How Joe Duran Plans to Boost RIAs' Growth

What You Need to Know

His new venture, Rise Growth Partners, will start with a small group of firms in 2024.
Rise will support RIAs with $1 billion to $5 billion in AUM in becoming national RIAs and facilitate deals, Duran said.
Duran stepped down as a partner at Goldman earlier this year; the bank recently sold the former United Capital business to Creative Plannng.

Former United Capital founder and CEO Joe Duran is looking to launch his new venture, Rise Growth Partners, with a small number of registered investment advisors in early 2024 and is already starting to consider which RIA firms to include in the second round, he told ThinkAdvisor in a phone interview on Friday.

As disclosed by Duran at the Future Proof conference in Huntington Beach, California, on Monday, Rise represents his return to the RIA sector and is looking to take minority stakes in RIA firms with assets under management of $1 billion to $5 billion each.

The venture’s goal is to make these firms into national RIAs with $10 billion or more in AUM. If an RIA selected by Rise grows to that level and then wants to sell to a larger firm, Rise will facilitate such a deal, Duran said Friday.

“If everything goes as we’d like, it’ll be very early, like January-February,” when the first group of RIAs will launch, he said.

“We’re coordinating right now,” he said, noting “we have an amazing group of … over 30 [RIA] firms that are currently in various stages of discussion” with Rise. The first group of RIAs will be “super important so we’ve been highly, highly selective with our first group,” he told ThinkAdvisor.

“We’re self-funding right now … but we obviously have to line [up] the capital to make the investments in the underlying advisory firms and we need to make sure that we’ve got the right partner” to invest with, Duran said.

To that end, he said: “We’re having conversations as we speak with some of the really finest private equity investors in the country, and we’ve had a lot of interest, which is great. But we’re being as selective with our investors [as] we’re being with the folks we invest in.”

So far, “we’ve spoken to, I’d say, more than a handful” of potential investors “but not as many as two handfuls,” he said with a laugh.