The Care Bears from that point forward has performed extraordinarily well, and that global licensing and royalty stream has grown significantly. 

Q: But where in the process did you decide that this was going to be a good investment and how did you think about structuring it? 
Collins: I think there's a parallel between the Broadway Touring IP and the Care Bears IP in that the intellectual property has existed for so long. That the baseline performance is very predictable. The question becomes at what price? And can we do anything to improve that? 

Sometimes the answer is “no.” Sometimes it would be trying to reignite a brand as if it were new because you bought it so well. But the reason you bought it is that no one knew the brand. But in the case of the Care Bears, it is an anomaly in so many different ways. If your listeners know about the Care Bears or their kids have Care Bears t-shirts, that's based on episodes that ran on CBS in 1981. There's no Care Bears movie. They haven't been on TV for 35 years. It's solely based on the quality of the intellectual property and how it resounds with the Western public. 

Q: what's the exit in that regard? 
Collins: Sometimes those are the self-liquidating style where once we meet our predetermined return on both a multiple and IRR basis, they own all their intellectual property again. 

So that's almost a bridge to an event that you need capital to do your thing. We will provide that capital. We don't care about your thing. We care about your intellectual property, and we will generate value from the intellectual property away from your business. And then when we make 2.2 times or 2.7 times, or whatever the case, maybe you own all your IP. 

Q: You've been in the unique position of seeing the entire life cycle of one of these assets, which is litigation finance. 
Collins: It started in 2000 probably…The pendulum of power in litigation finance swung from the initial days of one of the few providers of capital. 

I would visit a law firm and ask to look at its entire caseload and let it know which five I care about. In not very much time, there were so many providers of capital that litigation finance started looking a lot like mezzanine debt. 

Sitting on top of the entire caseload of every law firm in the US, that's very different from the earliest innings. The problem, the primary problem with litigation finance has been duration of cases. 

Q: Could you give an example of something, an asset that was particularly intriguing, but that you ultimately passed on? 
Collins: There are a lot. I mentioned the largest coin collection in the world. We looked at the largest classic car collection in the world. It's $250 million or something like that. 

I guess painting is liquid, but the value of the painting is intangible. That's where we've always had the shortcoming, the actuarial sort of analysis behind what is the value of this piece of art. 

We haven't been able to get there. It's an asset class that could play a role. It remains too qualitative. 

Q: What kind of frameworks can you apply? What kind of heuristics can you use? 
Collins: We have a number and a growing number of family office investors, some of whom we work with very closely and have brought into a couple of our deals as co-investors. There's always a bit of an education process. 

With the starting point being the valuation metric, that's the biggest challenge. The blessing for family offices is that most of them were created due to growth. 

Q: How does risk management work within the portfolio? 
Collins: It can be a great idea, but we need to understand the small correlations that we may have embedded in any individual investment or the first five investments taken on, as a group and as you build it out to a 12 or 15 investment portfolio.