private equity firms

“There are some private equity firms, and I've known hundreds of partners, and all of them leave feeling hollow with truckloads of money.”

“We don't think of ourselves as being a private equity firm. So we're not a partner led partner driven private equity model. We think of ourselves more as being a marketing firm, right? That's getting the word out about what we're doing, how we're doing it, try…”

“These days, if you're buying a company, the majority of private equity acquisitions are from other private equity firms.”

“I think the empirical evidence would show that private equity firms are good at cost cutting. They are good at cutting the fat. They are good at streamlining operations, and we saw that a lot in the data.”

“Given how low rates have been, and indeed how tight credit spreads have been, private equity firms have had an enhanced ability to buy growth companies and take them private. We've also had a world where, frankly, the big dominant companies have bought a lot o…”

“Most Hedge funds, private equity firms, small ones that start to grow, recognize that they have growing pains, and that their expertise is limited to investment, and they really don't know how to create an organization, how to create team culture, how to both …”

“And in many cases inside places like hedge funds or private equity firms or other places where allocators would invest, there's a high degree of respect on skill and a low degree of respect on character. And that creates division inside those teams.”

“It's still important for people to have programs that cultivate diverse talent at investment banks, at commercial banks, at private equity firms as analysts. I mean, that's still hugely important because that's where the networks come from.”

“And I think the private equity firm that has outsized returns and stays at pick a number of billion dollars and never grows. It's hard to attract young talent because the older folks get a little embedded. And it's hard for the younger ones to break through. S…”

“The number one limiting reagent in starting a new private equity firm. It isn't capital. It isn't investment ideas. It's other skilled investors that are complimentary to you that are great people that you can work closely with.”

“It sometimes seems when you start a business that is a private equity firm and your product is deal making, the impetus is to say, well, let's go do some deals because that's the product we need to go produce. But the inherent tension that everyone needs to un…”

“And I think that's why as those firms began to grow, you saw a little bit less and less of it because there was more competition going on than there was real value creation because everyone could do the deal pretty much themselves.”

“As we go forward, I suspect you'll see more and more competition from family offices that are large and they will do deals competing with private equity firms.”

“We cover today over 700 private equity firms. We've worked with well over 500. We've done over thirty billion dollars of financings.”

“From that roughly 152 hundred firms, we're probably seeing 15, 1600 deals a year.”

“Right now, private equity firms are very competitive with strategics, so businesses that are leverageable, people will put a lot more leverage often on businesses than we will. People often will adjust EBITDA in ways that are quite creative.”

“On the PREF deal, it's typically going to be a five-year deal where the lender's trying to make One and a half times their capital back.”

“More and more, I've been reading a bunch about private equity firms bringing on somebody called a leadership capital partner, really focused internally and making the deal teams and the investment professionals and the investor relations and the back office fo…”

“Well, in the private world, I think there is some of that that is absolutely happening. Where firms are growing just for the sake of growing, not because of the fact that they're doing it for performance.”

“A private equity firm or a growth equity firm coming into a series C or D sitting at the top of the caps table with liquidity preferences and all these downside protections, and they're ultimately earning more than the founders at exit. To me, it seems like th…”

“What you find out in a lot of these firms, what happened is individual people ended up making decisions and there were no governors around them. They just sort of all went, whether it's even the top person or they went in different directions and went the wron…”

“What really cost a lot of these firms was they bet big either on one company, one industry, one place, and as smart as these people are, and they're really smart strategically because they're investing for longer term. They have no choice. They make mistakes, …”

“Some of the economics at some of these firms Are not shared appropriately, and they lose key people, and too many people want to keep too much of the economics, and it blows the culture up.”

“So we've got about 20 private equity firms signed up, and by signed up, I mean they're committed to doing this at least a few times in their portfolio, following our standards, and then sharing some data back to the nonprofit so we can track where's the money …”

“And then I think at the end of the book, there's a chapter where the private equity firm actually looks to buy out assets from another firm that's in trouble. I think we're going to actually start to see a little bit of that.”

“The firms that looked at insurance, banks, ahead of everybody else have found that most folks at the similar scale have copied them since. And that tells you something. They had an edge. They had an advantage. It was proprietary. They had an idea. At the time …”

“To this day, there are LP segments of the LP world that don't love that idea, right? Don't love the idea. They look at it and they think, well, we think that that may misalign incentives some ways, and there's still some elements of the LP base out there that …”

“Over my time of time, one of the things that I noticed is that because we were more over special situations, there were times in the cycle that we were very missing. There were some really interesting opportunities, but there were other times in the economic c…”

“It's primarily done by private equity firms in the context of their portfolio companies, and it runs the gamut of industries from the likes of Bumble to GoDaddy all the way to Shake Shack, my personal favorite.”

“I mean, just like in other periods of dislocation in the market, I do think you'll see a consolidation of the brand extensions that we've seen to Mario's point.”

“And then the third, and this is the part that interests me the most as a lawyer, is that private equity firms Typically are able to insulate themselves from liability. So if something goes wrong at a portfolio company, the private equity firm is rarely held le…”

“The challenge that we've got is if these insurance companies fail, the responsibility for paying the continuing obligations will essentially default to the state guarantee corporations in which the insurance companies are incorporated. So if you have an Iowa i…”

“The industry has changed from institutional investors going into funds with perhaps less involvement to now co-investing alongside funds at more attractive terms. To some very large institutional investors having their own invest direct investment teams, often…”

“Lawyers like me have created a series of rules and regulations that have changed the incentives for investors that often works for the private equity firms, but may not necessarily work for workers, for customers, even for other investors.”

“According to Prequin, 645 firms have not raised a new vehicle since 2015.”

“The reason the private equity firms can't get the financing is because they're still trying to buy deals at valuations that are too high relative to what lenders are willing to lend.”

“I always ask the question when we're talking about value creation of who did what to who to actually get it done, because there's really one thing to say our value creation plan is X, but it's a huge gulf from that to achieving the value creation plan”

“I think there's 72 private equity firms now headed by people that work with me.”

“But they're going to want to grow that base, and oftentimes there's pressure to scale and diversify the revenue streams, which can be a big distraction for folks if they have to manage a smaller fund, lower middle market buyout pool when they've only been doin…”

“Everybody wants an internship today at a private equity firm or an investment bank, and I would call it the school of the real world. I think there's nothing better, be it working as a waitress or a waiter in a restaurant or working in a service business or wo…”

“I mean, we have to spend a lot of time to find these things. We have to spend a lot of time to structure these things. We have to spend a lot of time to understand these things. And I think it's something that a lot of other Private equity firms, asset manager…”

“We looked at some of the big private equity firms starting to raise hundred person sales forces to attack that market, and we thought, well, that's not really implementable for any PC, so let's keep it on there, but we don't really have anything right now.”

“Changes in the market impact firms that share a level a lot more than firms that share the same strategy. That's pretty unique. A level eight infrastructure firm and a level eight buyout firm are impacted by the market in more similar ways Than a level two and…”

“Those 15 firms, which is .2% of the universe that we track, controls about 20% of the AUM. If you go down just two more rungs that go level seven to level 10, those 700 firms control 90% of the capital.”

“There are a lot of private equity firms out there today who don't realize they've already raised their last fund.”

“Private equity firms only want to buy if they get a great deal, and they only want to sell if they're getting full value. There's a few turns of multiples in the middle, and you haven't seen that thought quite yet.”