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Most “middlemen” didn’t have a moat. They had friction, wrapped in a warm voice and a branded email signature. AI agents don’t care about your warmth. They care about outcomes, constraints, and a clean API. Travel is the canary. Hotels have spent years trying to escape OTAs because
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What happens when a lot of investors ask for liquidity from assets that are not liquid. Private credit was sold as the sensible adult in the room. Now Ares and Apollo have capped redemptions after withdrawal requests overshot their limits, Blackstone’s BCRED saw $3.7 billion of Q1 outflows,
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The old Forbes brand stood for editorial judgment. Scarcity. A bit of status. Now too much of it feels like rented credibility. That is what happens when a media company starts blurring the line between journalism, contributor content, paid memberships, sponsored storytelling, and executive vanity publishing until the average reader
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The global men’s grooming market is already roughly $65B in 2025 and still grinding upward at a steady clip. Premium prices are sticking because the customer has changed. Men now buy routines, not just products. The market has “platforms”, but not the one this thesis wants. Unilever buying Dr
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The minute a company says “we’re a family,” someone is usually about to get screwed. Because an actual family and a business are not remotely the same thing. Families do not fire Dad and call it a leadership transition. Families do not wipe out Uncle Brian on the cap
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In the pitch, it’s a spreadsheet. In reality, it’s a fog machine. They promise you’ll see exactly what’s working, what isn’t, and where to put the next dollar. Then the first time you ask why revenue didn’t move, you get the same speech. “Attribution
Life
Menswear is officially done with slim fit. Spring 2026 is all about relaxed, unstructured suiting, wider lapels, and jackets worn over knit polos instead of dress shirts.....basically what Italian men have been doing for decades, now available at every price point from Zegna to Todd Snyder. CNN
News
Advent and Cinven exploring €25bn exit of TK Elevator as Kone enters advanced discussions. If this closes, it would be one of the largest PE exits in European history and a defining test of whether strategic buyers will pay full freight in this market. The hold period on TK Elevator
Deals
Apollo acquires Nippon Sheet Glass for $3.7bn. Apollo's largest PE investment in Japan, and less of a buyout than a financial rescue. NSG has been drowning in debt since it bought Pilkington for £2.2bn in 2006. Apollo is injecting $1bn in fresh equity, lenders are swapping
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Because the moment the owner tells their accountant, their mate on the golf course, or the bloke down the pub, the next call is to a banker. Then your “proprietary” deal becomes a 40-person data room, a management presentation with suspiciously perfect margins, and a deadline that turns grown
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I’d start by building something that can actually improve a business without needing a spreadsheet to do the heavy lifting. The old model worked when money was cheap and time was short. Buy it, lever it, tidy up a few costs, sell it in five years, tell everyone it
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That’s the best they’ll ever look. Senior faces. War stories. Confidence. Nice slides. Big promises. Then you sign and meet the real delivery team. A new account lead you’ve never met. A junior buyer. A “strategist” whose main skill is arranging a status call. And the people