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This was a 2021 software deal done at peak optimism, peak multiple stupidity, and peak faith that recurring revenue could somehow suspend the laws of physics. Now the music has stopped. Blackstone and the lender group have reportedly refused to keep giving Medallia more payment flexibility, pushing it onto full
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Would you have invested? Put yourself back in 2007. A large Texas power utility. About $4 billion of EBITDA. A clear market position. Hard assets. Predictable demand. An 8.5x entry multiple, which at the time probably felt almost wholesome. Three elite private equity firms pile in. Largest LBO in
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LP theatre has entered its final form. Private equity has been doing this for longer than people think. The job titles just follow whatever LPs were worried about that year. Early 2000s: “Six Sigma / Lean Operating Partner” Translation: hired to fix operations across the portfolio, ended up running workshops no
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The first 30 days should be spent listening. Not unveiling a 90 day plan. Not marching through a diagnostic framework. Not presenting 47 slides on “quick wins” to a management team that already hates you on sight. Too many new operating partners arrive as if the business has been sitting
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A lot of private equity firms love talking about their "proprietary deal flow" as if they've built some secret intelligence network worthy of the CIA. What they usually mean is they know the same brokers as everyone else, get sent the same teaser at the same
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A decent product gets early love. The market decides it is not just a shoe company but a movement. Bankers arrive. A narrative gets marked up faster than the business. Then reality turns up and asks the sort of rude questions that PowerPoint tends to avoid. At its peak, Allbirds
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Because they’re not doing marketing yet. They’re harvesting what was already there. They bid harder on your brand. They mop up your warmest demand. They retarget everyone who already visited. They clean up obvious waste. They take credit for people who were going to buy anyway. The charts
Life
Tableside service is making a comeback across fine dining. The trolley, the guéridon, the carving cart.....restaurants are putting the theatre back into the meal and treating front-of-house staff as performers, not delivery mechanisms. MICHELIN GUIDE
News
NAV BDCs hit first-ever proration in Q1 2026. Cliffwater's fund received redemption requests for 14% of assets but could only return 7%. The board flexed the limit upward from the standard 5%, and investors still only got about $0.50 on every dollar they asked for. The
Deals
Carlyle acquires majority stake in MAI Capital Management for $2.8bn. Cleveland-based RIA, $72.6bn in assets, built from $9.2bn since Carlyle's initial investment through Galway Holdings in 2021. Harvest Partners and Oak Hill exit. Carlyle converts a minority position into full control. CEO rolling 100%
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Weekly “status”. Weekly “optimisation”. Weekly “roadmap”. Weekly “creative review”. Weekly “retrospective” of the week you just paid for. You end up spending more time talking about marketing than doing marketing. And the signals are always the same. The agenda is packed. The actions are vague. The deck is long. The
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That is half of private equity value creation, growth strategy, and board reporting in one line. Leads up. Traffic up. Pipeline up. “Engagement” up. Everyone claps like seals because the top of the funnel looks busy. Meanwhile conversion is awful, retention is weak, margins are leaking, the sales team is