Andrew Bluestein is co-managing partner of Bluestein Ventures, which was launched from the Bluestein Gordon Family Office. He talks about how he and his family structured the family office — and the venture fund — to support the family’s goals. He also discusses how they’re exploring the promise and potential of AI:
Who does the Bluestein Gordon Family Office serve?
The Bluestein Gordon Family Office is designed for the benefit of the seven members of the Bluestein Gordon family. My parents are G1, and my sister, my wife and I are G2. My two kids are G3. The family office is servicing G1 and their needs, and it also serves G2. We are also doing multigenerational planning that primarily would serve G3 but could potentially one day serve future generations.
There is light support on the personal side. Our executive admin helps with some personal travel and coordination of services. But family members also manage some of their own personal affairs themselves — for example, property management is done by individual family members.
How is the family office structured?
We have a hybrid structure, but we are much more outsourced than insourced these days. The family essentially serves as the board of the family office.
We have a few internal resources: an in-house accountant and administrative staff.
Then, we leverage outsourced resources. We work with Pitcairn, which provides investment management, estate planning and financial planning services for the family. We work with RSM as our tax provider, and we have an estate planning attorney and another law firm that provides some general legal services.
We also have some outsourced partners on the investment side. We also have a long-term partnership with McNally Capital, a lower-middle-market private equity firm. My dad was one of the original advisors when they launched. So, we are partners to that firm and invest through them, but we’re not part of the active management of that company. And we do some institutional-grade investing into other types of funds.
One of the partners is Bluestein Ventures, which is kind of an outsourced platform for the family’s investments. Although I spend some time working with the family office, my day job is with this venture fund, which started in the family office. It does venture investing primarily around the food industry and more generally around the future of modern well-being.
Who coordinates all these outsourced providers?
You just brought up a key challenge we have: My dad and I kind of serve as the representatives of the family to work most closely with these operational resources. We manage this in coordination with Pitcairn, which is meant to be the quarterback. Our internal team also helps.
It’s hard to outsource that last piece: the interaction between all the different resources and the family. That’s something we are having active conversations about, because it is a question: How much time do we want to spend doing that? How can we best get everyone coordinated?
How did the family come to invest in the food industry?
My mom used to be the CEO of a company called Ingredion, which is a Fortune 500 food ingredient manufacturer. So, as a family, as we decided to start doing some of our own direct investing, we saw an opportunity within the broader food landscape around advances in health and wellness.
I spearheaded this initiative about 11 years ago, when I joined the family office. Chicago is a major hub for food, so it was an easy place to launch and get involved. We have had some success along the way: We invested in a company called Factor, which is a prepared meal subscription service that ended up scaling and selling to Hello Fresh at the end of 2020.
So, with continued success, we ended up deciding that this was becoming more than just a family office investment strategy. I had a team doing this, and we decided it should be spun out of the family office and stand on its own. It’s called Bluestein Ventures. The family is still very much involved — we have an ownership stake in the firm and are the anchor investors. I serve as one of the managing partners, but we also have nonfamily members. We have a team of five that works on the fund and have raised a $45 million fund that closed in 2023. So, now it lives beyond the family office, but the family is very much still involved and invested in it.
How are you using technology and AI in your family office or investment operations?
We have tended to look to our outsourced partners to leverage their technology tools. So, we use what Pitcairn uses around financial reporting and what RSM uses around tax. Internally, we have traditionally just used commercially available services, like Dropbox for document storage. I think we have been kind of slow to really invest in our technology infrastructure.
However, with AI, we see a new opportunity: Could it help us really streamline and improve our operations? One of the things we have struggled with is the operational complexity: As you have more people involved and have all these resources, how do we generate the right information and make sure everyone has that information?
There may be value in investing more and seeing if we can really build a better kind of operating system for the family that would help coordinate resources and share information and also improve efficiency, so it reduces the burden of managing these operations. We’re still so early in the journey of figuring that out, because these AI tools are still very new. There is also this question around privacy that is a key challenge when it comes to the level of comfort in leveraging these tools if you’re providing sensitive family information.
With Bluestein Ventures, we are aggressively, from an investment perspective, trying to figure out how we can leverage these AI tools — both to think about how to make better investments, but also to manage the processes there: doing due diligence on investments, writing up investment decisions and so on. Bluestein Ventures is kind of our skunkworks right now to figure out how to use the AI tools that are changing how work is going to be done.
Then maybe there will be tools to make it easier for the family to engage with the family office. I think that’s the promise of AI: that it gives everyone more tools. So, it’s possible that the general tools will become more applicable to the family office world.
What are your long-term goals for the family office?
That’s another good question. We haven’t fully defined that, and it’s something we talk about. But I think the long-term objective is obviously to manage the family’s wealth and help support family members to make sure that they live fulfilling lives — and at the same time, it’s an opportunity to work together as a family, to invest, to support key initiatives in areas where we want to spend time and have impact.
That’s how I think of Bluestein Ventures, as well: We believe we’re playing a role in helping improve the food system, and it’s an area that the family has an interest in.
There may be other areas that evolve over time, as we have discussions around philanthropy and investments. I think that purpose is evolving. The family office is there to serve as that foundation so that the family can do purposeful activities leveraging their resources.