Other platforms
They pick. You trust.
- A small team decides which deals you're allowed to see. The rest of the market stays off the page.
- A shorter list doesn't make the deals safer. You still have to decide, just with most of the picture missing.
Advisors gave us portfolios, products, and pretty projections. What they couldn't give us was a clear, side-by-side view of how any given investment would actually behave for her: what drove the cash flow, what risks we were really taking, and what could break.
I already had a background in venture and private deals, and it still felt like guesswork. Every sponsor had a story, every platform had a curated shortlist, and every decision meant digging through PDFs, filings, and spreadsheets just to understand what was really in the deal.
So I started doing the unscaled version of DealStack for my mom: pulling SEC filings, operator history, structures, and terms into one place, translating the key points into plain English, and stress-testing each opportunity against her actual goals, constraints, and timeline. It didn't make the decisions for me, but it finally gave me a dashboard I could manage her capital from with a straight face.
When I shared that process with other accredited investors, the same thing showed up again and again: the gap wasn't in anyone's IQ, it was in the tools they had to work with. Serious capital was being allocated using consumer platforms and scattered documents that were never designed for LP decision-making.