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From the outside, progress looks loud. New strategy. New leader. New initiative. New dashboard. New transformation programme with a confident name and a board update full of arrows heading in the correct direction. From the inside, real progress is usually much quieter than that. It is boring. Repetitive. Easy to
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Private equity returns are getting harder. More competition. More capital. Higher entry multiples. Longer hold periods. Less multiple expansion doing the heavy lifting. More pressure to actually create value, which is awkward for an industry that spent a very long time confusing a rising market with genius. And what has
Life
Menswear has quietly re-embraced the small watch. This year's fashion-week wrists in Milan and Paris were dominated by 36-39mm cases, vintage Datejusts, and dress watches on leather straps. The era of the oversized dive watch as default is over. If you bought a 44mm chronograph
News
Thrive Holdings raising $2bn to run an AI-powered roll-up strategy. Josh Kushner's holding company, backed by SoftBank, Altimeter, D1, and OpenAI, buys consolidated service businesses and installs AI across them. First outside round after $1bn from Thrive Capital-linked investors. Founders keep equity. It is private
Deals
Lockheed Martin acquires Ultra Maritime from Advent for $3.45bn. Undersea and anti-submarine warfare. Advent bought it in 2022 as part of Cobham Ultra, invested $170m in product development, and is now exiting into a strategic buyer at a defence-sector premium. Revenue projected at $784m in 2026, up
Toolkit
The buy-and-build deck always works. A platform at 6x, three add-ons at 4.5x, blend the multiple down, grow the combined entity, exit the whole thing at 9x or 10x. On paper it is the most reliable value-creation story in the mid-market, which is why
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Private equity keeps responding to LP pressure in the same way. More slides. More dashboards. More portfolio colour. More commentary. More words spent describing things in ever finer detail without saying the one thing everyone is actually trying to work out: What is not working. That is the conversation LPs
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Private equity is one of the least transparent corners of finance. That is not an accident. It is a feature. The industry likes the opacity because opacity is useful. It keeps the marks private. It keeps the fee structures fuzzy. It keeps the portfolio company pain contained. It keeps LPs
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Most private equity firms have a diversity problem they do not talk about. Not gender. Not race. Cognitive diversity. The industry is full of people who look different enough for the website and think almost exactly the same. Same schools. Same training. Same career tracks. Same incentives. Same pattern recognition.
They’re usually just being held hostage by a tech stack that looks like it was assembled during a fire drill. CRM says one thing. Finance says another. Marketing has a dashboard that only works if you don’t ask it anything useful. Sales has “pipeline” in eight different places,
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You bought a customer acquisition machine with vans, ladders and a claims history. Unfortunately, your diligence team spent most of its time looking at the vans. Most PE firms still diligence home services like the business is the trade on the sign. Roofing company. Car wash. Gym. Auto shop. QSR.
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If I were building a deal sourcing engine in 2026, I would not begin by hiring more associates. I would build a system that finds off market opportunities before the bankers do. Because most firms still call it sourcing when what they really mean is reacting slightly faster to the