Berkshire Partners

“But they were first fund investors with Excel Ventures, with Blackstone, with Berkshire Partners, just a long list of firms that were excellent firms. They were there in fund one.”

“We're the largest investor in our private equity funds, and we're also, as a group, the largest investor in Stockbridge.”

“We're essentially long only. We have a right to short, but we've done it only a couple times in our history”

“In 2017, we bought about 20% of the company after they were through their accounting restatement and then subsequently joined the board.”

“There was a business that we were invested in at Stockbridge, a company called Skillsoft. It's an education software business that Berkshire private equity ended up taking private. And we got to see what public information would allow us to understand about th…”

“Across the firm, we chose not to have any walls between the two businesses.”

“For the first time, we did comparable sheets with public companies, and we were seeing private companies go for more than public companies. So the control premium was higher than the liquidity premium.”

“As an entire group, we discuss every idea that's making its way into the portfolio from a very early stage, which we call our tear sheet stage, where we're just introducing the whole team to the business to a final investment memo. Everybody from the newest an…”

“So we don't invest in things like, is the drug going to be approved, or where commodity prices will ultimately drive the answer.”

“Building it internally was important because the relationships of the people were a key to making it work. It wasn't just saying, Geez, Berkshire partners should have a public firm. Let's go hire a team to go do it. That would not get the collaboration that we…”

“The private equity side is divided into industry teams. We put one of our people on each one of their industry teams, so that way they can learn about what they're learning about the industry.”

“Well, there's three reasons that you sell. One is you lose conviction in the thesis, and you think you should move on. Two is it gets so expensive that you think the returns looking forward aren't acceptable, or at least certainly compared to what else. Or thr…”

“We do a lot of work up front, but we do multiples of that work after we own a company. And just ensuring that we're not holding onto something simply because we did a lot of work and we have endowment effect and it's in our portfolio.”

“So we found it's extremely rare that we end up with MNPI on a company and the places where we've run into issues They've tended to be opportunities, not conflicts or issues. We've co-invested in things.”

“Berkshire Partners invested in the company in the late eighties when it was a small agricultural plastic pipe producer and held the business continuously until 2010 through multiple funds and then sold it to another P firm who took it public in 2014.”

“We invest in two to three things a year. We probably look deeply at 10 to 20 things a year with a pretty big team, and so the several hundred that we look at, we're putting them down very quickly for one of those reasons.”

“So the key is if we have a problem with the company, it's better for us to sell than it is for us to go on the board and try and change it.”

“For the first two years, I think we invested exclusively internal capital and tried a lot of things. So like Rob mentioned, we tried to short. The first short, I think, lasted a week. And we realized we were not going to be good at it. We didn't want to do it,…”

“The private data would be great if you had an enormous change thesis. If you thought management was doing the wrong thing on major operational issues and you thought you could do better, I don't know how you make that decision without internal data.”