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: Venture capital is driven by a self-reinforcing success feedback loop
“It is such a feedback loop business where success begets success. The best venture firms would attract the best entrepreneurs. They had the best corporate relationships. They could hire the best partners. If you were an entrepreneur needing help with your star…”
Sullivan: Operating capabilities are table stakes to win modern PE auctions
“Pretty much all of it now has adopted that model because it's become table stakes. And if you don't have those abilities, you can't pay the price that it takes to win an auction for an asset these days. So you need to have those skill sets internally.”
Sullivan: PE firms must pre-position ahead of auctions to manage risk
“In a world where it is so crowded and competitive and expensive, firms need to figure out today a way to get ahead of those processes, not so that they're necessarily buying businesses outside of auctions or buying them at bargain prices because the sellers ar…”
Sullivan: Swensen's aggressive 1987 crash rebalancing was correct for Yale
“He was 33 years old at the time, and he'd been in the job for probably two and a half years, so it was a pretty gutsy thing for him to do. We wound up having to do some things to mollify the chairman, which David wasn't exactly thrilled by, but we mostly got w…”
Sullivan: KKR's RJR Nabisco buyout proved to be a mediocre deal
“Some of those deals didn't wind up working out very well, and RJR proved to be a very mediocre deal for KER.”
Sullivan: PE adopted EBITDA in the 1990s to mask rising valuation multiples
“There was a time, probably in the early nineties, where people stopped talking about EBIT multiples, earnings before interest in taxes, and started talking about EBITDA multiples, heading in depreciation and amortization. I think they hoped nobody would notice…”
Sullivan: Chasing legacy 40% underwriting targets leads PE managers to failure
“We had a firm in particular that said explicitly to us, we're still looking for deals we can underwrite to 40%, and the deals that they wound up underwriting turned out to be pretty risky situations, and a fair number of those risks wound up blowing up in thei…”
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…”
Sullivan: Yale's pre-bubble VC gains offset late-90s dot-com fund losses
“We had some spectacularly bad funds in the late nineties that we committed to, but their predecessors More than paid for what we lost in that period of time.”
Sullivan: Venture capital is a lottery ticket business concentrated in specific firms
“It's a lottery ticket business, and the lottery tickets systematically end up in certain places.”
Sullivan: Top-tier VC list is broader today than 15-20 years ago
“The list of who's a top tier venture capitalist is maybe a little broader than it was 15 or 20 years ago, and there are probably more people that have, from a standing start, been able to move into that realm than was the case for a lot of my career.”
Sullivan: Bad private fund commitments lock up capital for 15 to 20 years
“On the private side, if you make a mistake, you're stuck with it for 15 or 20 years, or you have to take a huge haircut in the secondary market. Sometimes you just will not find people that want to buy your crummy fund.”
Sullivan: Allocators only learn if GPs are good partners during downturns
“The venture business has its bust every 10 or 15 or 20 years, and it's when times are bad that you really learn, are people good partners? It's easy to be a good partner when everybody is making lots of money.”
Sullivan: GP-led secondaries originated around 2010 to resolve zombie funds
“Some of the original GP secondaries came out of that world. That's how that whole phenomenon started, that you had these zombie funds in the 2000 ten-ish era, where it was clear that there was no way for the GP to earn a carry, but There needed to be some kind…”
Sullivan: Overly complex fund structures often signal underlying manager problems
“If things got too complicated structurally, that was often a sign of a problem.”
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…”
Sullivan: Yale never reinvested with a manager after dropping them
“There certainly weren't instances where we were an investor with somebody, pulled the plug, and then got back on board. That was often just too hard.”
Sullivan: Yale did not dwell on missed venture capital partnerships
“I wouldn't say we spent a lot of time worrying about the ones we missed. There were certainly venture firms that we might have worked with that did very well, but we didn't. The ones that we did work with were fantastic. There wasn't much point in losing sleep…”
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…”
Sullivan: Yale's massive China gains stemmed from backing Hillhouse's Lei Zhang
“Whereas we want to make a huge amount of money in China, as China opened up as an investment opportunity, but a lot of that happened because of our relationship with Lei Zhang, who founded Hill House, and he happened to go to Yale's business school, and he hap…”
Sullivan: Bottom-up manager selection outperformed top-down mandates at Yale
“Keeping an eye out for interesting, creative people who maybe are trying to blaze a new trail and seeing how it goes, that was a much more successful strategy for us than a sort of top-down decision to, now we need to be spending time on this.”
Sullivan: Manager selection is by far the most important factor in PE
“People read the book and see all the success Yale has had in the private equity world, in the hedge fund world, in places where manager selection is really by far the most important factor in success.”
Sullivan: Managers should own failed risks rather than blaming acts of God
“It always really bugged me when managers would take a risk, and then the risks blew up in their face, and they'd act like it was some act of God that they couldn't possibly have foreseen and so shouldn't be punished as it were for.”
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 |