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

Assertion Supported

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…”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 50:05 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted

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…”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 47:56 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

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.

What they said58 What others said7 Episodes1

Everything Tim Sullivan said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Partly supported

Sullivan: Yale was an early backer of Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Mayfield

“Yale was already an investor with some of the preeminent firms in Silicon Valley and Boston. Sequoia, Kleiner, Perkins, Mayfield, people like that.”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 8:26 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Disclosure

Sullivan: Yale backed virtually all 15 targeted venture firms within five years

“So we made a list of 15 different firms, went out and met all of them. Within five years, we were investors with virtually all of those firms, and most of them did fabulously well for us in the nineties and many since then, and some of them are still in our po…”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 9:34 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Assertion Supported

Sullivan: Scaled private equity firms are fragmenting into niche sub-verticals

“Some of the firms that verticalized 10 or 12 years ago are now creating sub verticals. The industrial team is not the industrial team anymore. There's the aerospace team, and the packaging team, and whatever else.”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 17:20 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Disclosure

Sullivan: Yale avoided private equity firms doing large public market buyouts

“We tended to avoid firms that did big things in the public markets.”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 20:10 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Insight

Sullivan: Sustained 30-40% PE IRRs inevitably get bid down by inflows

“If there's a world where firms are generating consistently 30, 40% IRRs, people are going to notice that, and some people are going to say, hey, I should do that too, and then the returns inevitably get bid down.”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 21:24 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Sullivan: During dot-com boom, some VC funds saw 90% of deals profit

“They'd have funds where 90% of the companies they invested in were profitable deals.”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 28:01 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Sullivan: Yale's VC managers rapidly grew from $200M to $1B funds

“Pretty much all of the venture firms we worked with, if in 1995, they were managing a two hundred million dollar fund. By 1999, they were managing a billion dollar fund. And then they were investing the billion dollar fund in nine months, which again, proved t…”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 29:31 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Insight

Sullivan: Diligencing VC firms requires speaking directly with portfolio CEOs

“We always found it extremely useful to talk to the CEOs and the entrepreneurs of the portfolio companies of the venture firms”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 57:22 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Insight

Sullivan: Allocators must verify managers offer more than just commodity capital

“Trying to find people where the answer is not just they had money is really important. That's true across the private investment world is there are tons of people with money. There's tons of money out there. You need to ask why the people that are making the d…”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 58:33 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

Assertion Supported

Sullivan: Swensen's 1985 Yale hiring received no Wall Street Journal coverage

“When David Swenson got the job in 1985, there were no articles in the Wall Street Journal about him getting a job at Yale Endowment.”

Tim Sullivan Jul 14, 2025 ▶ 7:01 Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456)

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 2 Anne Martin 2 Kimberly Sargent 1 Chris Douvos 1

Statements about Tim Sullivan, by other people (1)

Insight

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…”

Anne Martin Dec 2, 2019 ▶ 16:44 Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114)