Roy Carmo Salsinha and the art of the introduction

Before Roy Carmo Salsinha could build a business around introductions, he needed a computer. His sisters helped pay for it. His parents lent him $20,000. He was 26, working from their basement, with his girlfriend beside him. She is now his wife. The beginning of Carmo Companies had a family resemblance because, in several practical ways, his family had made it possible.

He recalled those details when the business reached its tenth anniversary in 2026. Finance has an ample supply of grand nouns. Salsinha’s account offered a household, a loan and the equipment needed to begin. It also included thanks to the team that had helped build the company. He had kept the helpers in the story.

An introduction starts at home

Carmo dates its founding to 2016. The New York firm organizes conferences, investor roadshows and capital introductions across private markets. These are investments such as private equity, private credit and real estate, where managers and prospective investors have reasons to spend time understanding each other.

Salsinha’s work puts him near the beginning of those relationships. As president and CEO, he oversees strategy and institutional investor, private equity and development partner ventures. In plain terms, he helps arrange circumstances in which people can meet, ask questions and decide whether another conversation is worthwhile.

His own early financing gives that occupation an appealing symmetry. Before building a business around introductions, he received backing from people who already knew him. The basement belongs in the account because it gives the later hotel meeting rooms a point of departure. There was work to do before there was a room to book.

Learning who needs whom

Before Carmo, Salsinha worked at Markets Group. His remit included building platforms in Latin American economies that brought international allocators into contact with real estate funds and developers seeking financing. Some of those businesses were looking one to three years ahead. He also worked with US real estate vehicles seeking Latin American institutional capital, particularly private wealth.

The movement went both ways. A fund in one country could need an investor elsewhere; a US vehicle could look south for backing. That history is more useful to understanding his career than a vague description of someone as “well connected.” It identifies the work behind the connection: understanding the direction in which each participant wants to travel.

Salsinha studied international business at Hofstra University, earning a Bachelor of Business Administration. He speaks English and Portuguese fluently and communicates proficiently in Spanish. His education and languages sit naturally beside a professional life spent working between the United States and Latin America.

A shared language gives a conversation a start. The more demanding question is what the participants actually have in common. His subsequent work repeatedly returns to that question, with particular audiences, investment strategies and places taking the place of a general invitation to network.

The questions before the conference

In May 2018, Salsinha published an interview with Kenneth Munkacy, then senior managing director of Kingbird Properties. The discussion began with the family office behind the business and moved through Munkacy’s career, property strategy and investment horizons. It also asked why he would attend Carmo’s Toronto gathering.

Munkacy described differences between public companies, investment funds and family offices. Quarterly earnings, fund life cycles and a family’s longer perspective could produce different pressures on an investment. The people might all discuss real estate, yet arrive with different clocks running.

The interview gives a glimpse of Salsinha doing something quieter than hosting: asking another professional to explain the terms on which he works. Those distinctions make an introduction more useful. Knowing someone’s title is one thing; understanding why they might have patience for a particular opportunity takes a better question.

The next month, the Brazil-Canada Chamber of Commerce listed Salsinha on a Toronto breakfast agenda. The June 7 event, held at Dentons, covered Brazilian investment opportunities ahead of the Canada Latin America Real Estate Meeting. His scheduled contribution concerned that forthcoming gathering. The program also included representatives of the Brazilian consulate and Brookfield.

It was a compact example of the geography already present in his career: Brazil, Canada and an audience with an interest in cross-border investment. The purpose was specific enough to fit into a morning. A calendar entry can sometimes explain an occupation more clearly than a job description.

A room can have several addresses

By 2021, Carmo’s invitations covered both physical and virtual gatherings. A December European web meeting used Zoom and Slack. Its invitation described an audience spanning private equity, venture capital, real estate, family offices and institutional investors. The planned discussion concerned opportunities, allocations and private-market performance.

Those subjects have a practical relationship. A manager can explain what is available. An allocator can consider whether it fits. Other participants can compare what they are seeing. A screen changes the setting, while the invitation still needs to give people a reason to pay attention.

That November, Salsinha also signed the invitation to the fourth annual Latin America US Real Estate Meeting at W South Beach in Miami, during Art Basel week. The stated aim was to bring together investment vehicles, allocators and private wealth investors active across the United States and Latin America.

Art and investment made for a busy week in the same city. Carmo’s invitation had its own stated purpose: encouraging cross-border real estate transactions through discussion and networking. It is a reminder to distinguish the organizer’s ambition from the investor’s eventual decision. An invitation can open a conversation; the participants must do the rest.

The specificity continued in Mexico City. The second annual Private Markets Mexico Meeting was scheduled at the St. Regis on October 25 and 26, 2023, during Formula 1 week. Its invitation named private equity, venture capital, secondaries, private credit and real assets as areas of discussion for Mexican institutional allocators and family offices.

A Chilean gathering that November put pension perspectives near the beginning of its agenda, following Salsinha’s opening remarks. Representatives of Chilean pension organizations were scheduled to discuss alternative assets, including the use of primaries, secondaries and co-investments. The distinctions are technical, but the organizing principle is easy to recognize: give a particular group a particular set of questions.

Monterrey gets a special mention

Then there is the way Salsinha talks about a meeting once people have arrived. Sharing photographs from Carmo’s first Monterrey Private Markets gathering in January 2025, he affectionately compared his conferences to his children. Equal love was the official policy. Monterrey, apparently, had made that policy difficult.

“But this one was special!”

Roy Carmo Salsinha, on the first Monterrey meeting

The photographs show the familiar parts of a working conference: attendees listening, a panel talking and people gathered at a reception. Carmo celebrated the family-office turnout. Salsinha’s comment supplied the parent’s pride. It is a small joke, but a useful one in a career that can otherwise disappear into institutional terminology.

In January 2026, he returned to Monterrey in a more directly grateful register, sharing a video from the second annual meeting and crediting people in the city with helping him succeed in the business. That acknowledgment gives a place a role in his personal story. Monterrey is an investment audience and a community he has chosen to thank.

A smaller table, a more specific conversation

Carmo’s roadshows offer a smaller setting for the work. Its services include virtual introductions after an event, individual in-person meetings in a chosen city and private dinners or cocktails with selected investors. The company describes its gatherings as a way to keep track of investor activity and appetite.

That helps explain why the meeting need not end when a panel finishes. A conference gives several people a common occasion. An individual appointment lets a manager discuss a fund, a direct investment or a co-investment in more detail. Different formats make room for different questions, and for the time required to answer them.

Salsinha also appears as a partner at Cobra Carmo Group, alongside Angel Bernal Robles and Federico Cerdas Ortiz. The business joins Mexico City-based Cobra Development with New York-based Carmo Companies to develop purpose-built residential rental communities in Texas’s four major metropolitan areas.

Here, the cross-border connection leads into development itself. Mexico, New York and Texas each have a place in the venture’s description. It is another expression of the working geography that runs through his career, this time organized around residential communities rather than a conference agenda.

Ten years, and the next invitation

When Salsinha marked a decade of self-employment, he looked back to the family who had helped him start and the team who had helped the business grow. Those acknowledgments give the milestone its character. His account makes success something several people contributed to, beginning with a loan and a computer.

The public calendar supplies the meetings. His own recollections supply the people: parents, sisters, his wife, colleagues and the community in Monterrey. For someone whose profession involves arranging introductions, that seems an appropriate way to tell a life. He remembers who was there before the first invitation went out.