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And somehow, magnificently, they all seem to have discovered the same ten managers. Every one of the top 10 backs Blackstone. Nine of ten back KKR. Apollo, Carlyle and EQT show up across more than half the list. This is not stupidity. It is institutional logic. When you are CalPERS,
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Yesterday at Google I/O, Search stopped pretending it was still ten blue links and a polite little box. Google announced an AI-powered search box, AI Mode at over 1 billion monthly users, information agents that monitor the web for you, and generative UI that can build custom search
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Not because firms suddenly became transparent. Calm down. Let’s not get carried away. Because underneath the industry now sits a shadow cap table of minority GP stakes, fee streams, carry participation, balance sheet bets and very polite strategic partnerships that mostly mean: “we would like a slice of your
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It is a membership business nobody has bothered to build yet. Most portfolio companies still describe themselves far too narrowly. They think they are in installs. Repairs. Truck rolls. Dispatch. Seasonal demand. A local service category with decent margins and the usual staffing headaches. Fine. But that framing leaves a
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Private equity conferences love the glamorous stories. The AI platform. The software rocketship. The sexy consumer brand. The deal everyone can talk about without sounding like they spent three years underwriting waste hauling in Ohio. Meanwhile, the boring services roll up quietly does exactly what it is supposed to do.
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Sounds excellent in an LP meeting. The decks are immaculate. Everyone has read the Bain report. Someone has said “agentic” with a straight face. Then you ask what the AI plan actually looks like at portfolio level. Usually, it is a job title. A Head of AI hire. An offsite
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Private equity has a recency bias problem. The last deal that worked quickly becomes the template for the next five. One healthcare services platform performs well and suddenly everyone has deep conviction in fragmented healthcare services. One software roll up lands nicely and now every mediocre vertical SaaS asset is
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In 2026, private equity completed a structural shift from a leverage-driven returns model to an operations-driven returns model: 47% of value creation now comes from operational improvement (versus 18% in the 1980s), portfolio companies must now deliver 10% to 12% annual EBITDA growth to match historical IRRs (versus
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The short answer A private equity operating partner typically earns a base salary of $200,000 to $500,000, a performance bonus of $250,000 to $1 million tied to fund and portfolio-company results, and carried interest of roughly 1% to 3% of the fund's carry pool.
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Both work with PE-backed companies. Both promise operational improvement. They are structurally different jobs, with different incentives, time horizons, and accountability. Get the distinction wrong and a PE firm burns a seven-figure consulting budget on a deck that sits on a shelf, or hires a full-time operating
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A five-question framework operators can use to tell whether a continuation vehicle is a genuine extension of operating runway, or just engineered liquidity.
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Operating partners in 2026 rely on a small set of named frameworks to convert a deal thesis into EBITDA growth: the 100-Day Plan, the Value Creation Plan, the EBITDA Bridge, Marketing as an Asset Class, the Three Levers of Operational Alpha, the First-90 Diagnostic, the AI Operating Stack,