Serena Williams started Serena Ventures in 2014. By the time Forbes counted in April 2024, the firm had backed more than 85 companies and 14 of them had reached valuations of $1bn or more. What that record does not show is the middle of it, the six or seven years in which almost none of those companies were worth talking about and the only thing being built was a set of working relationships with founders nobody had heard of.
Ten years is the real unit of measurement in private capital, and it is the one nobody reports on, because a decade produces very little that can be written up until its final stretch.
The pattern repeats wherever people commit early and stay. Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman founded Thirty Five Ventures in 2016 and the firm has since backed more than 100 companies, Adweek reported on 18 February 2022. In June 2020, NBA.com reported, Durant took a 5% stake in the MLS club Philadelphia Union with an option for a further 5%, which is a statement about the decade after the purchase rather than the quarter around it.
Tommy Shields, Head of Investor Relations at Onyx Reserve, a private investment firm operating in South Florida, spends most of his working week on the front end of arrangements of that length.
“A transaction has a beginning and an end and a relationship has neither, which is the part people get backwards,” Shields said. “The deal is an episode inside something longer. Somebody who organises their working life around the episodes ends up with a long list of acquaintances who each remember one thing about them. The people who last are organised the other way round, and the transactions happen inside the relationship instead of in place of it.”
The horizon is the structure, not the sentiment
Long time horizons in private capital are not a temperament. They are built into the legal and institutional furniture, and the furniture is heavy on purpose.
Deloitte Private counted 3,180 single family offices in North America in 2024, the largest regional share worldwide, in its Family Office Insights Series published that year. An entity of that kind is set up specifically to outlive the person who set it up. Its committees and its reporting cycle assume a decision-maker who is not in the room yet.
Relationships get formalised the same way once people intend them to last. LeBron James and Maverick Carter took roughly a 1% stake in Fenway Sports Group in 2021 and expanded it in 2023 under what Sportico described as a lifetime partnership. The word doing the work there is lifetime. Somebody wrote a duration into a contract because the duration was the point, and both sides accepted a document that removes the option of quietly drifting apart when the arrangement stops being convenient.
Which raises the awkward question of what a person does with all the opportunities that arrangement rules out.
“Saying no is the most underrated relationship skill in this business and hardly anybody practises it,” Shields said. “Declining badly costs somebody the thing in front of them and the next four they will now never hear about. Declining well is telling a person the real reason early enough that they can go and spend their week on something else. People remember a straight no far longer than they remember a yes that arrived with conditions attached.”
Everybody claims the long view, and the sector cannot say how many have one
Here is the uncomfortable part, and it is the more interesting part.
The industry that talks most about generational thinking has thin evidence that it has prepared for a generation. Only 35% of family offices have a defined succession plan and just 27% run structured next-generation education programmes, according to the UBS Global Family Office Report 2026, which surveyed 307 offices holding $627.4bn between January and March 2026.
Then set that against a different room. RBC and Campden Wealth, surveying 141 North American family offices with $285bn between them from April to August 2025, found 69% had succession plans in place, up from 53% the year before.
Two credible surveys, three months apart, on the single question of whether these institutions are actually built to outlast their founders, and the answers sit half a category away from each other. Neither is dishonest. They asked different populations a differently worded question, and the gap between the results is nearly as wide as the thing being measured, which means anybody quoting either figure across a table will sound equally confident and the person listening has no way to tell which number they were handed.
The timing is what makes it matter now rather than eventually. Bank of America Private Bank, surveying 335 US decision-makers for its 2025 Family Office Study published on 13 November 2025, found that 87% of family offices have yet to pass to the next generation, while one in three expect a leadership transition within five years.
Almost nothing has been tested, and a great deal is scheduled.
Read forward rather than backward, that is a straightforwardly good position to be in. A sector with most of its handovers still ahead of it is a sector where the practices that survive the next ten years are still being chosen, by people who can watch what the surveys are telling them and act on it before the transition arrives rather than during it.
“Nobody builds trust from scratch, whatever the phrase suggests,” Shields said. “A person walks into a first meeting carrying whatever the last few people in their seat did, and walks out having either added to that or spent some of it. The seat outlasts whoever is sitting in it. Anybody who really understands that behaves differently in a quiet year, because the quiet years are when the balance gets added to.”
Where the clocks are visible
South Florida property makes the arithmetic unusually legible, because the timelines are physical and public.
In the first half of 2026, the entry threshold for an ultra-luxury single-family home reached $15.0m in Miami-Dade and $14.0m in Palm Beach County, according to MIAMI REALTORS. Assets at that level change hands rarely and are held for long stretches, so the number of people any one participant will deal with over a career is small and each of them will be dealt with repeatedly.
The construction cycle runs on a similar clock. Savills Research projected in its Branded Residences Annual Report 2025/26 that the global count of completed branded residence schemes would reach 910 by the end of 2025, up 19% from 764 a year earlier. Every one of those buildings was agreed years before anybody moved in, by parties who had to keep faith with each other through a financing process and a delivery date that moved at least once.
Onyx Reserve Signature Estates, the name the firm uses for its South Florida luxury real estate work, sits inside that timescale. So does everyone else operating in it.
“A long horizon changes what a first meeting is for,” Shields said. “Somebody working to a two-year clock is trying to establish whether a thing works now. Somebody working to a fifteen-year clock is trying to establish whether they will still want to know this person in fifteen years, which is a slower question and a much better one. Most of what is worth knowing about the answer shows up in how a person talks about the partners they had before.”
The leadership transitions Bank of America counted fall in the same handful of years as the deliveries now under construction. In most cases the person who will be sitting across the table when both arrive is already working somewhere in the sector today, and has not been introduced to anyone yet.
