Private equity has quietly entered a new sport: competitive talent hoarding.
Every firm now appears to be stockpiling operators the way children collected Pokémon cards. Operating Partners, Senior Advisors, Venture Partners, EIRs—hand out a title, add them to a slide, declare victory. LPs love the imagery. It signals “capability.” It looks sophisticated. It gives the impression of a tightly coordinated machine humming in the background.
The reality inside most firms is slightly less heroic.
Plenty of these talented people sit idle. Others overlap so heavily their bios are virtually indistinguishable. A few are used as last-minute pitch props. And in far too many cases, no one has built an actual system to deploy them: no resourcing model, no operating cadence, no clarity on which operator is meant to do what across the portfolio.
It’s performative capability building. The theatre of readiness.
The punchline is that hiring ten Operating Partners doesn’t give you ten times the capability. It usually gives you ten times the coordination cost. Add in political friction, inconsistent incentives, and a complete absence of shared tools or workflows, and the firm ends up slower, not stronger.
The funds that genuinely extract value from operators don’t focus on headcount. They focus on utilisation, rhythm, and structure. They treat operators like a portfolio asset, not a decorative slide. They know exactly who gets deployed, why, when, and how. And they measure it.
Everyone else is just running a very expensive talent museum.
