Greetings from New York.

I'm up here for a quick spring break trip with the family while my oldest daughter kicks off her college exploration tour. The trees and plants are in full bloom, but there's still enough nip in the air to remind you that winter isn't that far gone.

We're all coming out of March Madness this week. I watched more college basketball this season than I have in years — I'll blame the Nebraska men's run for pulling me in — and it was a fun one to get lost in.

Speaking of getting practical: our next How I AI session is coming up, and if you missed the first one with Laura Hubbell and my business partner, Kailash Duriaswami, this series is worth having on your radar. Less theory, less hype, more "here's exactly how we're using this on a Tuesday morning."

Our team at Milemarker has also been shipping some of the most transformative updates we've ever put out, and it's a delight to watch the immediate impact on how firms run their businesses.

This week, I want to focus on a comment from UCLA women's basketball head coach Cori Close as she recapped her championship season. The principles she laid out are massively applicable to today's talent game — a game that's too often short on virtue, grit, and character.

Here's this week's dollar-slice-pizza-fueled Rising Tide.

Now, on to this week's article.

Sunday afternoon. Post-lunch. Remote in hand.

I turned on the women’s national championship game. South Carolina vs. UCLA.

I’ve lived in South Carolina long enough to appreciate what Dawn Staley has built. Six straight Final Fours. Three national titles. A third consecutive championship game appearance. This year’s team wasn’t supposed to get here — they had the youth, the transfers, the question marks. But they showed up anyway. That’s what Staley’s program does.

They ran into a buzz saw.

UCLA led from the opening tip and never let up. South Carolina shot 29% from the field. The Bruins won 79-51 — the third-largest margin of victory in championship game history. It was pretty obvious by halftime, but truly over by the third quarter. South Carolina could not find an answer.

I almost turned it off. I usually do when a game gets that lopsided.

But I stayed.

I watched the final buzzer. The confetti. The celebration. The postgame interviews.

And then UCLA head coach Cori Close said something that stopped me cold.

Close had been at UCLA for 15 seasons. Mentored by John Wooden himself. Never won a national championship. This was her program’s first — ever — in NCAA women’s basketball. And in the biggest moment of her career, standing on the court with confetti falling around her, she said this:

“The talent is our floor, but our character will determine our ceiling.”

She’d been telling her team that all year. Not just in the locker room before the title game. All season long. It was their operating principle.

Read it again: talent is the floor. Character is the ceiling.

Think about how counterintuitive that is. We live in an era obsessed with talent. We recruit for it. We pay premiums for it. We build entire strategies around acquiring the most talented people we can find.

And we should. Talent matters. UCLA had five seniors score in double figures. Gabriela Jaquez put up 21 points, 10 rebounds, and 5 assists. Lauren Betts — the Most Outstanding Player — had 14 and 11. That’s not a fluke. That’s elite talent performing at the highest level.

But here’s what Close understood: talent got them on the court. Character is what made them play the way they played. The connectivity. The attention to detail. The composure under pressure on a stage they’d never been on before.

Talent assembled the roster and helped them win before the pressure got turned up. Character won the championship.

I think this has real implications for all of us.

Wealth management is full of talented people. Smart people. Credentialed people. People who can analyze a portfolio, build a financial plan, and articulate a market thesis incredibly well.

But talent alone won’t build a great firm. It can’t create a culture that retains people for decades if all that talent isn’t backed by character that stands up to pressure. It doesn’t produce the kind of client relationships that survive bear markets and generational transitions.

Character is the ceiling.

Character is the advisor who calls a client before the client calls them — not because there’s an alert in the CRM, but because they actually care. Character is the ops team that stays late to fix a data issue nobody would have noticed for weeks. Character is the leader who gives credit publicly and takes blame privately. Character stays curious when something seems wrong. It doesn’t flash to anger reflexively. It doesn’t celebrate when something goes wrong for someone. It takes care. It perseveres.

Character is what shows up when the pressure is on.

Dawn Staley demonstrated character too on Sunday. After getting blown out in the championship game for a second straight year, she stood at the podium and acknowledged her team’s effort wasn’t enough that day. She gave UCLA credit. She kept the focus on her players. She handled it with grace.

That’s character when the ceiling caves in.

We’re in a talent arms race in this industry right now. Firms are fighting over advisors, technologists, and operators. NIL deals for financial services professionals might as well exist given the way recruiting has evolved. And I get it — you need talented people to compete.

But talent without character is a team that looks great on paper and falls apart when it matters.

Character without talent is a team that overachieves but eventually hits a wall.

The magic — and Close figured this out over 15 years — is when talent becomes the baseline expectation and character becomes the differentiator. When the people on your team are both excellent at what they do and excellent at who they are. When those young women walked in to her gym in LA, she didn’t expect them to be fully formed. She taught them skills on the court and for life.

I’m thankful to be surrounded by people like that. At Milemarker. With our clients. With the partners and advisors I get to work alongside every week. People whose character consistently exceeds their talent — and their talent is already remarkable.

That’s the ceiling worth chasing.

“The talent is our floor, but our character will determine our ceiling.”

Fifteen years of coaching. One quote. One championship. And a lesson that applies far beyond basketball.

Build talented teams. Absolutely. But never stop measuring what actually matters.

The floor gets you in the game. The ceiling determines how high you go.

Episode 139: On this week’s episode, Kyle Van Pelt sits down with Kailash Duraiswami, Chief Technology Officer at Milemarker, where he leads the development of data infrastructure and AI-powered solutions for modern advisory firms.

In this episode, Kyle Van Pelt talks with Kailash about his unconventional path from launching an RIA straight out of college to building tech that transformed data operations for financial firms. They unpack the challenges firms face with fragmented data, the importance of centralized infrastructure, and how AI will reshape wealth management. They discuss why firms need to reclaim ownership of their data, how to avoid becoming an “accidental CTO,” and how Milemarker is building scalable, simplified tech solutions for advisors navigating a multi-platform, AI-enabled world.

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro

(03:17) - Kailash's money moment

(08:20) - What is Pantenix?

(11:34) - The value of a data warehouse

(13:55) - Kailash's thoughts on cloud-based infrastructure

(15:40) - The importance of data platforms

(19:53) - Why becoming a CTO should be intentional

(23:54) - AI in wealth management

(26:10) - The advantage of building your own language models

(33:15) - Why CTOs in RIAs need to understand wealth management

(37:26) - Why all-in-one platforms limit user experiences

(40:27) - Kailash's Milemarker Minute

If you would like to arrange a meeting time, please reply to this email, and we’ll schedule something on the calendar.

Jud Mackrill