In September 2023, venture capital firm General Catalyst launched a registered investment advisor, Catalytic Wealth, to serve founders, entrepreneurs and high-potential individuals within and outside the venture firm’s ecosystem. This week, General Catalyst officially unveiled the wealth management business under a new name, GC Wealth, and shared a more in-depth look at its vision, approach and growth thus far.
General Catalyst tapped Dave Breslin, who was previously responsible for growing First Republic’s private wealth business from $60 billion to $290 billion in assets, to run the RIA. Breslin’s first day on the job was May 1, 2023, coincidentally, the same day J.P. Morgan took over troubled First Republic in the midst of the regional banking crisis.
Since then, Breslin has been quietly building General Catalyst’s wealth management business under CEO Hemant Taneja’s leadership. The firm now boasts over $2.3 billion in assets under management across a team of more than 20 people. That includes nine advisors across three former First Republic advisor teams, and many home-office folks also from First Republic. But Breslin said he will stop recruiting for the time being.
“We believe wealth managers must serve as the connective tissue between their clients and the leading edge of this innovation where new ideas are being created,” the company said, in a blog post. “GC Wealth’s proximity to the technology ecosystem sets it apart, offering specialized support, responsible collaboration, and unique experiences that connect clients to global transformations shaping the future.”
In a recent interview with WealthManagement.com, Breslin discussed what he’s built, the benefits of working inside a venture firm, and his strategy for the future.
This interview has been edited for style. length and clarity.
WealthManagement.com: Why did General Catalyst take the last year-plus to officially announce its wealth business?
Dave Breslin: General Catalyst is involved in a lot. They’ve taken on some things after Hemant Taneja became the CEO there. They bought a hospital, they closed an $8 billion fund. They merged with two other venture firms, one in India and one in Europe. They rebranded and re-architected the firm last year, all of which happened in a very short window of time after I joined. There was always a desire to wait awhile just to make sure that we had everything on our site ticked and tied before we went out and showed ourselves off of the world.
Once those things started coalescing at GC, which are all absolutely amazing things that they got done, we wanted to be at the back end of that news because there were just so many people paying attention to General Catalyst at that point. That interest was something we wanted to take advantage of and not pre-empt.
WM: Why did General Catalyst decide to get into the wealth space?
DB: It goes really to all the things that they’re doing that are really meant to be deeper in the areas they want to be involved in. You have to be actual practical practitioners of the industry that you’re in. And from a wealth standpoint, First Republic was just so involved with venture and tech and private equity in a very deep way, both in the bank and the wealth management side. And Hemant, in particular, was just always wanting to internalize that community and that fabric and that connective tissue that First Republic built in its client base inside of General Catalyst. For him, just the relationship benefits of that and the flywheel aspects of it are just magnetically compounding.
We brought over the teams from First Republic to accomplish that. Thankfully, we went three for three on the teams that we really wanted to bring over.
What we sought to do was have a business that is very in tune with mature wealth and knows how to administer that in our sleep, but then also build the technology, the scale, and the capacity to serve that emerging wealth segment that is so prevalent. You can’t escape it when you’re in a venture ecosystem. It’s all potential, and it’s all serendipity in a lot of ways, so we wanted to make sure we built a wealth business around it.
Also, there are elements of the business where we can be additive to the General Catalyst ecosystem and not just a pure taker from that ecosystem to build our wealth business. We introduced founders to General Catalyst, hopefully, ones they would have never met before. We introduced, give or take, 40 people to the GC ecosystem—and a few they cut checks to from the venture fund—to back whatever initiative they’re building.
Those are the ways that we leave a penny; the way to take a penny is that we help these founders when other firms won’t, and that really brings together that tissue with General Catalyst in a way that I think will be magnetically compounding going forward.
Last but not least, General Catalyst raises funds from investors. The two biggest things for Hemant and me when we started this were that we weren’t going to be a portfolio company because, just like the hospital, once you have something as an investment, you have to think about selling it. You manage businesses in different ways when the end games get written.
And No. 2: we don’t want to be a permanent capital vehicle from the General Catalyst fund complex. We can allocate our client assets where appropriate to General Catalyst, but that’s not the goal.
The true mission here is to grow organically, not to add advisor teams. Unlike everyone else in the industry building wealth firms around inorganic growth and just finding ways to get people on board through equity and a thousand other ways to induce their partnership, that’s the last thing in the world we were doing.
WM: How did you build this thing?
DB: When I first came on board, I spent the summer more or less by myself at General Catalyst, just doing my due diligence. I tried to unlearn everything and remove all my past experience in looking at vendors and looking at potential custodians and things like that. Concurrently, I was talking to some of the foundational people I wanted around me, both the advisors but also the home office folks.
I was focusing on five different teams and the top three that I wanted fit pretty quickly. It became really obvious to me which ones were going to make the most long-term sense, and I thought would have the most fun and be the best people inside this environment because culture’s huge. I live and breathe the culture of the advisors and the way that people around the business see them.
Two of those teams joined in September 2023. And then, the last team joined in January 2024.
WM: Where are those teams based?
DB: One team is in Cambridge, Mass., sitting in the same office as the General Catalyst team. And then it was really important to me to bring all the folks from Jackson Hole, Wyo., given the wealth shift. It’s basically San Francisco East at this point with better taxes.
The third team joined in Delphi, Wash., a short hop from San Francisco.
But what we realized is that these founders are everywhere. So just because General Catalyst has most of its investment team in the Bay Area, and Hemant’s here, the leader of General Catalyst, and I’m here, that means nothing.
WM: How many advisors do you have now?
DB: We have nine advisors, and we’re going to stop there for the time being.
WM.com: Do you plan to do any acquisitions in the wealth management space?
DB: No. We will consider opportunities, but it would have to be a really good cultural fit. And it would have to be people who know a lot about this ecosystem because it is very nuanced.
GC is one of the top five largest firms in the world and doing amazing things outside of venture, and the people here are such amazing connectors and have so much confidence from the people around them. I know we can build some amazing connective tissue of organic growth throughout the organization and beyond GC.
I also want to build these three teams into their own companies, basically. I want the firm to be comfortable with them. The second I start introducing more teams, they get fatigued, the people at General Catalyst will say, “Oh man, now I got to get to know this team and if I like them or not.” We had that happen at First Republic. It was a byproduct of adding so many teams.
It’s just not a way to grow business. This isn’t a PE-backed thing; we don’t have to sell this thing in two years. We’re not the advisors on the other side of the fence—they wake up thinking about EBITDA and multiples every day of their business and not their clients, and that, for me, is a non-starter when it comes to doing this job.
WM: General Catalyst has invested in some of the technology companies that cater to financial advisors, like Powder and Origin. How will that play into GC Wealth? Do you use those technologies?
DB: I actually introduced them to Powder.
For General Catalyst, their job is to go find companies like Powder out there before anyone else does and invest in them on behalf of the limited partners. And then you have me. Being a wealth manager for a long time, I’m a natural consumer of technology for businesses. I get pounded every day by everyone who’s invented something in this space. Now, they can come to us when they see it because the folks who run financial services investing or wealth tech investing at GC don’t have decades of legacy experience in the trenches like my team. And they see something when it sparks their interest from whatever metrics they use to evaluate that, they then come to us and ask us to check out the technology.
The same thing in reverse, like Powder. A friend introduced me to Powder. I said, “This is really cool. We’re going to start using this. I know my friends at other firms are going to use it. Let’s invest in it ASAP,” so we invested in the seed round of Powder.
But they have 1000% of the vote on what they invest in. I could just say I like something here or there; I’m not involved in the investment, structuring and deal decisions, and stuff like that.
In the middle, we’re actually creating things from scratch. Founders might bring us things that aren’t companies or anything yet. They just have a thought about what our industry needs. We have this very fun playground in that we’re helping develop next generation technology.
And the end question: Do we use them? Absolutely. We use Powder, Allocate, Arch and GeoWealth, which is our TAMP and trading partner. Nevis is another startup that has been spending a lot of time with us. They’re building something that I think is going to be revolutionary.
WM: What does GC Wealth’s tech stack look like, and how is it different from other wealth management firms out there?
DB: It’s not terribly different. I mean, the vendors out there are the vendors out there. We custody our assets with Fidelity’s family office platform. I think there are only about 40 firms on that platform. I think it’s the best you can get on the custodial side. We use GeoWealth for our billing, performance reporting, account reconciliation and a few other things. We also use their white-labeled client portal. We use eMoney for our financial planning software. We also use Salesforce as our CRM.
We recently signed up with wealth.com. I’ve been pretty impressed with how they’ve brought together some of the technology around document generation for trusts for some of our clients. These emerging wealth folks—they don’t need a $7,000 estate planning attorney. They need very, very simple trust, estate plan documents and in some cases, health directives, all the normal things that you could pay a few hundred dollars as opposed to saddling them with a $7,000 engagement with an estate planning attorney.
We use Arch for our reconciliation of alternative investments across all platforms for our clients.
Getting to the smaller end that we use in limited cases is a platform called Allocate, which a former First Republic employee founded, Samir Kaji. But Samir founded Allocate as an alternative to iCapital, and we’ve used that in the past for a couple of our fund investments and things like that. But they’ve been an awesome integrated partner.
We really focused on using one custodian so we could build our tech toward one firm and have one single point of data and things like that.
It’s actually a very lean tech stack if you look at our vendors. Some people are using 20 different things, and I just can’t understand how they keep track of all that. We’re finding that it’s easy to replace one thing. It’s hard to replace four things. When you have a gigantic tech stack doing 50 different things, it’s not only difficult to manage, it’s hard to find areas where you can replace things and then do that transition elegantly. We want to be able to take advantage of new things on the fly if they’re good. With Powder, we started using it the next day. They integrated really well with our other things, which is a gating mechanism for anything. We can’t bring on a single piece of technology unless it integrates with every single thing we already have.
WM: Can you say how much General Catalyst has referred over to your business?
DB: We haven’t been purposeful in leveraging the ecosystem yet. The whole firm has been making sure that the big things got done—the fund got closed, the rebrand got done, the two mergers got done. You want to give them the airspace to get the important things they tried to get done for their job, so we weren’t showing up in the way that you historically think to make sure that referrals were coming.
That said, we got a lot. We signed up about 25 to 30 founders as clients.
We’re also working with about 60 people from the GC ecosystem who aren’t even clients. We’re doing planning for them; we’re helping them build roadmaps for what’s anticipated based on the trajectory of the companies. Let’s say they’re a Series A company. “Here’s what’s likely to happen next. You’re buying your first home, you’re getting married, you’re having your first child,” whatever it means, those elements build into roadmaps for people. We don’t make a dime off that.
Our advisors and our financial planners are spending that time working with that emerging wealth segment and making sure that we are really effective stores for them so that when there is wealth to manage, we’re there. There are instances with those people where there is a little bit of wealth to manage, but we want to be long-term focused.
General Catalyst is very long-term focused to a degree that I’ve never seen in my entire life. We try to manage that with the people because we want to make sure that we don’t have any pressure on those people to be great clients for us. If things are going to happen as they happen, and GC’s going to help them along the way, getting to where their company needs to be, we’re there to provide that financial resilience wherever it can be possible.
WM: You mentioned General Catalyst’s funds. Will your firm invest client assets in those funds?
DB: We’ll provide access as long as they continue to earn that right. They’re extraordinarily good at what they do, so that’s not a concern. But just like any asset manager we use on our platform, we apply the same exact lens to General Catalyst. The nice thing is that for a venture shop, they don’t raise money every day. They have a very large core fund; they raise it every 2 1/2 to three years. It’s hard to say you’re actually pushing it on anyone.
Last year, anecdotally, we had situations where clients wanted more invested in those funds than we wanted them to do. In a lot of ways, we actually restrained some of our clients from doing as much as they were going to do in some of those. We did allocate about $25 million of our client assets to GC’s Fund XII, which closed in the fall. That’s an $8 billion fund.
