Episode Details

In this episode of The Rainmaker Podcast, Gui Costin sits down with Jeff Collins, Managing Partner of Cloverlay, for a deep conversation on what it takes to raise institutional capital for one of the most differentiated strategies in private markets. Cloverlay, now on its fourth fund, invests exclusively in uncorrelated, non-operating assets — wireless spectrum, intellectual property on the content side, Broadway theatrical rights, litigation finance, pharmaceutical royalties, and other esoteric assets that don't sit neatly inside traditional buyout, credit, or real asset buckets. The result is a firm with a sales challenge that's fundamentally different from its peers: Cloverlay isn't competing to be the best CLO equity fund in a crowded category. It's competing to be understood at all.

Jeff walks through the origin story of Cloverlay, his decade-plus at Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, and the realization that the "special situations" work he was doing there — the completion-portfolio assets absent from most institutional allocations — deserved to be its own firm. He initially thought Cloverlay would be a family office and multifamily office strategy. Instead, 85% of the capital came from true institutions: public pensions, corporate pensions, and the most sophisticated allocators in the world.

That reality shapes everything about how Cloverlay goes to market. Jeff argues that positioning is the entire game when you're selling something no LP has a bucket for. The firm has sharpened its pitch down to four sentences, leading with "uncorrelated assets, and you don't own them" and immediately moving to concrete examples. The mechanics of the 60-minute meeting get significant airtime: Jeff and Gui agree that the default structure — firm background, two questions, 40 minutes of the LP talking — isn't really a meeting. Cloverlay intentionally breaks that muscle memory by asking questions most LPs rarely field, pulling them out of autopilot and forcing them to start slotting Cloverlay into their portfolio in real time.

The CRM is the backbone of Cloverlay's sales discipline. A 9 AM Monday sales meeting runs every week, organized by relationship owner rather than as a report-out, with senior investment and sales leadership triangulating on every target. Gui and Jeff then dig into how AI is transforming what's possible with relationship data — Dakota's Claude-in-Slack tool surfacing full four-year customer histories, and Claude coming to Dakota Marketplace — while making clear that none of it works without disciplined data entry upstream.

Jeff closes with a candid assessment of the current fundraising environment: in 30 years, he has rarely seen new relationships harder to secure. Unlike the post-GFC period, when allocators leaned into opportunistic trades, today's LPs feel no urgency — they can simply wait. The firms that win in this environment are the ones finding the minority of allocators who still view differentiated strategies as a solution to uncertainty. And for any GP eyeing international capital, Jeff leaves a concrete tactical note: the Middle East operates entirely on WhatsApp.

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