Limited partners (LPs) in private investment funds face many unique challenges when it comes to administration, portfolio management, and cash flow planning.

Litan Yahav, founder and CEO of Vyzer, joins the show to discuss these challenges that High Net Worth investors face as LPs in multiple private placement offerings, and how his product can help address their investment management needs.

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Episode Highlights

• Litan’s path to becoming a limited partner investor in dozens of private investment offerings, and lessons that he’s learned along the way.
• Best practices for LPs when performing due diligence, and questions that they should pose to GPs.
• The many challenges of a typical self-directed LP investor.
• Why Litan and his partners started Vyzer, the problems that the platform addresses.
• Private equity real estate industry trends that LPs should have their eye on.

Guest: Litan Yahav, Vyzer

• Litan Yahav on LinkedIn
• Vyzer – 10% discount link for podcast listeners

About The Opportunity Zones & Private Equity Show

Hosted by OpportunityDb and WealthChannel founder Jimmy Atkinson, The Opportunity Zones & Private Equity Show features guest interviews from fund managers, advisors, policymakers, tax professionals, and other foremost experts in Opportunity Zones and the broader private equity landscape.

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Show Transcript

Jimmy: Welcome to “The Opportunity Zones & Private Equity Show.” I’m Jimmy Atkinson. High-net-worth investors who invest passively into different private placement offerings face numerous challenges, and joining me today is fellow investor and entrepreneur, Litan Yahav, the CEO of Vyzer. And Litan joins us today from Netanya, Israel, just outside Tel Aviv. Litan, welcome, and thanks for joining me on the show today. How you doing?

Litan: Great. I’m super excited to be on the show with you, Jimmy. I love what you guys…

Jimmy: I’m excited to have you here, Litan. I don’t always have fellow limited partner investors on the show. I’m usually speaking with accountants or attorneys or fund managers, deal sponsors, folks who are either providing services to the industry or raising capital for their deals. So, it’s good to have a fellow investor on the show. We’re gonna talk a lot about your company, Vyzer, toward the end of the show today, but I wanna talk with you about just your journey as an LP throughout the course of the episode before we really dive into the meat of what Vyzer does. But let’s touch on Vyzer first here real quickly. For our audience of high-net-worth investors who may not be familiar with Vyzer yet, can you give us a brief introduction to Vyzer and what your role is there?

Litan: Yeah. Well, Vyzer sort of sprouted out of our own issues managing these passive investments that we’ve been doing for the past eight years. And it’s essentially a platform to manage wealth for people that have more complexity, that have those types of investments. So, that’s, like, in a nutshell. But, I mean, I love to dive into the story behind, like, LP investing and passive investing, and then maybe they’ll be better, easier understood exactly what Vyzer’s about.

Jimmy: Yeah. So, we’ll get there. We’ll talk a little bit more about Vyzer later in the episode. I guess we kinda have to set up why you created it and what services it provides to folks like us, limited partner investors, and a lot of the audience listening today, as well as, you know, as I mentioned, you are a high-net-worth investor. You’re a passive limited partner, or LP investor, in a number of real estate and private equity deals. I’m curious, how did you get your start as an investor?

Litan: So, I’m a tech founder, and founded a startup, like, 11 years ago, with my current co-founder, and a very crazy, weird, probably whole episode just to talk about that. But it was in the diamond industry, and we did 3D imaging for diamonds. Anyway, we sold that back in 2015, made some money, and decided to manage it on our own. And in Israel, which is where I live, every second person invests passively in real estate abroad, in the U.S., in Europe. And so everyone knows a guy. And so we started to invest our money on our own. Investing at the beginning in a few single-family rental properties, and then with some sponsor operators we know from Israel who do real estate syndications in the U.S. And that was basically the beginning of the journey of investing that started eight years ago, and sort of gave us that understanding, me and my co-founder, that we wanna be as passive as possible when it comes to investing. And that means you have to find really good people to invest with, that you can be passive. But that’s sort of, like, the gist of how we started.

Jimmy: And so you had this windfall, and you started accruing some wealth, and then you had the opportunity to invest passively in a number of real estate deals. Prior to that, or maybe even now as well, are you doing any investing into any traditional types of investments, stocks, bonds, through a brokerage account? I’m just curious if you’ve just always been what I might refer to as an alternatives investor?

Litan: So, I’m a tech founder, and that comes together with risk, right? And so I am not what you’d call risk-averse. I’m a risk-taker. But with that said, I think that investing in alternatives isn’t as risky as what a lot of people do in the stock markets. That’s my approach. So, I’ve never sort of been drawn to stock picking or dealing with public investments, other than just buying an index fund and just forgetting about it. So, I had this understanding pretty early on that if it’s not my job or my profession, I’m probably never gonna beat the market. And most people don’t. And so why even spend time trying to? So, I’ll just invest in an index fund, and take my risks to leverage to create more wealth in the alternative space, so.

Jimmy: No, I think that’s a great strategy. It’s similar to my approach as well. I’ve been a stock market and bond market investor for, I guess, all of my adult life, pretty much. But I don’t pick stocks either. I like to invest passively in some low-cost index mutual funds and ETFs, and a handful of, I think, I guess I got a handful of stocks in an older portfolio of mine. But the vast majority of my liquid wealth that’s in traditional public markets is just in low-cost index funds. I think that’s a good way to go unless, as you point out, it’s gonna be your full-time job. And even those folks, who devote a lot of their time and attention to trying to pick the right stocks oftentimes have a hard time beating the market.

So, yeah, that’s interesting how you decide to allocate your risk differently. You’re more of one who wants to take the risk out of the public markets, and put it into alternatives instead. So, one thing you pointed out in one of your previous answers is that you’re looking for quality people to partner with because you wanna be a passive investor. You don’t want to be the one picking the real estate deals, picking the properties, owning and operating them. You wanna own them passively, so that comes down to picking the right partners. What are some of the most important aspects that you consider when you’re evaluating different partners that are trying to raise capital from you?

Litan: Well, so, first off, I think anyone who does passive investing as a limited partner, as an LP, like, anyone needs to understand that the deal doesn’t mean anything. What matters is the people you invest with. And so, the most important aspect is vetting those people, those companies. And for us, it’s always been investing with people we know, lowering the risk that they will not lie to us, cheat us, scam us, or screw us over in that sense, right? That lowers the risk. There’s always a risk involved. But lowering the risk means I wanna find people I trust, who won’t do any of that. That’s hard. And early on, the only people we invested with were good friends of ours, or good friends of good friends of ours.

That also results in different type of risks, because these people don’t tend to be huge operators or sponsors. They don’t have 10, 20, 30 years in experience. But, the most important thing for us is we know that they are gonna be 100% trustworthy. That one, for us, is the foremost important aspect for passive investing, and it’s hard to find those types of people. And after we exhausted the people we know, or friends of friends of people we knew, we started to look other places to find ways to meet people that we can create that high level of trust. And it’s not foolproof, but it’s sort of like, you know, going to these events, joining investor clubs and communities, consuming a lot of content, cross-referencing a lot of information. It’s a hard process to find those people. But once, sort of, you find them, it just becomes, like, streamlined.

Then it’s just a matter, right? You get an email with a deal, and it’s a spreadsheet or some sort of offering. It’s not a matter of, like, “Is this information correct, legit, or not?” Because I already vetted the person. I trust that what they give me is accurate. Now, it’s just a matter, for me, is, “Do the numbers match my strategy at this point in time?” Because a lot of people think that doing that type of investing is not passive. And it’s not if you don’t have those people you can trust. I’ve never visited any investment property I’ve invested in. Never. Because my passion is building tech companies. I’m not going to be a real estate active investor. I have no aspiration to becoming a general partner at any point. I just want my money to grow with people I trust. That’s a long answer to a short but important question there.

Jimmy: No, but it’s a super-important question. I think it was a great answer. It’s similar to how I might answer as well. I have reviewed, I don’t know how many pitch decks over the last several years, running my Opportunity Zones business and my alternatives investments business at WealthChannel now. And I’ve also spoken with hundreds of high-net-worth investors, and I get different questions from both sides. But the investors ask me, “Hey, what should I be looking for in a deal?” And I have to tell them, “The deal is almost secondary. You need to make sure that you trust the person that you’re writing a check to. Do you believe in the team? Do you understand and believe the story that they’re telling you about who they are and what they’re investing in?”

The deal’s important, don’t get me wrong, but it’s almost secondary. In fact, not even almost, it is secondary to who is running it, who is the team behind it. And then on the other side, you know, I consult with different asset managers and deal sponsors on, you know, how to put together a compelling pitch deck. And sometimes I go through a pitch deck and there’s very little information about the team, or there’s not even photos of the people on the team. I’m like, “You gotta tell the story about yourself.” Because before you sell the deal, you’re really selling yourself. You’re locking up this LP’s money for how many years. He may not know you yet. That’s the first step. You need to make your introduction of yourself to the LP before you ask him or her for any money. It’s super important. The people behind the deal, sometimes that gets forgotten about, you know, but they try to lead the investor, I’m sorry, the deal sponsor tries to lead with the deal a little bit too much, I think.

And especially when you’re first getting to know an investor, it’s all about you, the person behind the deal. Totally agree. And I think, yeah, like you, Litan, I don’t know that I’ve visited any of the real estate projects that I’ve invested in. I’m thinking I am invested in one tech company, and I did visit their tech campus once. But other than that, I don’t know that I’ve visited any of the multi-family buildings or other types of buildings that I’ve invested in over the years, because I just trust the folks running it to do what they do best. I don’t need to be visiting the sites all the time. So, you’re in real estate. Are all of your LP investments solely in real estate, or do you have any private equity deals outside of real estate?

Litan: So, the real estate, different types of real estate. Storage as well. ATM. I’m trying to think about others. I think no, it’s mainly real estate. Sort of, value-add and development. Yeah, just to your point, just on the passive and trust, I’ll give you, like, a very short story, an example of how passive and trustworthy I am when I invest with someone, or how important the trust factor is. So, we invested with this guy in Brooklyn, who bought a small multi-family, you know, three-plex I guess, or four-plex, with the objective to flip it, and do, like, 30%, 35% within a year. That was sort of the plan. And after he bought it, a month goes in and he got an offer to sell it and make 10% profit. And he called us and asked us, we were, like, three or four partners. He’s like, “What do you guys want? What do you guys think I should do?” And we’re like, “Dude, we don’t know. We trust you. You make this call and whatever you decide, we’re fine with it.” He ended up selling it, and we made 10% after a month, which is fine, right? And again, it’s like, all I care about is what they think. If they think it’s a good deal, if they think it’s a good opportunity, then I’m in. If the numbers match what sort of we’re looking for. So, yeah. So, totally agree.

Jimmy: Yeah. That’s maybe the biggest value of being an LP investor is you get to outsource that decision-making to someone that you know and you trust, and you value their judgment. You don’t wanna have to think about it. You’re running your own company, or you’re spending time with your family. You don’t wanna have to think about all these different deals that you’re invested in. If they call you and ask you for advice, just say, “I don’t know. You figure it out.”

Litan: Exactly.

Jimmy: “I’m playing with my kid,” or “I’m running my business over here,” right? How many different deals are you invested in these days?

Litan: I think I’ve done 30-something deals over the years. I think they’re, like, 10 active at the moment, or 8. I don’t remember. But yeah, but to the question before, it’s all real estate, and all real estate equivalent. Some startups as well. Nothing more than that.

Jimmy: Yeah. All real estate. But some of the real estate has an operating business component on top of it, like the ATM has some revenue or some cash flow generated from, I guess the operation of the ATM. And then the storage units, there’s probably a business there at the storage facilities. So, you said about 30 different deals that you’ve invested in, 10 active. How many different operators is that with, or GPs is that with? Is it a smaller group of GPs that you’ve invested with multiple times, or?

Litan: Yeah, some. And some which were only one-offs I haven’t invested again with. I think over the years we’ve invested with, like, 10 or 11 different GPs across those deals. And again, it’s not because some of these GPs… Because these are small operators, they don’t tend to have a lot of deals. And so it’s not because they raised money and we didn’t wanna invest just because they didn’t have any more deals. Just because they’re looking for really good stuff. And because these are small operators, they’re really picky to what they choose. They don’t have a ton of investors, so they don’t have to supply deal flow for a lot of investors who are looking to invest. One of the things I’ve seen with, you know, the huge operators that send a deal every other week is that they’ll have hundreds of different LP investors, and they need to supply for that demand.

Until there’s a lot of deal flow coming in, which personally I don’t like to invest with those types of outfits. Just because I don’t wanna get deal flow every other week. I think that it’s a numbers game, and some of these fall. And not because they’re bad operators. Just because that’s the game, right? Bad things happen. So, I prefer just to invest with more medium to smaller operators that, you know, do one or two deals a year, maybe a little more. Just because that, I feel like that’s sort of the smaller operation, and not a lot of overhead, and really important for them to care for their investors. Yeah.

Jimmy: Yeah. That’s the case for investing in smaller to medium, as opposed to larger. I think I tend to lean toward the other side of the spectrum. I tend to invest with the larger companies, that might be a little bit more established. But, you know, there’s a different level of risk there that I’m comfortable with than what you’re comfortable with, it sounds like.

Litan: A hundred percent. It’s all, yeah, totally risk-return. I also spoke with a fairly large operator who also gave me a different insight, which is really interesting to think about. The bigger operators don’t go for the smaller deals. Smaller deals have a lot of potential, also higher risk, right? So, the medium to small operators go after the smaller deals, which have higher risk-return. The bigger operators go after the bigger deals because they have to deploy a lot of capital, so these bigger deals tend to be more relevant for them. So, that’s also an interesting aspect. Over the years, I was under this sort of misconception that the larger operators have sort of worse, or not LP-beneficial terms. So, the smaller operators, many times, there’s a split, and there’s only one pref, and then above that, it’s a straight split, like 80%/20% towards the LPs.

And then I had a conversation with larger operators over the years, where I’ve even heard, like, it’s, like, a 6% pref and then 50%/50% on top. And they can afford that because they’re huge, and they have a lot of LPs, and that makes sense. But I prefer the better terms for me, the LP, even if it’s high-risk. But then, recently I met some operators that have really good terms for LPs, and these are bigger operators, and I’m like, “Maybe I’ll reconsider my strategy of who to invest with.” But yeah, there’s a lot of interesting aspects to that LP investing, the lessons that I’ve learned over the years.

Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, 50%/50% split after a 6% pref doesn’t sound very good to me. Yeah, typically what I see is 6% to 8% pref and then 80%/20% is pretty typical. And then sometimes you can get to 50%/50%, but only after you achieve a pretty high hurdle may be of, you know, somewhere in the low to mid-teens. But these deals are structured all different ways, by all sorts of different operators. And, yeah, I would just encourage LPs to always ask about the waterfall terms before they invest, if that matters to you, and it probably should.

So, you mentioned you’re doing almost exclusively real estate, a little bit of operating businesses wrapped into those real estate deals. What locations do you like? Are you primarily in the U.S., or do you do some stuff closer to where you are as well, in Europe or the Middle East?

Litan: So, I’ve invested mainly in the U.S. I’ve done a few investments in Europe. Now I only invest either in Euros or Dollars. I had one investment that I did in Poland, and it was a good investment, but then just the exchange rates killed me. I mean, I didn’t lose money, but I made substantially less than I expected because of the exchange rates. And then I decided from that point on, I’m not investing in anything that’s not a major currency anymore. But other than that, I want to diversify into Euro and Dollars, but I don’t really look into geography as much as I do into the operators, right? I think, again, that’s key. I don’t really care where they invest as long as they’re good people to invest with.

Jimmy: Yeah. It always comes back to that, right? So, you mentioned you are no longer doing any deals that aren’t on a major currency. Maybe that was a mistake that you made, picking something in Poland. I don’t even know what their currency is. I guess they’re not on the Euro. What are they on?

Litan: No, they’re on Zloty.

Jimmy: Okay. Zloty. Never heard of that, I don’t think. But suffice it to say, maybe that was a mistake you made. Are there any other mistakes that you’ve made along the way, investing in 30-plus deals, or lessons that you’ve learned?

Litan: So, I think another aspect, and I don’t know how important that is in this environment, where interest rates are so high, but that’s the question about refinance, and what the terms are when a refinance event occurs. And this is something I didn’t ask at the beginning. And then, when refis started to occur, and each operator dealt with it differently, I started to ask that question going into new deals. And what I mean is that when you invest in these cash-flowing deals, they’re usually based on the invested capital, in terms of cash-on-cash annual returns, right? Let’s just say you’re supposed to get 7% to 8%, they say it’s 7% to 8% annualized…or annual cash-on-cash return, which is distributed let’s say every quarter. And let’s say you invest $100,000. And so, $8,000 bucks a year, every quarter $2,000, makes sense.

But then what happens if after 2 years, there’s a refinance event, and you get $70,000 back. That’s great, but what happens to the remaining? What happens to the cash distributions? What happens if you hold a property now for another 10 years and you’d return all the $100,000 in the refi event? Do I get any cash ongoing? Like, there’s a lot of these questions that I never asked at the beginning, and now I ask, not necessarily because of the terms, but more as the response of the operator and see how they deal with that type of question.

Jimmy: Or if they even know the answer to that question.

Litan: Exactly. Well, I mean, it’s all right. By the way, it’s all right not to know it. Not everyone asks that question.

Jimmy: Yep.

Litan: But, when someone answers it wrong, and I drill down on it, and I wanna make sure, “Are you sure what you’re saying? Because it doesn’t make any sense.” And then they’ll go check, and go back to, “You’re right. I was wrong.” It’s like, that whole dynamic just helps vetting the person you’re investing with. And so that was something that… Again, those are, they’re good problems to have, right? You invested capital. Let’s say you get all the capital back, you’re at zero risk. But still, you wanna understand what’s happening with this deal, if that situation occurs. Because the first or the second multi-family value-add deal I did eight years ago, I invested $100,000, exactly, I got $70,000 back after a year and a half, and I’m still in the deal. They haven’t exited yet. The cash flow I’m getting is based on the remaining capital invested. So, it’s, like, the IRR on that’ll be okay, because they got a chunk of money at the beginning, but it’s still, like, from a cashflow perspective, like, I’d prefer that money to be sitting elsewhere, making more money. So, anyway, that’s another lesson I guess that we’ve learned investing in these types of deals.

Jimmy: Yeah, that’s a pretty good one. And that lesson gives you the knowledge that you need to ask some hard questions of your GPs, and get to figure out how they respond to a tough question like that, whether they know their stuff or not. What are your overall goals when it comes to your LP portfolio, your passive real estate portfolio, and what’s your investment strategy to try to attain those goals?

Litan: So, it depends… That’s what comes into the numbers, if the numbers match my strategy. And so, if I’m investing in a multi-family value-add type deal, for me, that’s, like, medium risk. And so, medium-risk, I expect a certain return on that risk, and I’ll look for, you know, 12% to 18% IRR on those types of deals. And then if it’s a development type of deal, which is higher-risk, I’ll expect higher returns in shorter time, right? So, like a development. If a multi-family deal is, like, 5 to 10 years holding period, a development deal should be 1 to 3 years max, and should generate above 25% IRR, in my mind.

So, that’s, like, a strategy that I look for. And same goes for, like, ongoing cash flow. If it’s a short-term deal, like two to three years, then ongoing cash flow doesn’t mean much. But if it’s a 5 to 10-year, I wanna see cash flow ongoing. So, those are my strategies for investing. And obviously, I wanna be passive. As passive as possible. I want my money to work for me, and I wanna spend time with people who matter, and build companies that I enjoy building. And so that all supports that strategy.

Jimmy: And it sounds like you’re not just doing more opportunistic, higher-risk, or development deals, and you’re also not just doing, on the other side of the spectrum, just core value-add type, medium-risk deals, I guess. You’re kind of blending your different risks into a larger portfolio, is that right?

Litan: Yeah, again, the key indicator for me is who am I investing with, and then, what type of deals they have. I have so many good people I’d wanna invest with now. Now it’s just a matter of liquidity. Like, if I had a lot more liquidity, I’d be able to deploy it tomorrow. But yeah, so, it’s, I don’t wait for a good deal to come by. I wait for a good operator that I want to invest with.

Jimmy: That makes sense. What about some of your favorite deals that you’ve done over the last, what, you’ve been doing this for about seven or eight years, I think you mentioned. Any deals that really stick out in your mind?

Litan: I mean, this type of investing is a little boring, right?

Jimmy: That’s a good answer. Yeah.

Litan: It’s not like, “Yeah, well this was, like, there was a lot of adrenaline in this deal and a negotiation,” when, like, I don’t do that, right? I can say that, like, probably one of the operators I like to invest with, they’re, like, a one-stop shop. They do everything from, you know, locate the property, raise funding, property-manage it as well. So, like, they do everything, end-to-end, like a full turnkey solution. Like, fully integrated, I guess. I think that’s the wording for it, right? And they’re just really good people, communicate really well. And the last deal, they exited the… And this was a multi-family value-add deal, they did 30% IRR. And so, again, that was, like, in amazing market conditions over the past few years. But that’s a deal I remember, because it was, like, outperforming, and it was with good people. Other than that, that Brooklyn deal was something that I remember, right? Just to prove to myself that I’m passive, but yeah.

Jimmy: Yeah. What about partners? Or do you have partners that you oftentimes will invest with other people…

Litan: Yeah, so…

Jimmy: …maybe friends or colleagues that you’ll kinda go in with them on a deal or they’ll pull you into a deal?

Litan: So, my co-founder and I, we invest almost in everything together. And at some point, I think eight years ago, we established an LLC in the States that we invest through, just so we can diversify into more deals, reach those minimum tickets in each of those deals at the beginning. Right? Because, like, many of these deals have $50,000 to $100,000k minimum. So, if you don’t wanna do that, we sort of, we established this LLC that we’d invest through, and then each of us put $50,000 into a deal that the minimum’s $100,000, through the LLC. So, we do a lot of investing together. And we have other friends that we’ve invested with. I joined this mastermind community called GoBundance a few years ago, that I also invest with some guys in that community group as well. So, yeah, I’d say almost everything I do, I invest with other people that either I trust them, they trust me, and we invest together.

Jimmy: Yeah. That’s always nice to be able to do that, as opposed to going it alone. My longtime business partner and good friend, Andy Hagans and I, we oftentimes will go in together on a deal. So, he has blind spots and I have blind spots, but we kind of balance each other out. We know where each other’s blind spots are. So, it’s more fun that way, I think, to go into deals with a friend of yours, so you can celebrate…

Litan: I don’t know about you guys, but my co-founder, my wife always jokes, he’s like my second wife, or first, depending on who you’re talking to. Yeah, we do a lot of stuff together, so…

Jimmy: I know how that is. I spend too much time with my fellow co-founder as well, to the chagrin of my wife sometimes. But I digress. Let’s get back on track here. What about some of the challenges of being an LP? It’s kind of difficult to manage, obviously, all the different sources of cash flow, and all the different deals you’re invested in and the different, I don’t know what kinda tax returns you get there in Israel. I suppose you do have tax liabilities in the U.S., so you probably get a lot of the same tax forms that I would. But there’s a lot of challenges with being a passive LP, in that you start to think, “Boy, how passive is this, really?” Can you go through what some of those biggest challenges are?

Litan: And these are first-world problems, right? And…

Jimmy: Yeah, oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Litan: They’re problems to have, so I wanna just start with that. But yeah, I mean, over the years, when you sort of invest in all these different types of investments, you’ll lose track of it. So, I get an email from an operator and I’m like, “Oh, shit. How much did I invest with this guy? Is this what I expected?” And, you know, money going in and out of your bank account, and, like, understanding, “Wait, is this $2,000 coming in? What is this even related to? Was it supposed to have happened?” And then obviously, at the end of the year, you know, tax returns, K-1s, 1099s coming in, it was just a mess, right? And so, at some point three years ago, me and my co-founder were like, “Yeah, this is passive, but it’s becoming too active.” And no financial advisor or wealth manager around us, sort of, like, could help us. And so, we said, “Screw that. Let’s just build something for us to automate that.” And so, yeah. So we took those problems we faced as LP investors, and built ourself a piece of software to automate the whole thing for us.

Jimmy: Just to automate and simplify the process of being an LP, to be able to capture all those tax forms, to be able to essentially see a dashboard of what’s going on in your portfolio. Tell us a little bit more. What is Vyzer, and who are your users, and what does it do?

Litan: Yeah, so that turned into Vyzer. Like, we built this for us, and then a bunch of us wanted it as well. And the whole thing around us was, like, I get an email from an operator, I just throw it into this platform, and then I link in my bank account and it automatically detect transactions, and then everything would just be linked together. And then a bunch of friends were, like us, wanted as well, and then we said, “Wait, there might be a whole business here.” And so we sort of spoke with a lot of people around the world, specifically in the U.S., and just found a lot of people like us and we decided to build a new startup, and that’s what Vyzer is, basically. And so, Vyzer is this platform that helps people like us, that have this more complexity, that they’re dealing with spreadsheets that break, that get emails and cash flow going in and out, and just don’t have a solution.

So that’s what we built Vyzer for. It sort of automates that whole process of gathering your emails, your documents, linking in your bank accounts, and it also, brokerage accounts, everything into one place, projecting cash flow. We also have this really cool feature we launched a few weeks ago, which shows our members where other members are investing, anonymously. Like, how their asset allocation looks, which operators people are investing. Because it’s so hard, like I said, to find people to trust. Like, I’ve spoken with operators and I’ve asked them for references to other people invested with them, but I don’t even know if they’re gonna give me legit references, right? And so, we built this whole aspect of the platform to show me anonymously where others are investing, and that creates a zero conflict of interest, super-transparent aspect of private investing. And there’s a lot of stuff we wanna add onto that, but the idea is to get that holistic approach. We call it, like, a type of virtual family office, for people that aren’t big enough to have a family office, but they’re big enough to have complexity.

Jimmy: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And so, it’s not just a tool that LPs can use, but it’s also, in some ways, it’s like a community I guess, although it’s anonymous. But you kinda get to see what other like-minded investors are doing with some of their capital. I think that’s really interesting.

Tell me more about the mastermind that you’re in also, GoBundance. I mean, you’re kinda getting back to that community aspect, because I think that’s so important with being an LP, is not going it alone. If you have a partner or a co-founder, like you do and I have, to go in on deals together, that’s really neat. But it’s always kinda good to move with the crowds, or kinda gain wisdom from crowds, and at least different people in your network or different like-minded investors. What do you get out of that mastermind that you’re a part of?

Litan: Yeah, so, we found there are a bunch of these types of mastermind groups. Some of them are free, some of them cost money. GoBundance has this minimum net worth, and it costs some money, and it’s a group of just people that are like-minded to sort of build wealth, just powerful relationships, spend time, like, go on a great experiences together and also invest together, and also tend to be a lot of real estate people in that group as well. But a bunch of investor groups, there’s another group called Left Field Investors.

Jimmy: I’ve seen them. Yeah.

Litan: Yeah. So, Jim, one of the founders there, and he’s a good friend, and they’re doing some really cool stuff as well, and a bunch of these online communities… I think you also had one, right? For investors that are interested in Opportunity Zones and stuff like that, right?

Jimmy: Yeah. Well, it’s not a mastermind group, but we do have a large platform and email list, and we do multiple online events per year, through OpportunityDb. We have our OZ Pitch Day events, where our group of investors come to learn about Qualified Opportunity Funds that are raising equity from high-net-worth investors. So, similar, yeah, but I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a mastermind group, but yeah, there are some similarities there for sure.

Litan: Yeah. I think this place is just a way to connect with people that are like-minded, that are looking to, like, build strong relationships and build more wealth. So, it’s powerful.

Jimmy: And then, you were struggling with all of the different tax forms, and managing your portfolio across a dozen or more, a few dozen different deals, so you started this thing, that eventually turned into Vyzer, and now Vyzer’s up and running. Who should join Vyzer, and why?

Litan: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that once you reach a level of complexity, and what that means is, when you have at least five-plus private investments, that’s when things become a little complicated, and you have to build spreadsheets that break. In addition to a budgeting app that you might use, like Mint or Personal Capital, all these other budgeting apps out there, you still need to start and maintain a spreadsheet, and then you have to build a Dropbox or Google Drive folder to get all your documents into and track everything. And if this is not your full-time job, it becomes just a lot of work. And that’s when you start to need a platform like Vyzer to help you streamline that, not miss stuff. Like, be very efficient when it comes to taxes, staying on top of your, like, cash flow.

One of the things, sort of, a lot of people around us sort of joke about is that they might have wealth, but they’re cash-poor, and then when something occurs, like a cash event, or taxes, and they’re not ready for it, they have to go scramble for, like, a line of credit. And so, when you’re sort of in that wealth creation mode, you need to stay on top of things, or else you might sort of find yourself with your pants down. And so that’s sort of, like, where Vyzer is to help.

Jimmy: Yeah, that’s really important, because sometimes April rolls around and you’ve got a tax liability, and you realize, “I don’t have the liquidity to cover this.” That could be a huge problem. So, Vyzer helps kinda stay on top of that as well, and helps you plan for that. Litan, this has been really fascinating talking with you today, and appreciate all the knowledge and insights that you’ve shared with my listeners and me. You know, you’re clearly a pretty savvy, sophisticated LP investor. Just to kinda zoom out a little bit, and keeping in mind your strategy and your goals and your experience in being a passive investor, what are some important trends that you see playing out over the next few years across the private equity real estate industry? Or, do you not really concern yourself with such things? Do you just really rely on your relationships and the operators and the GPs that you trust? You can take that answer in either direction.

Litan: Yeah. Well, first of all, the answer is yes, I trust the people I invest with, but the numbers either match and there’s a new strategy, it needs to match because the world is changing. And, both from a currencies perspective, from an interest rate perspective, from a real estate valuation perspective, there’s so many things that are changing now. And so the assumptions need to be super, super conservative. In my mind, when I go into deals today, as opposed to how they were last year, it’s very hard to find good deals. It’s very hard to raise money. It’s very hard to get cheap debt. And I’m not saying it’s not possible. There are good deals out there. There are different things that make sense. It still makes sense for the money to be deployed. But on the other hand, there are other opportunities now, you know, to get yield at zero risk, in a sense, right?

SVB reminded us that there is no zero risk for sure, right? But at lower risk, right? So, like, if, in Israel, for example, I get 6.5% yield on a monthly dollar cash deposit. 6.5%, that’s, like, at zero risk, or almost close to zero. And those deals need to be, like, extremely good on paper and conservative in order to make sense, because you have liquidity with this type of investment, right? You’re backed by the government. And so, I’m… again, I think people should invest. I just think, you know, good people. Be conservative. And pay attention to, like, what’s happening in the markets.

Jimmy: Well said. Well said. Well, hey, really wanna thank you for joining me today. Litan, it’s been great talking with you. Before we go, where can our audience of high-net-worth investors go to learn more about you and Vyzer, if they’re interested in creating an account at Vyzer, or learning a little bit more about your platform, where can they go to learn more?

Litan: Yeah, for sure. So, it’s Vyzer. It’s V-Y-Z-E-R.co. It’s a weird URL, but that’s it. You can reach out to me, litan@vyzer, or Twitter, Litan Yahav, Facebook, LinkedIn. I’m pretty responsive, and happy to connect with other LP investors, share more knowledge if anyone’s interested. And I really appreciate this, Jimmy. This has been awesome. I love what you guys are doing.

Jimmy: Yeah. Well, thank you. And it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. And for our listeners, we will have show notes available at our website, opportunitydb.com/podcast, and I’ll make sure to link to Litan’s email address, as well as vyzer.co. And please also be sure to subscribe to us on YouTube or your favorite podcast listing platform to always get the latest episodes. Litan, thanks again for joining me today. Really appreciate it.

Litan: Thanks.