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Private equity is entering the part of the film where the easy tricks stop working.
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The investor update is now a literary genre.
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The safest asset class in the room just started checking the exits.
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A lot of firms sell an operating model. They bought a Trello board.
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Standardisation is what people demand when they don’t trust management.
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Private equity “returning to its roots” is a polite way of saying the party ended and someone finally turned the lights on.
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Operating partners need a badge and a gun, not another steering committee invite.
Private equity keeps hiring “value creation” people, then sends them into portfolio companies with zero mandate, zero budget, and the authority level of a polite email. And then everyone acts confused when the plan doesn’t happen. Obvious value creation: We underwrote 300 bps of margin expansion from “procurement synergies.
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Bain just put it in writing: “12 is the new 5.” 
Translation for anyone still clinging to 2016: the deal doesn’t work unless you actually run the business. Awful, I know. A decade ago, a “typical” buyout could hit a 2.5x over five years with ~5% annual EBITDA growth because leverage was fat and multiple expansion did the heavy
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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
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If I was building a private equity firm for the next decade, I wouldn’t start with a fund. I’d start with a platform.
Capital is a commodity now. Everyone has a logo, a banker list, a lender relationship, and a “proprietary deal flow” story that’s basically networking with better lighting. The firms that win won’t be the ones that can buy companies. That part is easy-ish. They’ll be the ones
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Every board deck says “pricing power” like it’s a personality trait.
Most businesses don’t have pricing power. They have a CFO with a spreadsheet, a CMO with a hope, and a sales team quietly discounting in the background. This is the bit everyone skips: pricing power is only half the game. The other half is operational control. And PE loves