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

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.
Many of you have probably seen the red buses traversing the streets of London. Some of you have probably taken a London red bus to get to your next stop in the city. 
One of those red bus companies, Arriva, is owned by $60B AUM infrastructure investor I Squared. 
We went to North London to Arriva’s Palmers Green bus depot to take an inside look at the business of Arriva.
Arriva London is one of the largest bus operators in London. They’ve been carrying passengers around the UK’s capital since 1980 and they currently provide around 18% of the capital’s bus services, transporting 300 million passengers a year and covering 50 million miles across the 100 routes they operate under contract to Transport for London. 
Arriva London is part of the broader Arriva Group, which operates in 11 countries across Europe. The Group operates almost 12,000 buses and 650 trains, completing 1.5 billion passenger journeys a year.
We had the chance to sit down with the team at I Squared behind Arriva and I Squared’s infrastructure investing platform that delivers essential, everyday services to people across the globe.
We talked with I Squared Senior Partner Mohamed El Gazzar, Fund Partner Maxime Jacqz, and Principal Kristen Guo about how they have built Arriva into a pan-European transportation platform.
Chapter 1 - Mohamed El Gazzar: Patience, price discipline in their infrastructure investments, and professionalizing the Arriva platform. 
Notable quotes from Mohamed: 
“We’re very disciplined when it comes to our entry price. The deal doesn’t work, but we like a sub-sector. We continue to track that sub-sector.”

“Data centers need more power. The transportation sector is going to continue to electrify. The housing sector will continue to electrify. As a colleague of mine says, it’s yes or yes.”

“A lot of people buy certain businesses and say, ‘Oh, my exit route’s an IPO.’ But if the market’s closed, what do you do? We’ve been there before.”

00:00 Inside London Bus Depot
01:03 Infrastructure Investing Goes Mainstream
01:37 Sponsor Message Ultimus
02:35 Meet Mohamed El Gazzar
04:42 Europe Infrastructure Evolution
07:58 How Concessions Work
09:52 Why Buy Arriva
15:00 Carve Outs and P2P Deals
17:23 Value Creation and CapEx Plan
21:34 Electrifying Fleets and Power
26:51 Risks Regulation and Geopolitics
29:27 Diversification Mid-Market Exits
33:46 Democratizing Infrastructure Access
35:55 Closing and Sign Off
Chapter 2 - Maxime Jacqz: Value creation with Arriva
Notable quotes from Maxime:
“We hate the concept of having an asset which has unlimited downside and zero upside.”

“There is a single factor which is doing everything, which is talent. Without talent, you have nothing. The next buyer is not going to buy us. They’re going to buy the team.”

“Can we create an amazing value creation story with it? Yes. Could we also create a monster? Absolutely. And we don’t want that.”

00:00 Welcome Aboard Arriva
00:30 Maxime’s Path to I Squared
02:16 Investment Lessons on Risk
04:10 Electrifying the Bus Fleet
07:42 Platform Strategy and Synergies
10:24 Mid-Market Consolidation Playbook
12:58 Talent as the Value Driver
14:51 Picking and Backing Leaders
17:04 Operators vs Bankers Balance
18:45 Growth vs Exit Discipline
Chapter 3 - Kristen Guo: How capital markets can be a growth engine for infrastructure companies
Notable quotes from Kristen Guo:
“We’re very boring with our leverage profile. We always only take senior debt.”

“The debt should be a facilitator, but it should not drive the fundamental business decisions.”

“The amount of knowledge you learn by talking to someone on site, running that site, is way more than what you can read from a board deck.”

00:00 Welcome Aboard Arriva
00:30 Kristen’s Career Path
01:12 Capital Markets Fuel Growth
02:50 Financing Arriva Cash Flows
04:43 Building Lender Trust
05:48 Private Credit and Leverage
07:32 Platform Synergies in Action
09:08 Asset Management Conference
10:24 Site Visits and Real Learning
Bios
Mohamed El Gazzar is a Senior Partner of I Squared Capital, responsible for the infrastructure strategy in Europe. Mohamed is part of ISQ’s Executive Committee, Investment Committee, and Operating Committee, where he leads the Human Resources subcommittee. He sits on numerous boards and DATs, including but not limited to Conrad Energy, Lighten, Cube Cold Europe and Aggreko. Since joining I Squared Capital, Mohamed has led the acquisition and development of portfolio companies encompassing power and utilities, energy, transport and logistics, digital infrastructure, environmental infrastructure and social infrastructure. Some of the power and utilities investments that Mohamed has led include Energia Group in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; T-Solar, a solar PV portfolio with operations predominantly in Spain which was sold in 2020; and Conrad Energy, a UK independent power producer providing highly flexible generation; Aggreko, a leading global provider of mobile modular power, temperature control and energy services. In the transport and logistics space he led the 2018 acquisition of TIP Group, the largest pan-European trailer and truck lessor with presence across 17 countries in Europe and Canada; Cube Cold Europe, a pan-European cold storage platform focusing on acquiring and developing small- to medium-sized cold storage facilities across strategic areas such as ports and logistics hubs; and Arriva, a bus and rail operator. In 2019, Mohamed was involved in the acquisition of Domidep, I Squared Capital’s first investment in the social infrastructure space and one of the largest elderly residential care providers in France. In the digital infrastructure space, Mohamed led the acquisition of EXA, a leading pure-play operator of critical telecom infrastructure networks, which was completed in 2021. More recently, Mohamed led the acquisition of Applus, a global leader in the testing, inspection, and certification (TIC)sector. Before joining I Squared Capital, Mohamed spent 12 years at Morgan Stanley, most recently as an Executive Director of Morgan Stanley Infrastructure (MSI), a global platform for infrastructure investments at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Mohamed holds an LL.B. with Honors from Warwick University in the United Kingdom.
Maxime Jacqz is a Fund Partner based in the London office, leading ISQ’s European asset management function. Maxime focuses on portfolio company management and asset optimization, as well as due diligence and transaction execution. He serves on the boards and DATs of I Squared Capital portfolio companies including, but not limited to, EXA, Enva, Aggreko, Applus, Cube Green Energy, Cube Cold and nLighten. Max...

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.