Apollo hired three managing directors. Carlyle supplied one of them.
Apollo hired three managing directors, one of them from Carlyle. Advent's head of tech strategy now works at the OpenAI venture Advent helped fund.
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Advent sold its last CCC shares at $7.79. GTCR will pay $7.75.
GTCR and Elliott are paying $7.75 a share for CCC. Advent sold its final stake last November at $7.79, down from a $10 SPAC-era price.
Thoma Bravo's Proofpoint pays 53 times free cash flow for Varonis
Proofpoint will pay $49.75 a share for Varonis, 52% above the June close. The multiple is 53 times free cash flow, and the first-half cash flow fell.
EQT's fee-generating assets rose €40bn in a quarter. Coller was €34bn.
Fee-generating assets rose €40bn in the quarter. Strip out the Coller acquisition and the gain is about €6bn.
Two buyout veterans have launched a national security private equity firm
Watch Point Capital has a one-page website and two founders from Madison Dearborn and Platinum Equity. Here is what we can say about the new defence-focused firm.
GP financing, explained. How managers borrow against fees and carry, and why it is so hard to find below $30m
GP financing is a loan or preferred instrument provided at the manager level, to the general partner, the management company or a sponsor affiliate, rather than to the fund. It is secured on what those entities and their owners actually hold, which means equity in the management company, the right
If I were running AI diligence on a PE portfolio right now, I would not ask "are you using AI?"
I would ask which level of the spectrum you are actually on. Because most portcos think they are a 4. They are a 2. And the gap between those two numbers is where the write-down lives. I have sat in enough board meetings where the CEO confidently describes their
If I were building a PE operating model from scratch, I wouldn't start with a value creation plan.
I'd start by killing the theatre. Most operating models are built backwards. There's an ops team that is really a reporting team. There's a "value creation" function that is one person, a recycled PowerPoint, and a heroic ability to say "cross-
“Show me the distributions” is a wonderfully efficient way to shorten an LP presentation.
Saves everyone forty slides on why the portfolio is performing magnificently despite the absence of any money. The valuations are robust. The assets are exceptional. The exit pipeline is encouraging. Lovely. The pensioners have asked whether they can spend the appendix. Private equity gets paid to be patient. Fair enough.
LP meetings have become theatre with better catering.
A lot of LP meetings are no longer really about communication. They are about stage management. The deck is polished. The messaging is tight. The bad news has been moved three clicks deeper into the appendix. The winners get a cinematic retelling. The problems get translated into phrases like timing,
PE conferences are broken. Their floor plans tell you quite a lot about the attitude behind them.
“Value creation” gets top billing on the main stage. Operating partners get a separate room, a different floor, sometimes an entirely separate event. The industry has managed to make the people responsible for delivering the investment thesis a fringe attraction. Quite an achievement. And giving operating partners their own conference
AE Industrial lost two partners in one week, both to operating seats.
AE Industrial lost two partners to company jobs. Everyone else was hiring operators. Senior moves at the 200 largest US PE firms, week to 13 October.
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LPs now ask what AI will not make irrelevant.
The re-up conversation has changed. It used to be anchored around what you returned. Track record. DPI. TVPI. Loss ratio. Attribution. Vintage year context. Whether the exits looked heroic because you created value or because the market was briefly behaving like a drunk uncle at an auction. That still
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Your conference recap post is a selfie with a lanyard.
For two weeks after every major PE conference, LinkedIn becomes unusable in a very specific way. Panel photo. Handshake photo. Lobby photo. Dinner photo. Candid networking photo that was clearly taken with the strategic intent of a small military operation. Then the captions arrive. "Honoured to share the stage
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Apparently, the quickest way to become an AI business is to replace “automation” in last year’s board deck.
Same product. Same process. More exciting valuation expectations. CIMs, board decks, presentations. Everything must now be “AI powered”, “AI enabled” or “AI first”. God forbid you’re just profitable. Management needs a roadmap. The sponsor needs a portfolio story. The banker needs something sexier than “well run distribution business”. So
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If bankers earned a fee every time they put “proprietary” in a CIM, they could stop charging for the deal.
Proprietary technology. Proprietary data. Proprietary processes. Then you get access. The technology is Salesforce with some custom fields. The data is a purchased contact list. The process belongs to Dave. Dave has left. Bankers love this word. The competitive advantage it implies is considerably harder to find. “We own it”
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The Best Private Equity Books of All Time: A Definitive Reading List
Twenty-five books, from Barbarians at the Gate to the critics the industry would rather you skipped. What to read, and what to leave on the shelf.
Life
Reality Labs lost $4.6 billion last quarter. The glasses cost $1,300.
Meta VR Glasses weigh 100 grams, cost $1,299.99 and ship in spring 2027. The display is the best Meta has built. The field of view, the empty box and the $8.6bn first-half loss are the rest of the story.
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OpenAI stopped selling its $200 ChatGPT plan. That tells you what it costs.
New sign-ups to ChatGPT Pro $200 are paused. Existing users keep it, everyone else gets the $100 tier. A company only rations a product when the price was wrong.
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PE has a talent strategy in a slide deck somewhere.
Every private equity firm says talent is a competitive advantage. Then most go to the same headhunters, with the same job descriptions, to hire from the same pool of people who have already worked at the same banks, same consultants, same funds, same schools, and occasionally the same emotionally repressed
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Conference season reveals the best version of every PE firm.
A magical version. A temporary version. A version that lasts roughly forty-eight hours, or until Monday morning. On the panel, the firm is operationally focused. On Monday, the operating partner has missed the last three board meetings because nobody quite decided whether they were necessary, optional, or mostly decorative.
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The Best Private Equity Conferences for Operating Partners (2026 to 2027): Ranked by Who Is Actually in the Room
Every conference list is a calendar. This one tells you which rooms are full of operators, which are full of the people selling to them, and which three are worth the flight.
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The Best Books for Private Equity Operating Partners (2026): What Operators Actually Read, and What They Skip
The best books for PE operating partners, grouped by the job each one does, from capital allocation to running the company. Plus the shelf to skip.
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Private equity has a peculiar habit of paying a premium for a business, then acting offended by how it works.
The founder makes every decision. The systems don’t talk to each other. Pricing is mostly instinct. The finance team closes the month through an act of collective faith. All spotted in diligence. All described as “opportunity”. Then the deal closes and the same things become management failures. Marvellous. We’