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If I were building an integration playbook, page one is people.
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PE kills founder speed, then wonders where the growth went.
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PE media is polite because its revenue depends on being polite.
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Most PE firms still cannot price digital into EBITDA.
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Carried interest, explained
Carried interest, usually called "carry", is the share of investment profits that a private equity firm keeps after its investors have been paid back. In a typical PE fund, the Limited Partners (the investors) put up the capital. The General Partner (the PE firm) runs the investments. When
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Continuation funds in private equity
A continuation fund is a new private equity fund that a PE firm raises specifically to buy one or more portfolio companies from an older fund it already manages. The old fund gets to exit. The companies move into the new fund. The PE firm keeps managing them for another
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EBITDA add-backs, explained
EBITDA add-backs are adjustments a company makes to its reported earnings to produce a higher "adjusted EBITDA" figure. The logic is that certain expenses in reported results are one-time, non-recurring, or non-operational, and so should be added back to arrive at the "real" earnings power of
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Buy-and-build and multiple arbitrage
Buy-and-build, also called roll-up, is a private equity strategy where a firm buys a platform company in a fragmented industry and then acquires smaller competitors and adds them to the platform. Over 3-7 years, the combined group gets bigger and, in theory, more valuable per unit of earnings. Multiple arbitrage
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Earn-outs in PE deals
An earn-out is a deal structure where part of the purchase price for a company is deferred and paid later, contingent on the acquired company hitting agreed performance targets. Instead of paying the seller 100% of the price at closing, the buyer pays, say, 80% upfront and 20% in year
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NAV lending, explained
NAV lending, or NAV financing, is when a private equity fund borrows money using its portfolio of investments as collateral. Instead of the fund's individual portfolio companies taking on debt (the traditional way PE uses leverage), the fund itself takes on debt at the fund level, secured by
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Covenant-lite loans, explained
A covenant-lite loan, often shortened to "cov-lite", is a leveraged loan with fewer of the protective clauses that lenders traditionally used to monitor borrower performance and intervene early if things went wrong. Traditional leveraged loans included "maintenance covenants" that required borrowers to periodically meet specific financial