Ruggie on AI, private markets, and the bubble he sees coming

[00:00] Thomas Ruggie: A bubble is going to be created. We're investing in the Microsoft and the Apple and the Amazon of tomorrow. There's going to be a period, a day of reckoning where some of these are not as attractive.

[00:15] James Burton: Hi everyone, my name is James Burton from Investment News. Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm delighted to be joined by Tom Ruggie, founder and CEO of Destiny Family Office. Tom, thanks for joining us.

[00:27] Thomas Ruggie: James, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to connect with you.

[00:32] James Burton: Congratulations, of course, on being named a 2026 Investment News Advisor of the Year for alternative investments. Great achievement, Tom, and well done. I hope you enjoyed that night. We're going to use this opportunity to dive into a couple new features that you're bringing to your company and exploring Destiny Access and Destiny Intelligence. First of all, Tom, just give us a quick recap on what they are.

[01:00] Thomas Ruggie: First I want to say thank you for mentioning the award. It was quite an honor. We did this interview a year ago and, on the cusp of me winning the award in 2025, I mentioned to you that we're already putting groundwork in with a goal of winning the award again in 2026. So now I'm going to put that stake in the ground again. The goal is to three-peat, or at least to be one of the finalists. We're going to be talking about some of the things that we're doing that hopefully put us in the running.

[01:40] Broadly speaking, Destiny Intelligence is really our AI platform. I can go into more detail about it, but we brought in a gentleman that was leading AI innovation for Amazon. I feel pretty fortunate to be able to get somebody of that quality and caliber to join our team and build out our AI platform.

[02:03] Destiny Access, as we've talked before, we've been very heavy in primarily late IPO, late-stage pre-IPO companies, direct investments into private companies. So Destiny Access has been built to be a destination portal for those that are participating in not only the direct investments but also the alternative investments that are a pretty big portion of our business.

[02:38] James Burton: To stay on Destiny Access there, Tom, what gap in the market do you think that fills? How are you ahead of the game there?

[02:46] Thomas Ruggie: I think that the gap in the market is the coordination of what a client is investing in and gaining access to information on those investments. My goal with Destiny Access really is, like I used the word destination, I want it to be a destination point.

[03:10] If you were a client, you'd be able to go onto the portal and not only pull up information about your holdings, but have the ability to say, "Hey, I want to receive any publicly available information live as it comes." We're using AI to feed that information into it.

[03:35] Hypothetically, if you have four holdings, Anthropic, Crusoe, SpaceX, and OpenAI, you'll be able to go onto it, click on your account, see when you purchased the assets, what the purchase price was, and what the current valuation is for every single position that you've purchased.

[04:02] Then we have tiles set up that you can go into. The SpaceX tile is going to feed information to you, and you're going to have the ability to really cater exactly what you're looking for and what your benefits are. We're also using AI, like the Amazon site, where it's going to be able to track what's of interest to you. Our goal is to constantly feed you what's appealing to you and what you want to see when you go onto the site.

[04:32] James Burton: Are you leaning heavily into AI there, Tom? It's obviously exploding. So Destiny Intelligence then, how heavily have you leaned into AI? What features is that going to offer to advisors? I'm curious because I know it's an area that you've done a lot of research on.

[04:50] Thomas Ruggie: Yes, it is. The great thing about the stage of the business that I'm in is I have a lot of resources and a lot of great clients. The thought process for us to actually focus on AI was really an initiative led by a client of mine and seeing directly what he was able to do with AI in his business.

[05:15] Candidly, James, had it not been for that real-time development and seeing how important AI was in my client's firm, I think I probably would have been like the majority of RIAs out in the country. My feeling is that if you were to poll financial advisors, 90% of them are going to say they're utilizing AI.

[05:45] But the difference between utilizing and really capitalizing on it is significantly different. When we made the determination that we wanted to be a leader in the AI space and get ahead of the curve, that's when we started looking to see what kind of talent we could bring on. To bring on the caliber of talent that we were able to bring on has been fantastic.

[06:15] We're just over three months into this. The ultimate goal is for Destiny Intelligence to be a place where other RIAs can go and effectively utilize the core competencies that we've built up in the AI space for their business. There's no better way to do that than to beta test everything that we're doing with us.

[06:51] James Burton: Thanks, Tom. It seems like an interesting pivot for you in that you're catering to the industry rather than clients. What prompted that sort of move? Just AI's capabilities?

[07:05] Thomas Ruggie: As I mentioned, I think there's a big missing link for a lot of advisors. I felt like what we're doing has significant potential to be scalable. More importantly to me, I'm the one utilizing the AI, but I'm not the one that's going to be leading Destiny Intelligence.

[07:30] It's going to be what I would call a self-managing company that is utilizing our firm to beta test everything that we're doing. As you know from our conversations, never content, never 100% happy, always trying to get better. We're going to continue to do that within the AI world and make that offering available to other advisors.

[08:01] I think it's a unique opportunity in such an amazing space. I'm pulling these numbers out of the air, James, but I would bet that less than 10% of RIAs are truly using AI to the capacity that is going to have a meaningful benefit to their business.

[08:18] I've already seen significant time savings for me in two ways. The first is actual time savings where AI is literally giving me more hours in the day. The second, and possibly even more important, is that I've been able to utilize AI where it's not necessarily saving time, but it's doing things that I would not have had the time or taken the time to do on my own.

[08:51] For example, we do a lot of direct investments and private company investments. The analysis that it takes to vet the opportunities that cross our path is very time-consuming. With AI and what we've been able to develop from a standpoint of what we're looking for and what the roadmap looks like from a vetting process, I've been able to do significantly more vetting than we've ever been able to do.

[09:24] It's added additional benefits that ultimately trickle down to our clients. Bigger picture, I think this could be a huge benefit to other advisors that are not fully utilizing AI to the full strength that is available for them.

[09:44] James Burton: This is a follow-up. Wet my appetite a little bit. What's the coolest feature about Destiny Intelligence that you're looking forward to rolling out the most?

[09:57] Thomas Ruggie: I don't know if I'd call this the coolest feature, but you hear a lot about agents. One of the first things that we did was build an agent. Internally we call it a mini Tom.

[10:16] The purpose of it at this point is not meant to be client-facing, although that changes a little bit with Destiny Access. We gathered effectively all the intelligence that could be found about me, including our interviews, podcasts, articles I've written. It really took 35 years of information and ultimately downloaded it into AI.

[10:51] Then Shawn, my AI person, went to AI and said, "We have all this information about Tom Ruggie. Now go through the information and come up with questions that still need to be asked." AI spit out another 40 questions and I spent about six hours being interviewed about myself and what I would do and how I would do things.

[11:21] What ultimately came out of that, at least my initial vision, was that we were going to use this agent of me to help answer questions for my team before it gets to me. Our team is around 30 people. Now if somebody puts something together and wants me to review it, they run it through my agent first and say, "What would Tom say about this?"

[11:50] It spits back information and recommendations. Then they update it and get it to me. What I found is that the answers are not only right on cue with what I would give, but candidly they probably even sound better than what I would give.

[12:10] Where the real win for me has been is to ask myself the questions. You could send me an email and say, "Hey Tom, what do you think about what's going on with the war? How does that impact my portfolio?" Typically, I'd spend 20 or 30 minutes creating a well-thought-out response.

[12:48] I still want to do that. The difference is, if I get that question two months down the road, I've already previously answered it, but I don't recall who I answered it to. One thing Shawn says about AI is it gives you photographic memory.

[13:05] Now I can feed that same question into the database that already has my answer, and within seconds I'm able to have a reply, review it, make any adjustments, and get it back out. That's where the time savings has come in. I didn't actually realize initially that there was going to be significant time savings for me asking my own agent what I would do.

[13:32] James Burton: The future's kind of wild. I look forward to hearing more about that. I'm switching gears slightly, Tom. I want to get your thoughts on the private investment space. I know this is an area that you know a huge amount about, but where are we in your view with late-stage pre-IPO private investment? Are we at an inflection point?

[13:56] Thomas Ruggie: I don't think we're at the inflection point yet. We may be, but if we're not, we're very close. The biggest names in the industry are probably going to be going public within the next six months or so.

[14:15] I've said this before and I stand by it. I think we have a period of time where AI-related investments are going to go gangbusters, especially when a lot of these companies hit the public market such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

[14:40] What I anticipate having is a feeding frenzy where everybody has the fear of missing out. You get that euphoric optimism and everybody's trying to invest. In my opinion, James, what's going to happen is that a bubble is going to be created.

[14:58] Some people think we're in one right now. I personally don't, but I do clearly believe that is going to happen. I think we're going to have a similar reaction to what we had when the internet boom happened. Everything hockey-sticked, everything went up, and then unfortunately at some point that bubble burst and there was a big adjustment.

[15:28] The great thing about a lot of these companies is I believe we're investing in the Microsoft and the Apple and the Amazon of tomorrow. The big companies, in my opinion, are here to stay and they're going to do very, very well.

[15:46] But there's going to be a day of reckoning where some of these are not as attractive. From a standpoint of what's available on the private investment side, our pipeline isn't nearly as robust as what it was a year ago. To me, that's a sign that we're coming toward the end of that cycle, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

[16:10] James Burton: Interesting. Going back to your award, Tom, many congratulations. Pretty straightforward question. You're going back-to-back. What's your secret sauce?

[16:24] Thomas Ruggie: I think the biggest secret sauce is no complacency and always trying to get better. As I've already mentioned, when I won the award last year, I literally came home, got my team together, and said, "What are we going to do to put ourselves in a position to win this award again?"

[16:47] We did an awful lot. Winning the award this year, I had my entire team with me. Literally as we were celebrating that night, the topic of conversation was, "What are we going to do next?" The reality is what are we going to enhance that we're already doing to put ourselves in a position to win again.

[17:09] Destiny Access was already in the works. As this is being taped, Destiny Access was released for beta testing yesterday. We have 10 of our clients that are going to take about a week and go through it and give us thoughts on how to make it better.

[17:26] That's a very big initiative for us. Thus far, in interviewing clients for what we're doing, the response has been, "Tom, you're building something that I have never seen out there. If you can bring this to fruition, you're going to have something that clearly separates what you're doing from the rest."

[17:52] That's my goal, and that's always my goal. If I'm fortunate enough even to be in consideration for the three-peat, I'm going to have to really put my thinking cap on as to what we do beyond that. But I'll worry about that a year from now.

[18:11] James Burton: Best of luck, Tom. Congratulations again. Thanks for joining us. Always fascinating to chat.

[18:16] Thomas Ruggie: James, thank you again. Always great seeing you. I appreciate all that you and the Investment News team do, not only for us, but certainly for our industry. So, thank you.

[18:29] James Burton: And we'll see you next time here on Investment News TV.