry powder and inflated pricing.

If you invested at those prices, now is the time to be conservative? No—I say the opposite. Now is the time to get in. Market correction means more disciplined investing and honest valuations. Stripe went from $95B to $50B.

This is an investor’s market—not a founder’s market. This is the best time to invest.

Especially in private markets—real estate, private funds—great places to park money. But you must focus on asset quality.

Chris Shen: Exactly. There’s blood in the streets. That’s when you start doing the work and buying good assets.

Kyle MacDonald: Final question. What if a family office lacks in-house expertise? How can they still engage in venture capital effectively?

Chris Shen: Great question. Hiring analysts is expensive. Many go to large funds or start startups. Labor is tight. So you start with data. Benchmarking. Platforms like ours help you process the signal from all the VC noise.

Then use platforms like Kensin’s for execution and access. Don’t build in-house—it’s costly. Instead, invest in managers like Gayathri and Marina. They become your extended team. They’re your ears and eyes.

Emerging managers give you regional or domain expertise. You don’t go to Europe and magically know shipping. You back someone like Marina.

Over time, that’s cheaper and more effective than building your own team.

Kensin Lowe: 100% agree. That’s why I built DOT Investing. We help family offices by becoming an outsourced CIO. We do fund sourcing and diligence. Then, when it comes to co-investments, we direct them to funds like Gayathri’s or Marina’s.

And we use data from Chris’s platform to help. It’s all about execution and support.

Chris Shen: Also, let’s be honest—private bankers in Zurich or Hong Kong aren’t going to know tech like this panel does. They’re great at certain things. But for venture? This is the room you want.

Kyle MacDonald: Let’s end on a high note. What makes you optimistic about venture right now? Chris?

Chris Shen: This stuff is fascinating. We’re investing in science fiction that’s about to become reality. Marina’s transforming shipping. Gayathri’s bringing discipline to secondaries. Kensin and Revere are building the tools. Ten years ago, this wasn’t possible. Now it’s all at your fingertips. Don’t jump in the deep end, but start learning.

Kyle MacDonald: Marina?

Marina Hajipateras: It’s about collaboration—family offices, VCs, founders. This “winter” is a time for us as managers to help founders. Strategize. Give them longer runways. That’s our role. And we’re doing it.

Kyle MacDonald: Gayathri?

Gayathri Sarkar: This is the best time to invest. Valuations are right. Founders are focused. It’s an investor’s market. Venture is now respected. When I tell my banker I’m a VC, there’s not even a drop-down option—I have to type “Other.”

But we’ve come far. Family offices are more sophisticated. And with platforms like Revere and DOT, we’re in a golden era of information. The next 20–30 years will be amazing.

Kyle MacDonald: Kensin?

Kensin Lowe: It’s about passion. Family offices investing in VC aren’t just after returns—they want to support innovation. When you back emerging managers, you get engagement and strategy. You unlock new technologies and untapped alpha. It’s not passive—it’s a partnership.

Kyle MacDonald: Brilliant. Thank you all for your insights. Jess, back to you.

Jess Spiro: Thank you, Kyle—and thank you Gayathri, Marina, Kensin, and Chris for such a thoughtful discussion. There’s no denying that VC remains a key focus for family offices. I hope today’s insights help as you shape your venture strategy.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in. The recording will be available here on LinkedIn, on the Simple platform, and on YouTube. This webinar is part of our ongoing series exploring the family office world. Keep an eye out for our next session.

If you’d like to learn more about Simple or our high-touch services, please reach out. And we’d love your feedback. Thanks again—and goodbye for now.