“After more than 30 years, the most valuable thing I’ve accumulated is experience,” Jean-Pierre Conte wrote in a Forbes Business Council column published Oct. 8, 2026.
Conte is the founder and managing partner of his family office, Lupine Crest Capital, based in Aspen, Colorado. A section of the column is titled “Experience And Patience.”
What Experience Buys
Experience helps an investor read a management team quickly, Conte wrote. It sharpens a sense of how markets behave. It also builds what he called “relationships with founders who call you first.”
Those relationships are built over years of work with companies and their leaders, according to the column. No shortcut is offered.
Conte has made a related point about philanthropy. A June 2025 Forbes column urged donors to research an organization before giving, much as an investor studies a company before buying it.
Where It Began
His own experience started in banking, well before the family office existed. The son of a Manhattan tailor and the first in his family to attend college, Conte began his finance career at Chase Manhattan Bank after Colgate University. He later joined a small private equity firm in San Francisco.
Harvard Business School came next, where he earned his MBA, and private equity after that. Lupine Crest Capital was launched by Jean-Pierre Conte in March 2025, and he has served on Colgate’s board of trustees since 2020.
Going Deeper
Conte’s first takeaway for business leaders is “Deploy what you know.” He wrote that investors who build lasting value are “going deeper into sectors where they’ve spent years building real knowledge.”
His family office was set up around four of them: healthcare, software, financial services and industrial technology. Each is a field he has worked in during his private equity career, which began after business school.
A Wider Pattern
Citi Wealth’s 2025 Global Family Office Report was cited in the column. Seventy percent of respondents had made direct investments in private companies, the report found.
Citi’s survey covered 346 family offices worldwide. Four in 10 of those investing directly had increased that activity in the prior year, Citi reported.
Experience and Patience Together
Experience shares a heading with patience in the column, and JP Conte wrote that patient capital still calls for active judgment.
He closed with his parents. They had arrived in the United States without capital. His family office was described as an extension of their outlook. J-P Conte’s earlier Forbes Business Council columns covered mentorship, education and wildfire preparedness.