iConnections CEO Ron Biscardi on building the world's largest capital introduction platform and the Tomorrow X conference

Speaker 1: of scaling, monitoring, and security. We have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Ron from iConnections here. He's the cofounder and CEO. Ron, how can There we go. Woah. Look at that.

Speaker 2: Oh, look at that. You you got some memo. Tip of the hat to you, sir. Looking

Speaker 1: fantastic. Looking fantastic. How are audio, but you have motion. Yeah. It doesn't matter. When you got a hat like that, who needs audio?

Speaker 2: Who needs audio? How are we doing?

Speaker 1: You have us? We'd love to start with background, but, also, what's, the the ribbon on the hat? Oh, I guess we're going black on black and there's some contrast there. One up desk. I think that might be the next iteration. I've been saying we need to There we go. Continue the progress. There we go. Evolve the house. You had you had this thing ready because we didn't I know we didn't give anybody warning. No. No. This was a test. We were testing all of our guests. Yeah. Can you pull out the fedora And you do. At a moment's notice. Anyway, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey. It's great to be here. And I have to give my

Speaker 7: 28 year old son credit because he got into the fedora way before we did. Wow. So he he he actually had one available. He Googled it over to me and it arrived like two minutes ago. That's amazing. Well,

Speaker 1: fantastic. It seems like you're you're feeling optimistic. Let's start with, like, some background. I'd love to let the audience know about you, your journey, and and and tomorrow x and what's happening. But Yeah. Well, let's start with iConnections. Yeah. Let's start with that. Absolutely.

Speaker 7: So iConnections is the world's largest capital introduction platform. And what that means is we connect the world's largest institutional investors with all the fund managers who appear on your show. Private equity, venture, private credit, real estate. Everyone who lives in those more unique strategies, they come to our events and they use our software to meet the institutional investors who deploy capital into them, and over the course of a year, we'll run about 30,001 on one meetings between all of them, and they'll move about 10 to $20,000,000,000 in a given year through that whole ecosystem.

Speaker 1: It's really become a machine. And what is the what is the business model? What's the shape of the business? I know that there's events, but there's there's probably other things. Like, you walk us through the shape of of the business? So the the business is we we really

Speaker 7: combine the software. The software is the special sauce that makes this whole thing go. Sure. But because alternatives is very much a face to face business, you know you don't cut a 10,000,000, $100,000,000 check without meeting someone in person. So it is still very much a face to face business, and we combine our software that makes it possible for you to identify who do you really wanna meet and spend time with. Sure. And then at our event series, you actually do those face to face meetings. Got it. So we all the investors, of course, come for free. We roll out the red carpet for all of our institutional investors. Yep. We take great care of them, and they never have to pay because they're the money in the room. Yep. And and the GPs are the ones who pay Sure. For that package of software plus event. That's great.

Speaker 1: Was there a chicken and an egg problem? I'm interested in, like, how you start the business.

Speaker 7: Yeah. It's definitely a chicken and egg Right. Kind of problem. So I was lucky enough to have been at a point when we started iConnections in 2020, we actually did it by way of a global charity event. We said we first went to the institutional investors and we said, hey, everyone's freaking out. Know, you can't do a lunch meeting, you can't have a breakfast. All the ways that people got together were not available. Sure. We said, we wanna do a global event to benefit food banks all over the world. Mhmm. We'll give a 100% of the money we make to the food banks, and we're gonna charge the GPs to come to this thing. Will you just agree to take meetings? They they literally don't think one of them said no. We had about 400 institutional LPs in that event. We ran 3,000 meetings, and I'll never forget the first meeting was a fund in Hong Kong meeting the Kansas State University Endowment. And I remember thinking there's no way these two people would have ever met if it hadn't been for the software making it possible. So COVID really created this opportunity to make it more of a tech play at the core because like I will say the industry doesn't generally adopt technology quickly. You know, they're they're very old school. They wanna just get in a room together. Yeah. But the tech kinda made it possible during COVID. They all had to buy into that and it worked incredibly well. And then they kinda fell in love with it and it took off from there. And then I'd love your

Speaker 1: your overview, your positioning of Tomorrow x. It's it's it's sort of like my Super Bowl in the sense that the group that you bring together is incredible. And particularly, you just get people that are huge names in the world of private markets but are sort of under the radar among retail investors, among the broader investor community. But that's what I love about it because it would be so easy to to pull other names on stage. But I think you've done a great job of, like, honing a really, really laser focused polished product. But how much of that was deliberate? How how much of it is happenstance? How do you think about positioning Tomorrow x today?

Speaker 7: So Tomorrow x is different really from what I just described. Yeah. Tomorrow x is really the brainchild of three of us. Myself, Gavin Baker, and Antonio Gracias. Yeah. I had been talking with Gavin and Antonio about they are the best. I had been talking with them about how to pull more tech CEOs into what we were doing in in the fund world, and they advised me to not do it in Miami where our flagship typically happens. They advised me to really try and do something in Austin, and then they actually came back to me a few months later and said, we've been thinking about that discussion and we would love to do an event in partnership with you. So that was kind of the beginning of Tomorrow x. But I I would say more than anyone, it's been Gavin's brainchild. Gavin Gavin is so active on x. Yeah. He loves that community, and and his concept was why don't we try and democratize access to a world class banking conference for the FinEx community. You know, you think about it, there are so many analysts on Substack and Reddit and X of course who are never gonna get invited to a Wall Street event. Know, you're not gonna see them at a Morgan Stanley conference or a Goldman conference, but they all would benefit from being in a room with the best tech CEOs in the world. Mhmm. So Tomorrow X is our attempt to really bring that world class banking experience to the masses. So if you're a retail investor, or you're an analyst that has a substack, and and you're really active in the space, you can now come to this event and hear Jensen Huang Yeah. Michael Dell, John Gray, David Solomon, know, the CEOs of Databricks and Vercel. I mean it is in if you go to tomorrowxsummit.com and look at that speaker list.

Speaker 1: Absolutely

Speaker 2: important because some of these people are, like, very much moving the market. Totally. You'll have these, like Absolutely. Monthly CEOs. Yeah. Yeah. The market's tons. Well well, that, but I'm saying Investors even analysts that may not even use a real profile picture Yeah. But they are deeper in this stuff and have bigger audiences than than many people at the bank. You look the industry analysis.

Speaker 7: Yeah. These are important. Yeah. Then the long tail as well. Yeah. Tons of them. Yeah. Absolutely. And and that was exactly Gavin's point and and why he felt I mean, we we, you know, like normally when you do a conference, you start small. You know, you get like a ballroom in a hotel and you try and get a thousand people. We rented a stadium. So the concept the concept of Tomorrow X is like, let's really lean in to this thing and make it available to the masses. You know, it's priced super inexpensively so that it's really accessible by anyone. Mhmm. And we're gonna be there. Yeah. We're very excited to And get you are, guys. I I can't tell you. This is so exciting to have TVPN as our podcast media partner. We were like, who do we want to be the tech podcast partner? And there was really only one choice. Yeah. We have some amazing guests lined up. I know it's gonna be an amazing event. I'm so excited for it.

Speaker 2: It's yeah. It's just so perfectly aligned with everything that we love. Yeah. And we really hope a bunch of people in our community, which already are overlapping with Yeah. With Gavin's are are all there in person. We can't wait to hang out with everybody. No. It's gonna be fantastic. For sure. You guys will have plenty of interviews. Hopefully, your son comes too because he's clearly tapped in. Yeah. He will be there with We got these this morning. Yeah. He already had it. He already had it ready. He was years ahead of He the invested early. Head of the curve then. Alex Biscardi ahead of the curve. Amazing. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Great to see you here on the show, and we can't wait for the event in November. Thanks so much for having Same here, guys. We'll talk to you, Brian. Bye.

Speaker 1: Up next, we have Ben Hilack in person, the cofounder of Raindrop. I'm gonna tell you about Shopify while he comes in to the TVP and UltraDome. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces,