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If your portfolio company dashboard has more than 7 KPIs, nobody is looking at any of them. They may say they are. They may even nod thoughtfully on the board call. Someone might circle back on one of them to look engaged. But in reality, once the page gets too
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The Deployment Company closed yesterday. $10 billion vehicle. Nineteen investors. TPG anchoring it, with Brookfield, Advent and Bain Capital alongside. The structure is what's interesting. OpenAI guarantees the consortium 17.5% per annum for five years. OpenAI engineers get embedded inside portfolio companies. PE pays for the privilege.
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Which is reassuring, because apparently buying a company for 12x EBITDA and hoping the multiple expands again is no longer considered a strategy. Shame, really. It was such a tidy religion. The problem is most VCPs are the same thing wearing different fonts. Pricing initiative. Sales effectiveness. Digital transformation. Procurement
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A lot of add on acquisitions get described as strategic. They are not. They are a convenient way to grow revenue without having to say the more awkward thing out loud, which is that organic growth has stalled. It sounds much better in the board deck to talk about market
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Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman have launched a new AI services venture to push Claude into portfolio company operations. The logic is obvious. PE gets a centralised AI deployment engine it can roll across hundreds of companies. A margin lever with scale, repeatability and just enough “proprietary platform
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In most portfolio companies, "commercial excellence" means a consulting engagement. A team arrives. They interview everyone. They rename obvious problems. They produce a 60 page deck. They hold a workshop. They leave. Nothing changes. Pricing is still inconsistent. Sales management is still weak. Lead follow up is still
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If you are a PE-backed CEO or a sponsor reading this, you have probably been pitched both. The same fund partner who told you in March you needed a fractional CFO is in May suggesting a fractional operating partner. The two roles get conflated, and the pitch decks do
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"PE influencer" is a phrase that should never have been written. But the people below are publishing real ideas about private equity, on platforms where the ideas reach beyond the conference circuit, and they are worth following if you work in or around the asset class. Mix of
Life
The bourbon glut is here and it is glorious. Overproduction from the 2010s PE-fuelled boom means five and six-year-old bottles are hitting shelves at prices that used to buy you a three-year-old. Distilleries are cutting production to rebalance, which means right now is the best
News
LP concerns about continuation vehicle conflicts hit the Financial Times. Institutional investors questioning whether LPAC members approving CV transactions are indirectly benefiting their own secondaries arms. CVs accounted for roughly 20% of PE exits last year. The GP sits on both sides. The carry resets. The valuation question is inherently
Deals
Clearlake completes $1.7bn acquisition of Qualus from New Mountain Capital. Power grid services across the full infrastructure lifecycle. New Mountain bought it from Mason Wells in 2021 and added 12 bolt-ons in five years: Patterson Power, Phoenix Engineering, GridBright, Ferreira Power, and eight more. The result is a
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Something we keep running into at Claymore Partners is this: The portfolio company has the tools. Nobody uses them. The CRM is there. The call tracking is there. The dashboards are there. The automation is there. The reporting is there. Wonderful. Now show me the adoption. Show me the sales