“My parents came to the United States to build,” JP Conte wrote in an Oct. 8, 2026, Forbes Business Council column about family offices.
His parents were the first people he mentioned. Investors, markets and sectors came later in the piece.
No Capital, Plenty of Conviction
They arrived without capital, according to the column. His father, a U.S. military veteran, worked as a tailor and salesman in a midtown Manhattan clothing shop. He had not attended college.
Conte was the first in his family to earn a degree. He graduated from Colgate University in 1985 and later earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. His parents, he wrote, brought “conviction about what was possible and about the value of building something that lasts.”
An Instinct to Build
The founder and managing partner of his family office, Lupine Crest Capital, wrote that the urge to build was passed on to him.
“That instinct is in my bones,” JP Conte wrote.
Lupine Crest Capital was set up in March 2025 to put his personal capital to work in fields he knows, including healthcare, software, financial services and industrial technology. He has spent decades in private equity.
His First Mentors
Wall Street financiers bought their suits at his father’s shop. Conte has called them some of his first mentors.
“It was inside this midtown shop where I earned my first mentors,” he wrote in a March 2025 Forbes Business Council column. Jean-Pierre Conte has said their guidance helped him “fall in love with finance.”
Coming Back to His Parents
Most of the October column covers patience and people. Both are presented as lessons that held up over his career in private equity, which has now run for decades.
Then the piece returns to where it began. “My family office is an extension of that idea,” he wrote.
He has used similar language in interviews. “My parents didn’t think in quarters,” he told Authority Magazine in July 2026.
A Thread Through His Writing
Conte has written about first-generation college students several times. A December 2025 column on education described the unwritten rules of college that his better-connected classmates already knew.
He has served on Colgate’s board of trustees since 2020. He has also written for Forbes Business Council about mentorship, health, wildfire preparedness and adventure. That board seat sits alongside a long record of support for Bay Area education programs, including SEO Scholars and 10,000 Degrees.
J-P Conte’s October column carries the same family history into the work he does now. Lupine Crest Capital is based in Aspen, Colorado.
