The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 26 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Giannini: LP advisory boards are a total waste of time
“I think advisory boards are a total effing waste of time. I have learned nothing. Here's what I've learned. Zero. Advisory boards are a place where LPs want to feel important and feel really good, and GPs want to make them feel important and really good, and s…”
Giannini: Private equity brings intense public dislike upon itself through arrogance
“This is an industry that is really disliked. It's extraordinary how, how disliked we are, and we do it to ourselves. We do it to ourselves with the amount of money that sloshes around and the way generally as an industry we act like, well, we deserve it becaus…”
Giannini: Private equity GP-to-GP deals deliver the same returns as other exits
“We've run numbers. The return is basically the same. There's no real difference between A GP to GP deal return and a non-GP to GP deal return. So there's no advantage or disadvantage.”
Giannini: Portfolios will be 50% private and 50% public within 15 years
“I believe in 10 years, 15 years, that portfolios will, by and large, be 50% private, 50% public.”
Giannini: PE Investors Should Cut Manager Relationships and Concentrate Capital
“I'm not a big believer in the amount of diversification that most of this industry says you got to have. You have to cut back the number of relationships you have and concentrate them on those groups that right or wrong you believe are going to get you through…”
Giannini: Global Economies Face Shallow Recession, Not 2008 Crisis
“I think that inflation peaked a while back and is headed down. I don't know if it'll get down to two percent. I don't think it really matters. I think the most global economies outside of perhaps China are going to go into a recession and it will be a shallow …”
Giannini: Investors claim long-term horizons to hide recent investment mistakes
“People that tell me they're long-term investors, they're always telling me they're long-term investors when they don't want to acknowledge a mistake they just made in investing.”
Giannini: Most GPs fundamentally do not understand LPs
“The thing GPs, and I say this to them all the time, they do not understand LPs. Most of them just don't understand where an LP is coming from.”
Giannini: Sector concentration in software is acceptable due to diverse sub-segment dynamics
“Is the sector, when they say they're in infotech or software, it's so vast that the drivers of return, the drivers of what will make, the industry will not rise or fall. The multiples may in the public markets because they lump them in together, but the indust…”
Giannini: Cheaper middle-market private equity pricing is a complete myth
“So I would say the pricing myth is exactly that. It's a myth. There's as much competition in the mid-market as there is in the larger end of the market.”
Giannini: Scaling in a growing industry is harder than a corporate turnaround
“What I've learned about a growing company in a growing industry is that it is much harder than a turnaround, oddly enough. A turnaround focuses you on sort of the existential crisis. The problem and the challenges for growing a company is that you have a numbe…”
Giannini: Middle-market return dispersion is vast and widened over 10 years
“The larger firms, the largest, have a narrower dispersion of return. In other words, the difference in return is not that great between XYZ big firm. Don't tell them that, because they're also a top quartile. In the mid-market, there's a vast spread of return.…”
Giannini: Much of the ESG movement is hype and happy talk
“I would say a lot of it is hype. It's a lot of happy talk. It's a lot of feeling better about yourself saying you care about ESG.”
Giannini: Continuation funds are currently used for GPs' better-quality portfolio companies
“Why I think continuation deals are really interesting is that by and large, today, you are seeing the better companies go out in those deals. I think where you worry is when it starts to be, oh shoot, this is so easy, I'm just going to throw out any deal. I do…”
Giannini: Private Markets Face a Widespread Lack of Downcycle Experience
“To me, one of the big challenges has been the relative inexperience of a huge, huge segment of the private markets universe, whether it's at Hamilton Lane, whether it's at our clients, whether it's in the general partner community. When you think about people …”
Brown: Top asset managers are building thoughtful, low-fee products for wealth channels
“The sophistication in the product innovation that these large asset management firms are working on, whether it's an Apollo or Franklin Templeton, a Hamilton Lane, Blackstone, of course, comes to mind and others. They're really designing very thoughtful, low f…”
Giannini: Private markets firms shifted from single strategies to multi-asset platforms
“On the investing side, again, one of the big changes in the industry over the years is everyone always used to do one thing, like you did private equity or you did private credit. Now you do everything and we do everything.”
Giannini: Concentration risk is dangerous when driven by single-factor commodity exposures
“I think where you worry about concentration in an industry is where there is one thing that happens. So if I'm concentrated in banks, well, they rise or fall kind of at the same time. If I'm in, natural resources was a big thing. Everyone was in oil and gas fo…”
Giannini: Private equity fund managers are the world's best salespeople
“These are the greatest effing salespeople on earth. They just are. They really are. They're so good. I say that to people all the time. We are dealing with some of the smartest, best, That salespeople will ever meet.”
Giannini: Public market stock movements falsely dictate perceptions of management intelligence
“What I didn't realize, because we're not, I'm not a public company person, is stock price may or may not have anything to do with the underlying company, but it becomes something people look at, and so when it's going up, the company may be doing what it was d…”
Giannini: Hamilton Lane listed as controlled company to prevent activist interference
“We went public as a controlled company. And that means that there's an unequal balance between economic ownership and voting control. And that was a big deal for us. It was a big deal for our clients because what people didn't want is hedge fund X decides, oh,…”
Brown: Top PE firms like KKR and Apollo are tokenizing fund interests
“We're also seeing firms, and most recently KKR just announced this. Apollo also announced one. Hamilton Lane as well. They are tokenizing interests of their funds and putting them on the blockchain.”
Giannini: Hamilton Lane touches nearly $1T across AUM and advisement
“We are now about 550 people, which doesn't sound very large compared to a lot of companies, but when you're from four, it sounds huge. We are 150, hundred sixty billion under assets under management with another eight hundred billion under advisement, so we're…”
Giannini: Almost all private equity funds have large international LP bases
“Nobody, well, except the smallest funds, nobody has a fund that doesn't have a huge international component.”
Giannini: Hamilton Lane tracks roughly half of all historical private equity capital
“Well, we're fortunate in the sense that we have a huge database just because when you have a trillion basically in assets that you're running on real time and doing cash flows, you have a lot of that data, but to have it all, like if I said, let's go get all o…”