Alt Goes Mainstream: The Latest on Alternative Investments, WealthTech, & Private Markets

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
One of the best-performing venture investors in history is back in the saddle. And this time, he’s bringing the stampede to invest in some of the most consequential companies of our time.
For Chris Sacca, the seeds of investing in energy were sown 23 years ago when he was building data centers for Google. 
His investing career went into full bloom with Lowercase Capital, the venture firm he founded in 2010 with $8.4M in capital. Thanks to early investments in Uber, Twitter, Stripe, Instagram, Blue Bottle Coffee, Docker, Optimizely, and others, Lowercase’s first fund returned over 204x DPI and around 250x MOIC. 
For his second act, he is going bigger to solve massive problems that require real solutions across energy, power, water, AI, transmission, and nuclear fusion. 
He and his wife, Crystal, co-founded Lowercarbon Capital (and are the firm’s largest LPs) to invest in companies that own every part of the electrical stack, from sunlight to socket.
Chris and Crystal have built out a stellar team to match the opportunity in front of them by bringing together the requisite ingredients to be an expert and differentiated investor in energy, advanced manufacturing, nuclear fusion, and transmission. General Partner Clay Dumas was previously Chief of Staff in the White House Office of Digital Strategy. The firm’s most recent General Partner to join the ranks is Caie Kelley, who leads the firm’s Growth investing efforts. Caie brings to bear a background in private equity at Permira and investing in climate startups at Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures and output so considerable that the Lowercarbon team calls her “CaieGPT,” despite that output being human-generated. 
Irrespective of political regime, geopolitical chokepoints, and supply chain reconfiguration, the world was in dire need of better, faster, safer, cheaper, and cleaner energy alternatives. 
Chris, Clay, Caie and team at Lowercarbon set out to invest in new energy and manufacturing companies that could become the foundation of the new energy economy when Lowercarbon launched in 2021. In that time, national security, energy security, geopolitical tensions, reorienting of supply chains, and a hotter earth have all undergone seismic shifts. Lowercarbon has invested across the energy stack to back companies addressing these challenges and building the foundation of the new economy.
There’s a lot to play for here on Earth, as Chris noted in the podcast, saying, “Mars is for quitters. If we are going to Mars, we are giving up on what we have here.” 
And what we have here is what this fascinating conversation with Chris and Caie focused on. We covered:
Why climate may not be the best way to describe Lowercarbon’s investing activities.
How big is the energy market?
Why Lowercarbon avoids investing in “science projects.”
What it takes to underwrite investing in hardware and hard tech companies.
How Lowercarbon unearths “fundamentally different technologies that are providing fundamentally different costs,” according to Caie.
Lessons learned from Lowercase and how to know when to bet big on an investment.
Why the likes of Antora, Crux, Fuse Energy, Base Power, Panthalassa, Cloover, Solar Square, Commonwealth Fusion, Emerald AI, and more could be such consequential companies.
Why the Lowercarbon team are “unapologetic capitalists.”
Bios
Caie Kelley, General Partner

Caie is a General Partner at Lowercarbon Capital, where she focuses primarily on growth stage opportunities and provides a quantitative lens to the team’s deep tech and science-backed work. Prior to Lowercarbon, she was at SOUNDWaves, the climate-focused venture arm of Sound Ventures, where she built out the team’s sustainability strategy, helped raise the fund’s first external capital, and backed founders at multiple stages of growth across batteries, alternative materials, circularity, and climate software.
Prior to Sound, Caie was at Permira, an $80b private equity fund based in New York, where she focused on technology and industrial services growth-stage businesses. Caie started her career in the technology investment banking group at JP Morgan in both San Francisco and New York, where she advised IPO-ready companies on how to graduate to the “real world” (public markets).
Caie holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and where she wrote a very, very long thesis on Southeast Asia and first became painfully aware of the disparate effects of climate change on developing parts of the world. Caie grew up in the Bay Area with two biologists as parents but is now a Southern California loyalist — she currently lives in Los Angeles where she spends her free time consuming reality television and staying up to date with pop culture discourse, and going on flat walks in the sun with friends.
Chris Sacca, Founder & Managing Partner

Chris is the co-founder of Lowercarbon Capital, backing the world’s most ambitious and scalable decarbonization solutions across energy, industrial materials, transportation, carbon removal, and advanced manufacturing. The portfolio spans countless companies, each proving to the world that hard-tech climate solutions are just good business.
Alongside his wife, Crystal, Chris also co-founded Lowercase Capital, best known for its very early investments in Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Twilio, Docker, Optimizely, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Stripe, making it one of the most successful venture funds in history.
The performance of the Lowercase funds vaulted Chris to the number-two spot on the Forbes Midas List and landed him a place on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list before he shifted in 2017 from broad-based venture capital to focus on climate innovation, philanthropy, and creative pursuits.
Before becoming an investor, Chris served as Head of Special Initiatives at Google, where he founded and co-led the Access division. His projects included Google’s multi-billion-dollar initiatives for the 700MHz and TV white-spaces spectrum, culminating in Google’s $4.7 billion bid in the FCC spectrum auction. Chris oversaw billions of dollars of global energy projects and co-led the siting and acquisition of groundbreaking data centers in Oregon, Georgia, and the Netherlands. Chris helped expand the company’s global fiber-optic and undersea cable footprint, drove many of Google’s business development and M&A transactions, and was a founding team member of the company’s New Business Development division. In recognition of his accomplishments, Chris was among the first Google employees ever to receive the Google Founders’ Award, the company’s highest internal honor.
Earlier in his career, Chris practiced law at Fenwick & West, representing startups, venture firms, and multinational corporations in financings, M&A, and licensing deals, and later held executive roles, including General Counsel and Head of Corporate Development, at one of the world’s largest streaming and digital media companies, Speedera Networks, later acquired by Akamai.
For almost 20 years, Chris has been a fixture on television, radio, podcasts, in ...

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
What happens when you bring Tokyo-Neapolitan style pizza to New York? 
You get one of the hottest new reservations in a city full of top restaurants and pizza spots.
 
Are there similarities between pizza and asset management? 
Different styles of pizza appeal to different people. Same in asset management. But there is one constant: the way the pizza is made matters.
At Pizza Studio Tamaki, the Tokyo-Neapolitan pizza is made with acclaimed pizzaiolo’s Subasa Tamaki’s dough flown in directly from Japan. Every detail matters. Every flavor is unique. And it all blends together into a unique pizza experience.
That’s something Nomura Asset Management International is aiming to do in the U.S. with both public and private markets.
We recently sat down at Pizza Studio Tamaki for a live podcast with Nomura Asset Management International CEO Shawn Lytle, with the wealth channel in the audience, to discuss pizza, patterns in asset management, and private markets. 
Shawn’s deep experience working for a number of the industry’s largest asset managers and understanding of what the wealth channel needs across public and private markets set the table for a great discussion on the evolution of asset management, how culture impacts how firms work with the wealth channel, and how to bring an international brand into the U.S. market.
We ate the pizza while we podcasted, and we even did a pizza rating. Spoiler alert, PST was really good. So was the podcast.
Bio
Shawn is Chief Executive Officer of Nomura Asset Management International, where he is responsible for overseeing the business, investment teams, and strategies for clients. He joined Nomura Asset Management as part of Nomura’s acquisition of Macquarie Asset Management’s US and European public investments business in 2025. He also serves as the President of Nomura Funds (formerly, Macquarie Funds) and oversees registered vehicle governance in the US and Europe. Shawn is a member of the Nomura Asset Management International Executive Committee.
He has more than 30 years of asset management experience. Before joining Macquarie in 2015, he held several management and equity investment roles at UBS Asset Management and various roles at J.P. Morgan Asset Management.
Shawn is a member of the Investment Company Institute (ICI) Executive Committee. He is also a board member of OppNet and Philadelphia Financial Scholars, in addition to being the former Chairman of the National Association of Securities Professionals (NASP).
He earned a Bachelor of Science in marketing from The McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
Thanks, Shawn, for sharing your expertise, wisdom, and passion about asset management and private markets.
Show Notes
00:00 Tokyo Pizza Meets NYC
01:07 Ultimus Fund Solutions Sponsor Message
02:05 Meet Shawn Lytle
02:18 Why Japanese Pizza Studio Tamaki
05:09 Four Firms Four Cultures
06:10 Craftsmanship And Consistency
06:52 Bringing Nomura To US
07:21 What Great Managers Share
09:00 Choosing The Right Partner
10:29 Curated Menus Fewer Managers
12:50 Beta Is Free Alpha Matters
13:48 Nomura Platform Advantages
15:39 Winning In Japan ETFs
17:11 Sports Marketing Lessons
22:29 Private Markets Next Wave
27:59 Pizza Rating And Wrap Up

A Word from Our Sponsor, Ultimus
This episode of Alt Goes Mainstream is brought to you by Ultimus, the full-service fund administrator and transfer agent powering asset managers in private and public markets. As alts go mainstream, you need real expertise to handle complex fund structures, connect with key distribution partners, and handle sophisticated compliance, reporting, and transparency demands.
That’s Ultimus: high-tech, high-touch solutions for over 450 clients and 2,500 funds with $775B in assets under administration. Backed by an expert team of over 1,200 employees, they place client service at the core of their business, helping you navigate complexity during your fund structuring or launch and then supporting you through every stage of growth. Whether you’re already in the market or thinking about entering private wealth, you can trust their team’s deep expertise in retail alternatives to help you reach your goals.
Learn more at ultimusfundsolutions.com or email info@ultimusfundsolutions.com.
We thank Ultimus for their support of alts going mainstream.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
Today’s podcast dives into the world of data and decision-making in private markets. 
We were in the studio with private markets polymath Jeb Altonaga. Jeb is SVP, Head of Business Development in Private Markets at Arcesium, where they have built a financial management data platform aimed at solving the data normalization problem across public and private markets.
Jeb’s multihyphenate background puts him in a position to see the data challenges for GPs and LPs alike from all different angles as Arcesium works to take unstructured data and turn it into structured data and insights to help asset managers run their businesses more efficiently and serve LPs better.
Jeb’s background spans Citadel, where he was Head of Relationship Management & Operations in Asia-Pacific, to being an LP as the COO at Blue Pool, a large family office based in Asia, to running capital formation and as COO at Australian activist investment firm Sandon Capital. He joined Arcesium in August 2025 to spearhead the execution of business strategy and the product roadmap for Arcesium’s software solutions in private markets.
We had such a fascinating discussion given the various vantage points that Jeb has had in private markets. We covered:
How to think about data normalization and why it matters.
Where and when transparency makes sense.
Which asset classes may benefit from less transparency.
What secondary markets might do to transparency in private markets.
What a tradable market in private markets could look like.
The evolution of private credit’s market structure.
What Jeb would make more efficient about private markets.
Why it’s important to be a lifelong learner.
Bio
Jeb Altonaga leads business development for Arcesium’s Private Markets segment, drawing on over 25 years in alternative investments, capital formation and funds management. He founded Clearglass Capital Partners, a private capital advisory firm, and previously served as COO at Sandon Capital in Sydney and Partner & COO at Blue Pool Capital (& Pinyin) in Hong Kong and began his buy-side career at Citadel Investment Group in Chicago. Jeb holds an MBA from NYU Stern and has served on the board of Hedge Funds Care Asia.
Thanks, Jeb, for sharing your wisdom, expertise, and passion about public and private markets.
Show Notes
00:00 Welcome to Alt Goes Mainstream
01:25 A Message from Ultimus Fund Solutions
02:22 Jeb’s Career Path and Lessons
04:05 Why Jeb Joined Arcesium
04:40 From Loan Tapes to AI
06:33 Building in Private Markets
07:26 The Missing Middle Layer
08:55 Do GPs and LPs Want Standards
10:38 LPs Must Drive Change
11:33 Family Office Perspective
14:23 AI Adoption for Different Generations
18:11 Private Markets Need a Desktop
21:02 APIs versus SFTP plumbing
23:25 Evergreens and Secondaries Push Transparency
28:49 Secondaries as Portfolio Tool
29:11 Transparency vs Information Edge
29:48 Private Equity Transparency Limits
30:10 Why Private Credit Opens Up
31:48 Market Structure Highway Analogy
33:08 Tech Stitching Private Data
34:14 Golden Source Data Layer
35:19 Arcesium Intelligence Agents
35:39 Front to Back Platform Buildout
36:50 Why Firms Differ on Same Stack
39:27 Tech First Culture as Edge
41:04 Private Credit Marketplace Debate
43:41 Liquidity Mismatch and Gates
46:24 Secondary Trading Tech Readiness
47:37 Security Master Fix and Wrap
A Word from Our Sponsor, Ultimus
This episode of Alt Goes Mainstream is brought to you by Ultimus, the full-service fund administrator and transfer agent powering asset managers in private and public markets. As alts go mainstream, you need real expertise to handle complex fund structures, connect with key distribution partners, and handle sophisticated compliance, reporting, and transparency demands.
That’s Ultimus: high-tech, high-touch solutions for over 450 clients and 2,500 funds with $775B in assets under administration. Backed by an expert team of over 1,200 employees, they place client service at the core of their business, helping you navigate complexity during your fund structuring or launch and then supporting you through every stage of growth. Whether you’re already in the market or thinking about entering private wealth, you can trust their team’s deep expertise in retail alternatives to help you reach your goals.
Learn more at ultimusfundsolutions.com or email info@ultimusfundsolutions.com.
We thank Ultimus for their support of alts going mainstream.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
Today’s podcast dives into the world of real estate with one of the industry’s largest managers and investors in industrial real estate.
We sat down in Franklin Templeton’s New York City office with real estate veteran Josh Pristaw, Managing Director, President of Clarion Partners, a $73.3B AUM real estate investment firm within Franklin Templeton’s alternatives platform.
Josh discussed data and durable demographics, which are drivers of the deeply researched investment process that his team at Clarion employs to invest in industrial real estate.
Josh’s background, which spans developing shopping centers to investing in real estate in Brazil to running one of the industry’s leading single-family rental investing platforms at Pretium, has helped him lead Clarion, one of the industry’s largest industrial real estate investment platforms.
Josh and I had a fascinating conversation, connecting data and demographics to actionable insights in real estate investing. We covered:
The durable demographic and secular trends driving Clarion’s investment strategy in healthcare real estate.
How 10,000 people turning 80 years old in the US daily is creating an “aging in place” dynamic that is impacting housing supply and self-storage demand.
Why industrial demand is tied to e-commerce growth.
How Clarion takes a quantitative approach to real estate investing, evaluating sub-markets using recursive factor analysis.
How diversification and liquidity drive Clarion’s open-ended fund strategy, with 95% of the firm’s $73.3B in AUM residing in open-ended funds.
Why data centers pose liquidity, capex, valuation, and concentration challenges for open-ended fund vehicles.
Bio
Josh Pristaw, equity owner and Managing Director, is President of Clarion Partners. He is a member of the Firm’s Executive Board, Investment Committee, and the Board of Directors for Clarion Partners Holdings, LLC. He joins Clarion from Pretium, where he served as Senior Managing Director and Head of Pretium’s real estate platform. Prior to Pretium, Josh co-founded GTIS Partners.
He has more than two decades of real estate experience across property sectors and functions, including acquisitions, asset management, portfolio development, and capital markets. He joined Clarion Partners in 2025 and has been working in the industry since 1997. Josh graduated from Dartmouth College, B.A. (1997).
Thanks, Josh, for sharing your wisdom, expertise, and passion about real estate investing and your data-driven approach to the asset class.
Show Notes
00:00 Introduction
01:14 Message from Ultimus Fund Solutions, Our Sponsor
02:44 Josh Career Origins
03:55 Real Estate Scale Shifts
04:51 Understand Demographics and Mega Trends
05:35 Senior Housing Supply Gap
07:12 Housing Turnover and Storage
08:24 Data Models Across Sectors
09:21 Data Driven Allocation Lens
09:57 Four Drivers of Returns
12:16 Timing Bets and Liquidity
15:17 Lessons Learned From Building In Brazil
18:06 Invitation Homes Data Ops
19:44 Clarion Data Science Edge
21:06 Quant Meets Relationships
22:11 Asset Class Specialists 
23:16 Industrial Demand Megatrends
23:32 Ecommerce Trillion Wave
24:16 Efficiency And Taller Warehouses 
4:58 Robotics Power Premium
26:54 Infrastructure Constraints 
29:44 Why Not Data Centers
34:27 Supply Glut More Sellers
33:10 Liquidity Supply Imbalance
36:12 Evergreen Fund Playbook
39:26 Portfolio Rotation Discipline
41:16 Career Advice and Wrap Up

A Word from Our Sponsor, Ultimus
This episode of Alt Goes Mainstream is brought to you by Ultimus, the full-service fund administrator and transfer agent powering asset managers in private and public markets. As alts go mainstream, you need real expertise to handle complex fund structures, connect with key distribution partners, and handle sophisticated compliance, reporting, and transparency demands.
That’s Ultimus: high-tech, high-touch solutions for over 450 clients and 2,500 funds with $775B in assets under administration. Backed by an expert team of over 1,200 employees, they place client service at the core of their business, helping you navigate complexity during your fund structuring or launch and then supporting you through every stage of growth. Whether you’re already in the market or thinking about entering private wealth, you can trust their team’s deep expertise in retail alternatives to help you reach your goals.
Learn more at ultimusfundsolutions.com or email info@ultimusfundsolutions.com.
We thank Ultimus for their support of alts going mainstream.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
Today’s podcast takes us to Oslo, Norway, for a very special conversation with Christian Sinding, the former CEO of one of the industry’s leading alternative asset managers, EQT.
Christian’s hometown of Oslo provided an ideal setting to showcase both the Nordic heritage that represents EQT’s DNA and the global ambitions of the firm (and one of its portfolio companies, 1X) that is looking to fund Europe’s first €1T company. 
Christian has been one of the leaders in the alternative asset management industry. He was most recently the CEO of EQT, where he steered the firm on an impressive growth path as a public company and helped scale the firm to almost €300B AUM. 
He’s now focused on another ambitious project: the Scaleup Europe Fund, a fund that EQT is managing and has support from the European Commission to invest in Europe’s most promising technology companies. 
With 1X Tech’s NEO humanoid robot joining us for part of the discussion, Christian and I had a fascinating conversation about the past, present, and future of alternative asset management and Europe’s technology ecosystem. Christian and I discussed:
The evolution of EQT and alternative asset management.
What Europe needs in order to fund the future.
How Europe can harmonize its capital markets infrastructure.
What it will take to create the €1T company.
What it means for companies to have global ambition.
The what, why, and how behind EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund.
Why EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund invested in ICEYE and Lovable.
Why EQT invested in 1X.
How Christian’s “why not” attitude can take Europe’s technology ecosystem to the next level.
Come for the conversation with Christian, stay until the end to meet NEO.
Bio
Christian Sinding is an Institutional Partner at EQT with nearly 30 years of experience at the firm. He served as CEO and Managing Partner from 2019 to May 2025, during which EQT quadrupled in size, becoming the fourth-largest company listed on the Swedish stock exchange.
As CEO, Christian oversaw EQT’s public listing on Nasdaq Stockholm in 2019 and guided the firm’s development as a publicly listed organization, with a strong focus on governance, transparency and long-term, responsible ownership.
Prior to becoming CEO, Christian served as Head of EQT Equity from 2011, where he played a central role in building EQT’s core investment franchise and expanding the firm’s international footprint. Under his leadership, EQT scaled from a market value of approximately €6 billion at listing to around €40 billion in 2025, further strengthening its position as a global leader in private markets.
Christian chairs the EQT Council and the Global Investment Forum, serves as Chair of the Investment Committee for the Scaleup Europe fund, and serves on the Investment Committees for EQT Equity and EQT Future. He is also a board member of the EQT Foundation, supporting EQT’s long-term societal engagement.
Christian brings deep experience in leadership, governance, public markets and long-term value creation, with a focus on resilience and partnering with founders and management teams to build durable, globally competitive businesses.
Thanks, Christian, for sharing your passion, expertise, and wisdom about private markets and building companies and for such a fascinating conversation.
Show Notes
00:00 Meet NEO, the 1X Robot
00:06 Europe’s $10B Gap
00:18 The “Why Not” Mindset
00:29 Lovable and The Trillion Euro Ambition
01:37 A Message From Our Sponsor, Ultimus Fund Solutions
02:35 Welcome Christian Sinding
02:40 Nordic Edge on Innovation
05:38 EQT Origins and DNA
08:01 Inspiring Change Not Control
08:36 Full Potential Planning
10:46 Troika Model Explained
13:42 Winning After the IPO
16:14 Capital Markets Playbook
20:56 Why Venture and Growth
28:44 Europe’s Innovation Gap
28:56 Politics Push Reform
29:37 Why Europe Can Win
30:47 Building Bigger Markets
31:18 A European Nasdaq Dream
32:28 From Local To Global
33:36 Founder Ambition Shifts
34:40 Lovable Trillion Dollar Vision
35:32 EU Inc And Capital Reforms
36:56 Private Longer Needs Capital
37:52 Scaleup Europe Fund Explained
39:53 What Makes It Different
43:02 Defining Success And Flywheel
46:47 The “Why Not” Mentality
48:58 Some Time With NEO, The 1X Robot

A Word from Our Sponsor, Ultimus
This episode of Alt Goes Mainstream is brought to you by Ultimus, the full-service fund administrator and transfer agent powering asset managers in private and public markets. As alts go mainstream, you need real expertise to handle complex fund structures, connect with key distribution partners, and handle sophisticated compliance, reporting, and transparency demands.
That’s Ultimus: high-tech, high-touch solutions for over 450 clients and 2,500 funds with $775B in assets under administration. Backed by an expert team of over 1,200 employees, they place client service at the core of their business, helping you navigate complexity during your fund structuring or launch and then supporting you through every stage of growth. Whether you’re already in the market or thinking about entering private wealth, you can trust their team’s deep expertise in retail alternatives to help you reach your goals.
Learn more at ultimusfundsolutions.com or email info@ultimusfundsolutions.com.
We thank Ultimus for their support of alts going mainstream.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.