The Ledger
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Giannini: PE Deal Volume Slowed but Top Asset Multiples Remain High
“What's happening now is the deal activity has slowed. There's no question, especially compared to what it was in the heyday of 21, 20. What you're seeing in this market today is on the equity side, The deals being done are really good companies. Great companie…”
Giannini: Private Equity Currently Lacks a Predominant Theme
“One of the curious things about at least this cycle right now is that there really isn't any predominant theme that says, oh, here's an incredible opportunity space like in tech. As John was describing, there are great characteristics behind these industries t…”
Giannini: Disciplined Portfolio Construction Lags Hype Cycles but Wins Long Term
“There are periods of time when someone who's doing portfolio construction, the way you're hearing here, will underperform because you're not 80% in venture, and venture's having a great time, and everyone goes, how come my portfolio's not up 800%? It's only up…”
Giannini: Middle East capital is concentrated but insufficient to fund all GPs
“So there is probably more capital available in the Middle East today than there are in other parts of the world, just in terms of concentration. So yes, there is more. Is it unlimited? Is it enough to fund all the general partners? Absolutely not.”
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 …”
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: Ungoverned individual decision-making drives private equity firm failures
“What you find out in a lot of these firms, what happened is individual people ended up making decisions and there were no governors around them. They just sort of all went, whether it's even the top person or they went in different directions and went the wron…”
Giannini: High concentration in single companies or sectors ruins PE firms
“What really cost a lot of these firms was they bet big either on one company, one industry, one place, and as smart as these people are, and they're really smart strategically because they're investing for longer term. They have no choice. They make mistakes, …”
Giannini: Unequal economic sharing destroys PE culture and drives talent loss
“Some of the economics at some of these firms Are not shared appropriately, and they lose key people, and too many people want to keep too much of the economics, and it blows the culture up.”
Giannini: Top PE firms succeed with small, shared decision-making teams
“When you look at KKR, there's two people. When you look at Carlyle, there's three people. When you look at some of the great firms, That have done really well in our industry. It is not one person and it's not 15 people. So I think you have to have this group …”
Giannini: Partner cohesion in PE is only truly revealed during downturns
“And I think when you discover it, probably it's in downturns, unfortunately, when you see what really goes on.”
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: Large PE Firms Are Doing a Very Good Job with Succession
“While we all worried about the big firms and how they would do succession planning, I would say they're doing a very good job of it.”
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: PE fund managers face conflicting LP demands around deployment pacing
“What you hear from managers, which is legitimate, is LPs yell at them if they're not investing. Like LPs hate paying on committed capital that isn't being invested, but God forbid they invested at the wrong time because then LPs yell at them for investing at t…”
Giannini: In 10 years, PE will center on portfolio construction
“I think in 10 years you and I will have this conversation and we will be talking about portfolio construction and whether we're leaning more into growth, more into this, more into that, whatever.”
Giannini: Venture and smaller PE firms will never share internal data
“Maybe some of the larger ones will. They're public, and maybe they won't have as much issue with it, and you can get it through FOIA, kind of those things that people do, but the venture firms, some of the smaller ones, no way.”
Giannini: Private market investors shrug off 100-basis-point spreads unlike public markets
“In the public world, in bonds or even in stocks, a basis point matters. 10 basis points, you're like salivating. In the private markets, we're kind of like, ho hum, a hundred basis points here, a hundred basis points there, no big deal, who cares?”
Giannini: Most investors are probably under-allocated to infrastructure and real assets
“I think you look at real assets, and traditionally infrastructure has had an inflation component, and most investors are probably under allocated to infrastructure and real assets.”
Giannini: US private equity international deployment peaked and is pulling back
“I think that we probably peaked on international investing a couple years ago. I think there is a little bit of a pullback, depending geographically who the investor is, but from the United States perspective, certainly there's been a pullback because of geopo…”
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,…”
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 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: 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…”
Giannini: 30% of private equity deals historically are sponsor-to-sponsor exits
“30% of deals in private equity, and this is over time, have gone from one general partner to another.”