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A perfectly diverse cast walking through glass corridors, sleeves rolled up, saving capitalism one portfolio at a time. In reality, it's 12 Angry Men. Same suits. Same stories. Same arguments, just with better coffee and worse empathy. You can see the gap every time the corporate photographer visits.
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The mythology around startups has gone from inspiring to absurd. A "unicorn" used to mean something rare: a company with a billion-dollar valuation and a business that worked. Now? It mostly means "a company good at storytelling and burning other people's money." The data
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The pattern is almost identical, only faster, louder, and with more zeroes. In 1999, we had people registering random domain names and raising millions because they had a “web business plan.” No product, no revenue, just a buzzword and a slide deck. Sound familiar? Now it’s AI. Every company
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The gym sessions you skip. The calls you make. The habits you tolerate. The people you surround yourself with. It’s all compounding, every day, quietly, without fanfare. In business, we obsess over financial compounding......IRR, MOIC, reinvested profits. But the real magic (or destruction) is happening elsewhere. Culture compounds.
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Freeze the lemon and shove it as far back up life as you can. Elbow deep. Because in business, you don’t win by coping, you win by counterattacking. Most people have been trained to absorb problems politely. They call it “resilience.” They think if they just keep calm, manage
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You’ve been there. You just walked into the best party in Vegas. Perfect music, open bar, crowd full of people who all look like they’ve made it. The room hums with self-importance .........everyone telling each other how great things are. You feel it too. You’ve made it
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Short answer? You don’t. You get invited. It’s one of the most opaque, relationship-driven roles in private equity—and it doesn’t follow a normal recruiting process. You don’t apply. There’s no job board. No clear path. It’s more secret society than career ladder. Here’
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The problem is no one updates the plan. A deal gets signed. The spreadsheet gets built. Revenue projections go up and to the right. EBITDA margin magically improves by year three. And everyone agrees to it because, well, it has to pencil. But here’s the issue: Six months in,
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Capital is commoditised. So is M&A. Everyone has access to debt. Everyone’s getting banker decks. Everyone’s playing the same playbook from 2012, just with higher entry multiples. The last true edge? Talent. Not the “we’ll bring in a new CEO post-close” kind of talent. A
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I’d spend 5 minutes on past returns and 25 on how we actually create value. Because past returns don’t win the next deal. And they certainly don’t justify 2 and 20 in a market where PE is getting harder. The days of buying low, levering up, cutting