Tim Sullivan
Senior GP Adviser, EMK Capital · 1 appearance on the record.
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Sullivan spent 39 years working alongside David Swensen managing Yale University's private equity and venture capital portfolios from 1986 until his retirement. Following his career at the Yale Investments Office, he joined London-based private equity firm EMK Capital as Senior GP Adviser.
58statements → 15claims → 7claims resolved → 71%fully supported → 3.9/5average certainty → 2.1/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 7said about them ↓
5 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 8 not checkable as stated how the 15 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 predictions · 12 assertions · 4 opinions · 31 insights · 7 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 15 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Tim argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Sullivan: Buyout firms routinely overpaid at 20-plus times EBITDA during COVID
“Buyout firms routinely paying 20 plus times EBITDA for quality businesses, but businesses that probably should not trade at that high valuation. Doing that in a world where interest rates were zero, and there was a lot of money being pumped into the economy by…”
Their most notable contradicted claim
Sullivan: Buyout firms relying on SBA leverage generally perform poorly
“One thing I never liked was we would have buyout firms come to us and talk about Oh, we're going to get all this leverage from the Small Business Administration. That's going to allow us to goose the returns and do all this clever stuff. To me, that was always…”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Tim Sullivan on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Tim Sullivan said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Sullivan: Parachuting former Fortune 500 CEOs into small buyout boards fails
“I think one thing we learned pretty quickly was not straightforward to bring in a guy who'd been a successful CEO at a big Fortune 500 company and have him parachute into an LBO situation as a board member or operating partner. You had to find people with the …”
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…”
Sullivan: Founders, not VCs, control modern late-stage startup exit timelines
“The biggest problem is they're not really in the hands of the venture capitalists. They're in the hands of the entrepreneurs. If you're an entrepreneur who doesn't want to bother being a public company, they're real questions for institutions about how do they…”
Sullivan: Scaling buyout funds suffer Peter Principle as target companies grow
“The challenge along the way is that sometimes the skill set that works with the small company is not Applicable to the bigger company. Also, bigger companies tend to be better managed, so maybe there's less you can do with them while you own them. There is a P…”
Sullivan: A $5B fund at 15% pays far more carry than $500M at 30%
“The carried interest on a five billion dollar fund compounding at 15% return is a lot more than the carried interest on a five hundred million dollar fund compounding at a 30% rate return. Plus, obviously, the fees are 10 X.”
Sullivan: Retail private equity investors will face disappointing net returns
“There are going to be a lot of doctors and dentists who are pretty disappointed 10 years from now with the net returns that they're getting from their financial advisor plowing their capital into private equity. Gross returns might be fine, but between the fee…”
Sullivan: Buyout firms routinely overpaid at 20-plus times EBITDA during COVID
“Buyout firms routinely paying 20 plus times EBITDA for quality businesses, but businesses that probably should not trade at that high valuation. Doing that in a world where interest rates were zero, and there was a lot of money being pumped into the economy by…”
Sullivan: Buyout managers anchor to cost basis instead of cutting bad deals
“They get too anchored to cost as a measure of value, and if they can't get cost, they're going to do whatever they can to get their cost back, and in fact, they might be better off to sell an investment that is not going to perform well no matter how long you …”
Sullivan: GP-led secondaries fail to do limited partners a true service
“The problem, from my standpoint, is we always thought at Yale, one of the reasons we hire these guys is because they know when's the right time to sell an asset. And we're sort of relying on them to do that. And then if they default that decision back to us an…”
Sullivan: Private equity will struggle to drive alpha like the past 40 years
“It's going to be very difficult for private equity, broadly defined venture and buyout and related stuff to be the single defining alpha creating strategy for institutional investors the way that it's been over the last 3540 years.”
Sullivan: Systematically finding 20%+ returning VC funds will be very hard
“I'm sure there will be times in the future where we have venture booms again, but the odds of systematically finding firms that are Consistently producing 20% plus returns and the occasional 80% returning fund. It's going to be very, very hard for that to happ…”
Sullivan: Buyout firms likely exit top-performing companies too quickly
“In fact, if anything, I'd say that buyout firms are probably too quick to sell their good businesses. Rather than churning over your good companies every three or four years, maybe you want to let them run a little longer and let them compound for maybe five o…”
Sullivan: Private equity sells winners in 4 years and holds losers for 12
“What winds up happening is the good businesses get sold in three or four years. The bad businesses hang around for 10 or 12 years. The GPs just think, well, I can fix this, and two years from now it'll be better, and a lot of times when an asset isn't performi…”
Sullivan: Maintaining an investment edge is harder in buyouts than in venture
“A lot more of it is just financial engineering and less differentiated a skill set, so maintaining your edge there is probably harder.”
Sullivan: Yale is unsure if PE verticalization will succeed long term
“That's playing out in real time in larger firms that Yale has worked with, and we're not always sure that that's going to be a successful evolution in the long run.”
Sullivan: Buyouts cannot tolerate portfolio zeros like venture capital can
“In the venture world, the winners pay for a lot of losers and it's okay to have half your portfolio return nothing. In the buyout world, typically your winners are somewhere between two and a half and four and a half X, and then occasionally maybe you get an o…”
Sullivan: One peak dot-com VC fund exited its losing investments at 3x
“One of our venture capitalists had a famous quote, our winners we sell for 20 times our money, and our losers we sell for three times our money. And it was true.”
Sullivan: Halting venture allocations in 1995 would have been a huge mistake
“We could have pumped the brakes in 1995, and it would have been a huge mistake.”
Sullivan: Yale walked away from top buyout manager after 7.5x fund expansion
“We had a firm that we worked with. We were in their first two institutional funds in the early 2000 period. They were both spectacularly successful. When they raised their third institutional fund, they set out to raise a fund that was seven and a half times t…”
Sullivan: Buyout firms relying on SBA leverage generally perform poorly
“One thing I never liked was we would have buyout firms come to us and talk about Oh, we're going to get all this leverage from the Small Business Administration. That's going to allow us to goose the returns and do all this clever stuff. To me, that was always…”
Sullivan: Power inverted as top VCs beg AI founders for 3% stakes
“When I started, if you were a smart guy in Silicon Valley, you crawled on your hands and knees up Sand Hill Road to Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins and begged them to invest. They'd invest Three million dollars and own 30% of your company. Now it's the other way ar…”
Sullivan: Institutional LPs fail to interrogate GPs on sell decisions
“I think institutions don't do a good job of asking GPs about sell decisions in general.”
Sullivan: Institutional LPs playing 'gotcha' with GPs is counterproductive
“One problem a lot of institutions fall into is thinking, I'm just as smart as these guys. Why are they so much richer than I am? I'm on this side of the table, but I could easily be on that side of the table, and they make things confrontational, especially if…”
Sullivan: Angel investor outperformance often stems from luck across large distributions
“If there are 5000 people in Silicon Valley writing these angel checks to entrepreneurs, Some of whom end up starting the Ubers of the world. You're gonna have a bell curve of outcomes, and somebody can be on the top end of the bell curve because they're really…”
The other half of the tape: Tim Sullivan's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 5 episodes on Capital Allocators. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 2Anne Martin 2Kimberly Sargent 1Chris Douvos 1
Statements about Tim Sullivan, by other people (1)
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…”
Every mention by year
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
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456) | Jul 14, 2025 | 59m |