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If your firm is part of the Anthropic JV or the OpenAI DeployCo announcement, your portfolio companies are about to find out what "embedded engineers" actually means. Six people in a Slack channel nobody set up. A roadmap nobody asked for. KPIs the CFO did not agree to.
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One of the things I like about Not Very Private Equity is that it actually has a view on deals. That should not feel unusual. It does. Most private equity media stops at description. Who bought it. What the multiple might have been. Which banker advised. What the press release
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Yesterday Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business, with connectors into tools like QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. The pitch is simple. Claude can help plan payroll, close the month, chase invoices, run campaigns and deal with the operational admin that usually gets done at 10:
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On 4 May, TPG, Brookfield, Advent and Bain backed a $10bn OpenAI deployment vehicle. The same day, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman seeded a $1.5bn Anthropic joint venture to push Claude into PE-owned companies. This week Apollo and Blackstone are negotiating $35bn of private credit to fund
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PayPal cut 4,760 jobs last week and called it an AI overhaul. Fidelity laid off 800 the same week. GM trimmed 600 in Austin and Warren and said AI was part of the decision, though not all of it. Strip the press releases away and the picture gets uglier.
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That is why The Untouchables works so well as a PE meme. The whole scene is about raising the stakes. Someone moves. You move harder. Someone pushes. You push further. Someone brings a knife. You bring the industrial logic, the leverage model, the synergy case, three consultants and a 94-
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Everyone in private equity worries about overpaying. Fair enough. Pay too much on the way in and you give yourself very little room for error on the way out. That part is obvious. It fits neatly in a model. You can argue about the multiple, tweak the downside case, and
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Not the polite version we use now. Not the beautifully formatted diligence report where every sentence has been washed through legal, the bank, management, three consultants and some heroic VP who thinks “further analysis required” is a personality. I mean an actual roast. A room full of people forced to
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Would you have invested? Go back to 2013. A PE firm is looking at a majority stake in a Canadian outerwear brand at an implied valuation of about C$250 million. The business is doing roughly C$200 million in annual sales. It is known for one thing: expensive winter
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The AI operating partner is the senior PE hire who owns AI-driven value creation across the portfolio, from workflow automation in portcos to fund-level capability build to the new operator skill mix that comes with both. The textbook version is shorter than the role. The textbook version is:
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Six 2026 outlook reports have landed in the past sixty days. Bain. McKinsey. PwC. EY. BDO. S&P Global. The reports differ on emphasis but agree on the substance. Exit timelines are extending. Fund finance is leaning harder on subscription lines, NAV facilities, and continuation vehicles. Fee compression is
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KPMG published its 2026 private equity leadership survey last month. The headline finding got picked up everywhere: 18% of senior leaders at PE firms are operating partners, not deal team. That number was 5-7% as recently as 2019. The asset class has invested heavily in operating capability over five