Gary Shields - Nassau Street Partners

0:09Gary Shields: Welcome to Northstar's Private Equity Fast Pitch, and thank you for joining us on this journey into the high-stakes world of private equity, where bold ideas, big capital, and brilliant minds collide. In each episode, we sit down with the trailblazers shaping the industry. key leaders, CEOs, founding partners, and visionaries from top-tier private equity firms, influential limited partners, and investment banking powerhouses. These aren't just conversations. They're front row seats into the strategies, insights, and personal stories from the thought leaders driving the deals that define markets and transform businesses.

0:57Gary Shields: Whether you're a seasoned investor, an aspiring young professional, or just curious about the forces moving the global economy, you're in the right place. So get ready to dive into the fast-paced, high-impact world of private equity with your host, the podfather of private equity, Jeff Henningsen. Welcome to Private Equity Fast Pitch. My guest today is Gary Shields, chairman and managing partner of Nassau Street Partners, and he has one of the more fascinating career journeys I've come across. Gary has spent more than 40 years in finance, working as a research analyst, portfolio manager, investment banker, corporate executive, and venture capital investor.

1:42He's helped finance companies, taken businesses through acquisitions, invested in more than 50 companies, and served on more than 20 boards. Along the way, he worked at some of Wall Street's most influential firms including Robertson Stevens and participated with Ted Waite, the founder of Gateway Computers, to build a significant venture capital platform. Today, Gary is helping build Nassau Street partners with a very specific vision. Much like the investment banks that helped finance the technology revolution of the 1980s and 1990s, Gary wants Nassau Street to help identify, finance, and guide the next generation of emerging companies, some of which could become the household names of tomorrow.

2:25And Gary believes we're at the beginning of another major transformation, this time driven by artificial intelligence. In this episode, we discuss the evolution of investment banking, what entrepreneurs need to discuss about raising capital, why finding the right financial partner matters, and how Gary and his much younger partner are combining decades of experience with fresh ideas to build a different kind of investment bank. But what I particularly enjoyed was Gary's personal journey. From financing one of the largest acquisitions in U.S. history at the time, to helping sell a health care company to Eli Lilly, to telling a billionaire entrepreneur not to invest another penny in a business, Gary has some terrific stories.

3:08He's also an inventor, a pilot, and a wine enthusiast, and he shares a philosophy that has stayed with him throughout his career. Make a lot of money. Have a lot of fun. This is a conversation about entrepreneurship, investing, relationships, and the importance of continuing to pursue opportunities regardless of where you are in your career. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Gary Shields. Now we'll get it kicked off. Gary, I'm just thrilled to have you on this podcast. We've been spending some time getting to know each other, and I don't know that we can do this in my normal 30, 40 minutes, but we're going to give it a shot.

3:45Why don't we get kicked off, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about Nassau Street Partners, and then once we dig in there, we're going to tell about your journey, which spans four decades and a lot of really cool experiences and things that I think the audience will love as well. So welcome to the show, and let's get it kicked off. Thank you, Jeff, for having me. It's a real honor to be here. Your podcast is, I know, very well followed, and I've enjoyed listening to it over a period of time. I'm Gary Shields, chairman and managing partner of a firm named Nassau Street Partners. We're a Wall Street-based firm founded about two years ago.

4:22We're a relatively young firm, but we have about 75 people with the firm today. We were founded with the vision of combining modern marketing techniques with finance techniques to build a firm that would be a leader in helping emerging companies to go through their journey of becoming household names. And I commented as we were getting to know each other that the names that weren't household names 20 years ago, the Googles, the AOLs, the Salesforce, those kinds of firms that 20 years ago were young emerging firms have their counterparts today. And those are the companies that we want to help with getting funding, doing mergers and acquisitions.

5:00We're going to expand the firm in a variety of directions. I have a vision of building what I would call one of the next four horsemen, which back in the day were Robertson Stevens, Hamburg and Quist, Montgomery Securities, and Alex Brown. My partner, Juan Moreno, contacted me about two years ago. He was a fellow alum from Georgetown University. I did my master's there. He had done his undergrad, and he said he had a vision of building a rapidly growing firm that would utilize marketing techniques that weren't being used in investment banking. and he was interested in bringing me on as an advisor.

5:37And he and I hit it off and I described my vision of building the next horseman and we meshed our visions together. We started the firm and started growing and we've helped about 300 companies in raising capital along the way. We use that as sort of an early business model for the firm. Today we use a lot of marketing for our firm. We have a very aggressive outreach program. Once again, not really used by a lot of investment banks. I call a lot of investment banking stuck in investment banking inertia. So our goal is to build the next firm that will help these companies, many of them today using AI that I think are involved in this AI tsunami, I call it, very similar to what technology was in the 80s and 90s that we helped as the four horsemen.

6:29Today, as I say, we have 75 people. We help companies raise capital. We do mergers and acquisitions. That will grow into direct investing, research, sales, and trading. And we have a roadmap to grow the company. We now are in nine countries around the world. We have a big contention in London. We're headquartered in New York, right on Wall Street at 40 Wall Street. So that's Nassau Street Partners today. Gary, give me a little window into the ideal client. What industry, what size, what's the profile of that client that is in your sweet spot? I think as a lot of the trends that have happened over the past 50 years, I would say, have been focused quite a bit in technology and healthcare, but I would say our ideal client would be in technology or healthcare or business services that use technology to help drive growth.

7:23There are companies that in a generic way are growing at, I would say, 20 % or more per year. Ideally, we're moving up the food chain. Since we're a relatively young firm, we took on some companies early on that were even pre-revenue type companies, but we're not real keen on taking companies of that size. We typically will look for companies generating$5 million or more in revenue if they're an operating company. Sometimes we get involved in the healthcare space, you can, and in biotech, that kind of thing, you can get involved in earlier companies. But$5 million in revenue,$1 million in EBITDA, ideally, we want to move that up.

8:05And enterprise value in the, call it$50 million range, we don't have hard and fast rules, but that's generally what we're looking at. And hopefully within the next year or so, we'll move that up to probably about$100 million enterprise value minimum. them. And so I would expect that most of these firms, this may be their first capital raise, their pre-private equity, pre-venture capital. With a lot of companies, if you get involved with a company that's doing$5 million in revenue and they're on Series C or Series D, that's not a particularly good story to tell. So they are generally companies that are doing their first raise, some of them even doing safes and not even to a Series A yet.

8:49But Series A, Series B, generally at this point, if we get involved with a company that's been around for 10 years or longer, they might have done four or five raises already. We got approached recently by a company on the M &A side that had been offered$2 billion and they would like to get$3 billion. So they're interested in hiring us to put that story together to try to get a higher price point for them. Many times I'll sit with a company for 30 minutes and I'll hear their story and I'll slap my forehead and say, why didn't I think of that? Because they have such varied ideas that are fascinating.

9:26I love the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem. Talk about outcome-oriented advisory model. Can you give us a little depth into what that strategy means. What we try to focus on, Jeff, is what does the entrepreneur really look for? What are they looking for? And what's their long-term vision? And how can we help get them to that vision? We want to focus a capital raise or an M &A transaction based on the strategy of the company. And to get the right outcome for those companies, we need to dig deeply into that story, understand what the background is of the company and where that company wants to go, and then match that up with the right kind of investor or buyer.

10:09So we spend a lot of time researching investors or buyers and coming up with the curated lists of who's the right partner for this company, not only from a financial perspective, but culturally, how do they fit with the management team, with the employees, and that type of thing. But our goal at the end of the day is we want a client who's happy. As I tell people the last thing, and I tell some of the young people who are with us, the last thing you want to do is to go to a client and say, we've exhausted the list. We haven't been able to achieve what you wanted us to achieve. I tell prospects, by the way, that you actually don't hire us to raise your capital.

10:51You hire us to run a process that will hopefully result in the capital being raised. But we tell people that guarantee and promise are four-letter words in our industry. You can't guarantee that you will achieve the end result, but you want to put together a process and take a client to the right kind of investor or buyer so that hopefully you create an optimal situation that the outcome, which will be raising capital or selling the company will be where that entrepreneur wants to go. And as a client of yours that potentially did our first raise, I would assume your goal is to stay with me as I continue to grow my business and help be my right arm in future capital raises and maybe even exit transactions?

11:39That's the golden rule, Jeff. When we get involved in companies, we don't want to do one-off transactions. We were looking at a company doing tidal energy using underwater tides to create energy. And it's a relatively early company, but they're raising quite a bit of capital, but they're going to need additional capital. So they'll be going through additional rounds and ultimately looking at an exit, which could be along the way an IPO or an M &A transaction. I go back to my old boss several bosses ago, if you will, but Sandy Robertson, who was iconic, was one of the greatest gentlemen in this business that we call finance, who ever lived.

12:20And rest in peace, he passed away about a year ago. But Sandy used to say that great companies can always get funded. And so I tell companies in looking at their future, they'll sometimes say, well, our goal is to get acquired or our goal is to do an IPO. And I said, build a great company and you'll have a choice of where you take it. So, yeah, we want to get involved early with the company and be involved. If it's Series A, we want to be involved with Series B and C and D and the IPO and the ultimate exit for the company. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your team? What makes the team unique besides, and we'll get into your background, so maybe pause on that.

12:59But the rest of your team, what are the things that make them unique? We have actually a relatively young team with our firm, but we look for people who have a lot of energy, have a unique perspective in terms of what they want to do, have a passion for what they do. I love everybody who I work with. I love recruiting some of these young people who have an enormous amount of, as they say, energy, enthusiasm. I can't tell you the number of our employees who have told me, Gary, this is the first job I've ever had where I wake up in the morning and I look forward to going to work. We don't necessarily look for somebody who has 30 or 40 years in the industry.

13:44Sometimes that actually is a negative because they're stuck in the ways that they've done transactions 20 or 30 years ago. And we try to, as I said before, employ new methods. I was interviewed actually, and it was asked why I got involved with Nassau Street Partners and what I like about it. And I said, there are three things. And the first one were the people. I love the people that we recruit. We're very careful. And we like to say, The next person that we hire will change the dynamic of this organization. It will change the future of the organization because they will have an impact on it.

14:23So we choose the best and the brightest. And to tell you what the other two, so it's the people. We're number one. That's what I love about this firm. Number two is the speed at which we carry out the transactions. And number three is the reach that we have. We have relationships with hundreds of family offices, with thousands of institutional investors. Nobody has warm and fuzzy relationships with thousands. But just as in your industries, you meet a lot of new people along the way and you develop new relationships. But we're aware of who are the players in the industry and who would have an interest in the companies we're working with.

15:01But I would put our team up against anybody on Wall Street, whether it's Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, whatever. We've recently put an emphasis on our M &A effort. And for that M &A effort, I recruited another partner who was 25 years with Intel Capital. A lot of people know him. He's done billions of dollars in transactions for Intel, in acquisitions, in early stage fundings of companies. Very bright guy. Did an engineering degree at USC, Wharton MBA. I have another partner that I recruited who spent eight years running Duff & Phelps in China, has done billions of dollars in cross-border transactions.

15:43And those guys, they're a great group to be around. I recruited another person that had our capital markets team, and he was one of my partners at Roberts & Stevens 30 years ago. And he had done exactly what he's doing for us. So he's helping to build out that backend infrastructure of institutional investors and family offices and that type of thing. So we're building a team that's second to none. I absolutely love the people who we've recruited. Where do you think your firm will be in three, four years from now? What's your vision? My vision is that I want to be the next horseman. And for your listeners, if they want to do a Wikipedia search of four horsemen, the four horsemen that helped finance the tsunami of what I called the technology tsunami of the 80s and 90s were Robertson Stevens, Hamburg and Quist, Montgomery Securities, and Alex Brown.

16:37When those firms, ultimately, all of them got acquired, and then a couple of years later, they sort of disappeared, as happens many times with acquisitions. And that left a huge void in the market. That void continues to exist. In about 2000, with the whole dot-com bubble, which was, I called it a bottle rocket, the rapid rise and rapid fall. But that, I think, was a temporary phenomenon. But since about 2000, the whole IPO market, Nimine, and that kind of thing have been muddling along. But that left a void in the market that I still think has not been filled, that exists for what I would call the next horseman, the next Robertson Stevens, the next Hamburg and Quist or Montgomery or Alex Brown, to help emerging companies and be a leader in helping those companies get funded, help them find the right ultimate homes, that type of thing.

17:31So my vision is to build that next horseman. And with my partner, Juan Moreno, Juan has the same vision as me. He's a much younger guy than I am. But it's really interesting that we have married his enthusiasm and his ingenuity and his vision with my, what I would call my age, my wisdom, my experience, and you marry those together. And what we want to be in two, three, five years is when a leading company that's growing at 20, 30, 50 % a year decides they want to raise capital or do their IPO or be acquired, we want to be on the list. They put together a list of five firms that they have to talk to.

18:19I want to be one of those five. I don't necessarily have to be the firm they choose. Hopefully I will be, but I want to be on that list of the firms that they say we have to talk to Nassau Street Partners. So that's the vision that I would have. So you just mentioned this, and I think this is a really great segue into your journey. You have four decades and a boatload of experience that you're bringing to the table. Paired with a co-managing partner who has youth and energy, that's just a really, really great dynamic. And I'd love for you to go back in history, and you've already talked a little bit about some various things, but tell me your journey.

18:59How did you get started in this business? And feel free to start wherever. It's very fascinating to me. Unlike a lot of young people who might decide that they want to become investment bankers, I didn't really start that way. I started out as an undergrad back in Ohio and had a thought that I was going to become a lawyer. I didn't really have a passion to become a lawyer, but I ended up going to Georgetown University for my graduate degree. I went to the Foreign Service School there, and that's a big recruiting ground for the Foreign Service and for the CIA and other international agencies, that type of thing.

19:36But I did my summer of the two-year program at the International Trade Commission. And during the year, I worked with a company named Superior Oil Company that was headquartered down in your neck of the woods in Texas and founded by the Keck family. And I went to work for their Washington office. That firm, by the way, Superior Oil, ended up getting acquired by Mobile Oil along the way. But met up with the head of that office who had worked for the government, but had also been an entrepreneur. And he played a big role in turning me into a real businessman. My interests really began to move from government or even legal.

20:16And I changed my mind from being an attorney to going to Georgetown's foreign service school. But I decided I wanted to go the route of business. And the head of the international group for the largest bank at the time in Houston was coming through Washington and had time to do about five interviews. And I was lucky enough to snag one of those interviews. And he asked me what I was doing. And I said, I'm doing my master's in foreign service at Georgetown and did the summer at the International Trade Commission. and during the year I worked for Superior Oil Company. And he all of a sudden said, oh, you mean the Keck family?

20:50I said, yes. And he said, that's our largest client. When can you be in Houston? So I started my career with the largest bank in Houston and I got my early education in doing lending and that type of thing. And then Credit Lune, the big French powerhouse came along and they wanted to open an office in Houston. And I was lucky enough to get offered the job to join them. That office took off like a rocket ship. It was at a time when interest rates were in the mid-teens, and we were able to loan money or do swaps or investment banking transactions at very favorable rates for these companies. I was thinking about it before we did this interview.

21:28I was lucky enough that during the time I was with Credit Leona, I got involved in the largest acquisition in the history of the United States, which was Shell Oil's acquisition of Bell Ridge Oil. and although you can't see me, I'm smiling here because it was interesting at the time, the largest acquisition in the history of the United States was Shell Oil's$3.6 billion acquisition of Bell Ridge Oil and I was involved in putting together$300 million of the money that helped to fund that and today$3.6 billion would be a yawn on the part of a lot of people But that was a big deal back then. I was very interested in investing and had gotten to know a guy in New York who was a pioneer in technology investing.

22:15He had a firm named Technological Investors, was managing money for a lot of institutions, foundations, retirement plans, that type of thing, and had about a billion dollars under management. And he was a pioneer in technology investing. In fact, to the point he had a slide rule for those listeners who remember what a slide rule is. He had a slide rule in his bottom drawer that when he started the firm, that's the way he did his calculations. I joined him and got involved in technology investing and was recruited away by a firm named L.F. Rothschild. For those of you who have seen the movie Wolf of Wall Street, you might remember the opening scene was where the lead of that movie walked in and he mentions L.F.

22:58Rothschild. And I was a senior exec at that firm when he started. Of course, nobody knew who he was. I was a research analyst covering technology, meaning covered storage, communications, and semiconductors. One of the interesting things, the big questions, for example, in storage during those days was, will storage ever drop below$10 a megabyte? Now, for those of you who are technologically inclined at all, you might think about that a little bit. $10 a megabyte for kicks a couple of months ago, I did the calculation to see what would that megabyte cost today. And a megabyte today costs one four hundredth of a penny.

23:37So we've gone from $10 a megabyte to one four hundredth of a cent. And that actually has an interesting aspect to it, which is the drops in prices and the availability of storage of electronics, of semiconductors, and that type of thing have allowed the proliferation and the emergence of AI today that I think will be the tsunami of the next 20 or 30 years. So I got involved in technology from there to get back to my journey. I was sitting at my desk during the 87 crash on Wall Street. And we didn't have instantaneous communication or that kind of thing. But LF Rothschild took a very large hit in one area that we were involved in, and it ultimately crippled the firm.

24:28And the firm ultimately didn't survive, but we laid off 40 % of the workforce. I was kept, and we were going to form a boutique technology investment bank. But I could see the handwriting on the wall, and I was being recruited by a lot of the bigger firms. I ended up deciding to join Robertson Stevens, which was, at the time, a small firm. I was employee number 125, was headquartered in San Francisco, but I joined the New York office because, of course, New York was the epicenter of the finance industry. A year later, I decided to move to San Francisco. And about a week after moving there, I slapped my head and said, what took me so long to make this move because it was such a beautiful place?

25:07I joined Robertson Stevens there. I was initially a senior research analyst with them. And then I ended up heading the investment banking group for environmental services. From there, I was recruited away by the Chicago Corporation, where I headed the technology and healthcare investment banking group, and met up with a guy along the way who was building a tiny operating company called Integrated Medical Systems, or IMS, we were known as. He recruited me to be the number two guy with his company. That was interesting to me because I had never been in an operating role. I had always been the guy who went in to see the CEO or CFO of a company and get the deal and then walk out the door and figure out how to get the deal done.

25:50But I never really understood what it was like to operate the company. So I joined the company as the number two guy, senior VP of the company. We built that company and along the way decided we were going to do our IPO. We selected our underwriters. I selected them. I'd put together a strategic alliance with McKesson Corporation. We were viewed as the pioneer in healthcare communications. And every time I would present at an investor conference, first hand that would go up would be, what are you going public? So we were planning our public offering, very anticipated public offering. And in the middle of doing our S1, I got a call from Eli Lilly saying, why don't we take that burden off your shoulders?

26:32We ended up at that point, we got into a negotiation and I negotiated an exit for our shareholders. made 30 times the return for our early shareholders. That had brought me to San Diego. And at that point, didn't want to move to Indianapolis, didn't want to be with a gigantic firm. And even if I did want those two things, probably, I was guessing Eli Lilly probably had 10 guys who were doing what I could have done within Eli Lilly. So I didn't want to do that, wanted to stay in San Diego. So I opened the yellow pages of the phone book to investment bankers or investment banks. There were none, so I had to form one.

27:10So I formed one of the early real investment banks in San Diego. Ended up along the way meeting up with Ted Waite, the founder of Gateway Computers, the computer company that put the computers into cowhide boxes. And Ted at the time had grown the company, was a multi-billionaire, was the wealthiest man in San Diego. And he asked me to get involved in a project with him. It was an investment he had made in a company and wanted to know if he should put more money into it and ask me what I thought. And after a couple of weeks of looking into that company and working with him on it, I said I wouldn't put another penny into it.

27:50And he thanked me for that, told me how grateful he was because it was his cousin's company. And he felt that anybody else who had worked on it with and probably would have wanted to be on his good side and told him to write the next check. I told him not to. So that led to me partnering up with Ted. And I ended up taking over initially a$100 million venture capital fund that he had just started and funded. We invested together. I then formed two more venture capital funds. It was one of the largest venture capital firms with the three funds, one of the largest capital funds in San Diego. We were top 10 or top decile, I should say, returns for the fund.

28:34We invested in more than 50 companies. I've sat on more than 20 venture backboards and directors of companies. It was a wonderful place to be. We still are partnered in a few companies. But along the way, Ted offered me the position to run his family office. And I turned him down for a variety of reasons, not because it wasn't a great opportunity, but it was going to be a long commute, silly things like that. I was really happy doing the equity venture and private equity investing. So we had a lot of fun doing that. And then I morphed my venture firm into doing investment banking again in San Diego, worked with literally hundreds of small companies to raise capital, do M &A transactions and that type of thing.

29:20Fast forward, I thought I was slowing down a little bit. And two years ago, I got a call from a young guy named Juan Moreno, who had graduated from Georgetown University. He had done some early work with Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Canada, but had a vision to create a new investment bank that would marry modern marketing techniques with finance. And he also had a strong marketing background, had founded a couple of marketing agencies, even as a student at Georgetown. So he called me, had found me through the Georgetown alumni group. He and I started talking. I described my vision of creating the next horseman.

30:00And Juan had a vision of building a very rapidly growing investment bank. And he was relatively open as to the direction that could go. But he was wise enough to understand that a lot of the large investment banks were stuck in what I call investment banking inertia. The same way that they did deals 20 years ago was to shuffle around, make good relationships with 10 attorneys or accountants or whatever, and hopefully those attorneys would throw them a bone along the way or a transaction. And Juan had a vision of using aggressive outreach to build a firm. And I bought into that, and he bought into my vision to build the next horseman.

30:42And we decided to build the next firm that would really be a leader in helping emerging companies, helping the companies that would be the household names 20 years from now, helping them with series A, B, C, sticking with them, doing their IPOs, helping them with the ultimate exit, which would be merger and acquisition, or as they say, going public. And although we don't currently do public offerings, that's on our roadmap. And so I joined Juan initially to be a senior advisor. And within about three months, I became the chairman and managing partner. So today, Juan and I run the firm. Juan does a lot of the capital raise side, what I call capital markets.

31:28I do a lot of the corporate finance side, which is more the M &A valuations and the transaction type business. So we're very complimentary. I like to say that with marrying the youth and the energy and the imagination of Juan with my age, wisdom, and experience, it has created what I like to say the magic that existed back in the 80s and 90s. And I recruited one of my former partners of Robertson Stevens to join me at the Nassau Street Partners. And he and I talk about the magic that existed back in the day of the 80s and 90s. And if you ask me to put that into words, it's hard to put into words.

32:13I'll just tell you that there was a magic in the whole finance industry back in those days in that technology tsunami that was going through the economy. And today we see that with AI, in my opinion. I was reading an article recently that over 200 ,000 companies have been formed that either use AI or were formed to directly be involved in AI. And some of those companies will become the household names 20 years from now. And if I'm still around, I want to be able to look back and say I was part of making that part of our economy. I love your journey and it spans so many different financial times in our economy and the internet and all kinds of different areas.

33:01The other thing I find fascinating is besides your career path, you hold two patents. You're a pilot. You grow wine. You have a very broad experiential base that you bring to the table for your clients and friends. And like we were talking about before we kicked off, I think each of your buckets I could talk about forever with your relationship with the Dow Brothers, who is a big winery that sold. And the listeners can't see the picture that I'm looking at, but your background is your winery that you have in your backyard. It's just really fascinating to me. I think with that background and the fact that you're working with and recruiting so many young professionals, I think my question that is common that I ask is really relevant.

33:44what advice are you giving young people today or coming to you saying, hey, what would you do if you were in my shoes and I was wanting to be successful in investment banking, private equity, or in business in general? I've thought about that question, Jeff, a lot. Here's what I tell young people is this is a fabulous industry to be involved in finance. Being an investment banker, being a venture capitalist in private equity, being an early stage entrepreneur, I've been involved in all of those areas at one time or another. But I tell young people, do what you can to get your ticket into the industry, because that's a pretty expensive ticket to get in.

34:21The competition is heavy. You're dealing with Ivy League schools and even schools today. I believe my alma mater I was reading is one of the most heavily recruited schools today for Wall Street. But you're competing against a lot of really talented people and people with a huge amount of influence in terms of joining firms, whether their parents have been involved in the industry or whatever. Once you get into the industry, it's a wonderful industry that will take care of you. And whatever vision you have, just like Nassau Street Partners, we have these young people and they say, Gary, what can I do with Nassau Street Partners three years, five years, 10 years down the road?

35:03And I tell them there's a whole lot that you will be able to do with our firm. I can't tell you exactly what that will be. Just as when Sandy Robertson and Paul Stevens and Bob Coleman founded what was called Robertson Coleman and Stevens became Robertson Stevens. When they founded that firm, I'm not sure if they could have told you what that firm would have looked like 10 years after it had been founded, but opportunities will grow, whether it be in working with clients to raise capital, whether it be working with clients and doing M &A, whether it be in research. I've worked with some people who are introverts who really love being in the back room, if you will, doing research and analyzing companies and that type of thing.

35:45They do a great job of that. I work with other people who just can't wait to meet their next stranger who they become friends with in 15 minutes. The other way to be a success in our firm and the way that I tell young people to measure your success, and I don't mean this to come off the wrong way, but the measure of success in our industry to a great extent is measured in money, the amount of money that you raise for companies, the amount of money that you make for companies, the amount of fees that you generate for your firm. A lot of that translates into what success means for you as an individual, for a young person.

36:24On the other hand, don't get too wrapped up in letting your financial success dictate what your success is. Just like Jeff, you just indicated, I have a lot of things in my background. I have a lot of interests, whether it be wine or I was an inventor of an advanced fluidic lens in the optical area. I've done a lot in my history. I'm a pilot. You're correct. I owned a beautiful airplane for many years. And an old friend of mine who was a lot older than I was back in the day, when I was probably 23 years old, asked me, what's your goal in life? And I said, I want to make a lot of money. And they said, don't let your life be defined by making money.

37:09And so I tell young people, don't do that. Have other interests. But along the way, have a lot of fun. I know you were going to ask me a question along the way about your favorite quote. And I'm going to share with you now, if you don't mind, Jeff. I will answer that question before you have a chance to ask. A favorite quote of mine that has helped lead me along the way was a quote that when Ted Waite, founder of Gateway, decided that he was changing the head of his family office, and he offered that to me, and he gathered everybody in the conference room of his family office, the 50 people who worked for him, and he had three slides that he presented to everybody to talk about this transition.

37:51And the first slide was the vision of what was called Avalon Capital at the time, which is his family office, still is his family office. It was the mission statement. And the mission statement was make a lot of money, have a lot of fun. And that has guided me, I realized through my life. And this industry has provided me with an opportunity to make a lot of money and have a lot of fun. And it's still why at this stage in my life, I tell people I went through my physical exam with my doctor a couple of weeks ago. He guaranteed me another 30 years. He said, beyond that, you're on your own. But you will probably open the paper one day.

38:32I don't mean to be morbid. You'll open to the obituaries and it will say Shields died analyzing his next transaction. And that's the way that I'll probably go out is having a lot of fun and having a lot of fun continuing to do what I do today. I love that. And I don't think I've said this for a while, but not too long ago, my common quote was, work hard, play harder. You can sleep when you're six feet under. That's a great quote. Well, Gary, this has been a phenomenal podcast. I know our audience is going to very much enjoy it and getting to know you. My last question I always ask for a firm like yours is if I'm a entrepreneur looking to raise some capital, whittle down my choice of advisors down to a couple and I'm trying to make a decision tonight who to pick.

39:23What are the key things you want me to remember as I'm making that decision that would tip me your way and your team's way to engage with you and let you do that work for us? I would go back to the comment about the people. I think, number one, companies will be working with some of the best people in the industry with our firm. I'll put our firm up against any of the largest firms that you want to think about. You get the Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan quality at a much smaller firm. For example, our M &A team goes in to pitch a company. You get three guys on our M &A team, one with 25 years from Intel Capital, done billions and billions of dollars of transactions with Intel Capital in early stage funding or M &A, whatnot.

40:08That's one of our partners. Another of our partners is a guy who ran Duffin Phelps in China for eight years, was with E &Y, was actually an advisor to the White House under both Presidents Clinton and Bush. He's one of the partners. Both of those guys have engineering undergrads. One went to Wharton, got his MBA there. The other got his master's at Georgetown. One got his undergrad in engineering at Berkeley. The other got a double engineering degree at USC. This is a team that you'd be dealing with in addition to myself overseeing what goes on. So you're getting a team that is unmatched on Wall Street, in my opinion.

40:50Also, be careful as an entrepreneur. When you're talking with firms that say they're in our industry, many times they'll be a group of maybe three or four or five people, but they really don't have an organization. We have 75 people. You're going to touch four or five or six people as your transaction gets processed. You're going to be dealing with a number of people and different departments in our organization. So we run like we're a much larger organization. And I think you'll find yourself at the end of that rainbow being very happy. Gary, thank you again. Great podcast and wish you guys the best of luck as you continue to grow this fast-moving firm.

41:32Thank you, Jeff. And you have a great podcast here. I just want to thank you again. It's been a real honor.

41:41Gary Shields: Thank you for joining us for Northstar's Private Equity Fast Pitch. For more information about Fast Pitch or our boutique private equity heavy hitter events, you can visit us at enorthstar.com.

42:01Thank you.