Meghan McGowan, Founder & CEO, Barramundi - Inflection Points: Leveraging networks and technology to give investors timely access to some of the world's most exciting companies

Speaker A: Hey there, it's Tom Ryan, Founder and Executive Chairman of icr. Before we get into the next episode, I wanted to ask that you subscribe to the show. It'll help us get even more unique and interesting guests on the podcast and in turn continue to educate management teams and the growing ecosystem that creates value for fast growing private and public companies. And while you're at it, head over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a five star rating. Very much appreciated.

Speaker B: We invest at the inflection points where we believe these companies are building in private before sort of the news hits and people know about them. And this allows us to get into deals at uh, an inflection point in valuation that our investors can make money and enjoy the ride along the way.

Speaker A: In ID Fund, Megan McGowan and her husband Joe built a platform that gave their investors seamless access to exclusive and lucrative private investment opportunities. Now, with their new firm, Barramundi, they hope to build on that previous success by leveraging new technology and expanding their total addressable market.

Speaker B: Barramundi isn't a rebrand, truly. It's the institutionalization of a way of operating that I've been building my whole life. And we're willing to break things while we're strong and put our systems on the table.

Speaker A: My name is Tom Ryan and this is. Welcome to the arena, the ICR podcast. Each week I sit down with today business leaders to give you an inside scoop on some of America's most prosperous public companies. Their origins, their challenges, and the keys to their success. Today we're talking to Megan McGowan, who's the founder and CEO of Barramunde, a private markets and pre IPO investment firm. Under her leadership, the company has grown to roughly 1.5 billion in assets under management, with more than 5 million invested across their companies. And they're defining the next era of the economy. From AI infrastructure to drone technology to digital finance, Megan's career path has been anything but typical. Before private markets, she built personalized portfolios and rare and collectible assets, specifically vintage wines. And that experience gave her an early read on what investors actually want, which is not just access, but access paired with connection, intention and trust. Prior to Barramundi, Meghan Co founded QJC Capital with her husband Joe McGowan, a boutique firm specializing in private equity investments in late stage private companies. Their experience together became the blueprint for the ID Fund, which later evolved to Barramundi. Let's enter the arena with Megan McGowan. So you came to the private Markets from the wine futures business and creating personalized portfolios and collectible assets and stuff. How did you get into that in the first place?

Speaker B: Well, it started when I was younger. I grew up in Oregon, and my dad was a doctor, sort of a gentleman farmer. And if you will, he was an old school doctor, where before Oregon was on the map in the wine world. He used to do operations on some of the winemakers in Oregon, and they truly didn't have the funds to pay for their operation. And they would trade him wine. We used to have mason jars of wine in our garage.

Speaker A: That is insane.

Speaker B: It was amazing. I don't realize until now what a gift that was, but so at Thanksgiving, he would bring in, you know, these insane varietals, Gewerstraminers and Rieslings that were grown in the Willamette Valley. And we got to taste wine and understand the chemistry and the art and what went into bottles of wine. And later I went back into the wine world. A gentleman by the name of Chris Cree put me under his wing. He was the fourth sommelier, master sommelier. And he put me under his wing and took me to tastings.

Speaker A: Oh, my God.

Speaker B: And ended up building wine cellars for the same kind of clientele and investors that Joe, my husband, was serving in Wall Street.

Speaker A: Oh, my God, like, what a cool way to grow up. My life was so boring growing up. But anyway, and so Joe was a Wall street broker.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And you two met and like these two worlds collided in a way. When did kind of the light bulb go off where you can take kind of what you do and know, uh, about people who want those kinds of experience and assets and kind of Joe's world with stocks and bonds and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah. So Joe and I met on Semester at Sea. So we met in college and shortly after, uh, we came together in New York City when I moved to New York. And at that time, Joe is a year older than I am. Joe spent years as a broker on Wall street and he was learning capital markets, deal structure, how to place opportunities, et cetera. And he saw the private market wave coming before most people did and moved into it. And at that time I was in wine Futures, building exclusive sellers for, for high net worth clients. And on paper, it sounds like a completely different industry when in actuality it's going to the same room with two different doors.

Speaker A: And Joe, you know, I was a Wall street guy for a while, obviously, like high walls and secrecy. You may have come at it a different way. You know, talking about like community and referrals and connection. How did you work out those two? Kind of, maybe, some might say competing forces and how it evolved into what you do today.

Speaker B: Great question. Yes, Jo did come from the world of high walls and secrecy. And I did insist on community and referrals and connection. I came from the wine world where sharing your tasting notes and having wine dinners was the norm. Where collectors shared their bottles in the tasting rooms that we were in, which allowed for referrals, truly for more wine cellars to stock and build, et cetera. So for Joe, the traditional Wall street wisdom said ultra high net worth want complete privacy. They want that high walls and to move in stealth and let no one in. And that training worked for him, Honestly, it worked for him. And I said no, it has to be about community. Our investors, the same investors want the same thing. It's about people. When you experience something great, when you are excited about something, it's just natural to want to share and bring your friends in. And at the end of the day, people are people. I sort of won that argument. And to this day, 98% of our investors that come in are referrals. And uh, we haven't done an ounce of marketing.

Speaker A: So I think it works other than today. Here we go. So, uh, what I found fascinating is, um, I'm old enough to remember how kind of private market investing was done even 10 years ago. But let's talk about after the financial crisis. And you know, you would be approached to invest in something and there'd be, you know, 100 page FedEx is going back and forth and signing and things like that. Like when did you realize there was a better way to do that? And how did you and Joe just kind of cook that up?

Speaker B: Oh, uh, well, honestly I was the FedEx runner. I knew all the FedEx spots at the time we're at around the North Shore of Boston. I literally knew every FedEx drop off location within like a 20 mile radius. We realized that an 80 page subscription doc had one missing signature. And it was the biggest deal we had done up to that date. And we missed the closing because we didn't have the signature from one investor that was overseas. And it was at that moment I said to Joe, we are honestly in the pushing paper business. Uh, we're not in the investment business.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker B: And to his credit, he realized what this industry needs is to solve for that. Not another fund, but, uh, to solve for that.

Speaker A: So there was a lot of paper being pushed around. You weren't in the investment business. You were in the paper pushing business. How did you say, hey, we're doing ID fund? And what did that look like in the beginning?

Speaker B: What it looked like in the beginning was we took the idea to build a portal where investors could log in and see a deal end to end and have everything there transparently. So the speed and the trust that we were missing when we were missing signatures in an analog FedExing back and forth was now contained in a portal. So normally speed and trust don't go together, but in this case, we built it because we had the transparency for investors to see their subscription documents, the videos that we put up, all the documents that allowed our investors in their own time to go back as many times as they wanted to be able to look and subscribe in our deals.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's amazing. Megan, I'm also an investor in ID Fund and some of your opportunities that you bring to people, and I was blown away. I think it was like three clicks and you're kind of done and you're wiring, you know, your investment in and there's tons of like follow up and some educational tidbit on the investment or a video or the CEO speaking. And it was really the most seamless private investment experience I've ever had. And a game changer. And you were doing it a long time before others. And even now some people are still doing the analog version of that, which is like mind blowing, but with the amount of technology at people's fingertips. Right, but you were doing it a little bit before the tech explosion.

Speaker B: Yes. Well, first of all, thank you for the feedback. Yeah, I'm excited. You're having a great experience. And truly, as we say, technology was never just the point. Access was the point. And technology is how we honored people's time to come on and be able to have it at their fingertips and go back to it and use it as they please. So I'm glad your experience is reflecting that.

Speaker A: And we're in agreement on the experience of kind of this proprietary portal and all the friction that it takes away from the process. But at some point you've got to deliver on, um, investment opportunities for people. And you have a lot of investors who've been with you for 20 years talk about the investments you've been able to help your investors access.

Speaker B: Yeah, we are concentrating on the AI infrastructure layer, drone technology, some of the defense tech and the crypto that is innovating and moving out into the marketplace. We invest at the inflection points where we believe these companies are building in private before sort of the news hits and people know about them. And this allows us to get into deals at, uh, an inflection point in valuation that our investors can make money and enjoy the ride along the way.

Speaker A: You know, and I think for investors, Megan, where you focus, timing wise, like in the life cycle of these companies, is so advantageous for investors. So, for example, you can get into something in a series A or B, and you know what, maybe you'll see liquidity and substantial liquidity maybe 15 years later, 20 years later, like, you never know. You're talking about later stage investing, possibly within a few years, not, uh, always guaranteed, but possibly within a couple of years of a liquidity event. And, you know, we're talking about companies like Anthropic and Scale, AI and Sandbox, AQ and Groq. Not Elon Musk's Groq, but G, R, O, Q Grok, the Q that Nvidia just bought. And one of the coolest companies I've seen come along in a long time called Zipline. I thought that was just like, absolutely incredible. And people can look that up. How are you getting access to these investments, which are just. I think it's incredible what you're doing. You know, when you allow people to come in with a $50,000 investment, that's a lot of money by anybody's standards. But the old way, you know, you'd have to put in a million dollars to get access to this. How do you get access to these companies?

Speaker B: Honestly, it's our network. 30 plus years building a network. And I like to say our sourcing and vetting compounds with our network. Along with the founders, they have great experiences with us. And it's our hope that as they come into the community, many of our founders have other founders they introduce us to. And we truly just piggyback off the relational and the partnership aspect that we build into our operating system, which is so important to the whole ecosystem. Thriving. Vetting deals and getting deals from our network is certainly the biggest way to get access into these hard to find, hard to access deals that you were just talking about.

Speaker A: Totally. It's so impressive. And Megan, you know, ID Fund was working great. And, uh, I can say that firsthand. Why launch Barramundi as a new company rather than just stay as ID Fund? What's different about what you're doing now?

Speaker B: Yeah, ID Fund was the proving ground. ID Fund proved the technology, the access, the community, and real returns.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And Barramundi isn't a rebrand, truly. It's the institutionalization of a way of operating that I've been building my whole life. And we're willing to break things while we're strong and put our systems on the table. And what got us here, we believe, won't get us there. Uh, let's disrupt ourselves first. And what do we need to move forward in a way where younger is coming in? A great wealth transfer is happening. How can we show up and open the TAM and serve those people as well?

Speaker A: And the name is so interesting to me. Tell us about the name.

Speaker B: Well, Barramundi. It's a funny story. Joe and I went to Australia for our honeymoon, and we were on an island, and Joe threw a hand line in, just messing around, and he caught a barramundi fish. And the guide that we were on the island with, truly, he freaked out as Joe was pulling in the fish. It was huge. And the guide was like, oh, my God, you caught a barramundi fish? He hadn't seen one. They're very elusive, hard to catch, really, and sort of coveted fish in Australia. And as we learned, the barramundi fish is the only species that can swim in salt and fresh water at the drop of a dime. The adaptability of the fish and as it swims over the Great Barrier Reef, when biologists and scientists are studying the reef, if they see a barramundi fish, they know for miles around that underneath that the ecosystem is healthy. So it's the same sort of indicator species that we want to be for our ecosystem to show up and find those founders that are also the indicator species where we. We know health is behind what they're doing, because we're vetting the leadership team and the founders first, and then the diligence and the numbers, et cetera, follow.

Speaker A: You know, I'm a sucker for a good name, and I think that's just an incredible metaphor for what Barramundi is hoping to accomplish for its investors. And I know we talked about the expanded tam, but I wondered what other ways Barramundi is diverging from how things were previously done at the ID Fund.

Speaker B: We are expanding our technology where we had access and allowed our investors to come in and invest from end to end, which is great. We are now adding AI into our back end.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: It's a company that we're currently invested in, where they have knowledge graphs. They're unbelievable. So the amount of personalization where we can show up and truly see our investors is how we're going to move forward. And the other way that we're really Looking at Barramundi that I've been doubling down on is leading through systems and processes, truly, instead of habits and how the system thrives and affect others downstream of what we're doing.

Speaker A: Yep, that makes sense. And you've had tremendous success. I know that Barramundi now manages roughly 1.3 billion through SPV structures. And you have a $50,000 m minimum. I mentioned that briefly before. Why did you set that as your minimum, Megan?

Speaker B: Well, with the $50,000 minimum, you know, the deals that we're sourcing and vetting and putting on our portal traditionally requires a million up to 5 million minimums or truly the right last name. And we use our SPV str, you know, standalone vehicles to pool conviction and get our community into rounds quickly that they couldn't otherwise. The $50,000 minimum, specifically, it's a serious commitment. It ensures aligned, thoughtful investors. But it also lets someone build a real private market portfolio across multiple companies instead of batting everything on one. So the SPV structure allows us to move quickly, invest and close on that investment while traditional structures are still scheduling committee meetings.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another thing you said earlier, which I wanted to go back and revisit, you talked about investing at, uh, an inflection point. What does investing at, uh, an inflection point mean to you?

Speaker B: What it means for me and what it means for our firm. We look for those companies that are doing the silent build years of infrastructure before the public recognition. And now, at the moment, the question shifts from can this work? To how fast can this scale. We come in where execution is everything and we think of it the way our name works. The Barramundi being the indicator species and the healthy one tells you the whole ecosystem is healthy for miles. We look for those companies that are the indicator species of their sectors because we see them firing on all cylinders.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think one thing you and Joe are exceptional at is, uh, you're not only smart and nice people, but you're very high EQ people. And that is, you know what? If everyone has superintelligence, the ones with the high EQ are going to be separated and successful. That's my own theory anyway. But I know you studied sociology and psychology, and human behavior is really the first principle of how to invest. How does that show up when you're sizing up companies and founders and talking about these different opportunities?

Speaker B: It shows up in leadership. We have an amazing team and a collection of investors that also help us on diligence and looking at the financials. But truly, the data rooms tells us what the founders built. Walking the halls allows me to see what they're executing on. When I see a founder talking we instead of I not understanding or knowing the answer to a question and handing it off to someone on his team. Allowing for teamwork to take place, just truly seeing how the whole team, specifically the founder, because the founder at Scale is really pushing his or her DNA into the company. Uh, you can read a lot about execution. At the end of the day, those teams are a collection of people and you can really see how they're going to execute and reach their milestones. Or not.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's the biggest trick as companies get bigger is how do you keep the culture intact? And a lot of these tech companies, it's not like a normal company, they might be hiring a thousand people every quarter. Like, well, I don't even know. But just, you know, scaling connection has got to be really difficult. I don't know, like, what your reaction is to that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with that. I'm doubling down on humans and scaling the Connection piece is really our jobs and the people on our team, their roles. Adding AI to what can scale, the different tasks that we can scale with AI, we are implementing and doing as we speak, and then adding on to the job descriptions and the impact. Where they can scale connection, where can they get out of the building and form relationships, have founder dinners, CFO roundtables, et cetera, where we can bring Connection in and allow AI to do our busy work.

Speaker A: Yep. You and Joe have been married for a while. You've been business partners. And you know, everybody says don't go into business with your spouse, but you ignored that, fortunately for both of you. What makes it work so well? Building a business with Joe? And you know what's the hardest part of that?

Speaker B: It's been a ride for good and bad. And, uh, you know, look, we didn't have liquidity for a long time. Uh, there were some, um, ups and downs. And there's nobody that I'd rather be in the arena with than Joe McGowan. He's extraordinary. And his ability to see deals, sales, form relationships is extraordinary. And truly, I've been around enough to know, just subjectively, he is the best of the best. There's no question. Yeah. Uh, but we completely differ in our operating systems. And the friction that that causes is the first place where we knew we had something, where opposites attract, where his transactional moving at a million miles an hour and my more relational, intentional. Let's figure out how the whole ecosystem, how all boats rise. Best outcome can play out is how we stay married and is how we stay aligned on our teams. And if we are modeling partnership and partnership behaviors, doesn't mean we always have to agree. The rest of the team is seeing that as well. And so it's a journey. It's. It's a living, breathing thing. You have to feed it every day, and we do that.

Speaker A: I think what you're best at is your genuine, uh, authentic people. And you're kind of laying it out there. Right. I mean, you know, I remember being in meetings with you all, and a tear is shed here and there. And, you know, you deeply care about what you're doing, and I think that attracts people to what you're doing. And you know, what, whatever struggle, you know, in building icr, there's been struggles with different opinions and stuff, but the most gratifying thing is when you kind of make it through to the other side and wow, you know, we really created this thing. And all of the struggle was necessary to get there. Right.

Speaker B: 100%. 100%. And modeling that partnership, truly, at the end of the day, uh, we have four kids, and they're watching us build this.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And honestly, growing and changing and allowing our kids to see that is the most important. That's what keeps us grounded.

Speaker A: It's cool. It's so cool. And then one last question, Megan. You know, I know you've said the bigger we get, the smaller we want to feel like looking five years out. This is such an incredibly exciting period. You've had all these amazing investment opportunities for your clients and stuff. What does this look like five years from now in your mind?

Speaker B: Truly, in my mind, the vision is that people live what we do. Our team, our founders, our investors, all experience Barramundi as a better version of themselves. I, uh, consistently ask, is our team, Are our investors our founders? Are they better people because they found us and concretely continued growth past the 1.5 billion, into expanded distribution channels, expansion into new generations of investors. We would like to keep our deal pipeline that allows us to be first to know and all the innovative deals. But truly the real innovation to me is experiential. I want people to love our experiences, you know, to show up in cool and interesting ways for everyone connected to us, like the team and founders, investors, to be a better version of themselves every day because they're in our ecosystem.

Speaker A: That was Megan McGowan, founder and CEO of Barramundi, a private markets and pre IPO investment firm with an incredible track record of giving their investors access to some of the most exciting technology companies in the world. She and her husband, Joe, have built an unmatched culture and a network of people that strive not only for financial returns, but but connection and intent. And they have ambitious plans to widen an already strong and thriving network, which will attract even more opportunity for everybody involved. I'm, um, Tom Ryan, and we'll see you next time back in the arena.

Speaker B: References to specific stocks are not intended to be recommendations for specific trading behavior. Comments presented on this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only and do not represent opinions or recommendations on whether to buy, sell, or hold shares of a particular stock. All investors are advised to conduct their own independent research into individual stocks before making a trading decision. In addition, investors are advised that past stock performance is no guarantee of future price performance.