The Firm
A family office
Our own capital, deployed with our own hands, under a name we didn't choose for ourselves.
A name we did not choose for ourselves
The firm carries a name that predates the deals, the portfolio, and us. It is a lineage, not a brand, and that changes how we think about every decision.
We named the firm after the people who started this family's story rather than after ourselves because that's the honest accounting of where the capital, and more importantly the values, came from.
It's also a constraint we chose on purpose. A firm named after the people who started something has to be careful with it. Every decision we make gets measured against a plain question: would this hold up to the people whose name is on the door, and to the generation that comes after us?
That's most of what "long term" means here. Not a hold period. A lineage.
Structure follows philosophy
We're a family office, and that isn't an accident of how we started, it's a choice about how we want to invest.
A fund has a clock. Ten years in, capital has to come back whether or not it's the right moment for the business. Every decision late in a fund's life is shaped by that deadline, and founders feel it even when nobody says it out loud.
We don't have that constraint. Our capital is our own. We can hold a company for as long as it remains a good company, invest more when the moment calls for it, and make decisions on the business's timeline rather than a fund's.
The other consequence of investing our own money is accountability. There's no committee to defer to and no LP base to explain a loss to. When we commit to a company, we're the ones who wear the outcome, and we behave accordingly.
Our crest
A family office should look like a family
A family office should look like a family. We commissioned a proper achievement of arms rather than a logo, because the values it carries are older than the firm and will outlast it.
The compass rose on the shield has four cardinal points, one for each generation of this family that carried the work forward. It also says something about how we invest: a compass gives you a bearing, not a destination. We don't have a sector we're headed toward. We orient by judgment and go where the operator is.
The gold at its centre is the fixed point every bearing is taken from. For us that's people. It's the one thing that hasn't changed across four generations, or across a portfolio that has nothing else in common.
The chevron is the builder's rafter, heraldry's oldest mark for one who gives steadfast support. Here it divides the shield rather than sitting on it, because everything above it rests on what the generations below built.
The ribbon across the field carries the name as IBG IV, a count of generations, set in Roman numerals as arms have always set numbers. A generation is a count, not a brand.
The wreath runs the full circuit of the shield rather than sitting on top of it. In a traditional coat of arms the twisted wreath binds a crest to a helm, and cloth falls away at either side. We took both off and carried the wreath around instead, thirty four twists, no loose end, nothing trailing away. A closed thing seemed like the more accurate picture of a family that has held together across four generations.
The motto runs on a scroll across the bottom: Fides · Constantia · Semper Optimum, trust, determination, and always our best.
Values
Three things we hold to
Trust
We say what we're going to do and then we do it. In a business built on capital and relationships, this is the only durable asset. It compounds slowly and it can be destroyed in a single decision, which is why we treat it as the constraint on everything else, not a value we aspire to, but a line we don't cross.
Determination
Every company we've been part of has had a stretch where the right move was to leave. We don't. Businesses that become valuable almost always pass through a period where they don't look valuable, and being the partner who stays through that period is most of what we have to offer.
Always our best
Not perfection, we get things wrong. But every company we're part of gets the full weight of what we know, the calls we can make, and the hours it takes. We'd rather be judged on effort we controlled than outcomes we didn't.