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Zombie fund was a useful phrase for about five minutes. It describes what these funds look like from the outside: old, tired, wandering around with unrealised assets and no obvious way home. Very dramatic. Slightly Halloween. Not especially useful. The real issue is structural. A hostage fund is a fund
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The chart is the whole story. The gold area is fee related earnings. Recurring. Scalable. Predictable enough that public market investors can squint at it and pretend it is a software company with nicer shoes. The grey dashed line is total distributable earnings, including realized carry. That is the bit
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When we start working with a PE backed business at Claymore, the first thing we ask is very simple: Where does revenue actually come from? Not the high level version. Not the board deck version. Not the one where everything is neatly grouped into channels, segments, and growth buckets that
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Private equity is not one operating philosophy but several. A neutral field guide to the five you will actually encounter, what each believes, who runs it, and when it works.
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An EBITDA bridge is a waterfall analysis that explains the change in a company's EBITDA from one point in time to another by breaking the total movement into its component drivers: organic volume, pricing, cost inflation, acquisitions, one-time items, and operational initiatives. In private equity, the EBITDA
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Operating partners embed inside a single leadership team. Fractional executive firms deploy a roster across many. Here is when each one wins.
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What a Value Creation Plan is in private equity, the six lever categories, who builds and owns it, how it maps to the EBITDA bridge, and why most VCPs fail.
Toolkit
Most managers brace for the credit conversation and underprepare for the one that actually decides the outcome. Here is what tends to go wrong when GPs approach a NAV facility, seen from the side of the table that has to underwrite it, and what a sound deal should look like
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Private equity has a duration problem. Hold periods have stretched. Everyone knows it. Fewer exits. More waiting. More assets sitting in portfolios far longer than the original model expected. And yet a lot of value creation plans still read like the business is going to be sold in the same
Deals
EQT's £9.4bn ($12.7bn) take-private of Intertek moves to due diligence. UK product testing and quality assurance. EQT increased its bid after three rejections. Intertek's board is now ready to recommend the fourth and final offer of £60 per share. If completed, this would
News
Anthropic in talks to raise $30bn at a $900bn+ valuation. FT confirmed investors this week: Greenoaks, Sequoia, Altimeter, Dragoneer. The PE relevance is simple: every dollar committed to AI at 30x revenue is a dollar not committed to a mid-market buyout fund at 12x EBITDA. LP allocation is zero-
Life
The 2026 World Cup starts in 25 days and the US men's team documentary "U.S. Against the World" is on HBO. Five parts following Pulisic, Adams, and the squad toward a home tournament. The production values are absurd. The stakes are real. If you are