Marc Debois

Founder, FO-Next | Family-office intelligence, direct investments and strategic capital | Where family capital moves, and why.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

60% of family offices have an investment committee, but only 35% have a succession plan (UBS).

Committees screen deals rigorously, but nobody writes down who decides when founders step away.

Process manages today's deals. Unwritten authority paralyzes transitions.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

60% of family offices operate an investment committee, but only 35% maintain a formal succession plan.

Leadership transitions often preserve existing deal pipeline and legacy committee cadence without review.

Operational inertia quietly outlives the founding principal.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

The four largest economies share identical core exports: machinery and electronics.

US, China, Germany, and Japan anchor their trade in proprietary IP and engineered equipment.

Price-setting power belongs to countries that manufacture complex capital goods.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Grouping private credit and venture capital into "alternatives" confuses portfolio function.

Private credit targets contractual yield with under 2% defaults. Venture absorbs a 60% to 70% loss ratio for power-law upside.

They belong on opposite sides of risk architecture.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

https://t.co/BhNEJfQmA4

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Age is capital's most ignored risk.
Europe is old; Africa is young. Act accordingly.

Median age today: EU 44.7. Sub-Saharan Africa 18.4.
By 2030, 1 in 6 humans will be 60+.
By 2100, the world's median age nears 42.

For European SFOs, that is not trivia. It is pricing power.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Two family offices can match on AUM, liquidity, and private market ambition, yet need very different portfolios.

A family that built wealth in logistics cannot underwrite like a peer in software.

Peer benchmarks treat distinct operating edges as interchangeable capital.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Your best investment tool is "no." Most people use it too late.

Featured in Financial Investigator on direct investing:

1. Say "no" early, not politely late.
2. Selection is the job.
3. Keep your process honest.

Where did you most regret not saying "no" sooner?

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Original breakdown & full discussion: https://t.co/5Efi6WUGKW

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Innovation moved. Capital has not.

R&D is the earliest leading indicator we get, and it is telling an uncomfortable story:

Global R&D growth fell to 2.9% in 2024, projected at 2.3% in 2025.

The weakest trajectory since 2009.

Capital is chasing yesterday's scale.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Full breakdown on the industrial policy vs capacity divide:
https://t.co/F315vmlKA4

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

The rare-earth bottleneck is not about mining. It is an execution gap.

Everyone tracks the geopolitics. The harder question is what building an alternative actually requires.

A policy target is not operational capacity. The gap between them is where the real story lives.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Billionaires do not live in countries. They live in cities.

Top billionaire hubs:
1. New York: 109
2. Hong Kong: 74
3. Moscow: 73
4. Mumbai: 69
5. Beijing: 63
6. London: 62

Asia takes 13 of the top 20. Capital flows through urban nodes, not broad country buckets.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

The rare-earth story isn't just about mining. It's an execution gap.

Vietnam's 2030 target on strategic materials is a policy goal, not operational capacity.

The spread between government ambition and real industrial machinery is where direct capital takes the hit.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

full breakdown on founder trajectory vs presentation polish:
https://t.co/RKES2ndVtL

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

A pitch can be rehearsed.
A trajectory cannot.

For lean family office teams, confusing presentation quality with founder capability is an expensive trap.

Look for distance travelled and what happens when rehearsed answers run out.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

From a deeper breakdown on family office decision dynamics and authority in IC rooms: https://t.co/Mbm7xOroDA

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Last year, I sat in a room where a father and his son disagreed about a deal.

The son saw a risk, but stayed silent. The room had not given him authority to challenge the founder.

Governance failure in family offices starts when permission to disagree is missing.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Crypto used to be a reputational risk in family offices. Five years ago, most wouldn't discuss it in an IC meeting.

In Goldman's 2025 survey, nearly half now hold or plan to hold digital assets. The reputational calculus flipped entirely.

[Marc Debois @deboismarc]

Nvidia spent $6B licensing Poolside's AI and absorbing 100+ engineers to build its own frontier models. The chip company is now competing directly with the customers it supplies.