Family Office vs. Private Equity: How Alejandro Betancourt López Plays a Different Game

A private equity fund lives by a five-to-seven-year clock. Alejandro Betancourt López runs O’Hara Administration with no clock at all, and that single difference explains much of what his portfolio is able to do.

Understanding how a family office departs from a traditional buyout firm makes his range of bets look far less eccentric and far more deliberate. The freedom to wait is the whole point.

The Clock PE Can’t Escape

A conventional private equity firm raises money from outside investors and deploys it over a defined window, usually five to seven years, with exits expected soon after. Every allocation decision gets made against that countdown, whether or not the timing suits the asset.

O’Hara carries no such obligation. That frees it from moves driven by a calendar rather than a thesis, and it removes the pressure to sell a good position simply because a fund is nearing the end of its life. The countdown shapes more than the timing of a sale. It also limits which assets a fund will buy in the first place and rules out anything whose payoff sits beyond the horizon.

Deploying Your Own Money

The core distinction, as Mergers & Inquisitions frames it, is that a family office deploys the principal’s own wealth rather than funds raised from external investors. That removes any duty to manufacture a liquidity event inside a fixed period.

For Betancourt López, that meant holding a pre-boom AI position for roughly five years and sitting on a portfolio of Spanish VTC licenses through years of regulatory contestation until the market finally validated them. A fund would have been forced out long before. Patience, in his structure, is a built-in feature rather than a luxury.

A Model the Rest Are Catching Up To

The wider industry is drifting his way. The Goldman Sachs 2025 Family Office Investment Insights Report found that 86 percent of family offices now hold AI exposure and that the average allocation to private equity sits at 21 percent of the total portfolio.

The same report noted that 72 percent are investing in private equity secondaries, up from 60 percent in 2023, because patient capital can hold through slowdowns that would squeeze institutional funds. He was building this multi-asset model roughly a decade before it became the dominant one. What reads today as a mainstream family-office strategy was, when he started, an unusual way to run money.