For the billionaires-to-be, it’s a chance to broaden networks, perhaps to eventually invest in a startup or partner on a deal down the road. For the startup accelerators, well, hosting a group of wealthy young people to network with their entrepreneurs could open up all sorts of possibilities.
“If you have two or three big family offices and they all deploy funding into a startup, that almost guarantees success right there,” said Mehrinfar.
Influential Week
Anna Karmann, 34, has been to all three of Deutsche Bank’s NextGen Innovation Summits, one of which was in Los Angeles, and said they’ve helped her develop some of her most important personal and professional contacts. “It’s basically the most influential week of the year for me,” she said.
Karmann, a physician-scientist at Stanford, ended up investing in Click Diagnostics, one of the startups that presented at the 2017 event, and said the roots of the company she co-founded, Sailfield Inc., are from connections she made at the programs. Last year, she brought her husband, Wilhelm Oliver Karmann, part of the family that founded the eponymous German car company.
The tours take evening outings to places like Regale Winery & Vineyards and Michelin-starred Dio Deka restaurant. The daytime speakers are pretty prestigious, too, with schedules touting entrepreneurs like Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, who sold his company to Amazon.com Inc. for $970 million. Deutsche Bank’s Los Angeles event included Javier Verdura, Tesla Inc.’s director of product design, and Hollywood talent titan Ari Emanuel, the model for Ari Gold on HBO’s Entourage.
“It sort of feels like when you were a child and you go on class trips with your school,” Karmann said. “You’re put together with a bunch of like-minded international people in Silicon Valley and you grow and network and learn all together.”
Those connections may come into play as heirs figure out how to manage, and hopefully swell, their fortunes in a world where everyone—from centuries-old banks to adolescent startups—has advice on how to handle their enormous inheritances, and it’s not always easy to pick the winners from the losers.
“It’s an enviable problem to have, but nevertheless they have a problem,” said D.A. Wallach, a 33-year-old self-described “rock musician turned tech investor” who spoke at Deutsche Bank’s 2017 and 2018 programs. “They have to figure out how they’re going to take the reins on their family’s wealth and what they’ll do with it.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.