The structure that used to define private equity, a closed end fund with a five to seven year hold mandate and a defined exit pressure, is no longer the only structure in the market. Over the past fiv...
For most of the modern private equity era, IRR was the metric that defined fund performance. It was reported on the cover page of every quarterly update. It was the headline statistic in every fundrai...
NAV lending has moved from niche financial product to standard liquidity infrastructure inside private equity in less than five years. Most established sponsors now have at least one NAV facility on t...
The AI capability of available tools has improved by an order of magnitude over the past three years. The AI absorption capacity of mid-market portfolio companies has improved by perhaps thirty percen...
The conversation about AI in private equity has shifted in 2026. The earlier waves of copilot deployment, document summarization, and chatbot pilots have given way to a more ambitious framing. Agentic...
Walk into any mid-market portfolio company on a Monday morning, ask three different functions for the same number, and you will receive three different answers.
Sales will tell you that the company h...
Private equity has spent eighteen months funding AI initiatives across portfolio companies, and a real allocation question is now coming into focus. Not whether to invest in AI. The question is no lon...
The hardest conversation in any private equity investment committee is not about which technology to buy. It is about what the technology is worth.
Every IC memo gestures toward digital transformatio...
The first ninety days after close are the most expensive window in private equity for losing people. Not the people with the loudest titles. The people who actually make the business work. They are us...
Most operating partners intervene before they diagnose. They arrive at a portfolio company with a playbook in their head, a set of standard interventions they have run successfully before, and a presu...
Private equity has a recurring blind spot. It pays a premium for founder-led businesses because they grow faster, decide faster, and convert customers faster than their corporate equivalents. Then it ...
Private equity skill is not built by theory alone.
You can study LBOs, valuation, and deal terms β but real confidence comes from repetition: sourcing deals, testing assumptions, building models, tra...
There is a number that almost no portfolio company tracks consistently and that turns out to predict an unreasonable share of commercial performance. It is the elapsed time between an inbound lead arr...
The 100-day plan is one of the most universally adopted, universally underperforming artifacts in private equity. Every fund has one. Every IC memo gestures at one. Every operating partner is handed o...
Most private equity value creation plans are not designed to be executed. They are designed to win an investment committee.
That is not a moral failing. It is a structural feature of how deals get bu...
