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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
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The layer of people whose primary function is aggregating information, writing summaries, building decks, and “managing up” is about to feel the shift first. Not because AI is more insightful than they are, but because it’s cheaper, faster, and doesn’t need three pre-meetings to prepare for the meeting.
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Everyone gets very excited about the new look. The menu is redesigned. There’s a “digital transformation” slide. Someone says “single source of truth” with a straight face. Meanwhile the basics are still feral. Jobs don’t reconcile to invoices. Inbound calls get treated like folklore. The same customer exists
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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,
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Same set. Same agenda. Same polite panic. The work doesn’t happen in the room, it gets narrated in the room. And you can spot the archetypes in the first five minutes. The Deck Sommelier Can’t start until the slides “flow”. Will happily burn 30 minutes adjusting a chart
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Translating between the deal team that wants “disciplined growth” (whatever that means this quarter) and the management team that wants to protect their P&L (and their jobs). Half the time, both sides are wrong. The deal team wants 20% growth with no investment. Management wants investment with no
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Most people still credit the pandemic with “inventing” remote work. The early software world would find that amusing. Basecamp, GitHub and Automattic were already proving the model while everyone else was debating dress codes and mandatory fun days. Automattic grew into a multibillion-dollar company without a headquarters, and somehow civilisation
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Everyone nods when it's presented. No one owns it when the quarter misses. Most "commercial excellence" programs in PE are theatre. They're built to look rigorous......frameworks, benchmarks, workshops. But they rarely move the needle. Why? Because they start with PowerPoint, not P&
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Scroll for five minutes and witness the parade: "Honoured and humbled to be named to the Top 40 Under 40 Over 30 list by a magazine that didn't exist last Tuesday." "Thrilled to announce I'll be speaking at the Northeast Regional Summit for
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Reviving dead brands for one last round of commercial exploitation. The model is simple, seductive, and deeply cynical. A licensing group buys the intellectual property of a failed brand......just the name, trademarks, and logos. Not the stores, not the people, not the product capability. Just the shell. They then
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Decks have become the modern currency of credibility. Consultants trade them. Bankers weaponise them. Operators tolerate them. Somewhere between analysis and action, we decided that design equals depth. That if it's animated, it must be insightful. The medium became the message......and the message got lost. In consulting,
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Somewhere along the way, we made “busy” a personality trait. Ask anyone how they’ve been and the default answer is the same: “Busy.” Like it’s proof of relevance. A humblebrag wrapped in exhaustion. People wear their overcommitment like armour. Too busy to think. Too busy to prioritise. Too