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In this conversation, we chat withAdam Felesky - Co-Founder and CEO of Portage. Adam is responsible for overseeing Portage’s strategy to invest in leading fintech opportunities on a global basis. Within the investment portfolio, Adam is a board director of Alpaca, Boosted.AI, Borrowell, Clark, Hellas Direct, KOHO, LoanStreet, Socotra, and TheGuarantors and executive chairman for Grayhawk Investment Strategies. Adam is also a Managing Partner and a member of the Management Committee at Sagard, a multi-strategy private asset manager. Prior to Portage, Adam was the Founder and Former CEO of Horizons Exchange Traded Funds, and a director and founding investor of BetaShares Exchange Traded Funds in Australia that was acquired by Mirae Asset Management of South Korea. Prior to this, he worked in JPMorgan’s Derivatives group in New York. Adam began his career in investment banking at CIBC World Markets. Adam holds a B.Eng. and B.A. in Political Science from McMaster University.
37’53”: Assessing risk and the credit cycle: A conversation on market perspectives
41’12”: Unlocking growth potential: Strategies for overcoming valuation challenges in fintech
44’59”: The channels used to connect with Adam & learn more about Portage
Sneak Peek:
Adam Felesky: …I'm a firm believer that markets are efficient, but sometimes they can be ignorant for a while. I do believe that M&A ... And I've been wrong on this, to be candid, because we really have seen a dearth of M&A. But I think M&A activity is going to be part of the solution. And I also believe that buyouts going to play a role here. That it's just going to make more sense for some of these companies to be taken out of the public markets and operate and exist in a private forum before ever returning to the public markets. And so, I think as a fintech investor in the private markets, you need to bet that these companies are going to have to be private longer because the scale for them to exist in the public markets, that threshold has just gotten a lot more significant. I think that's what a lot of people missed is going public seems like a great idea, but if you're on the cusp of what a mid-market cap company is, if you have any bumps in the road, all of a sudden, you're irrelevant to everyone.
There are very few pools of capital looking for micro-cap companies. And so, I just think you're going to have to stay private longer, and as a result, investors are really going to have to think about how they reserve against their positions. And we're thinking about this a lot. We used to reserve…
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