Deals
Views
Most roll ups don’t fail because of competition.
They fail because integration was treated as a future problem. The pitch always sounds the same. Buy fragmented assets. Centralise back office. Unlock synergies. Scale. What gets skipped is the hard part. How these businesses actually work once they’re stitched together. Different pricing logic. Different sales behaviours. Different tech
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AI Just Changed Private Equity Overnight. Copy The Playbook.
I asked a model to launch a $2B services roll up. It named the fund, designed the logo, scraped every founder over 55 within a 50 mile radius of a metro with above average household income, and ranked them by “succession anxiety score.” It built the investment committee memo before
Deals
Deals (w/e 2/19/26)
Ariel Alternatives Acquires Front Line Power Construction Ariel Alternatives has acquired Front Line Power Construction, with Cherokee Nation Businesses joining as a minority co-investor. Power grid infrastructure is no longer theoretical. It’s cables, substations, and hard backlog tied to AI data centers and electrification mandates. This isn’t energy-transition
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Everyone loves a roll up until the “synergies” meeting turns into an intervention.
You buy the platform. You add bolt ons. You put “synergies” in 48pt font and act like you’ve invented fire. Then you discover the truth: You didn’t buy one business. You bought twelve different versions of reality. One CRM that’s basically a diary One CRM that’s
News
News (w/e/ 01/30/26)
Blackstone Reports Record Private Equity, Credit, and Real Estate Inflows in 2025 Blackstone disclosed its largest ever private market fundraising year, with more than $240 billion raised in 2025 and assets under management climbing to about $1.3 trillion. Despite strong underlying performance in private equity, private credit, and real
Deals
Deals (w/e 01/23/26
Dallas-based private equity firm Highlander Partners acquired the Tapatio hot sauce brand a top-5 U.S. condiment with a cult following, from its founding family. The purchase price wasn’t publicly disclosed, but the strategic logic is clear: consumer food brands with deep loyalty and retail shelf presence can be
Views
The creator economy looks chaotic from the outside. In reality, it’s just private equity with better lighting.
Watch how the top creators operate and the resemblance becomes hard to ignore. MrBeast behaves like a diversified holdco. Multiple product lines. Brand extensions. International expansion. A consumer business portfolio that would make most funds blush. Last year he reportedly turned down offers valuing his empire north of $1.5B,
Theses
3x Thesis: The “Revenue Recovery” Platform for Healthcare Providers
Every healthcare investor knows the story: the clinic looks profitable on paper, but when you lift the hood, there’s 10–15% of revenue sitting in limbo...unpaid claims, coding errors, rejected reimbursements. It’s not a demand problem. It’s a billing problem. The U.S. healthcare system processes
Deals
Deals (w/e 11/28/25)
Patient Square Takes Premier Private in a $2.6B Healthcare Carve-Up Patient Square Capital has officially taken Premier, Inc. private in a $2.6 billion all-cash deal, pulling a major healthcare-services operator off the public markets. Since its IPO days, Premier has struggled under the weight of a complex structure
Cases
The smartest home-services play of the last decade wasn’t about technicians, it was about traffic.
Wrench Group is what happens when private equity finally understands that in consumer services, the real asset isn’t the fleet, it’s the funnel. It started in 2016, when Investcorp rolled four strong regional HVAC and plumbing players into a single platform across Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix. A
News
News (w/e 11/14/25)
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