private-wealth
(9)
The $6 Billion RIA Built to Make Complicated Money Feel Boring
Ashton Thomas sells a scarce luxury: one coordinated view of a wealthy family’s messy financial life. Its post-2023 expansion shows how a regional adviser can add offices, specialists and assets without sanding away the local teams clients hired in the first place.
The Boston Firm That Buys Into Everyone Else's Funds - and Manages $161 Billion Doing It
It started in 1982 as an insurer's venture arm with two employees and $200 million. Four decades later, HarbourVest sits on roughly $161 billion and a simple idea: you don't have to pick the winners if you own the whole board.
StepStone Group and the Business of Getting Into Rooms Most Investors Never See
A private markets firm started in 2007 now helps steer roughly $700 billion across private equity, credit, real estate and infrastructure - and it is quietly opening the door to individual investors.
The Firm That Built a Resale Market for Private Equity
Jeremy Coller spent 36 years arguing that private equity needed a second-hand market. Now that the market is worth trillions, EQT is paying up to $3.7 billion to own the firm that started it.
Vista Equity Partners Built a Factory for Better Software Businesses
Robert F. Smith made one unfashionably narrow bet in 2000: business software deserved its own investment machine. Twenty-five years, $103 billion in assets and more than 650 transactions later, Vista is testing whether that machine can make the leap from SaaS to agentic AI.
Morgan Stanley
The bank that decided predictable beats spectacular - and built a $9 trillion advice machine on top of a trading floor.
Goldman Sachs
For 156 years the firm at 200 West Street has been in the room when companies go public, countries borrow, and fortunes change hands. Here is how the deal machine actually works.
Ellevest
Ellevest is a New York-based financial company built by and for women. Co-founded in 2014 by former Wall Street executive Sallie Krawcheck and Charlie Kroll, it launched a gender-aware digital investing platform in 2016 designed around the realities of women's financial lives - longer lifespans, earlier salary peaks and the persistent pay gap. After selling its automated-investing (robo) business to Betterment in 2025, Ellevest now focuses on wealth management and financial planning delivered by an all-women team of advisors for clients investing $500,000 or more.
Robertson Stephens
Robertson Stephens Wealth Management is an independent, fiduciary registered investment adviser headquartered in San Francisco. Reborn in 2018 from the iconic dot-com-era investment bank, the firm now manages roughly $8 billion in assets for high-net-worth families and institutions across 13 states, blending personalized advisory with a modern digital client interface.