2025 ACG NY Family Office & Limited Partner Series – June Edition

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Corey Massella, Managing Director, UHY Advisors
MODERATOR

Corey Massella has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, tax and business advisor, and as a specialist in SEC accounting and audit services. Additionally, Corey has experience serving as a Private Equity and Technology Industry Group Practice Leader for a top 20 accounting firm.

Corey has successfully guided his clients through all facets of the mergers and acquisitions transaction cycle to help them make critical decisions while ensuring transactions are strategic and seamless.

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Joshua Becker, Partner, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP
PANELIST

Joshua Becker is a Corporate and Tax partner and trusted advisor to founders, emerging companies, investment funds and family offices.

Joshua’s practice includes advising clients on the tax and non-tax aspects of mergers and acquisitions, fund formations, hedge funds, emerging company investments, family office operational and investment structures, and real estate joint ventures and investments.

A major part of Joshua’s practice is dedicated to representing family offices—ranging in size from $100 million to $10 billion in assets under management—in connection with general investment structuring, M&A transactions and tax planning. Joshua has also advised on skyline-changing real estate projects throughout the United States, including properties in Miami’s Wynwood Arts district, Manhattan’s Hudson Yards development and San Francisco’s Mission Rock neighborhood. As the leader of Pillsbury’s Qualified Opportunity Zone practice, Joshua has structured over 70 qualified opportunity-fund structures and investments.

Finally, Joshua is a regular advisor to a significant roster of market-leading blockchain and Bitcoin companies and regularly advises such companies on a variety of legal issues and transactions.    

Joshua is a regular writer and speaker on partnership tax, qualified opportunity funds, blockchain assets and family office structures. He was recently named a Top 15 U.S. Legal Crypto Practitioner for 2022 by Citywealth and has been recognized as a “One to Watch” attorney by Best Lawyer.

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Sasha Bernier, Managing Partner, Hestia Holdings LLC; Managing Director, Cheltenham Enterprises; Founder, Creativo LLC
PANELIST

Sasha Bernier is managing partner at Hestia Holdings, a private investment vehicle. He is also in the investment team of Cheltenham Enterprises, a single-family office. Mr. Bernier is an active real estate and opportunistic investor.

Previously, he served as the vice president of Revere Capital, a real estate debt fund with the responsibility for underwriting and structuring new investment opportunities in the real estate debt space. He started his career as a banker at Evercore Partners.

Mr. Bernier holds a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a B.S. in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

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Mr. Robinson has over 35 years of direct investment experience in multiple asset classes in the USA, Asia, Europe and South America. He is a Managing General Partner of the Black Opus Special Situations Group (BOSS) which focuses on highly specialized investment strategies in the Alternative Investments asset class. Mr. Robinson also manages the Montclair Capital Group (his family office). In addition, Mr. Robinson co-founded and is the executive director of the Black LP Association (BLPA) which has over 100 senior black investment professionals as members (including 20+ CIOs) that work at LPs that have over $1 trillion of AUM in aggregate.

Prior to BOSS and BLPA, Mr. Robinson was a General Partner at Avenue Capital Group where he launched Avenue's Asia investment management business in 1999 and grew it to over $5 billion AUM, opening 9 offices in 8 countries and building and managing a team of over 110 employees throughout China, India and Southeast Asia. At the time, the fund was the largest Alternative Investments asset manager in Asia ex-Japan. The fund invested in private equity, infrastructure, real estate related assets, distressed debt, nonperforming loans and mezzanine investments.

Prior to joining Avenue in 1999, he was the Chief Investment Officer for the Richmont-Parley Investment Company, a Hong Kong based investment company. Before that, he was a Portfolio Manager and the second highest ranking investment professional at The Pacific Group’s Asia Hedge Fund based in Hong Kong and affiliated with the U.S. based hedge fund, Tiger Management Corporation. At the time, The Asia Hedge Fund was the largest hedge fund in Asia ex-Japan. The Asia Hedge Fund directly invested in long/short equities, convertible bonds, fixed income securities, currencies and derivatives.

Prior to that, Mr. Robinson was an investment professional with the Prudential Investment Corporation. During his seven years at Prudential, he participated in over $600 million of direct investments in private credit and private equity and also invested in convertible bonds and listed equities.

Mr. Robinson founded and ran BVCC, a nonprofit organization that provided one of the most comprehensive education and training programs for college students entering the venture capital and tech startup ecosystem. Over 2,200 students from dozens of colleges and universities have participated in BVCC’s programs.  Mr. Robinson also founded and funded New Jersey Advocates for Education, a college scholarship program which awarded scholarships of up to $25,000 per person to over 300 students from the greater Newark, NJ area. He also founded and led the Garden State Scholars (GSS) program, an afterschool program for high school students in the greater Newark, NJ area. GSS had over 1,000 students participate in its programs.

Mr. Robinson graduated with Honors with a B.S. in Business Administration from Florida A&M University in 1987 and received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1994.

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Christopher Bhutani, Principal, 1989 Holdings
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