deals
Leonard Green Buys the Golf Circus Back Topgolf Callaway is carving off the fun part: it’s selling a 60% stake in its Topgolf venues and Toptracer business to Leonard Green & Partners at a $1.1 billion valuation, generating about $770 million in cash to de-lever and buy back
theses
Most local governments still run on software that looks like it came free with Windows XP. Procurement, permits, inspections, citizen support portals......held together by outdated code, clunky interfaces, and people who've been "restarting the server" since 2004. Yet these systems handle billions in transactions and
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Everyone in the early 2000s could see the smartphone wave coming. The idea that our lives would move to a small screen in our pocket was inevitable. Analysts wrote about it. Telcos built for it. Investors piled in. And if you’d asked who would dominate this future, the answers
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Fractional CMO. Fractional CFO. Fractional CRO. Fractional sanity. It's the new epidemic of modern business......leadership as a subscription service. The model sounds brilliant in theory: get senior talent without the full-time cost. In practice? It's a carousel of consultants playing executive dress-up. They parachute in,
life
Walk through midtown Manhattan at 7:30am. Between the Sweetgreen salads and the AirPod calls, you'll spot them: an army of fleece-vested analysts, all dressed like they're about to close a Series B in Montauk. It wasn't always like this. Pre-2008, Wall Street wore
news
Carlyle Circles Lukoil’s Foreign Assets as Sanctions Fatigue Sets In Carlyle is sniffing around Lukoil’s non-Russian assets, a sprawl of energy holdings valued around $22 billion, according to Reuters. It’s the kind of geopolitical scavenger hunt only a top-tier PE shop attempts — buying orphaned assets from a
deals
Arcline Investment Management Acquires Novaria Group in ~$2.2 Billion Deal Arcline is buying Novaria Group from KKR in an all-cash transaction valued at roughly $2.2 billion. Novaria, the Texas-based aerospace and defense components supplier, has been one of KKR’s industrial roll-up winners—13 acquisitions, tripled revenue, and
views
And access, done right, is one of the highest-margin products on earth. Access is what turns a $100 bottle of wine into a $10,000 membership. It's what turns a hotel into Soho House, a gym into Equinox, and a handbag into Hermès. The product is just the
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AI isn't coming for customer service. It's already running it. Klarna's AI assistant handles 2.3 million conversations a month. That's two-thirds of their customer chats, with the work output of 700 agents. Resolution time dropped from 11 minutes to 2. Customer
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A perfectly diverse cast walking through glass corridors, sleeves rolled up, saving capitalism one portfolio at a time. In reality, it's 12 Angry Men. Same suits. Same stories. Same arguments, just with better coffee and worse empathy. You can see the gap every time the corporate photographer visits.
views
The mythology around startups has gone from inspiring to absurd. A "unicorn" used to mean something rare: a company with a billion-dollar valuation and a business that worked. Now? It mostly means "a company good at storytelling and burning other people's money." The data
essay