Tim Sullivan
8 statements across 2 episodes · 2 bullish · 2 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Dec 2, 2019 by Anne Martin · said 6 times in 5 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Tim Sullivan's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Ted Seides (2), Anne Martin (2), Kimberly Sargent (1), Chris Douvos (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Tim Sullivan, oldest first
Dec 2, 2019 positive
Martin: Institutional Allocators Do Not Need to Participate in Every Good Deal
“Tim Sullivan used to say this thing, which has really stuck with me, and I repeat it often, which is, you don't have to do every good deal. Just every deal that you do has to be good. And so you have to be not afraid to miss something good. So you're really pl…”
Jul 14, 2025 neutral
Sullivan: Five-deal track records suffer from small sample sizes and survivorship bias
“Part of what went wrong is just that if people have five or six deals in their track record, that's really not a representative set. Maybe they did just flip heads Five times in a row and look good. And one of the problems is you never see the people who flipp…”
Jul 14, 2025 negative
Jul 14, 2025 negative
Sullivan: Sourcing managers via peer referrals is harder in buyouts than venture
“That's harder in the buyout world because people are much less prone to be working together. Normally they're competing with each other and A lot of buyout managers, by definition, if someone outbids them for a deal, then that person is stupid. They pay too mu…”
Jul 14, 2025 positive
Jul 14, 2025 neutral
Sullivan: 40 years of PE returns were driven by falling interest rates
“Some of the success that our managers generated in the nineties and the first half of the 2000 was due to equity multiples going up in general. The whole 40 years until very recently was a story of declining interest rates and multiples ought to go up in a mar…”
Jul 14, 2025
Jul 14, 2025 neutral
Sullivan: PE benchmarking requires qualitative risk evaluation beyond raw IRR numbers
“Two firms with 20% IRRs might have very different risk profiles, and so you want to understand that. The problem is a lot of that's hard to quantify, so inevitably you have to just Have a qualitative assessment of what are these people doing, and has it worked…”