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Most operating partners get brought in too late. By the time the board decides it needs help, the problem has usually metastasised. Growth has slowed for three quarters. The sales team is blaming marketing. Marketing is blaming lead quality. Operations is blaming fulfilment. The CEO is saying the plan is
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I’ve written and reviewed a lot of CIMs. Most of them spend 40 pages explaining the market, the management team, the financials, the margin bridge, the customer base and the usual “multiple levers for growth” section that somehow manages to say almost nothing. Then digital gets two pages at
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Private equity due diligence is obsessed with what a company has done. Historical growth. Historical margins. Historical retention. Historical cash conversion. Historical customer concentration, dressed up just enough to stop anyone panicking. Fine. Now show me what the business cannot survive. That is the part almost nobody really stress tests.
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Would you have invested? Put yourself in 2012. A mid market PE firm is looking at a niche consumer products company in Austin, Texas. Price for a majority stake: $67 million. Revenue: $29 million. Headcount: 20 people. Product line: basically one thing. Customer base: fishing guides, hunters, oil field workers.
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Every PE portfolio company is now being asked the same question at board meetings: What is your AI strategy? Fair enough. It is 2026. Nobody wants to sound asleep. But most of these businesses still cannot answer a much more basic question: What happened to revenue last week? Not cleanly.
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PE sponsors do not run portfolio companies. Operating partners and value creation specialists do. The firms below are the ones sponsors actually retain when in-house OP capacity runs out, or when the asset needs senior outside firepower without the cost of full-time hires. The category is fragmenting fast.
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Private equity has a newsletter problem. Too many of them. Most are vendor newsletters dressed up as analysis. A few are genuinely useful. The list below is the genuinely useful set, ranked by what an operator or sponsor actually gets from reading them weekly. The order is rough. The first
Life
The Plaud NotePin S clips to your lapel and transcribes meetings using AI. Press a button, record, get a summary and action items within minutes. No app switching, no laptop open, no pretending to take notes while checking your phone. BUSINESS TRAVELLER
News
Thoma Bravo signs multi-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud. Not a vendor contract. A structural partnership where a cloud hyperscaler embeds its AI stack directly into a GP's portfolio companies at scale. $300bn+ in portco value. Gemini models. Forward deployed Google engineers. Co-sell routes through Google
Deals
QXO agrees to acquire TopBuild for $17bn. Brad Jacobs. Third major acquisition in eleven months. Beacon Roofing for $11bn. Kodiak Building Partners for $2.25bn (closed April 1). Now TopBuild, the largest insulation distributor and installer in North America, at a 23% premium. A year ago QXO had no building
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What LPs talk about after your annual meeting is rarely the IRR slide. GPs tend to think LPs are sitting there admiring the performance summary, nodding at the benchmark comparisons, and marvelling at the neat little bridge explaining why everything is broadly fine. They are not. They are talking about
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You own a recurring revenue, route density optimisation business. That sounds like semantics to some people. It is not. The way a management team describes its own business shapes almost every decision that follows. If they think they are in landscaping, they tend to behave like a commodity operator. They