Curated Crowdsourcing: Rebuilding Trust in the World of Private Investing with Teddy Gold

Jack Sharry: Hello everyone. It’s great to have you aboard for this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. Thanks for joining the conversation. You’ve heard me say many times on the 200 plus podcasts we’ve recorded over the past four years that we love to shake things up as we look at helping investors, advisors and firms achieve better financial outcomes. And today is another first. We have met with many business leaders who run traditional for-profit businesses and wealth and asset management, and annuities, alternative investments, research and consulting, and FinTech. But today, we’ll have our first discussion around a crowdsourced membership concept. Our guest is Teddy Gold. Teddy is co-founder of 3iMembers. 3iMembers is a network for accomplished private investors who source opportunities, share expertise, and build value for one another that goes far beyond the deal. The investment network started three years ago in the midst of the pandemic. And as I did my homework on LinkedIn, my favorite source, I learned 3i is not a tech platform. It’s a human network. As 3i celebrated a recent milestone, learned investing is random, but if we can build the systems, incentives, and infrastructures to enable idea sharing between investors, we can unlock crowdsourced knowledge to make us all smarter investors. And in the three years that the network has been around, it has grown to 500 members organically and driven largely by word of mouth. As with all things in life, there have been a fistful of wins and a basket full of lessons. Today, we’re going to talk with Teddy Gold, one of the co-founders about the network. He helped launch and some of the lessons learned. Teddy, welcome to WealthTech on deck. Good to have you here.

Teddy Gold: Jack, it’s great to be here.

Jack Sharry: So, let’s start with at the beginning. And I have a bunch of questions. So what is 3i? What is the big idea? What do you all do? Who do you do it with and for? And what’s the benefit of belonging to the network? So fill us in.

Teddy Gold: So 3i is a little over three years old now, and it’s a membership network for family offices, founders, and active fund managers. The idea came from my partner, Mark Gerson, who started the expert network, GLG. Mark, in starting his own family office, realized that deal sourcing was totally random. It’s a valuable process, but there’s really no infrastructure to support the regular sourcing of good ideas. It’s just a function of who you happen to meet at whatever random reason for whatever, random time, specifically deal sourcing in privates and alt. So Mark came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea at the time is why don’t we create a network and dedicate the network to sharing ideas, educating each other on interesting opportunities and just becoming friends and getting to know each other. And, you know, three and half years later, have 650 now members of the network. And we took this thing to market with a very simple idea of a monthly deal call.

Jack Sharry: Wow.

Teddy Gold: And it’s evolved ever since launch, it still sort of maintains the, still the heartbeat of what we do every month. Two members will present on zoom an opportunity they’re working on. They’re excited about and have capacity. And the big rule is you can’t pitch your own product. And through a series of diligence calls and tapping member experts, we’ve done about $750 million invested now through that platform. But I think what we didn’t realize at the time of founding was, and we didn’t even really conceive of in the beginning was the power of community. And from the deal call, we’ve built an event series. do 150 events a year now across over 15 cities. We’ve got an introductions program for members to meet each other on a regular basis, an asset allocation workshop, WhatsApp channels, a website, much more. But it all starts with this idea from Mark that deal sourcing is random and we can make that process less random by creating a network of people we know and trust.

Jack Sharry: So let me dig in here, I’m fascinated by what I’m hearing. So I’d love the whole concept notion of community. So I wanna hear some more about that. I wanna hear about what you, you talked a little bit about this, I’d like to go a little deeper if we could around what you had in mind at the start, which sounded like just basically sharing ideas and all that, but it seems to have gone much deeper and then I guess how are you harvesting that? How are you leveraging that? What are you doing with that?

Teddy Gold: Yeah. So I think there’s no shortage of noise in the world, particularly around investments. And I think there’s no shortage of new sources of information. think what’s hard is finding good curated quality voices. I think interestingly enough, investing is a good application of crowdsourcing so long as the crowd itself is qualified. So that’s where we started this idea and where the premise began. said we’d grow it only by referrals and the initial kind of cohort was built around Mark and Mark’s immediate network from the successes of GLG and his friends and co-investors and our second partner, my third partner in the business, Billy Libby, who came out of Goldman Sachs and started a very successful specialty finance firm, 90. Billy also had a similar club concept. Had 10 tech founders and 10 quants he would bring together on a regular basis to share deals and ideas. So crowdsourcing works. You just need a qualified crowd. And we said, if we grow this thing, just by referrals, we can create a mechanism using expertise of members to narrow down. A wide top of funnel of deals and ideas presented every month. every month, about a hundred, literally 150 times a month, a member will send in or call in and say, Hey, I’m looking at this deal and I’m interested in it. Is there someone in the group I could do diligence alongside or who can give me a second opinion?

Jack Sharry: So how does that work exactly? Do you have like a message board? How do you try out your idea?

Teddy Gold: Yeah. So in the beginning days with, you know, just 10 members, you can imagine there was little process and little vetting. Now with 650 members, there’s a much more robust process and a lot more vetting, all using member expertise. So 150 times a month, a member will literally call us or email forward out of their inbox, a deal they like, they’re working on, or they’re thinking about. We’ll do two things. First, we apply it against a scorecard of does this fit our criteria? So is it member sourced? Is the member planning to invest on the same terms available to everyone else? Is it a private deal? And is it capacity constraint? If it hits those four criteria, we’ll send it to a group of members to look at it, who can give us a sort of thumbs up, thumbs down on expertise. And then it goes to a membership committee to vote whether it will join our monthly deal call. So there’s a process behind it, but it all just starts with relationships, right? And understanding our members and saying, hey, you know, Jack, you understand wealth and wealth tech and what’s going on in financial services.

Jack Sharry: Interesting.

Teddy Gold: What are you working on or a deal that you might find interesting? Is there something you want to bring to the platform and share with the group?

Jack Sharry: Interesting. So, this is this is true crowd sourcing. I’m so unused to really having the marketplace speak in this way and I love it because it’s it’s it’s a jury of your peers, so to speak, where whatever idea you might have, there’s a guess what I’m getting at here. There’s a issue opportunity. I don’t know how else to characterize it of trust. In other words. You’re gonna get so get it get at that because communities all about trust and what you’re developing here is around really trusted colleagues’ cohorts co investors potential co investors talk about that a little bit.

Teddy Gold: Well, I think it takes a huge amount of trust to invest in a deal. I you literally have to wire money out of your account into the bank account of ostensibly a stranger and then trust reps and warranties they’ve made on the promise of some future deal, right? That could be some far-flung real estate development or an idea to buy small businesses or some arbitrage they found in the market that they think they can capitalize on while getting paid themselves as managers. It’s a high trust thing, probably one of the highest trust things we do as human beings.

Jack Sharry: Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Teddy Gold: I think in order to get to that level of trust, you have to know that people around you who are researching the deal, doing diligence on the deal and have at least a first or second degree connection to the ultimate manager of the deal. And crowdsourcing lets you get there pretty quickly. So if you can tap a network of a couple hundred folks and say, hey, we’re, I’ll make it up. We’re buying an aircraft engine off of an airplane, which we did together. We’ve gotten into the part out and leasing space.

Jack Sharry: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Teddy Gold: We can tap the network and say who is expert in aviation finance, who can vouch for the reputation of the sponsor and who can help us underwrite a deal. It’s funny, all the events we do and the seminars and the workshops and the get togethers and the WhatsApp groups, all of those community functions I think are in service of creating an environment of trust so we can become better investors when we do invest in deals together.

Jack Sharry: Let’s stay on this this issue of trust and how does this guy I suppose it comes about just because you have all these different folks that have been brought in by friends, basically you only join the club so to speak by referred in and and talk about that dynamic because it sounds like they gotta be pretty rigorous if they’re gonna bring his trust is at the core of what you’re trying to get at and trying to understand. So talk about that dynamic. think that really intrigues me.

Teddy Gold: Well, I’m personally fascinated by trust. think in my lifetime, we’ve lived through a transformation of trust where trust used to be placed in the institutions and the big corporate logos and the media and politicians, celebrities, sports teams. In my life, I’ve seen the shift away from that. And I was actually just looking into this. Edelman, the marketing firm, does a great research report on this and they track where American trust is going every year.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, yeah.

Teddy Gold: They found, I believe last year was the first year that the trust of peers rose to the top of the list of groups of people that folks trust. And the only group on par with peers were scientists. So, media, politicians, Congress, all the trust in these major institutions, I think has just fallen over time. And how do you cultivate trust in peers? think colleges do this well through admissions processes.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.

Teddy Gold: And what we do at 3i is we’ve got background checks to make sure everyone’s aligned. We do reference checks on every member that joins, but most importantly, everyone who joins is just referred by an existing member and someone who says, I like the 3i experience. I want to bring in one of my friends and you know, someone on our team will talk to them, make sure it’s an aligned fit. And, you know, from there, you can start to cultivate that environment of trust.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, yeah, let me let me go further with this because I think about this personally can help but do that personally when I when I’m looking at Anything that has especially having to do with money or anything having to do with something that really matters My first instinct my first thought is who can I talk to that? I know and trust to help me out here it whether it’s hiring someone it’s doing business with someone It’s you know all the different ways that we engage with others where it’s meaningful. It’s important

Jack Sharry: My first instinct is I start by frankly not trusting. That’s where I start. And then again, my next immediate thought is who can I go to that has expertise? Just I’m thinking some personal things in my life right now, whether it’s legal stuff or financial stuff or it’s relationship stuff, business relationship, I suppose. Keep it there, it’s also personally, but certainly on the business side.

Jack Sharry: What’s been their experience? Who are they dealing with? And frankly, in a weird way, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. It’s not so weird, but I built up a practice, a business of what I do. It’s all predicated on trust, that I’m a trusted source. I deal with trusted sources. I don’t know if the right word is curate, but I work hard at that one. I wanna make sure if I’m gonna recommend someone or I’m gonna go to someone, I wanna make sure that I can count on

Jack Sharry: So talk about that, that seems to be at the heart of all this.

Teddy Gold: In the first quarter of 2025, there were a thousand unique requests of the platform. But really what a request of the platform means is a member calling in, just like you mentioned, either through our WhatsApp channels or to someone on my team or myself and saying, I’m moving to Portugal. Are there any members there who can help us learn about local schools? I’m restructuring my trust in a state and I’m having trouble understanding the fee schedule of my lawyer, who can speak to what a fee schedule should look like? I’m traveling to Los Angeles for my kid’s birthday and want a great sushi restaurant for a celebration. I’m doing diligence on a new Blackstone fund and I’m interested to speak with someone about what Blackstone reporting looks like when you go directly. All of these types of questions, and there were a thousand of them brought on the platform in just the first quarter, all these platforms

Jack Sharry: Yes.

Teddy Gold: All these questions are looking for a trusted source to give an answer to. But the problem is you’re always biased with your own network because you only know and can keep track of so many relationships in your head. So my hope with the platform and really I think what the long-term aim is, is we can through a really rigorous database and a nice data schema, come up with a good way for us to say, Jack, you’re traveling maybe and you’re going to be in Berlin this summer. We on the back end have cataloged every member who’s got expertise in traveling in Germany, living in Germany.

Jack Sharry: Sure, sure, sure.

Teddy Gold: and we can make that connection systematically. for us, it’s kind of a combination of the data layer, which our team, and I take seriously, because I think it’s how we scale, then, the human touch on top of it, so we can just help you find a good restaurant.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, interesting. So how do you manage that? I’m again, I’m thinking of just putting it in personal in a personal context, because I do think that this notion is there’s something to it that’s unique, special, really fascinating. But I’ve just been involved in a real estate transaction. And so in doing that, I talked to three different realtors, interviewed them all, did my thorough diligence. I happen to know them all because I live in a town where I happen to know the probably the three top real estate agents. It was a fascinating process. did the same thing in terms of personal financial planning, where C-switched advisors went through a similar process. I had to work at it and I had to listen carefully to figure out who was the best fit. I think in both cases, I wound up with the exact right person, but I had to work at it. It took time and effort. A lot of times, I don’t have that patience or what have you, but it was important enough, obviously, in both situations where I really wanted to do that diligence and it made a difference.  So that seems to be at the heart of this is we want to find people we can trust and people we can rely on. So how do you ensure that that happens? Because it sounds like your network is going well beyond, it’s going to sushi restaurants or schools in Portugal. And I think that’s a good thing. I think that’s a great thing actually. It shows a high degree of trust. So talk about that dynamic and how you make sure you ensure that that occurs.

Teddy Gold: I think it starts with a definition of what 3i is. Though the network started as an investment platform and that was our initial aim, there are a couple of principles that I think underlie what makes a successful investment platform. The first and most important is a non-solicitation rule and this is common in similar peer networks. So I think the second you feel like there’s a service provider who is giving you a biased perspective, when you raise your hand and say, I want to restructure my trust in a state, who’s the right person to help me do that? The last person you want to hear from actually, ironically, is a trust in a state  service provider because they’ve got skin in the game to tell you some service and they’re biased in their approach. So there’s a no solicitation rule one. Two, there’s a clear definition of who a 3I member is, right? So it’s those three buckets, family offices, recently exited tech and real estate entrepreneurs and active fund managers. And third, it’s just a culture of openness that we’ve cultivated through, I think a lot of the community functions and a very active involvement of the team. I think that trust is earned over time. And in order to feel comfortable posting into a WhatsApp group or calling into a platform and asking for help and diligence on a deal or a personal or business or financial decision, you’ve got to feel like you know the team. I make it, you know, we’ve got a team of 25 full-time folks here based out of New York. I make it the job of the team to let’s make sure we really understand the needs of the member and make sure they feel comfortable with the platform. And two, let’s catalog that stuff so we can make it repeatable and come back to it.

Jack Sharry: Interesting. So, what do you do with all this? Where are you going with all this? Because you’re really building up a storehouse of trust, or at least a platform or a foundation of trust. And it seems like it’s going to expand beyond where you may have started. So what are your thoughts? Where do you want to go with this?

Teddy Gold: We just put out a survey to our membership, really out of curiosity, that asked how happy or satisfied are you with your current wealth manager? And we learned that 65 % of members are dissatisfied with their current wealth management solution. Now, I don’t want, I think, to be fair, think there’s some bias in that because the type of member who joins, the type of person who joins 3i is naturally more entrepreneurial in the way that they think about investing and the way they think about family office construction.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, and if I may, probably think they’re smarter than any advisor they might work with.

Teddy Gold: I think that’s maybe true, maybe not. I’ll leave that. Exactly. They’re naturally predisposed to, I think, be skeptical. And we talked about trust. They’re skeptical of the traditional gatekeeper, frankly, because many of them were in the business that the gatekeepers are in. They charge an AUM fee. They know the business, and they have a hard time, I think, grappling with, hey, one or.

Jack Sharry: But they’re more do-it-yourself type investors if they’re network like yours. Yes. Sure, yeah.

Teddy Gold: point or a point and a half or a half a point in my wealth every year is going to go to pay off, to the bottom line of some RAA roll up out there somewhere or some big boutique RAA or bulge bracket bank. know the economics. They know the gross margin profile of wealth management. think they don’t get differentiated deals. There’s very little transparency on fees. And some of the basic services like reporting and quarterly balance sheets and cash in, cash out are not there. I think, look, we are never going to become

Jack Sharry: Yeah. Interesting.

Teddy Gold: I don’t want to say never. Our goal is not to become a wealth manager. Our, goal with 3i and where I see this going is let’s map and we have mapped all the services that call it the 50 to $250 million on average family or investors looking at and what they would turn to wealth manager for. that’s investment management, reporting, bill pay, cashflow analysis, K1 management, back office, bill pay, research, analytics.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, yeah.

Teddy Gold: All of these individual services, if you can crowdsource from a bunch of successful people on how they do it right and how they do it in their own personal lives, we can create a big knowledge bank and a big knowledge hub that becomes a public service for our members and say, hey, if you’re interested in how to manage the cashflow of your portfolio or do quarterly reporting or procure investment management software to look at your portfolio, come to 3i not because we know the answer or pretend to know the answer, but we’ve just accumulated the information and wisdom.

Jack Sharry: Interesting.

Teddy Gold: from the qualified crowd of folks who’ve gone through the procurement decision. And here’s the best practice guide on how to think about trust in a state, for example. So long-term, I love the idea that information is being fractionalized through podcasts and newsletters. And there’s so much information out there that 3i can make it just a little bit easier for our members to make the decisions of how to manage their wealth.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, so let me dig in. where do you go with that? By the way, I want to just make a comment you mentioned earlier, as many of the people you’re dealing with come from the business, would assume, or least are intimately familiar with all that goes on there. And I just remember this is decades ago. I made a presentation that happened to be in Buffalo, New York. I was talking to a group of advisors. And I asked the question, which I never asked again because it was just so everyone’s face went white, blank.

Jack Sharry: Like, wow. I said, I was talking about trust. I’ve been talking about trust for a very long time in my career. Just I think it’s so fundamental. It is so fundamental to what we do. Don’t want people’s money and their future and all the rest, their family, all that stuff. And I said, who in your office would you give your mother’s account to? And they all looked back at me like. I can see it in their eyes. No one, there’s been one here, maybe not no one, but every one or two. And there was an office that had probably 50 advisors at the time. And just sort of, and I was like, I just came out of my mouth and I go, I’m not asking that question again. It was too confronting. was too, but it gets to the heart of the matter, which is where do you go to get trust? So given what you’re saying, how do you, I guess there’s two questions. How do you monetize that? mean, you’re looking to make money as well as you should, you provide real value. So how do you get paid? And then what do you do about it? Because it would seem like you could crowdsource financial advice, family office level financial advice. So talk about those two things.

Teddy Gold: The membership is $18,000 a year. And we’re intentionally transparent about our pricing and have been from the start. The fee has increased modestly, basically. I think we’re still tracking behind inflation. But it’s $18,000 a year, which gets you everything, access to the events, access to the deals. We don’t take a fee on the deals we do. don’t take a carry. And we’ve done about $750 million through the platform at this point.

Jack Sharry: Smart, smart. Gotcha.

Teddy Gold: An outside businessman might say, hey, if you just took a carry or fee on the deal flow, you’d have a robust business model. But I would say that would actually destroy the trust that we are aiming to build with our members because I never want to be in the conflicted position where I say, you know, we’re looking at, I’ll use the aircraft engine tear down deal. I personally think it’s a bad deal, but I’m going to get paid if my member invests in it. And therein lies, I think the key.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, I getcha, yeah getcha.

Teddy Gold: misalignment by design of the wealth management industry, which is you are supposed to be a fiduciary, but you are also getting paid to dispense financial advice. I really think it’s one of the biggest problems in the wealth management industry. look, the business model is very straightforward. It’s again, $18,000 a year. And it’ll be that way I see for the foreseeable future because I want to provide transparency to the member in an industry that I think is just fraught with.

Jack Sharry: Yes, yes.

Teddy Gold: You know, changing fees.

Jack Sharry: Gotcha, gotcha. Well, loving this conversation, Teddy. This is fascinating and we’ll have to have you back down the road. I wanna hear how it continues to evolve. It sounds to me like you’re gonna continue to provide services and love what I’m hearing. I think this issue of trust is central to the financial services industry. It’s fundamental, but listen, my pontificating on all that. That all said, anything we haven’t covered, you think we oughta make sure that our audience is aware of as you’re talking about 3I and what you’re up to.

Teddy Gold: Well, I think particularly, I’ve been a long-time listener of your show and a big admirer of, I think, the messages you share. I think what we’re seeing, and we’ve touched on this a little bit, what we’re seeing as one of my great advisors once told me is a shift from power of attorney, which is the traditional model of the wealth manager, right? You sign away, you know, the ability to make investment decisions. think power of attorney is becoming power of network.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, interesting.

Teddy Gold: The smartest family offices and the best entrepreneurs who have recently exited businesses and folks who are becoming really thoughtful about the way they make decisions are just increasingly turning to peers and saying, how do we do this without getting ripped off in a way where we can maintain control and maintain latitude over the decisions we’re making? I think this is happening across the economy. I think it’s happening in news. I think it’s happening in media. I think it’s happening with influencers. And I’m starting to see that shift now tip in wealth management. So let’s track it together. I mean, we’ll see how the wealth management industry evolves. It’s certainly an ever-evolving animal. But I’m seeing smart folks turn to networks.

Jack Sharry: You know, it’s interesting, as I’ve talked about on the podcast before, and I’ll talk about it now, I wrote a book called Authentic and Ethical Persuasion, and it’s fundamentally about trust and how you earn trust. You earn trust by listening, connecting, understanding, and not being conflicted. And one of the things I’ve been, this is for another podcast for another day, but I can’t help but at least point to the fact that what I’m finding in the network I’ve developed over, I’ve been around the industry forever, four decades at least. That the level of trust I enjoy at this point in my life and career has never been higher, because as much as I can, and I have an interest, I high incentives to do well, but I’ve found the more I can win trust and not blow that up or not mess with that, it’s sort of interesting. Perhaps I’ll have you back to just talk about that issue, it really what it comes down to is it. I find it frankly helps my business. I’m trustworthy. Does that make sense?

Teddy Gold: I think it does, because I think the fundamental piece of building trust is giving in proportion to the amount you’re taking in a relationship. I think of that, you know, when I bring someone onto the three community, I ask them, you know, when I call on you for expertise and diligence, or when someone has a question that relates to your industry or the place you live, are you willing to answer? And I think for me, Jack, I think the trust that you’ve built just comes from a willingness to give, right? Give people a platform to speak and…

Jack Sharry: Yes, yes, good point.

Teddy Gold: You know, share your contacts. And I think you’re kind of the first person to be willing to make a connection. And I think it’s no wonder that you’ve built trust. It’s no wonder you wrote a book on trust. It’s no wonder you’re interested in it. Because I think you understand the fundamental equation, is in order to build it, you have to give in a relationship more, as much, if not more than you take.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, yeah. And much like this conversation and just put up a yellow highlighter to the thought, I’m looking to advance the discourse. I’m looking for the other to succeed. And that’s my fundamental orientation. And if I benefit, yippee, that’s great. And if I don’t, yippee, because they’ll be back for something else when the time is right. But anyway, we’re getting off into, I don’t want to call it La La Land, but this is all fundamentally important, but this is a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. This has been a real pleasure. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation I was looking forward to it. They didn’t fully understand it but I think I have a pretty good sense of it now and I really appreciate it So one last question always my favorite. What do you do outside of work for fun, something that you’re passionate about, excited about, also that people might find interesting or surprising

Teddy Gold: Well, it’s May in New York, which for me means the tennis courts are reopened in Central Park. And I missed the boat on becoming a child tennis star. I even missed the boat on playing tennis as a kid, which is a parenting note I’m going to, you know, I want to share with my, with my folks. But I picked up the game two years ago. I love being outside. I love playing in the public parks in New York and I’ve become involved in a organization called the City Parks Foundation, which does a really beautiful job creating access for folks who might not have access to the outdoors and specifically tennis courts in New York City. So it’s been very fulfilling to do a great job and partner up with the US Open in August in Queens. So I love getting outside and I love playing.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. Good for you. Love that. Don’t know if you know this, you probably don’t, but I was a tennis teaching pro back in the day in my 20s, indoor and outdoor clubs and all that. So I get it. I love it. So Teddy, thanks. This has been a great conversation for our audience. Thank you for tuning in. If you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe and share what we’re doing here at WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. should also check us out on our dedicated website, wealthtechondeck.com all of our episodes are there along with articles, perspectives, and curated content from many leaders around the industry. Teddy, thanks a lot. This has been a lot of fun. I enjoyed it.

Teddy Gold: Thanks, Jack. Great to see you.

Jack Sharry: Good to see you as well.