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APEX Global Forum is a private, invitation-only community of wealth creators, comprising around 300 members across more than 20 countries. Part investment network, part family office community, part trusted support group among peers, APEX is the room where founders, investors, and families meet.
The Hamptons Wealth and Legacy Forum is where the APEX community will gather this summer in East Hampton for three days. The forum is built around the conversations that define how wealth is created, deployed, and passed on. It brings members together across investment, philanthropy, and family office strategy and aims to answer the intergenerational questions that sit underneath all of it. Kari Chaudhry, CEO and Managing Partner, explained more.
When you created APEX Global Forum in 2019, what was the inspiration and what were you trying to achieve?
I wanted to build something deeper than exchanging business cards. We were all working, but for what purpose? It became clear quite quickly that what we were really doing was building wealth, whether that meant creating it for the first time, compounding it, or preserving it. Once you see that, everything else follows. The subtext of everything we do is investment, collaboration, and supporting each other in our businesses.
The other half of the question was what you do with the wealth once you have it. How do you deploy it, how do you spend it, how do you put it to good use? That is why impact and philanthropy became pillars of APEX alongside investment. It was never only about making money. It was about what the money is for.
And then there is the next generation. You cannot secure multigenerational wealth if the connections and the conversations are not at the center of it. So we put a real focus on bringing the next generation in, educating them, and making wealth something families actually talk about.
Looking back on your journey, was there a pivotal moment that changed the trajectory of your career?
Yes. It was having my daughter. Until then, I do not think I fully understood what any of it was for. When she came into the world, I suddenly had a much clearer picture of the footprint I wanted to leave behind. What tools and resources I wanted to give her. What kind of world I wanted her to grow up in.
Everything after that was shaped differently. How I saw the world, how I created wealth, how I deployed it. The values I held before were not the ones I wanted to build my life around once she was here. She reshaped the whole thing.
APEX brings together wealth creators from across industries. What conversations do business leaders need to be having today that aren’t happening enough?
The footprint you want to leave behind. We need far more honest conversations about what legacy actually means, because it has different meanings for different people, and it is not only about money. Money gives you a tremendous head start, but it is not the whole answer.
The real question is what legacy truly means to you, and that is a difficult one to sit with. Finding that purpose is hard. Most people at this level have never been asked it directly, and I think it is the conversation that matters most and happens least.
How can the next generation prepare for leadership in a world that is changing faster than traditional business models?
I think it is really important for the next generation to be brought into the family’s values and foundations early. There is no correct age and no right or wrong way to do it, because every household operates differently. For me, I started talking to my daughter at around five. She is very curious. She can already tell you a fair amount about a profit and loss statement.
Beyond that, it is teaching them the value of money. The hard work and the ethic it takes to make it, and then the power of saving it, investing it, and paying taxes with it. That is how they come to understand how budgeting really works, and how they learn to appreciate it rather than take it for granted.
Why does a community like this need to exist at all?
Because there are conversations you cannot have anywhere else. The family office space, the intergenerational dynamics, the honest business problems you are carrying. Most people at this level have nowhere to take those. They cannot raise them with their team, sometimes not even with their family, and certainly not on a public stage. What APEX provides is a trusted environment where those conversations are normal. It is a family office network, a business support group, and a place to build alongside each other, all in one. That trust is the thing that keeps people coming back. The deals matter, the events matter, but it is the fact that you can speak freely among people who understand your world that makes it a community rather than a network.
Years from now, when people look back on APEX Global Forum, what do you hope its lasting legacy will be, not only for the business community, but for the next generation of global leaders?
I hope people look back and say APEX changed what they did with what they had built. Not that they came to a beautiful event in the Hamptons, but that a conversation here made them think harder about the footprint they wanted to leave, and who they were leaving it for.
I would want it remembered as the place where wealth stopped being a private thing and became a shared one. Where members invested alongside each other instead of alone. Where women were brought into the room as investors and not just guests. Where the next generation was taught early, so that what one generation built was actually understood by the one that inherited it.
Businesses get bought and sold. Communities do not. If APEX is remembered for anything, I hope it is that we made honesty the standard, we made building together normal, and we treated legacy as something you define on purpose rather than leave to chance.