Tiger 21, an invitation-only network for the ultra-wealthy, occupies a distinct corner of the global wealth landscape. You must have $20 million or more in investable assets to become a member but the draw is less status than access: A confidential forum where entrepreneurs, family-office principals and inheritors review each other’s portfolios and pressures, much like a board of directors.
The group is now sharpening its focus on India, a market, President and CEO Timothy F Daniels says, no business can afford to overlook. It has launched three groups in India, is evaluating a fourth one and there are also plans for a dedicated family-office group.
Inside its India meetings, succession is discussed with unusual urgency, Daniels tells Forbes India in an interview. The investment mix is evolving as well. One of the most notable long-term shifts globally is private equity’s climb from low-teen allocations 15 years ago to roughly 25-28 percent today. Edited excerpts:
Q. What are your plans for India?
India is an ascending power and, from a business perspective, every business needs to be present in India. I’ve been visiting India for about 15 years and have seen a great deal of change. The next 15 years are going to see even greater changes.
From a Tiger 21 perspective, our goal is to build a global network. For that, you have to be operating in India. And it works both ways—our Indian members are able to expose themselves to other parts of the world with a level of insight that may not be available in other forums; and our non-Indian members can better understand what’s going on there.
Q. And who are the members in India? Family offices or entrepreneurs?
It’s both. And this would be the answer to a certain extent around the world for Tiger 21. We pursue this intentionally because we want to bring as much diversity of perspective and background as we can to individual groups as well as to the network as a whole. There’s age diversity—broadly, members across our network are 27- to 87-year-olds. There’s gender diversity, there is diversity in the background in terms of how members have come into wealth.
In certain markets, you’ll see a bit more of a leaning towards family office principals, and, in markets like India, a bit more of a leaning towards entrepreneurs. But it’s early days for us in India.
Q. Is diversity a big focus for you?
It is. A Tiger 21 group acts like a board of directors for each individual.
Now, you want diversity in boards. You don’t want eight accountants or eight lawyers or eight marketing people. You want one of each of these. And that’s what we aspire to achieve. If, for instance, I made my wealth in real estate, it doesn’t help for me to sit down with 10 other real estate individuals. I am probably already connected in that community, but wouldn’t it be interesting for me to sit down with a young person who’s involved in blockchain, another person who’s the CEO of an industrial company, another who is a third generation (G3) in a family business.
Also Read: Wealth is also about giving back: Sanjiv Goenka
Q. A new class of wealthy has emerged in India in recent years—the startup founder. How are they different from old money in terms of their expectations, aspirations, concerns, and behaviour?
I’ll offer something that I shared with the members after I’d been with Tiger 21 for maybe five months: If you’ve met one Tiger member, you’ve met one Tiger member. But for this to be helpful for you, I’ll generalise a bit. I do think that people are looking at wealth differently and their needs are expanding.
If you are an entrepreneur who had a significant exit, you probably spent the past 10 years just focussed on building this business, and now, all of a sudden, your life has completely changed, in some positive ways and some potentially negative. Your bank account will certainly be enriched and, in all likelihood, you’ll never have to worry about money again. But you have to worry about how you support your children to have purpose in their lives. You have to think about perhaps other family members who want to come to you with the best possible investment idea that may, in fact, not be the best possible investment idea. You need to think about how do you perhaps have an impact in different ways, maybe philanthropically.
And again, I’ve seen this throughout my time in India, but I was in a Tiger 21 group recently and I heard such an orientation from so many of the members towards giving back to their community.
So it’s really about assisting people in the consequence of their wealth and managing it so that wealth, which ought to be a benefit, doesn’t become a burden.
Q. But I’m going to press you on this a little more. How different are these two groups when they’re investing their money?
You mean family offices and entrepreneurs?
Q. Yes.
Let’s add a little a dimension to the entrepreneurial element and say this is a first-generation wealth creator. She didn’t necessarily come from money. So she may be thinking: ‘Do I need to worry about multigenerational wealth?’ And oftentimes that is a big consideration.
For entrepreneurs, the question isn’t necessarily ‘am I going to invest in real estate or commodities or private equity?’ It’s more ‘just what’s the purpose of the wealth’. Whereas a third-generation individual would probably have very different views about how to invest. First of all, it may not be fully theirs to invest. They may be assisting or guiding the family in terms of the investment. So the considerations are quite different, but they can help one another.
Q. A first-generation entrepreneur is inherently a risk taker. But somebody who’s a part of a family office has seen wealth being made in a more stable way. Does that also reflect in how they invest? Are entrepreneurs more prone to taking risks?
The answer is typically yes. We have to be careful when we generalise but, broadly speaking, the entrepreneur is going to be taking more of a risk-on approach.
Tiger 21 around the world is much more heavily weighted towards first-generation wealth creators. We publish an asset allocation report every quarter based on how our members are investing and, typically speaking, our members are approximately 75 percent invested in risk-on assets. So, private equity (PE), public equity, private real estate. That kind of orientation is not something you would see broadly in the markets.
Q. Are you seeing any change in that (asset allocation) mix of late?
If you look at it quarter to quarter, changes are modest, but they can be significant over a longer period. The biggest trend that we have seen over the last 20 years is the move towards PE. It used to be in low teens, say, 15 years ago, and now it’s typically in the 25-28 percent range.
Globally, we’ve seen more interest and investment in private credit, and obviously venture capital has always been a relatively significant investment area, given the entrepreneurial orientation of our members.
Q. Where are family offices investing?
They are becoming more involved as principals in private equity transactions. I was speaking to a member recently, who’s a G3. They had rotated out of their family’s core business and actually gone into buying major companies and major stakes in individual entities as if they were a PE fund.
Q. How are meetings in India different from the usual ones?
Every time I go to a meeting with a new group, the first thing I’m looking for is: ‘Does this feel like a Tiger 21 group?’ And India groups truly felt like Tiger groups. What I mean by that is the level of openness, sharing, trust, the willingness to dive deep into one another’s opportunities and issues... Beautiful diversity, different industries, different ages, different backgrounds.
Where we notice a bit of difference is there’s a lot of discussion around succession in India. That’s especially where family-run businesses are involved and there’s a transition happening from the founding generation to subsequent generations—there’s talk around accountability and responsibility.
Frankly, the Tiger members are G2 or G3 and they’re working with their parents or grandparents to understand what role they can and should play to support the family business. They’re also thinking about their own children. And one of the things I hear from members—and this is not just in India but across the board—is: ‘Do our children really want to take on the family business and what if they don’t?’
This problem recently came up in a US meeting. A member shared that the governing documents for the family business said that a family member had to be running the family office. But there was nobody who wanted to run it. There were governance and family engagement issues. So the group helped the member work through this and ultimately figured out that the member could bring in professional help, but, at the same time, adjust the constitution and also start to nurture some of the next generation to have greater interest in taking on a role in the family business or family office.
I’m already seeing members from around the world engaging on these topics because these may be newer topics in some markets but they’re old in others and so they can learn from one another.
So family business and succession in the family business is an area in India where members are going to get a lot of value in terms of sharing experiences with one another.
Q. So that is the biggest concern right now?
I wouldn’t say concern. It’s an area of discussion in India.
One of the members was recently discussing how he should give his father the confidence to let him take the responsibility for the business. He felt ‘I’m ready for it. I’m basically doing it today and I just need him to be able to take that next step’. And they had great counsel on how to engage with the father in a way that was not threatening to him and didn’t feel like he was taking away the father’s purpose.
Q. When you’re dealing with the ultra-rich, what kind of an edge does exclusivity give you?
Exclusivity among our members is an interesting concept. When we think about the ultra-rich broadly, exclusivity is really important. It’s like: ‘I have this watch and nobody else can have this watch’. But that’s not the Tiger community. The thing that I perhaps admire most about our members is they have this amazing combination of achievement and humility. You’ll often hear Tiger members say: ‘I’m just very lucky and you can’t just be consistently lucky’.
I can even go to the extent of saying a person who is going to focus purely on exclusivity may not find Tiger to be the right fit for them because it’s not as though I want to keep other people out. It’s that I want to be with people who I can help and who can help me. It just so happens that the common denominator for us is we’ve been successful and that success has created wealth.
Q. So your value proposition is the peer network and not the fact that you’re exclusive…
Right. We just happen to be exclusive because not everybody has that level of wealth.
Q. What does it take to become a Tiger 21 member, apart from the net worth criterion?
We focus on four other dimensions and they are more subjective traits but they’re perhaps the most important. There’s character: ‘Are you a good person? Are you someone that others in the community would want to sit down and engage with, someone they’re going to feel comfortable opening up to and feel as though that person will open up to them similarly?’
Another is capacity: ‘Do you have the time’? Because money is one thing, but the bigger investment is frankly the investment of time. We need you to consistently be in that group. And the group makes an investment in understanding you as well.
Third is contribution: ‘Do you have something unique to contribute to the group’?
And fourth is condition: ‘Are you willing to abide by strict levels of confidentiality and transparency’?
Q. And how big is a group?
The optimal size for a group is 12 to 15 members. Every group has a dedicated person who we call the chairperson or chair and they are responsible for both curating the group and then nurturing it. They are the conductor of this orchestra, if you will.
Q. What’s in it for the chair?
Our chairs are exceptionally accomplished individuals as well. Many of our chairs could be members and, in fact, 25 percent of our chairs are former members.
They are the biggest part of our expense but, in virtually every instance, the chair could be making more money doing other things with the time that they invest in Tiger 21. It is the intangible benefits that count.
Our chairs have their own community globally that comes together and shares ideas. Also, the ability to have an impact on these people who already are having a positive impact on the world, and to help them amplify that impact, that’s why the chairs are here.
Q. How are you different from other peer networking groups, like, say, Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO)?
One is the dedicated chairperson at Tiger groups. At YPO forums, members rotate into chair and members. Again, I’ve got a lot of respect for YPO and they do a great job training those members to be facilitators. But not everybody is inherently a good facilitator.
Then the fact that you can visit groups all around the world. I can’t think of any place where you can participate in other group meetings around the world. Ours, we actually encourage it.
Q. You’re dealing with a bunch of highly accomplished people and then you go and put them in a room. Does that lead to conflict at times?
Thank you for asking that. Because in a world that is getting increasingly polarised, this is key. People come together with different political views and values, but there is this unique ability at Tiger 21—and a lot of it is the magic of the chair—to make sure this works well.
It also is a factor of the type of people that we bring into our community. Our members are as good at listening as they are at sharing an opinion. So this is a place where you can have conversations with others that you respect about topics that you can’t talk about anywhere else.
Members share with each other topics they might not have shared with their spouse.
Q. You have a separate family offices group. Do you have any Indian family offices there?
We are creating a new group in Dubai and there’s one Indian member there. We will be creating another family office group in India. The demand is definitely there.
Q. When are you planning to launch the India family office group?
When we find a great chair to launch that group for us.
Q. A chair is that important! You really need a chair in place before you launch a group?
Definitely. We will not launch a group without a chair. Think about it: (The annual fee of) $33,000 is, of course, a lot of money but it’s the investment of a day every month that is the biggest investment you make in Tiger.
I would never ask you to make that commitment of money and time if you didn’t know who your group leader was.
Q. What’s the average net worth of your members globally and in India?
We don’t yet have the data on India yet. Though my guess is that India profiles quite similarly to the rest of the world.
Globally, the median last year was $130 million and the mean was $70 million.
Q. The way you choose your members reminds me of Warren Buffett and how he looks at people. Do you have a lot of Buffett followers among your members?
Absolutely. There’s the annual pilgrimage to Omaha (for the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting) by many of our members. Some members are his disciples.
Q. Are Tiger members heartbroken at Buffett’s exit?
We’re all heartbroken. There can’t be another one like Buffett. We’ll see what happens there. But yeah, they are (heartbroken).
Q. Your target group is limited because you deal with the ultra-rich. So what’s next for Tiger? Where do you go from here, say, over the next 10 years?
We’ve done some market analysis and we are a tiny percentage of the TAM (Total Addressable Market) actually. But if you look at the SAM (Serviceable Available Market), the most penetrated market that we’re in is Denver, US, where we have 7 percent of the SAM. So we haven’t come close to, and during my time at Tiger we won’t come close to, saturating.
When I think about the next 10 years, it’s all about the member experience, it’s about continuing to figure out what our members need and deliver that.
We’ll continue to expand globally. A key part of that is creating an incredibly robust global network because if I am a member in Milan, I really want to know how do I invest in India. And if I’m a member in Los Angeles and my child is doing an internship in Zurich, I want to make sure that I can reach out to the Zurich members and have them be there to support her.
A key area for us is using AI to personalise the experience to an even greater extent.
Q. I thought your business would be AI-proof. How does AI help you?
I don’t think anybody should say we’re AI-proof today. But I think you’re right, the businesses that rely on interpersonal connections and relationships are going to be least impacted and certainly we see that.
I think of AI as a way to enhance the member experience, to improve our business processes… to optimise time, place and content in terms of connections and to make the experience more powerful.
First Published: Dec 10, 2025, 15:04
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