Matan Hazanov lost nearly everything in the 2008 financial crisis, then spent eight to ten months meeting hundreds of advisors on Wall Street and Bay Street. He found they all wanted to gather or trade assets, not give independent advice. That gap became his business.
And so it was kind of at that moment that I. It dawned on me that there was this fundamental divide between the art and science of wealth creation and the art and science of wealth preservation. They're like two different worlds. What happened along the way is as I started to come into liquidity, also I got involved with my alma mater at the Shiva University, and I was chairing the investment committee. And with the issue of university and with my own capital, we went through 2008, 2009, global financial crisis. In both cases, we were caught with our pants down. Everybody ended up in the same place. All of my advisors ended up in the same place. I recognized that I was naive. I mean, I was in my 20s, right? So I was green. I was an arrogant little punk. Like, really me thinking, because I've had some early successes, I sort of thought I was God's gift to, you know, sort of business building or wealth creation. And that year, 0809, I ate just an enormous amount of humble pie. But on my investment committee, I was the most insignificant pipsqueak in the group. Everybody else was like, titans of industry. I'm sitting around and I'm thinking, okay, guys, like, I'm clueless. How the hell did we get here? And, like, everybody is like, shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. What are you doing with your own fortunes, which are colossal? And again, everybody's back to, you know, mortified shame and whatever. So that, one, there was this recognition that there's a fundamental divide between the art and science of wealth creation and wealth preservation. And then two, I had. All the advisors I had around me were, as I said, ended up with. I mean, it would be charitable to call it lackluster results. And also had no consideration of what was going on for me in my operating businesses or assets. I have made every dumb mistake in that period. I lost an extraordinary amount of money. My partner and I had a fairly sizable portfolio of industrial real estate and some other assets that went belly up. And like, as I said, one of three things have to be true. Either I really didn't understand how to leverage the financial service world, or I just had this gift for surrounding myself with like, the big village idiots of the financial service world, or there was something structurally and fundamentally problematic with the way the financial service world or the wealth management ecosystem was structured, and I just couldn't understand what it was. So I went on initially a search for new advisors. But it was also a little bit of a curiosity. And that curiosity became a whole hog obsession. I ended up going, spending eight to 10 months, going up and down Wall street and Bay street, trying to find better advisors, and meeting hundreds of people throughout that period. At the end of that walkabout, what quickly occurred to me was that it was very unsatisfying eye opening, but I still hadn't hired a single advisor. And I started to realize that 100% of the people I was meeting with were either in the business of gathering assets or in the business of transacting with assets. And there was nobody who was in the business of just providing unbiased, conflict free advice, independent of where those assets may sit, independent of any transactions. Or I reflect on it like well, that seems problematic. Somebody should be able to offer advice.
