Family Offices & Private Equity

The phrase family office suggests something more mysterious than it is. Strip away the vocabulary and what remains is a set of decisions about where capital sits, who is allowed to move it, and what happens on the day the plan stops working. Families that keep money across generations are not smarter about markets than everyone else. They are more organized about those three questions.

Private markets are where a growing share of that capital has gone, and the reasons are structural rather than fashionable. Public asset classes have grown more correlated over the last three decades, which means a portfolio can look diversified and behave like a single position. Private assets are priced less often, held longer, and are not dragged along by the same daily sentiment. That is the product. Return is what you are paid for accepting the illiquidity that makes it possible.

The part that gets skipped is that private markets do not offer an average you can buy. In public equities you can purchase the index and be an unremarkable investor with a perfectly good outcome. There is no equivalent here. The spread between a strong manager and a weak one is enormous, and plenty of funds have returned less than the capital committed to them. Which means selection is not a refinement of private investing, it is the entire activity, and the questions that matter are unglamorous: the full track record rather than the case studies, money actually returned rather than what the manager says the remaining holdings are worth, results spread across vintages rather than concentrated in one lucky window, and an honest loss ratio.

These episodes cover how allocators think about that work: how deals get placed rather than marketed, why access is granted to predictability rather than to capital, how a waterfall can quietly undo the seniority you thought you bought, and what changes when you stop asking about upside and start asking about process.

Written in Spanish and in English, with an essay on every page that carries the argument further than the runtime allowed.