What are the key takeaways from this Alt Goes Mainstream episode?

Key insights include: **Family Office Asset Allocation:** Goldman's survey shows family offices maintain 42% allocation to alternatives, 12% in cash, with duration shifting from 50% under three years to majority over three years. This higher alternatives exposure compared to typical wealth clients reflects their ability to tolerate illiquidity while keeping cash reserves for capital commitments and opportunistic buying during market dislocations.; **Secondaries Market Growth:** Secondary investments emerge as the dominant trend across all regions, offering family offices the ability to invest in mature companies at discounts to NAV, avoid j-curve effects, and gain full transparency into assets. This strategy consistently delivers approximately 15% returns while mitigating downside risk compared to blind pool commitments in high-valuation environments.; **Private Markets Outperformance:** Average performing buyout funds outperform MSCI World by 5% over twenty years, while top quartile performance significantly exceeds this. Private credit shows 3% outperformance over traditional high yield in the last decade. However, taxable investors must calculate after-tax returns net of fees, as pretax returns are irrelevant for individual wealth management decisions.

What did Sara Naison-tarajano discuss on Alt Goes Mainstream?

Sara Naison-Tarajano, Goldman Sachs partner and global head of Apex, explains how she built a dedicated platform serving 600+ family offices globally. She covers the intersection of private and public markets, how ultra-high-net-worth families allocate capital differently, key findings from Goldman's family office survey, and why intellectual curiosity matters more than rigid career planning in finance. Key topics include: **Family Office Asset Allocation:** Goldman's survey shows family offices maintain 42% allocation to alternatives, 12% in cash, with duration shifting from 50% under three years to majority over three years. This higher alternatives exposure compared to typical wealth clients reflects their ability to tolerate illiquidity while keeping cash reserves for capital commitments and opportunistic buying during market dislocations.; **Secondaries Market Growth:** Secondary investments emerge as the dominant trend across all regions, offering family offices the ability to invest in mature companies at discounts to NAV, avoid j-curve effects, and gain full transparency into assets. This strategy consistently delivers approximately 15% returns while mitigating downside risk compared to blind pool commitments in high-valuation environments..

How long is this episode of Alt Goes Mainstream?

This episode is 66 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Alt Goes Mainstream

Goldman Sachs' Sara Naison-Tarajano - working with the apex of the wealth channel

January 20, 2026

66 min episode · 2 min read

Sara Naison-tarajano

Episode

66 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Productivity, Personal Finance

AI-Generated Summary

Published Jan 20, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Family Office Asset Allocation: Goldman's survey shows family offices maintain 42% allocation to alternatives, 12% in cash, with duration shifting from 50% under three years to majority over three years. This higher alternatives exposure compared to typical wealth clients reflects their ability to tolerate illiquidity while keeping cash reserves for capital commitments and opportunistic buying during market dislocations.
✓Secondaries Market Growth: Secondary investments emerge as the dominant trend across all regions, offering family offices the ability to invest in mature companies at discounts to NAV, avoid j-curve effects, and gain full transparency into assets. This strategy consistently delivers approximately 15% returns while mitigating downside risk compared to blind pool commitments in high-valuation environments.
✓Private Markets Outperformance: Average performing buyout funds outperform MSCI World by 5% over twenty years, while top quartile performance significantly exceeds this. Private credit shows 3% outperformance over traditional high yield in the last decade. However, taxable investors must calculate after-tax returns net of fees, as pretax returns are irrelevant for individual wealth management decisions.
✓Beating Inflation Framework: Wealth management reduces to one core principle: portfolios must beat inflation post-spending and taxes to preserve purchasing power across generations. This requires staying invested rather than holding excess cash, understanding required annual spending plus inflation adjustments, and maintaining disciplined asset allocation across public equities, fixed income, and alternatives regardless of market volatility.
✓Geographic Diversification Trends: Asia family offices hold 19% in cash, down from 25% in the prior survey, reflecting greater proximity to geopolitical conflicts and newer wealth requiring strategic deployment. Families use three primary hedging strategies: geographic diversification, tactical gold positions, and treasury allocations, while opportunistically hedging equity exposure during low volatility and high valuation periods.

What It Covers

Sara Naison-Tarajano, Goldman Sachs partner and global head of Apex, explains how she built a dedicated platform serving 600+ family offices globally. She covers the intersection of private and public markets, how ultra-high-net-worth families allocate capital differently, key findings from Goldman's family office survey, and why intellectual curiosity matters more than rigid career planning in finance.

Key Questions Answered

•Family Office Asset Allocation: Goldman's survey shows family offices maintain 42% allocation to alternatives, 12% in cash, with duration shifting from 50% under three years to majority over three years. This higher alternatives exposure compared to typical wealth clients reflects their ability to tolerate illiquidity while keeping cash reserves for capital commitments and opportunistic buying during market dislocations.
•Secondaries Market Growth: Secondary investments emerge as the dominant trend across all regions, offering family offices the ability to invest in mature companies at discounts to NAV, avoid j-curve effects, and gain full transparency into assets. This strategy consistently delivers approximately 15% returns while mitigating downside risk compared to blind pool commitments in high-valuation environments.
•Private Markets Outperformance: Average performing buyout funds outperform MSCI World by 5% over twenty years, while top quartile performance significantly exceeds this. Private credit shows 3% outperformance over traditional high yield in the last decade. However, taxable investors must calculate after-tax returns net of fees, as pretax returns are irrelevant for individual wealth management decisions.
•Beating Inflation Framework: Wealth management reduces to one core principle: portfolios must beat inflation post-spending and taxes to preserve purchasing power across generations. This requires staying invested rather than holding excess cash, understanding required annual spending plus inflation adjustments, and maintaining disciplined asset allocation across public equities, fixed income, and alternatives regardless of market volatility.
•Geographic Diversification Trends: Asia family offices hold 19% in cash, down from 25% in the prior survey, reflecting greater proximity to geopolitical conflicts and newer wealth requiring strategic deployment. Families use three primary hedging strategies: geographic diversification, tactical gold positions, and treasury allocations, while opportunistically hedging equity exposure during low volatility and high valuation periods.
•NextGen Engagement Strategy: Successful families demonstrate transparency by bringing children under the tent early, focusing on financial literacy education delivered by third parties rather than parents. The next generation shows longer time horizons, investing in emerging themes like women's sports, nuclear energy, and solar power, while feeling pressure to protect first-generation capital through deep education and understanding.

Notable Moment

Naison-Tarajano reveals she accepted Goldman's offer the same night as her first interview and canceled all other interviews, expecting to stay one year. Twenty-six years later she remains while her roommate, who convinced her to apply, left after eight months. Her lack of agenda allowed her to follow intellectual curiosity across investment banking, derivatives, and wealth management.

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Episode Transcript

So it's been twenty six years. I started at Goldman in 1999 as an investment banking analyst. I interviewed or had interviews at 12 different firms. Goldman was my first interview. It was all day. It was so exhausting. Exhausting. I got an offer that night and accepted on the spot and canceled all the others, thinking I would be here a year. I'm still here twenty six years later. Everybody gets a piece. We're going mainstream. Everybody's gonna eat. We're going mainstream. All my family's gonna eat. We're going mainstream. All my family's gonna eat. We're going mainstream. All my family's gonna Welcome back to the All Goes Mainstream podcast. Today's episode brings us to the Apex of the Wealth Channel. We sat down in Goldman Sachs' headquarters at 200 West with Sarah Nason Terrejano, partner and global head of private wealth management capital markets and global head of Goldman Sachs Apex. Sarah is also responsible for the one Goldman Sachs family office initiative in The Americas. Sarah has been at Goldman Sachs for over twenty five years, where she's worked in a number of roles across the firm, equipping her with a multidisciplinary background that has brought to bear in her current role leading the global platform that delivers multi asset investing, financing, and direct investment opportunities to some of the world's largest family offices. Goldman Sachs Apex now serves more than 600 family offices across the globe. Sarah and I had a fascinating conversation about the growing intersection between private markets and private wealth and what some of the wealth channels largest investors find interesting and differentiated. We covered how Sarah expected to spend one year at Goldman and it turned into twenty five years at the firm, how her background in derivative structuring and public markets has helped her approach private markets, and what investors in private markets can learn from being exposed to public markets, why Sarah decided to create Goldman Sachs Apex to build a dedicated group to help large family offices invest directly into private markets, how Apex is related to Goldman's one Goldman Sachs initiative, how the power of the platform helped to differentiate Goldman's wealth management business, what lessons The Wealth Channel can learn from how the ultra high net worth and billionaire family office segment approaches private markets, takeaways from the Goldman Sachs family office insights report, and how The Wealth Channel can engage the next generation clients and how private markets plays a role in reaching the next gen. Thanks, Sarah, for coming on the Alcos Mainstream podcast to share your expertise and wisdom on private markets and working with The Wealth Channel. Sarah, welcome to the AllCoast Mainstream Podcast. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me here in the Goldman studio. There's a lot to discuss. You've seen a lot in your career at Goldman in markets. There's a lot going on in private markets, how families are thinking about it. You recently put out a …

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