Los Angeles’ richest are managing some of the largest amounts of wealth in the country, yet many choose to do so in an office no bigger than that of a startup.

Keeping track of family investments or running venture capital firms, these business titans have bailed out of their well-appointed corporate suites to keep track of their millions from small boutique shops but with awesome resources.

Among them, Louis Gonda left International Lease Finance Corp. to set up Lexington Commercial Holdings Inc. to manage his real estate assets. Eli Broad resigned from SunAmerica Inc. to engage in a number of for-profit and philanthropic investment activities. And Global Crossing co-founders David Lee and Barry Porter left that telecom giant last year to launch their private venture firm, Clarity Partners.

While leaving their respective corporate cocoons, from which they emerged very wealthy, they are not retiring. Rather, an increasing number of the city’s rich are starting family or individual investment firms, as well as venture capital enterprises, far from the corporate boardroom.

“The one thing they have in common is that successful entrepreneurs, even after they’re successful, continue to have aspirations and new objectives that motivate them,” said Russell Goldsmith, chairman and CEO of City National Bank, which provides banking services to many high-net-worth individuals. “And that can be across a broad range of financial goals, philanthropic goals or community goals. Most successful entrepreneurs don’t ever really quit; they just shift or enhance or expand their goals. We talk about the way up the ladder of a career. After you hit a certain level, there’s always another rung above you.”

Some find that the entrepreneurial spirit that thrives in their small boutique investment shops is reminiscent of the early days when they started to build their business empires.

“We are proud of what we created at Global Crossing, but it started with a handful of people,” said Barry Porter, now general partner of Clarity Partners. “(Clarity is) really a return to our roots. We offer to run companies small and reasonably large because we’ve been there, done that. But we help build companies behind the camera instead of in front of the camera.”

Starting new endeavors

Blame it on their type-A personalities, Porter said, but many of the richest executives in L.A. aren’t quite ready for a quiet life of golf and sailing.

In a sense, managing their own wealth is like starting a whole new small business, Goldsmith said.

“Entrepreneurs at a certain level of affluence recognize they are the equivalent of a small business or a not-so-small business and they have enough capital that they can really look at their own investing like a business would look at its capital,” Goldsmith said. “They do the so-called family office. It’s a professionalization of the greater wealth that a small number of people have accumulated.”

As professional and well-financed as they are, the family foundations and investment firms in which some of the richest work are often in comfortable and home-like settings, said Neil Resnick, a senior vice president with Grubb & Ellis Co. who often works with high-net-worth individuals seeking office space.

They like to be close to home and are often “enticed by the wonderful views of a high rise,” he said.

And they like plenty of elbow room, often housing three or four people in a 2,500-square-foot space, which typically fits eight or nine employees, Resnick said.

Getting rich quick

The bull market of recent years has allowed many of L.A.’s richest to accumulate their wealth quickly and at a younger age.

This means a longer time to manage money for a living.

Many of the personal boutique firms that are run by L.A.’s richest are a hybrid of investment groups and venture capital firms.

Some, such as Clarity Partners, like to identify and invest in the “diamonds in the rough” companies, rather than build a company of their own from the ground up, said Bob Bannon, chief investment officer of Sanwa Bank California. Most like to focus on the industry in which the executives built their original fortunes, he said.

Many of the rich believe that managing a venture capital firm provides some of the best returns for their wealth.

“They believe they can get a greater return doing that than turning over their money to a manager or bank or institutional money manager,” said Eli Broad, the 67-year-old co-founder of Kaufman & Broad Home Corp. (recently renamed KB Home), who has a family foundation. “They’ll have opportunities that professional money managers don’t have.”

Many institutional money managers, for example, are precluded from investing in companies with market capitalizations below a certain threshold. Yet some of these smaller companies can turn out be very lucrative investments.

In addition, family investment firms have the advantage of tapping into their own contacts and relationships with others, Broad pointed out. And the network of contacts available to L.A. billionaires is, of course, very extensive.