YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Kelly

lines on the record: 81
first: 2025-11-24
most recent: 2025-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You know, Ted, I have two teenage boys and our kids know each other their whole lives. For Kristen and me, it's quality time with the family now that we'll be empty nesters here in a couple of years. In a work setting, it's more towards servant leadership. So helping others, teaching others. I've been blessed in my career, what I've been able to do now. I'd like to help other people achieve what they're setting out to do.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know where it originated from. If it was the Bible or Bruce Lee, but something to the effect of so you believe. So you will achieve my own interpretation of that is about mindset. The mind can be the greatest limiter to your own progress, but it also can be the greatest force accelerator if harnessed correctly. If you believe that you can achieve something, that growth mindset can take you very far.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to start with Lee Cooperment. Without him, I don't think I would be here for giving me the opportunity to break into the alternative investment industry. And then I would say Gil Cafre. Gil was the head trader at Tiger. He was my partner at Front Point. He's been my mentor now for, gosh, about 25 plus years, just someone who impressed me with his integrity and how to treat others with integrity. Outside of that, there's honorable mentions Julian Robertson and Sunny Harford. Anyone who gave a young me a shot deserves a place on my personal hall of fame.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am the son of a single Irish woman who gave birth to me and put me up for adoption. She was living in the United States. She died shortly thereafter, sadly. I was adopted by two amazing parents. My dad was a World War II veteran at the age of sixteen, an NYPD cop in a few precincts, South Bronx and Queens. He was an amazing guy. My mom raised me and my four siblings and just passed this year. I owe her and my dad everything. They gave me the gift of education. I was the first in my family to go to college. How I wound up here. But for the grace of God and some amazing parents, I'll never know.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything fitness related, the more intense, the better. I used to enjoy triathlons. I'd say nowadays I like lifting heavy objects”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Delivering for clients. We're in a new regime in the market backdrop. It's going to be more difficult, higher uncertainty, higher volatility, higher inflation, the old playbook is not going to work for the markets we're heading into. And helping investors, both institutional investors and individual investors, navigate that and offering them investment strategies that will work well and provide the kind of income growth and diversification that they're going to need. That's what excites me.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To think about these things. And it's changing rapidly. Kids today have a life expectancy, I think, 103 years old or something to that effect. With AI, who knows how long they'll live. But we don't really design insurance and investment products encompassing that and the duration of what that's going to entail. That's a huge area that needs to be further explored. Digitization and tokenization of private assets will come and it's going to provide a significant amount of opportunities in the future.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100, 120 billion dollars, almost two trillion dollars of stocks of small amounts of secondary markets will grow. We're in the very early innings of secondary markets for both fund level investments individual GP-led single asset secondaries pre-IPO secondaries and things of that nature. That area is another big area for growth. Outside of that AI gets a lot of the press in terms of what that will do for the economy, for financial services and healthcare and all of these businesses. The area that probably doesn't get a lot of press is longevity. And what I mean by that is the reality is our children are going to live much longer lives than our parents ever did by decades. What is that going to mean for investment products, for insurance, for retirement plans, the complexion of asset allocation, and how we design portfolios?”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of opportunities, if you're looking over the long arc, there's still tremendous opportunity in private credit despite recent concerns about individual credits, despite the fears that there might be a bubble forming. We are still undercapitalized in private credit to where the opportunity set is. The amount of dry powder and private equity, the number of companies that want access to lending capital. We are just scratching the surface on areas like asset-based finance, which is a multi-trillion dollar market. We're only just beginning to offer those in private credit. There's still significant room for growth there. In the secondaries market, we have a $10 trillion private equity market globally, only $200 billion of volume in private equity secondaries this year. 2% of the stock in private credit, that number is”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To provide the ecosystem with the ability to seamlessly gain access directly into these investments, those things just take time.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thus began a cycle of more challenging backdrops for, say, stocks and bonds together in a 60-40 portfolio and for bonds generally in long duration fixed income instruments. That accelerated this trend of wanting to put assets into private credit, private equity vehicles. We also had a tremendous evolution in structures in private wealth, in the platforms themselves, so the wire houses and large RAAs and their level of sophistication and their build out of resources, the operational and regulatory complexities were being solved, the infrastructure that firms like iCapital in case we're putting in place to help facilitate these investments. All of that took time was a confluence of all of that coming together over the past decade.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Felt the same way when we were building front point, we were wondering if this institutional trend was ever going to happen. It pays to be early, but it also requires a lot of patience in some ways, or what I would call the golden era of the market backdrop that started in 1987 when Volker stepped down, ended in 2021 with the end of zero interest rates.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What created the tipping point for a decade ago you thought this would happen? And it's really only the last few years where we've seen the adoption really kick in on the credit side. Maybe it's starting to in private equity. Why now?”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private wealth capital will likely not enter directly, but we're going to see more of it. So institutional investors should learn to coexist with it.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In managers who, for the first time, are offering their strategies to private wealth. So they will take advantage of the growth of that channel on those businesses and the value of those businesses. And there are institutions that are using that as an opportunity to avail themselves of liquidity in the secondaries market. If you take the endowments that are looking at selling some of their private equity and venture positions, the primary demand for those secondary positions are coming from evergreen private equity vehicles. If you try to continue to carve your assets away from that trend, you can do that. You can avoid by investing earlier stage companies. You can invest direct co-investments. You can create SMAs. There are ways to carve out opportunities that”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should understand that it's here to stay. This isn't a temporal situation. The demand from private wealth will be the fastest growing source of capital into alternatives for the foreseeable future. If you're an institutional investor or allocator, you can think of it as competing with your capital. You can look at it as displacing your capital. You can think about it as an opportunity to potentially partner with that capital or use it in some advantageous way. If you think about that last category, there are institutions, and we work with a number of them who will seed vehicles that will be primarily offered to private wealth channels. By doing so, they will gain economics and ownership in the revenue stream of those vehicles. There are institutions that are buying GP stake.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in addition to making sure there's a calibration of what people understand, there's the potential very large volume of capital coming into these strategies. I've already seen it in private credit. Maybe it happens in private equity. What does that mean for, say, the institutional owner who's there today, who sees a lot more demand than they had in the past?”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's awareness, education, and expectations management where it has the greatest surface area for risk. That's why we spend so much time on education for the advisors and their clients and thought leadership. These are less liquid opportunities. And there's no guarantee you can exit if you want to exit. That lesson will be learned. There needs to be an appreciation you are getting these characteristics of returns and diversification and access to an illiquidity premium. The trade-off is you may not be able to get out any moment that you want to materially get out. That matching of expectations needs to be clear and well laid out. That's the biggest risk.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't weigh the risks as much as the quantum of capital coming in because that question often gets asked around whether or not private markets and private credits a bubble. If you look at the sheer amount of economic activity, US GDP going from $11, $12 trillion of GDP pre-great financial crisis to $30 trillion today, the number of banks and the consolidation in banks and their move away from lending to private companies and middle market companies, the rise of the number of private companies and companies staying private, all of those trends speak to more and more opportunity for that capital coming in. It's a supply demand matching. The bigger risks revolve around this idea of management of expectations, ensuring that why investors are embracing this match up with what can be delivered.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's important that we have a common brand and identity at future standard. We did not set out to build a multi-boutique firm. If you look at the most successful alternative firms and talent shops, they have a common, cohesive brand and they do that for very good reason. Despite having a series of acquisitions, we wanted to identify across a common brand and a common platform with the proposition that Future is about anticipating what's next in the marketplace on behalf of our clients and standard about raising our standards and what we can deliver for our clients. And that's the identity upon which we have identified ourselves as future standard.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you've addressed this market, you joined Franklin Square at some point in time. It was renamed FS. There's a theme here, now Future Standard. How have you thought about the branding exercise for all of your team to go out and distribute your product?”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have nothing but admiration for our competition. They are the best at what they do. Our focus is on private markets. Our focus is on the middle market, a future standard. We do think that's distinct from some of these larger alternative players who are operating in the larger megac space. They're providing equity and credit capital to companies that 10 years ago would have been publicly traded. That is the upper middle market, distinguishing what we do from what they do is important. We think that our offering has differentiation and brings something to the table for clients that they can't access with those large players. But I think it's tremendous that individual investors now get access to the likes of Blackstone and KKR and Ares and Apollo. These are tremendous firms. It's a great evolution. For all individual investors.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm curious in this space, almost like MAG 7 in concentration. There are a small number of mostly large public alternative asset managers who have addressed this market with products and distribution. What's it like competing with them in this space?”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sensible decision around whether those trade-offs work for a particular client in a particular situation. That's why we work with advisors. They're best suited to help make that determination.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be in 100% daily liquid instruments. It doesn't make any sense to me. And it never has. At least having the opportunity to avail yourself of an illiquidity premium over a long duration, long-duration assets that can diversify your exposures and enhance the returns of your exposures makes common sense. We will inevitably see that find its way into defined contribution in the 401k market. One of the reasons we like working with advisors generally is who better to determine the suitability of these investments than an advisor as closest to the individual investor client and knows whether or not those trade-offs, because there's no right or wrong. So alternatives aren't better than traditional investments. They're different. They bring different trade-offs in liquidity and fees and complexity. And knowing those tradeoffs to make a”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find contribution is 12, 13 trillion of assets for 1K is a significant piece of that much of that in target date funds and qualified default options. Ultimately, we will see more partnerships between traditional asset managers and alternative asset managers that create structures like collective investment trust to be put into target date funds and 401k plans that have a mix of liquid traditional investments and less liquid alternative investments. Now, private market alternatives might comprise 10, 15 percent of that pool. But I've always viewed that as a missed opportunity to begin with. If you're someone in your 20s or 30s and you have a multi-decade long horizon to invest your retirement assets, why should all of your assets”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the drivers to then translate that into what the return potential of a business like this is over a course of five or seven or ten years and trying to translate that into a base of expectations for what you're offering to people and how that compares, frankly, against public companies, large cap stocks or the Russell 2000. I think the education has to move across the full understanding of investments that they have in their portfolio today and the trade-offs of liquidity and complexity and fees.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do need to understand history to start. You need to understand what the historical returns have been. You need to understand the underlying fundamentals that drive those returns, revenue growth, EBITDA growth, if there's leverage being incorporated, how much leverage is incorporated, what is the cost of that leverage. So there's the quantitative metrics that have to go into it. Then there's the fundamental and qualitative understanding of impacting these companies and helping their businesses. There are private equity firms who have expertise in industrial services and they have great firms that work in healthcare services and they are used to working with these businesses, improving their governance and people and innovating and adding value and what impact the contribution of not just capital, but their partnership can have on the underlying company and its fundamental prospects. It's that shared appreciation.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easy for us to talk about the historical perspective and where we think it might go today. It strikes me it's harder for that end owner who doesn't have the history in the market to understand and calibrate their expectations of what they should get out of private equity. How does that education process get to that end client so that they're not disappointed five or ten years ago? Okay, but they're not what someone might have pitched them looking backwards.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really can't lever be on six, seven, eight turns of leverage on these LBO turns. The days of financial engineering, your way to higher returns, in my view, are over, where you're really going to see the outperformance in private equity are going to be faster revenue growing companies, lower multiple entry points, more fragmented ecosystem private companies, and where you can add operational value. That just simply tends to be more in the middle market than in the large and mega cap private company market. So I do think that the outperformance that you've seen over time with middle market private equity funds over their large and mega cap peers is only going to not just continue, but move even higher.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weighing the trade off across that is the job that we undertake in diligence, but also the advisor needs to think about in terms of what's suitable for their clients and their objectives. On the private equity side, if you think about private equity going back 10 years ago and decomposing returns, private equity returns had witnessed increasing degrees of leverage. We saw LBO multiples of leverage of six, seven, eight times, decreasing cost of financing that leverage each turn of capital as debt capital became cheaper, and multiple expansion, which we saw prevalent over that period of time. Well, now fast forward to today, cost of financing's higher by hundreds of basis points. You're not getting much multiple expansion on large and mega cap LBOs that are trading at 17 to low 20s times EBITDA.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The private credit side of the business, the state of play today is you have tighter spreads. There's a lot more capital and credit than there has been. You have higher base rates. We did exit zero interest rate period. So if you're looking at a floating rate loan, sofa is a lot higher than it was three, four years ago. The expectations have to be base rates are coming down, distribution rates and yields will come down in those private credit floating rate vehicles. In the middle market, once you move into smaller companies or mid-sized companies, you do get an additional premium of spread for those types of opportunities. When you move into more opportunistic credit and non-sponsored base credit, you have even more of a premium that gets added. The trade-off is those are riskier. Those are more fragmented. More risk, more return.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think about the increasing adoption, particularly in the private equity side, as it relates where we are in the cycle? Rates are a little higher, private equity prices are higher than they were in the past. And you can look back at the returns and say they have been great. But most people think this is a harder starting point. As the advisors are talking to the wealth channel about coming into this for the first time or growing it significantly for the first time, how do they think about the expectations for what forward returns will look like?”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns in a private equity evergreen structure as you will in a private equity drawdown structure. You might be looking at hyens net IRRRs or higher, given the fact that you have to manage for liquidity, you're not going to generate that level of returns. The returns will be more likely a 12 or a 13%. You're trading off the return there. The advantage goes back to continuous compounding and J-curb mitigation been to diversification. So those are the trade-offs that you need to weigh between locking your capital up for 10 to 12 years in a draw-down vehicle if you have the investment minimum to satisfy that or investing in an evergreen strategy, you get lower investment minimums, but you're going to trade off returns for that.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still early, but the education learning curve advisors have come up and have understood these evergreen structures and are now looking at opportunities to invest in growth strategies in private markets. The offerings themselves, the advantages of a private equity evergreen structure are that your capital is drawn immediately and invested. You have vintage diversification. You mitigate the J-curve. You're not waiting for capital drawdowns. You have continuous compounding as opposed to waiting for your capital to get called and brought in. There's a managed expectation of putting your capital to work. The trade-off, and there's always trade-offs, include the fact that these are not liquid strategies, so they're in semi-liquid structures, that you're not going to generate the same level of return.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strategies is there's greater ability to provide for leverage. The structures that have evolved over time, the wrappers that you create to deliver that to investors have to take that into account. Real estate can fit well into a REAT, private equity assets and to a tender offer fund, credit into interval funds. That's typically what you see in the market.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interval funds have greater flexibility on the one hand, but more leverage limitations. You might have an interval fund, for instance, could have all asset-backed financing strategies, which has a limitation in a BDC model of qualified versus non-qualified investments. You don't get the same degree of leverage in a closed-end interval fund. Different strategies will have different types of wrappers. Private equity interval funds, private equity ricks today are typically offered in the tender offer fund. In evergreen strategies, credit fits quite well into those rappers because they're more cash flowing than private equity. You have cash income refinancings, shorter duration, three to five year assets. Whereas in private equity, these are longer duration assets. The reason you see secondaries so often in private equity evergreen.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“BDCs originally were created through a congressional act in 1980 as a way to bring capital into private businesses. The original BDCs back then was more of a venture capital model. It was really only after the Great Financial Crisis that BDCs became this private credit lending model with proliferation of funds like ours and Ares and others. There's an advantage in terms of the ability for individual investors to invest in those vehicles at low minimums. It's friendly for an individual investor model to be able to invest their capital into BDCs for income. There are advantages for the end investor through the leverage that's allowed in the vehicle to deliver the type of income objectives that one has. Now there are limitations as to what's qualified assets and not qualified assets and structural limitations to the types of things that can be put into a BDC.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you joined Franklin Square, BDCs were the vehicle where a lot of the wealth individuals were accessing these strategies. That's evolved. There's now interval funds. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of different vehicles and where you're seeing that demand today”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And built over time a team of 30 credit professionals today were managing close to $10 billion across a series of vehicles both offered to private wealth but also to institutional investors as well as the CLO business and now has a team of significant size to build that over time and originate private credit.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After we separated with Blackstone, Blackstone had gone on to build their own private wealth business and undertake building their own BDCs. We partnered with KKR. There were only a handful of firms that had the ski origination scale to be able to undertake originating several billion dollars a year of private credit lending in our BDCs or of significant scaled size. It made it easy to decide we were going to partner not to try to build that from scratch. In terms of bringing Andrew and his team in terms of opportunistic private credit and non-sponsored private credit, Andrew had been doing that for many years and we had a smaller pool of capital, which he took over permanent capital vehicle and began to manage that set of portfolios.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the original credit strategy and some of the others, you either hired people and built it on your own or partnered with someone and said, what were the pivot points in those decisions to buy or build?”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why that matters is those private equity sponsors then view us as your strategic partner. There's a lot of capital out there and capital has become more and more of a commodity. Everyone in that ecosystem, you need to prove why you're not just a commoditized piece of capital. This strategic partnership model is something that generates significant deal flow across our five verticals. That deal flow is ultimately what begets the opportunity for our clients and the outperformance.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Several hundred relationships with high quality middle market private equity sponsors and those relationships, very powerful engine for sourcing deal flow. That was a distinctive point of you could try to replicate this, but it would take many, many years to replicate this business. And you can't replicate several hundred relationships overnight. Why that set of relationships matters is today we're able to work with a given middle market private equity sponsor and say to them, we can invest directly in your fund. We can co-invest with your portfolio companies across your funds. We can provide you with a solution for your LPs for secondary liquidity. We can work with you at the GP level on a continuation vehicle. And we can lend to any of your portfolio companies from senior in the capital structure down to junior.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it came to portfolio advisors, their business had been operating for 30 years. They've been operating in the middle market space of private equity, which the middle market's a broad definition of 10 million to a billion dollars of revenues. Private companies, there's 200,000 of them. But the focus at future standard is enterprises of a billion dollars in valuation and down. So core and lower middle market. That was the sweet spot for portfolio advisors across their primary and secondary and co-investment business. So it matched well. With that came capabilities in each of those areas, funds that had been around for many years. Also, they had built”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We currently employ 600 people, roughly, at future standard. Of those 140 are in that full suite of distribution and client relationship side of the business.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think about a firm like Morgan Stanley, like a wirehouse that has a significant number of advisors and their underlying clients looking at these strategies, they don't want an investment manager to say to them, here's a bucket, go fill it up with your private wealth money. You have to work with the advisors, help them understand the strategies, the risks, educate them, help them educate their client base. And there weren't many investment firms that had that capability and set of resources and experience doing that through the years some have undertaken to make that serious investment of done it well. Still to this day, there aren't many firms that are well equipped to bring their offerings to the private wealth market.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I joined 11 years ago, not many alternative investment firms had spent time and money on the private wealth channels. They might have had a small team dedicated to it. In order for an investment firm to undertake serving the private wealth channel, it takes a significant amount of resources, a significant amount of patience and time because it does take time. We had a fully built national wholesale distribution capability across independent broker dealers, registered investment advisors, wire houses, regional broker dealers with national accounts, business development, sales, and marketing, education, and thought leadership, all of that built out, but significant resources invested in doing that. That's an important distinction because”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The private well channel and individual investors deserve to get the same treatment as institutional investors, so the same types of investments that institutional investors invest in to give them more fair fees, to give them better structures where they can invest more seamlessly directly into these underlying investments. That's been the point of all of this. And it's been an evolution because it's a big sea change from the early days of those offerings and the access to those original investments to today where you have individual investors accessing the exact same investment as the largest, most sophisticated pools of institutional capital in the world at institutional levels of fees in structures that work for them in terms of liquidity and so forth.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the early days of providing alternatives to the private wealth market, what was then called retail, although we don't call it retail today for good reason? There were a lot of products out there and partnerships that were adding fees on fees once you get through all the layers of fees and loads that are involved in these offerings. What's left for the individual investor? We wanted to avoid that situation. And the way to do that is identifying strategic partnerships where we offer one layer of fee and we share in the revenues between partners. We have contributions of capabilities to deliver that and deliver that with one layer of fees as opposed to passing on two separate layers of fees to the individual investor. That's really been the mission of future standard from the beginning, which is we want to level the playing field for all investors.”
2025-11-24 · Capital Allocators · Michael Kelly – Democratizing Access to the Middle Market at Future Standard (EP.473) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source