“I felt like getting rich was a ripoff. I expected somebody to show up one day and be like, ‘ok, Mr. Zurrer, all of your problems are solved.’ And that never came.”

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In the summer of 2018 Ryan Zurrer was in Zurich, Switzerland with a mighty large check burning a hole in his wallet. He’d been active in crypto for several years by then, had wanted to work for the DAO in 2016, and went on to join Polychain Capital, one of the most volatile, and successful, early digital asset hedge funds.

The fund returned 2,278 percent in 2017 – which seems like a typo but isn’t – according to investor documents obtained by CoinDesk. In 2016 and 2018 it lost 2.7 percent and 60.4 percent, respectively, according to CoinDesk. After leaving Polychain, Zurrer was wealthy enough to want to set up a family office yet he soon became repelled by industry practices. One encounter stood out.

“I finally met this one multi-family office here in Zurich,” Zurrer told me recently. “I told them the set of services I wanted to pay for the fee structure they were requesting. He said, ‘You know what? What you’re asking for has been asked for for the last 30 years in the multi-family office industry. But everyone is making so much money that no one has bothered to do it.’”

That was the moment Zurrer knew to get the services he wanted he’d have to build them himself. “Part of me was shocked that this guy had the gall to say that,” Zurrer said. “And part of me was very thankful that he did say it and confirmed that this is just a racket.”

Read More: Proof of Artwork: Ryan Zurrer on His $29 Million Purchase of Beeple’s ‘Human One’

His dissatisfaction led to Dialectic, which he created in 2019 and currently has six families as clients of the “invite-only, bespoke crypto wealth family office.”

It may seem tone deaf to focus on the vagaries of wealth management and family offices as crypto prices have suffered their recent precipitous drop. In the long cycle, however, crypto has created generational wealth for people who’ve been investing since Mt. Gox was solvent. In the case of Ethereum, the co-founders and dozens of others received their initial pre-mine ether for free, meaning any gain in the price of ether is pure profit. Several of the seven Ethereum co-founders received 300,000 ether, which is worth about $750 million at today’s price. While not an Ethereum co-founder, Zurrer was involved in the project early and has learned how money can and can’t change your life.

“I felt like getting rich was a ripoff,” he said. “I expected somebody to show up one day and be like, ‘ok, Mr. Zurrer, all of your problems are solved.’ And that never came.” To address that part of extreme wealth, Dialectic offers a service called Bespoke that handles tax optimization, jurisdictional planning and taking care of daily chores like home staffing and travel, Zurrer said.

“I talk with so many centimillionaires who have a list of things to do on Monday and don’t get them done by Friday and are not really thriving,” he said. The Bespoke service is run by Whitney Black who previously worked for the author and podcaster Tim Ferris and Napster co-founder Sean Parker.

The fees charged by family offices also astounded Zurrer. “I was shocked to no end by the remuneration structure of family offices,” he said. It’s common for an office to charge between 65 and 85 basis points, or 0.65 percent to 0.85 percent, of the amount it’s managing for the client, according to Zurrer. The fees are charged annually whether the family office makes money for the client or not, he said. None of the services like a personal assistant or help arranging travel were included for that fee, he said.

“For the most part I was getting laughed out of these multi-family offices asking for this,” he said. Dialectic charges its clients a modular fee between 5,500 and 32,500 swiss francs per month (Zurrer is no fan of the U.S. dollar).

He also simply wanted a pie chart, something that showed all his assets – from real estate to stocks to crypto to fine art – so he could manage his exposures in real time. While some software can track traditional assets in this manner, they’re rudimentary when it comes to crypto, and Zurrer has more than 250 positions across 22 networks he wants to track.

If you have the means . .

“The thing is, Dialectic was made for me,” he said. “I just brought in devs and we built this custom made.” His goal is to make his – and Dialectic’s crypto clients – generational wealth become inter-generational.

Dialectic is making money for its clients in five categories of investment theses, such as early stage investing in digital assets, a market-neutral high yield fund and a store of value fund that owns assets like gold, Swiss real estate and Pokémon Charizard cards. What? For real, Zurrer said.

“Pokémon Charizards are actually a very good store of value,” he said. “You could show up to a place in America or you could show up to a place in Japan with three Charizards and be able to buy a house. It’s globally recognized the same way gold is.”

Dialectic has returned on average 40 percent to 50 percent per month for its clients since inception and hasn’t had a down month, Zurrer said.

“One of the smartest things you can do for wealth preservation is be very rigorous about reducing fees in your portfolio,” Zurrer said. “If you’re paying them in [basis points] on your wealth with compounded interest over time, by the time you die you’re going to have given more money to your family office than to your kids. That for me was just off the table.” That’s one reason he views family offices as “the industry that is most ripe for disruption on planet earth.”