Joe Lonsdale on how Opto aims to enhance private investing for RIAs and family offices
Private investing today, there's very little data. It's very much just like asking your friends what they think. It's very much oftentimes emotionally driven, just driven by what you happen to be sold at a given day, as opposed to looking at the landscape of everything out there and understanding what the best people are doing in each space, understanding how to align your values, how to align your goals. It's very hard for most people to approach it in a sophisticated way. It's very opaque. So there's a lot to fix.
I started Opto because this is a really important market. It's a really exciting market, and the market's a mess right now. It's not just that the top RIAs don't always have access to the best things, even the top investment banks. The stuff I see people offering their clients from supposedly sophisticated banks. A lot of it's terrible. And how do you give the clients access? How do you figure out what they're passionate about? How do you show them options? When people are making high returns on their money, that means more economic growth, it means they are creating more with their money, it means their money is being less lazy. And it's our job to help them do that.
Building Addepar, I learned there's a lot of different types of RIAs and family offices you're not really building for one client. There's really tens or even over 100 types of clients. Everyone has specific ways of doing things. People are experts in one thing and not something else. And when you're trying to go after the space that give people access to the private markets, they might be the best in the world at a certain area but then not really know much at all about venture capital or energy or credit. And what I learned is that you have to meet people where they are. You have to tailor it to the way they think about the world. And you have to give them access to things that otherwise they might not have seen.
My vision for Opto is if we're doing a great job in five years and ten years from now, we're helping allocate trillions of dollars towards areas that are higher returning, that are creating more value, we’re helping people's money be less lazy, we’re helping people's money express their values in ways that are exciting. And we're making a lot of RIAs a lot more confident about the space; we’re making a lot of family offices a lot more confident about how to access these markets. And we're really making the private markets a more dynamic place where more people can achieve better things for the world, using the capital behind it.
What's different about Opto than other alt access platforms or alternative investment access platforms is that we started off as a technology company. We have core tech DNA. We're trying to build a solution that partners with the RIA. So we're coming to the RIA, we're saying you have this set of problems. How do we help make you run your business better? How do you help your clients express their values, understand what's going on, and how do we make money in a way that's aligned with your goals? While being an honest interlocutor for the space, giving you access to everything going on in the right way.
You know, if Opto is successful, we’re going to route more money towards good ideas, you know, there's always going to be speculative fads, there's always going to be malinvestment. But hopefully, giving people a better perspective on all the options out, there’s going to be less malinvestment and more money that's creating jobs, creating value for the world. You’re going to have a lot larger, more dynamic private markets, and it's going to be a lot more intuitive for RIAs and family offices on how to access those markets.