private equity

“The truth of venture capital is that it's really all about the people. Unlike growth stage investing or private equity investing where there is a business, there are financial analysis to be done, there are stuff to be looked at. When it comes to startups and …”

“I was really looking forward to moving into VC, where you're actually, you know, helping businesses grow as opposed to the more financial engineering of private equity”

“We're still seen in the same bucket as a private equity fund, 10 years capped, Return my money based on capital calls, minimum return, and until that change, some of the flexibility that might be needed to disrupt the asset class is not going to be there.”

“Or a third part path, which is more prevalent, I think, in Europe than in the US, you come in through the ranks of private equity or banking and then come in as an investment side.”

“So I would say that investing writ large across growth equity, private equity, has commoditized To a very high degree over the last decade in a way that would not have been the case in the prior 10 years to that.”

“Venture capital is so distinct, at least culturally and, you know, in the media from private equity, because fundamentally they are very similar and really they're identical businesses done at different scale and at different times in a company's life cycle.”

“Private equity actually has been incredibly entrepreneurial for a long period of time and really actually much more operationally focused than venture capital.”

“In the world of private equity, typically the stakes given are 10 to 20%.”

“Private equity is much easier than venture.”

“Venture investing can be quite emotional because the companies are so dynamic and get into such trouble, and it's very important to have a balanced decision-making and not have it dependent on how one guy gets out of bed in the morning, and that's not true in …”

“When I look at whether it's investment banking, mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity, and now venture, they've all followed a very similar curve where early on in the assets class lifestyle or business model lifestyle, it's really subscale and it's volati…”

“If you have an investor, private equity or venture firm, that claims that they make a big difference in their companies, that they're there with those companies operationally, that they change them in a positive way. And you have 40 or 50, there is no way you …”

“You can't just come in and cut costs out, and cut benefits, and then actually make money in the investment, because People don't want something that, that is, is declining in sales.”

“You can't be successful in this business without an ego.”

“If you really abstract what private equity is judgments about people, where you need to place them in their jobs, and what levers of growth you give them in order to help them grow a business. That is recruiting, and that is leadership, and that is HR.”

“By far, the most successful company come out of that is a company called Muckrack, right? Unbelievable success, right? And it was a team in the corner that actually took zero dollars of VC, Right? Until very, very late in the game when they did a private equit…”

“I think it's the diversification piece in, in private equity, the way to build an optimal portfolio, which I think is, I have 60, 70 active relationships in private equity. I think there's a lot of people out there that say it should be like 20 to 30.”

“I have seen lots of tire kicking across my portfolio in the last six months. A lot of it, not just from public companies, but a lot of it from ex-public companies that are acquired by PE. They're all looking to bolt stuff on. They're all looking to bolt stuff …”

“So for me, yes, when you get out, it's when you feel like that the acquisition prices are unreasonable. You do not believe raising prices in a outside the mobile course makes sense, and you no longer can increase the margin of the business through scale of red…”

“I view private equity in the following way. We're a huge Flashlight. You walk into a room that may be dark. I'm shining the light everywhere, in the corners, in the crevices, and what I found is those who are really good at their job are like, shine it here. L…”

“In the private equity industry, in the market sector, a really, really good outcome is enough four or five times your money. You can't afford a zero. That makes sure your average comes two and a half or so, or whatever it may be.”

“For the moment we cannot invest in private equity, which I think it's, which I we, and we now have this political discussion and we have arguments back and forth with the ministry.”

“What is true is that when you are a late stage investor writing fifty million dollar checks, that you are what we used to call private equity. So you're competing on price. There's already an established board. You're not adding that much value.”

“Where, where are returns going to come from? They're going to come from private equity. So private equity firms are going to step in and buy assets from venture capital funds. They will either buy A company or they will buy secondary.”

“The real goal of PE is if you use debt correctly, even when you lose, you win. Because you have, you've taken so much out, right? Or you've put so little equity, and if you could put in 10, 20% equity and leverage it up, like you win, even if you lose, you win…”

“I think it's a good thing. On the whole, to have more dollars and more sophisticated managers involved I get the, there is this tension of, like, what are their incentives long term? And I think always gonna be some balance, but there's only so many billionair…”

“The private equity scam is like, we probably all know this is like, you can invest in a company. It doesn't actually matter how well that company does. You can take a lot of money out of that company, and if it goes bankrupt, it doesn't matter.”

“We've got an LOI in a vertical SaaS business right now. LOI. We haven't got, this is not there yet. The company's done tens of millions. It's got a good valuation. It's PE.”

“And I don't think people in Europe think in that kind of way. I think people in Europe are largely trained in private equity. They think about how do I minimize my downside.”

“Savior is too strong of a word because most private equity outcomes don't generate incredible returns for the VC. So savior is not the right. It may be savior in the sense that like would get your money back. The sales loft outcome was an awesome one, but that…”

“Which was the biggest outcome that it was the highest multiple ever paid by private equity for a software company. Companies required for 2.3 billion dollars.”

“I think there will be consolidation, there will be private equity, and there will be a few that reinvent themselves. There will be a few that are nimble enough to figure out how to adapt to the new era, but I think most will get consolidated.”

“So now if you like look at all of our exits, a third of our exits have actually come from, Come to private equity in those companies.”

“You fire half the engineering team, Blend set that sales team into someone selling something else, right? And leave the product frozen time in two years, you've lost 30, 40% of your revenue, right?”

“PE is the big problem. They're really the same thing. I mean, venture is a subset of PE, right? And the PE is so much bigger. And the fact that these deals are, did not go public in two to three years is the bigger stressor. Venture, venture, they don't love i…”

“Almost everything about PE is better in terms of making money than what we do. And the only thing we have in our favor is that every once in a while, maybe once every five years, you find yourself with a 10% ownership in a thing that's already worth billions o…”

“It's a common misunderstanding that my industry is sleepy, boring, and just You know, aiming for those doubles over five years. If we do that, we don't do our job, really.”

“I don't think it's a, hey, every two hundred million dollar so-so infrastructure company with 16% growth is going to get hoovered up at 5.7 times. I think it's much more a thematic. I think this can be relevant in AI. They have a newer product that's growing m…”

“This is a category. This is a trend that's going to happen. You know, I don't think it's going to be the same wall of money as, you know, sovereigns or pension funds. It's just another source of capital, another pick a number, 20% more.”

“I think PE is not coming to save us, like everyone thinks it will.”

“From a liquidity perspective, we've been fortunate compared to most endowments where that private equity book has been self-funding the past three years, so our distributions Have paid for our capital calls over the past three years. Now, the sub asset classes…”

“Vast majority are not going to get public and consolidation will make sense because at the core, a lot of these businesses are very high gross margin and are run pretty inefficiently because we've got a growth mindset and we're certainly not optimizing for cos…”

“It is the most forgiving equity business of getting the price wrong. Let me tell you what I mean by that. PE, if you get the price wrong, they're low variance assets. If you overpay by 50%, you're toast, because they're three X assets and they're not going to …”

“To me, sometimes it just feels like a little bit of like it just feels like a different job than like the craft of venture capital where you're almost playing the lottery where you're like, okay, I have these 30 names that I own. I'm gonna try to do two of the…”

“So private equity, you look at private equity, total fraction of dollars in secondaries is a fraction of the asset class is about 25%. Historically venture has been about two to three. Now we're kind of like 10 to 12.”

“I think in 22, I calculated PE had taken private 12% of all publicly traded software companies in a year.”

“A lot of the best deals will go to the best firms. Like that's, what's very different about venture capital than like private equity. Like if you and I are trying to take a public company private, You know, you're KKR and I'm Blackstone. We're both trying to, …”

“So I think law firms will go through a quite significant consolidation period, because so far there hasn't been a lot of incentives to consolidate law firms, but now actually private equity wants to get in on the action. They want to fund different law firms w…”

“PE guys regularly come in to growth venture at the top of markets thinking this looks easy, and they regularly retreat from those markets when they discover it's hard, right?”

“If the safe part of the business takes some significant hits, it, you know, it's definitely going to reduce the appetite for risk.”

“You can't build a company big enough to go public. Strategics don't care. So you can sell this thing for three X revenues to fill in the PE from. That's not going to be true going forward.”

“We're five years into no net new customers and price increases and mediocre module expansion. I don't think there's another five years of those knobs and dials left.”