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Most firms treat rainmakers like anomalies. The ones that last treat them like a strategy. Why? Because rainmakers aren’t just talented individuals, they create leverage. • A great fundraiser doesn’t just bring in capital once. They create durable LP relationships that fund multiple vintages. • A sourcing MD doesn’t
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But it is going to make large chunks of the industry look embarrassingly outdated. • Deal Sourcing: The average associate spends ~60% of their time sifting through teasers, scraping LinkedIn, and chasing bankers. An AI-driven sourcing engine can screen tens of thousands of businesses against an investment thesis in minutes.
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It sounds clever: neat pieces, predictable moves, a brilliant strategist “seeing 10 moves ahead.” But the problem is, chess is finite. You win, lose, or draw. Outcomes are immediate and visible. Once the king falls, it’s game over. That’s not business. Business is Go. In chess, the board
Cases
By 2009, it was a $4.5B punchline. Overstocked. Overhyped. Over. The plastic clogs that took over every beach, hospital, and kid’s birthday party in the mid-2000s had fallen out of fashion hard. The stock dropped 75%. Retailers dumped inventory. Analysts declared the brand dead. Then something hideous
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They’re the cotton candy of marketing metrics.....sweet for about 3 seconds, then you realise you’ve ingested air. Impressions don’t pay salaries. Clicks don’t cover debt covenants. Cash flow does. Customer LTV does. Gross margin does. Yet, I still see portfolio company boards patting themselves on
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But who are we actually serving? LPs, obviously. They give us the money. But portcos… they make us the money. So here’s the uncomfortable truth most GPs won’t say out loud: PE firms treat LPs like customers. But treat portcos like cost centers. You pitch the LPs. You
Theses
Not another subscription treat box. Not another tele-vet point solution. A true platform, vertically integrated, brand-led, and built around the modern pet parent. Vet tech. Grooming. Supplements. Home delivery. Bundled into one membership, one app, one trusted brand. 1. Pet ownership is booming, but the experience is broken.
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Every week I hear a new acronym agencies are peddling: • LLM SEO • Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) • AIO (AI Optimization) • Conversational SEO • Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) • RAI (Retrieval-Augmented Indexing) Pick your flavour of alphabet soup.....none of it has a foundation. I’ve spoken to a dozen agencies in the
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Plenty think they have. They’ll show you their org charts, explain how value creation is now a “core capability,” and proudly announce that every portfolio company has a VCP tracked in Asana. But scratch the surface, and what you find is usually a muddled mix of consulting theatre, internal
Cases
Recurring demand. Predictable cash flow. Memberships that feel like SaaS. And with tunnel washes, a low-labor, high-throughput model that looks engineered for scale. But most investors are still underwriting these deals like it’s 1998: “Find the best corner lot, count the cars, and wait for the money.
Cases
Spirit Halloween isn’t just a pop-up store, it’s a seasonal private equity case study wrapped in polyester. Spirit Halloween is a masterclass in business model design. They sell plastic swords and polyester capes, but the real magic trick is how they run the business: • A billion‑dollar
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Why? Because the call center model is a perfect storm of inefficiency: • High cost, low value-add: Average U.S. call center agent wage is ~$38k. Add training, turnover (30–45% annually), and management overhead… the true cost per seat is easily $60k+. • Customer experience is broken: Long waits, scripted