McKinsey

Managing $525B & Building the World’s Largest Multifamily Office | Kurt MacAlpine, Corient

Oct 18, 2026 · 1:19:35

Corient CEO Kurt MacAlpine argues that wealth management's incentives are broken — advisors run as silos — so his roughly $525 billion firm operates as a professional services partnership with one compensation plan, one P&L, no chargebacks, and a fee-only fiduciary standard. Becoming CEO at 39, he deployed CI Financial's cash flow plus 3 to 3.5 turns of fixed-rate debt, weathering a 2021-to-2022 stock swing and buying back shares deemed criminally undervalued at $12-$13 a share. He took CI Financial private with Mubadala Capital with no new debt; Corient fully integrates about 50 acquisitions on day one, passing scale benefits like cheaper lending to clients. He recounts recruiting young partners rather than retiring sellers and picking Miami as headquarters to build for generations.

Inside Bending Spoons: Finding Talent, Leveraging AI & Driving Operational Excellence | Luca Ferrari

Sep 13, 2026 · 2:01:29

Luca Ferrari, co-founder of Bending Spoons, argues the company aspires to build "the best company there ever was" by favoring raw talent over experience. He explains how a centralized talent team screens candidates using over 100 signals, why hiring managers get trust instead of bonuses, and why the company abolished job titles. He describes extreme ownership and saturating capacity—giving people more work than they can complete—and a 50-plus tool operating system that lets him run Evernote, bought for about $200 million, with 20 people. The group reaches roughly $3 billion in run rate revenue; Ferrari says it buys to hold and transform, never to sell, and bids high and firm, trusting logic over blindly following data. He also explains why Bending Spoons is going public.