Join Bronson Hill and co-host Nate Hambrick on the Mailbox Money Show with Aleksey Chernobelskiy for a practical discussion on how passive investors (LPs) can stop investing blindly. Aleksey shares how he built GP LP Match — a platform that connects LPs with quality GPs — and why most retail investors don’t have enough conversations or data to make strong decisions. The episode covers vetting operators, evaluating track records, avoiding common pitfalls, using better tools and information, and the power of seeing many deals to develop better judgment.
Aleksey Chernobelskiy is the founder of GP LP Match, a platform designed to help limited partners discover and connect with general partners for real estate and alternative investments. He focuses on bringing transparency, better matching, and education to the LP/GP ecosystem.
This episode is essential listening for any passive investor who wants to invest smarter and reduce risk through better information and connections.
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Full Transcript:
Bronson Hill: Welcome to the Mailbox Money Show. I’m your host, Bronson Hill. I’m super excited to be here with my amazing co-host, Nate Hambrick, the author of the 18 Laws of Leverage. We’ve got an amazing guest with us today.
So glad you’re joining us today. We’re going to talk about what it means to be an LP investor and what it looks like today. And I think there’s so many things that have changed in the last few months, just in investor sentiment with the war, with Iran, with oil prices, all those things.
So Nate, tell me about what you’re seeing right now in the world as an investor. I know you’re an investor. Why don’t you give us a little update on what you’re seeing and what you’re interested and concerned about.
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, well, you know, the obvious update is, at the time of this recording, there’s a lot of tension overseas and oil prices are still really, really high. So for all the oil investments that I already own, you know, that’s I’m guessing a really great four to eight month stretch of profitability there. So that’s great.
Overall, I’d say my personal sentiment is I think there’s about to be a lot of opportunity here in the next three to six months. I can just feel it, and I could be totally wrong. Who knows? I don’t have a crystal ball. For those of you watching at home.
There’s just I feel like something’s about to shift and there’s about to be a lot of opportunity for people who are confident in making bold decisions. So it’s a wild time to be an investor, for sure.
Bronson Hill: It is, and it’s interesting as an investor, you can be a free agent. So it means you can choose what investment works well for you. Some people think it’s good I had a panel recently. Tom Wheelwright, the famous Robert Kiyosaki tax advisor, was on there. He said, “Just pick your lane and stay in it, no matter what time it is in the market.”
Which I think there’s an advantage to that, right? Because you have an edge there. If you’re a multifamily guy, just do multifamily. If you’re an oil and gas guy, just oil and gas. But I think there’s great times to invest in oil and gas and there’s times where it’s harder. Or there’s times to invest, you know, as an investor, into multifamily.
So our guest today is Aleksey. He’s incredible. He has a platform, LP Lessons. He also has his website, GP LP Match, and he basically works on helping LPs to get matched up with GPs that are in the right type of project that they would like.
So if you’re an LP and you’re like, “I don’t have enough deal flow,” Aleksey helps create deal flow for people. Aleksey, really excited to have you today. How you doing, brother?
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: Doing great. Thanks for having me, guys.
Bronson Hill: Awesome. Good to have you, man. So tell us, I know you have this site. You’re really speaking to many you had a pretty big reach on all the different social media platforms, especially LinkedIn. You’re huge on LinkedIn. Tell me a little bit about GP-LP Match and what made you want to start that.
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: Yeah. I guess the short version and happy to dive in if you’d like. But I was advising a lot of LPs. They kept asking me the same question, something along the lines of, “I live in Florida but want to invest in Arizona industrial. Do you know any GPs that do that? I want to meet them in Florida, but the property has to be in Arizona.”
And then six months later I would meet a GP that meets that, and I’m like, “Oh man, who was that guy?” And so I basically came on to this idea of, “Well, why don’t I just create a database that has LP filters or sentiments slash needs?” right,? That’s sort of like the demand side of the platform and then GPs compose deals, I’ll query that database, and if there’s a match, they can meet each other after reviewing the deck.
And so, I’m 15 months in. It’s still pretty early, but have had some pretty wild successes so far.
Nate Hambrick: A great, fantastic update to Bumble.I appreciate you. Seriously. It makes so much sense. I’m surprised that there aren’t more sites doing that.
What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned in pairing people like, deals that people are going for these days, or things that you’ve learned just because you’re in the thick of it of introducing people from both ends at the table?
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: Well, sorry jokes aside, I actually spent about a week learning about Bumble’s business model. So you’re on to something there.
Before I started the business, there’s a lot of similarity as to how I built this out. In terms of what I’ve learned, I would say two things. First, I think many LPs and it’s easy for me to say, right? I suppose I’m biased, but I really do believe this. I think all LPs don’t have enough conversations.
So one of the things that we’ve been pushing for a few months now is, like, when you request a conversation with a GP, it shouldn’t feel like you’re about to send your money, right? It should be like, I want to get to know this person. The deck seems pretty interesting. The strategy is legit. We’ll just have a conversation. And one of the biggest surprises, probably, is that so far that has not been such a thing with retail LPs.
Institutional and family office LPs are super active and they’re like obsessed with our platform. Retail is sort of like, “Aha, like there’s so much I don’t know how to pick it from any of it. I don’t have time to have these conversations, you know. And so they tend to, you know, opt into a conversation like once a month or something, which in my opinion, I would say for most LPs is not enough.
Meaning, you really need to have like a lot of conversations to figure out where to put your money. And I don’t think you should have the notion that just because you have a conversation, you should invest in this person’s first deal. It could be the second one. It could be that you never invest, you know. But conversations are important.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I think that’s interesting, and I think for a lot of LPs. I see that they either rush too much to deploy capital or they just think about it forever, right? They just get stuck in analysis paralysis.
Actually, now we’re talking about it people get stuck in analysis paralysis, right? Their mind can just kind of get in the way. I guess, what are some ways, how can somebody finds a new deal in general? Whether it’s your site or somewhere else, what’s the process of vetting? And how does a peer network of other people around them help to validate deals or not?
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: So I don’t run such a peer network. Meaning like LPs working together to vet deals, but there are some that exist. In terms of what to do, I guess I come from the institutional world. So I guess my answer is very institutional. The best way to learn how to vet transactions is seeing a lot of them over a period of time. Like, it does not start with anything but that.
If you don’t have the time to do that, I would argue that you probably shouldn’t invest, or perhaps trust someone else to invest it for you. That’s sort of like the other option. But at least you’re aware that that’s what you’re doing. I think the reason why that’s important is you have to develop a feeling for something that looks decent enough to spend more time on, or doesn’t pass the initial 30-second scroll smell test, right?
And I think a lot of retail LPs are really missing that. And that was one of the biggest reasons that I initially created the platform was a lot of retail LPs sort of see that. They get one deal from their cousin’s uncle and they sort of think that’s the only deal out there.
But in reality, I mean, I think we have 70 live transactions at the moment. And I’m sure we’re like a tiny sliver of overall GP live transactions that are currently raising. So there’s just a lot out there and you should see all of it.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, I was gonna ask you, as a passive investor and you even help build passive investing. How do you know if a deal’s a good deal or not? How do you vet it? What kind of filters do you go through?
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, I mean, I love what Aleksey said. I think that there’s this gut feeling that you see enough deals and you know. I often jokingly say every single deal is between an 18 to 20 percent IRR on paper. Like, it’s funny, everybody makes the math look exactly the same. But you look at enough deals, you talk to enough people. And there’s something intangible about the way somebody talks about their deal that gives you an idea of how competent they are.
Obviously, track record is really, really helpful. If you have a friend that’s already invested in the deal in years prior, you can ask them how it went. That’s really, really helpful. But as unscientific as it is, the gut check of looking at hundreds and hundreds of deals is really, really helpful. And that’s something that I love about you, Bronson, is you’ve sent me a lot of deals, you’ve looked through a lot of deals. I think just practice can really, really help.
And then once you find a couple deals that have really worked out well for you, then you can look for other deals that feel similar in nature. But ultimately it’s about relationships. The more GPs you know, the more people that you trust. This is my philosophy over the last probably three years. I’ve invested in a few lanes with a few different people and it’s worked out very well.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, that’s great. I think it’s so good. We talk about this a lot about having a plan, right? For a lot of LPs they see deals like, Oh, this is so cool, it’s just unique, you know, it’s investing in marinas and boats, or it’s doing these portal housing or whatever. And it’s like, Well, that’s all great, but what are your goals? What are you actually trying to achieve? And then I think one of the best ways to vet a deal is where did it come from.
I love having someone who’s a passive investor make a referral, because I think that that’s huge, right? Because then it’s like someone’s had experience with them and they don’t have a dog in the fight. Aleksey, what else do you say? Obviously, because people can put anything on a page they can kind of list everything they want. Sometimes great operators, they don’t go to third-party sites because they’ve got such a following. But how do you encourage folks to vet beyond just what’s in the numbers, right?
Because, you know, again, like Warren Buffett there’s the saying, he’s like, “Sometimes the better the marketing package, the worse the actual deal” right? So some people have great marketing but they don’t have great deals. I’m sure you’ve probably seen deals that like they don’t look very sexy, but man, these guys perform versus things that look really good and you’re like, “These guys were great at marketing.”
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: Yeah. I mean, what have I seen? Look, I mean, first of all, what you said is very true, and I’ve seen that. Let me start with this. I think LPs, in my opinion, tend to over-rely on the aesthetics of the initial deck, but also the reporting packages. Like, I cannot tell you how many LPs I’ve spoken to, it’s literally dozens if not more. They’ll just say, “Wow, the deck is so nice. And I invested. And the reporting, you know, comes in monthly and it’s so nicely formatted.” I’m just like, “You’re not serious, are you? That’s not what actually matters. It’s what’s inside, right?”
So I guess, just taking a step back. One of the things that I do is I try to make sure that there’s enough information in a deck before I send it out. There’s a large audience receiving deals, ranging from literally a retail investor all the way to a sovereign wealth fund, right? And so in my head, when I send a deal, I guess I’m a little bit less concerned with the retail LPs since they might not have standards.
But I know that the sovereign wealth guy has standards and they’re gonna judge the platform based on the deal that I send and what’s inside of the deck, right?
So it’s very consistently in my head. I try to make sure that decks are complete enough not necessarily where the GP puts out a 50-page deck. But just substantial enough to look at it and decide whether you want to have a conversation or not. That’s the goal.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, it’s so interesting these days. I think there was a point three or four years ago, if somebody listening is new to passive real estate investing, every time it was like, you’d go to a meetup and there’d be a hundred people there. And now it’s like, rooms are a little smaller. And some people have had some losses and some challenges. Which is actually, Warren Buffett says, “Be fearful when others are greedy.” So there’s a lot of people just, “Hey, what deals can we do?” And some people did something and they were like, “If we had that one back, we wouldn’t have done that one, right?”
So I think there’s learning there. But what do you think I mean obviously I think there’s a lot of things you can say specifically about the time in the market. But let me ask you this, Aleksey, what is your goal in growing this platform? Do you want to get to where there’s thousands of deals on here, or hundreds of deals? Is it a tokenized platform? What are some of the things that you’re hoping to create in the future from this? Where do you see things going? Some of the trends for investors that are going to sites and really looking for deals?
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: Yeah, the overarching goal is pretty simple. I happen to think that the highest quality GPs should spend more time looking for deals, and equity should come to them. Meaning, the market should be set up in a way that GPs are hunting for the best deals. LPs are always trying to find alpha and find those best GPs.
And so I see myself as sort of being in the intersection of that, and ideally I can create those matches at scale. The entire platform is created in a scalable way so that it doesn’t take too much time or effort for me to onboard a new user on either side. It doesn’t take so much time to get a new submission or match, right? So where am I going long term? I mean, it’s still very much to be determined.
But I am essentially testing a free way of connecting GPs and LPs, which sounds absolutely insane. So far it has been pretty good, and I think it’s sort of like I hate to say it but it’s like a Bumble, Instagram, Facebook type of approach of like, Hey, can I get a lot of people on a marketplace at once? And they’re both happy with the experience, and they keep coming back? So that’s what I’m building towards. It’s much harder than I thought, but I think I’ll get there. I’m still very, very hopeful.
Nate Hambrick: Everything worth doing is, unfortunately which is the sad reality. But, Aleksey, if you don’t mind getting a little bit more tactical, because I think we had a good train of thought there on what to actually look for. Obviously, don’t look at how beautiful somebody’s performance spreadsheet is like, we get that, right? But go a layer deeper. Besides just the connection, what are some things that you advise people to look for tactical knowledge, things to look for in the deal that a new LP wouldn’t even be thinking through?
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: Sure. So I sort of break it down into three steps. The first is what I like to call understanding the GP the experience. So it’s okay to invest with a GP that has not done this before, but you should know that going in and you should know that there is additional risk in doing so in terms of execution, right? So, has the GP done this exact same thing before in a similar market? How did it go? Right? And I would just and don’t always trust what you see. That’s true across any of these three pillars. But on the first one specifically, I see overstated track records all the time, exaggerated track records all the time, and so on and so forth.
Bronson Hill: How do you monitor, like, how do you get people honest about so, like, hey, they’ve overstated their track record? Do you tell them on the platform they’ve got to fix this, or how do you monitor?
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: I just fix it, you know. I mean, if someone submits a deal and they say they have 20 realized investments, and I find that I don’t know 18 of them are LP investments of $25,000 each, one of them was like a co-GP investment, and the other one was maybe a deal that they did themselves but they haven’t sold it yet I just tell them that I think the correct answer is zero.
And see how they respond, you know. If they respond with what’s the word I guess disagreement, that’s probably not such a good fit, because I know that’s how every single LP on the platform would view their experience. If they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I just misunderstood your question,” then, you know, like that’s okay. Like, the truth is that it’s zero, and as long as their deck doesn’t represent them as having 20 as opposed to zero, maybe they just misread the form and that’s okay.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, got that. How do you see AI changing obviously you’re in the tech space how is AI changing real estate investment for LPs?
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: I mean, I can tell you what we’ve done so far. So we sort of view ourselves as like a data platform. We will have like four sometimes more submissions come in every single day. Each deal’s a data point with details, right? And so LPs are able to query our database, actually, on any given deal and see how that deal compares in terms of fees, in terms of splits, in terms of IRRs and cash on cash, and a bunch of other factors relative to other deals.
And the whole purpose is, I just don’t think that a dentist should be, you know, sending a wire in a vacuum, right? So in my head, that was the first test like, how can I get more data in the hands of people? The second thing we rolled out and by the way, to connect to your point that’s driven partially by software but partially by AI, because we have to give AI feedback as to how to find the right comps in our database. So it’s really an agent sort of searching for the right things to show to the LP. The second thing is we rolled out deck reviews that are actually available for free. Like, you can just go to our website and see it.
You pop a deck in and it, again, will query everything we know about different deals and give you feedback. That’s all automated and actually free we don’t charge for it. The third thing, which kind of blew my mind last week or two weeks ago I have two engineers on staff and one of them told me that we have an extra Claude subscription, and I was like, “Wait, who is this?”
I was about to cancel it, and they told me that it was a bot. So it seems like yeah, the bot is making a few investments. Maybe one day! Yeah, it’s like a coding bot that will basically review our code base, suggest things every single night. But, like, I mean, the future is wild, Bronson. I just think there’s so much to build, and honestly I’m just trying to keep up.
Nate Hambrick: To your credit, your website is you know, I know we jokingly said a business or an investment is not as good as its spreadsheet but you’ve got an amazing website. It’s very clean and straightforward. And so props to you for building something really, really valuable. If you don’t mind me asking, Aleksey, where are you investing? What are some deals that you’re personally excited for, or what are businesses that you’re investing in?
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: Yeah, I’ll tell you this is a funny one from Bronson. Like, the best deal that I saw was probably two years ago. I got a coffee with this guy here in Phoenix and he was like, “I really want distressed deals.” So a few days later I came across a distressed office deal like, classic, vacant, super cheap in Phoenix and I was like, “Man, I really want to invest in this. Would you invest with me?”
And he was like, “Oh, I didn’t like, I didn’t mean this distressed.” So I’m just saying that as a little bit of a joke, but I’ve definitely seen that play out. I’m currently looking at a lot of the distressed stuff. I think there’s a lot of dislocation. I’ve seen that to be the case on our platform also, like the distressed stuff tends to get a little bit more interest than other things. You know, folks buying things from the lender or some sort of creative financing situations with the current owner and stuff like that that’s where I’m focused.
But again, I almost think of my opinions as irrelevant in terms of the platform. I sort of let LPs decide what they want to see based on their filters, and it’s all agnostic to my own feelings.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, I get that. Well, Aleksey, I’m so grateful for you, man. I think you’ve done some great work in the space. You’re obviously kind of bringing the LPs and the GPs together that’s what we need, right? GPs are looking for money to fund deals and LPs are looking for great deals to put money to. So I think that’s something that’s really neat. And I love that you’re using AI and some of that stuff as well and that’s really a trend that will continue. So how can people connect with you and hear about what you’re doing and find out how to get involved?
Aleksey Chernobelskiy: gplpmatch.com. And if you want to reach out, I’m just [email protected].
Bronson Hill: Awesome. I love that, man. We’ll sit tight for just a minute. We will get to wrap it up. We’ll break down the episode here, Nate and I.
Nate, I really enjoyed this episode. I think it’s so good to find the more deals you can find, I think the better chance you have of finding good deals. So if you’re somebody who’s new to investing I had somebody tell me once, actually, Christina Suter she said, “How do I know what’s a good house to buy?” She said, “Well, look at a hundred houses and then you’ll know when you find a good deal.” It’s kind of like just getting the reps in, right?
As they talked about their analysis tool. But I think, like he said, most investors don’t take the time to have the calls, to look at the deals, to do the underwriting. And that’s really what makes you better. Get the most reps in. That was kind of my biggest takeaway on this. What about you? What were your takeaways?
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, a similar point, you know. Obviously, looking at a lot of different deals is very, very helpful. But something that he brought up is not just looking at a lot of performers, but meeting a lot of people I think that’s really, really helpful. And it’s something that I’ve gotten out of practice with, right? Because it’s not just the deal on paper. It’s the person behind that deal. And going back to Warren Buffett you know, part of his genius is he always invested in companies where he knew the CEO or future CEO because everything, you know, paper gets you so far. That’s obviously very helpful. But if you know the person behind that I think the people make the deal more than the actual numbers, a lot of the time. So anyway, that was a really, really great reminder.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, I love that. And if you have not joined one of our Wealth Forum Live events we get about 30 to 40 high net worth people in the room. Nothing is pitched there. We just simply share information and share life. And it’s amazing how people want to figure out how to raise their kids so they’re not spoiled, they want to figure out how to leave a legacy, or, “What’s next for me after I’ve achieved everything in my life that I’ve wanted? How do I go to the next level in other areas, and maybe get my message into the world?”
So, you know, I appreciate everybody for being here. Thank you. If you haven’t joined our investment club, you can check out the link down below and go over to bronsonequity.com. But appreciate you joining the Mailbox Money Show, and thank you everybody, and we look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
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