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I sat in a classroom at Babson this week. Not as a speaker. As a student. The school that shaped how I think about capital invited alumni back for a session on family wealth continuity with Raúl Serebrenik and Carlos Tornel of Sentinel Legacy Advisors, two of Latin America's sharpest minds on multigenerational dynasties. They opened with a number that silenced the room: of all family enterprises that fail across generations, 95% fail because of communication breakdowns, unprepared heirs, and absent shared vision. Only 5% fail for the reasons we spend all our time on: legal structures, tax planning, financial architecture. We are solving for the wrong variable.
The Data
Latin American and Caribbean issuers placed a record $52.2 billion in international bonds in Q1 2025, surpassing the previous quarterly peak from 2021 (ECLAC, 2025). Capital that left the region during the tightening cycle is coming back, aided by lower U.S. real interest rates. For cross-border families sitting on local currency, this is a timing signal: the cost of moving capital into USD-denominated structures is compressing. The bridge between Bogota and Brickell just got cheaper to cross.
Miami will experience its slowest multifamily inventory growth in a decade in 2026, at just 1.6% (Marcus & Millichap, 2026 Miami Multifamily Forecast). Meanwhile, the city will add 9,000 jobs led by professional services and healthcare. The supply wall that everyone warned about is thinning from the inside. If you underwrote a 2023 vintage deal assuming elevated competition through 2027, the timeline just shortened. Through the Market lens of the Diamond Framework: the supply-demand imbalance is correcting faster than most models assumed.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act permanently restored 100% bonus depreciation for qualifying assets acquired after January 19, 2025, and raised the estate and gift tax exemption to $15 million per person starting in 2026 (IRS Notice 2026-11, January 2026). For cross-border families structuring U.S. real estate holdings, this is not a policy footnote. It is a structural shift in how you time acquisitions and plan generational transfers. The window that everyone was racing to close just got permanently wider.
J.P. Morgan's 2026 Global Family Office Report surveyed 333 single-family offices across 30 countries. 18% were from Latin America and the Caribbean (J.P. Morgan Private Bank, February 2026). The finding that stopped me: families with operating businesses are twice as likely to cite internal conflict as a top-three risk compared to non-business-owning peers. 41% of business-owning families identify internal conflict as a primary threat. This is the Babson thesis in institutional data. The risk is not the portfolio. The risk is the family.
Bank of America's Family Office Study found that 87% of family office wealth has not yet been transferred to the next generation, but 59% will move within the next decade (Bank of America Private Bank, 2025). That is $124 trillion in motion. The younger generation is allocating more aggressively to private equity and real estate, doing more direct deals. The capital is moving. The question is whether the families behind it have done the human work to move it well.
The Signal
The variable nobody is solving for.
Serebrenik presented a model at Babson that reframed how I think about wealth continuity. He calls it the evolution from family business to family office: from a family that owns a business to a family whose business is managing its own capital across generations. The distinction sounds semantic. It is structural.
Only 3.6% of family enterprises successfully transition across generations. Not because the legal architecture failed. Because no one taught the heirs how to think, communicate, or govern together.
His line landed like a verdict: "Without education, no governance. Without governance, no continuity.”
Through our Investment “Diamond Framework”: we obsess over Product, Market, Structure and Team. But Team is not just the GP. In a family enterprise, Team is the family itself. If the family is not trained, aligned, and governed, the best structure in the world collapses from the inside.
I have sat across from families who spent $100,000 on trust architecture and zero on preparing their children to understand what those trusts protect. That is building a vault with no one who knows the combination.
Structure without education is an expensive illusion.
Ahmad’s Margin Note
Being back at Babson's Miami campus this week felt different than it did as a student. I sat in a room full of people wrestling with the same question I think about every day: how do you turn success into stewardship? How do you elevate family wealth from a moment of liquidity to a multi-generational strategy? Not the spreadsheet version. The human version. Halfway through the session, I thought about my parents. They did not teach me about cap rates or trust structures. They taught me discipline, curiosity, and the courage to sit in rooms where I had to earn my seat. That is the education that compounded. To my parents: gracias. Everything I build sits on the foundation you laid.
Before I close: this week we crossed 300,000 subscribers. I do not take that lightly. Every one of you chose to give me your attention, and attention is the most valuable currency there is. Thank you for trusting me with yours.
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