Opinion

Anyone remember Curtis Sharp? A long time ago, Curtis won a $5 million New York Lottery jackpot and he spent the rest of the 1980s sashaying around New York in bespoke suits and bowler hats attracting crowds wherever he went. Curtis was the Man. Charismatic and impish, Curtis was the Toast of the Town. I […]

For those of you who know me, you know that returns, performance and benchmarking issues are near and dear to me – after all, my first child’s initials are IRR. I swear it was not intentional – just call it karma. I recently took our second child, (no weird acronyms here to make fun of, […]

72 virgins. We all know who gets them. No, I’m not talking about Al Queda or the Taliban. I’m looking closer to home, right here in our VC backyard. One the industry’s most venerable VC firms yanks the megaphone from the hands of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to pronounce its […]

I believe that there are natural reasons for commercial banks to get out of private equity investing: Commercial bank on-balance sheet capital is quite different from that of I-banks, and the issue of conficts for I-banks is real. First some perspective – I worked for a commercial bank in the US for 15 years, the […]

There are some interesting technologies that I have come across in private equity that I wanted to talk about and would love to hear feedback from you all. In structured products involving private equity, there are some compelling technologies involving cash flow modeling, risk analysis and other related tools. For instance, I know of one […]

I’ve heard that TPG is starting a “small buyout fund” or a mid-market fund. We’re not investors, but I would think LPs would be troubled unless they are adding some kind of new team under the TPG brand (which would be a separate issue, and something the Draper folks might have an opinion on). I […]

When you look at the classic risk-return charts presented by general consultants, private equity is the proud resident of that top right quadrant – often so far out there it appears lonely. Why does this matter or why should we care? Well, it is this perception of private equity that determines its positioning inside investors’ portfolios. Today, […]

It’s difficult to imagine what the group did to pretty-up Hertz for a public sale in that amount of time. So is this yet another complaint about mega-funds flipping companies while adding little value? No, because as Canada Bill Jones famously said, “it’s immoral to let a sucker keep his money.”

I’ve always thought that entrepreneurs don’t really understand VCs, and I’ve always been SURE that (most) VCs don’t understand investment bankers and the public stock market. So I guess I wasn’t all that surprised when I heard two opposing comments from different life sciences VCs at a recent conference. The first argued that today’s public […]

After sorting through about ten potential launch topics, I decided to write my first post on the growing concentration in mega and large-cap leveraged buyout funds in the U.S market. One could make a convincing argument that the returns from this small group of funds will be less variable than the returns from the broader […]