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But it is going to make large chunks of the industry look embarrassingly outdated. • Deal Sourcing: The average associate spends ~60% of their time sifting through teasers, scraping LinkedIn, and chasing bankers. An AI-driven sourcing engine can screen tens of thousands of businesses against an investment thesis in minutes. Pattern
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It sounds clever: neat pieces, predictable moves, a brilliant strategist “seeing 10 moves ahead.” But the problem is, chess is finite. You win, lose, or draw. Outcomes are immediate and visible. Once the king falls, it’s game over. That’s not business. Business is Go. In chess, the board
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But who are we actually serving? LPs, obviously. They give us the money. But portcos… they make us the money. So here’s the uncomfortable truth most GPs won’t say out loud: PE firms treat LPs like customers. But treat portcos like cost centers. You pitch the LPs. You
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Plenty think they have. They’ll show you their org charts, explain how value creation is now a “core capability,” and proudly announce that every portfolio company has a VCP tracked in Asana. But scratch the surface, and what you find is usually a muddled mix of consulting theatre, internal
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Not because the people aren’t smart. Not because they don’t want to help. But because they’ve been designed to observe, not build. Most boards in private equity aren’t boards. They’re quarterly compliance checks with catered sandwiches. You get the same format every time: - 100-page
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I’d start with the people who actually do the work: - Operators buried in integration plans - Founders trying to scale without getting fired - Growth-stage CEOs caught between board slides and bank covenants - The associate who just got asked to “benchmark CAC across the portfolio” by 9am
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There’s a whole ecosystem now built on one promise: “You can buy a business with no money down and become financially free in 12 months.” It sounds like M&A. It looks like private equity. But it behaves like a multi-level marketing scheme. Because here’s what’s
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No “proprietary IP” nonsense. Just out in the open for anyone to use. Why? Because in 2025, opacity isn’t a competitive advantage, it’s a liability. Most funds still act like their diligence framework is the nuclear codes. The truth? Everyone’s using the same ingredients: hire a CRO,
life
Never heard of him? Think of him as the Vince Lombardi of English football... if Lombardi had a sharper tongue, a bigger ego, and had won the Super Bowl with a team no one had heard of. Clough didn’t manage the big-name clubs. He took small, under-resourced, overlooked teams
theses
Morbid margins, minimal tech, and a $100B generational wealth transfer. The funeral industry is one of the last remaining consumer sectors untouched by modern technology. It’s awkward, analog, and full of friction. And that’s exactly what makes it interesting. Let’s start with the basics: the average cost
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We’ve all seen them. Sleek formatting, lots of arrows pointing in bold directions. They’re the corporate equivalent of a Tinder profile. Great photos, zero substance, and you just know it’s not showing up when it’s time to commit. You get slides like: • “Capture revenue synergies through
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They just don’t realise it yet. In 2021, LPs were piling into funds like it was the last chopper out of Saigon. Fast forward to 2024, and commitments are dripping in slower than a CFO’s reply to a marketing budget request. The data tells the story: • The median