Three years ago, we created our summits to bring together leaders to connect and learn. Two years ago, Rahul and I started advising a few managers together, and this year we added video content to our library. Each of these has been an incremental enhancement to serving this incredible community. But what we have in store next isn't something we wanted to do. It's something we felt we needed. We're changing the name of the show and platform subtly from Capital Allocators to Capital Alligators. Our research shows that in order for us to continue to grow, we need to reach a broader demographic, and our new name and logo will do just that. You'll have to trust me. I've been fighting this tooth and nail with our team, but I believe in the business aphorism, grow or die, and the data we gathered told a clear story. When the facts change, I guess I have to change my mind too. Now, this isn't totally off-base either. From the many conversations I've had with managers and allocators, it's become clear that what I thought I knew about their relationship with each other is just flat-out wrong. It's just not the case that GPs care about LPs or vice versa. They don't actually care about partnerships either. Instead, what's become clearer and clearer over time is that the almighty dollar wins. This business is about returns, full stop. And it's also about job risk, the CYA that comes from making sure you stay in the seat you're in for as long as you can. These are harsh truths I think we all know, but haven't wanted to say aloud. So there you have it. You'll see our new logo on the show starting today, renamed Capital Alligators, to better reflect the predators in our midst. Thanks so much for spreading the word about the April Fool's Day joke on capital allocators. Or is it capital alligators? Please enjoy my conversation with Megan Reynolds. Megan, it's great to see you.

Thanks so much for having me, Dad. I

would love you to take me through your journey that's landed you ultimately at Altimeter. Sure.

Happy to. So I started my career at Goldman Sachs, spent 10 years at Goldman. Very lucky to start my career in private equity and alternative investments at the time that asset class was just beginning exponential growth. Spent decade there, always focused on the investor side of the business, product management, fundraising, campaign management, investor relations, jack of all trades. After 10 years, I was recruited to join TPG. Very lucky to spend the next decade there as alternative investments expanded, grew, and we had the advent of big multi-product platforms and mega firms, of which TPG was one of them. So I joined the firm when it was $40 billion in assets. At its peak, when I left, it was about $125 billion. That's $240 billion today. And in 2021, I joined Brad Gerstner at Altimeter, which is a technology-focused investment firm, to help Brad really change the face of his investor relations, capital formation, in what I think is one of the most interesting places to be in the world right now, which is technology. I'd

love to dive in a little bit on each of those three platforms and how you've thought about the role. So you're starting at Goldman, big investment bank, big operation. What did you see in terms of that capital formation role in that seat? I

was very lucky in that it's a huge organization, but I was part of a very entrepreneurial group. We were building from the ground up. We were creating marketing materials from scratch. We were creating reporting and a fundraising function for an asset class that was new to most institutional investors and high net worth investors in the world. The exposure to private equity and venture capital for most institutional investors when I started there was probably less than 1% on average. And by the time I left, it was probably five or 10. So you can imagine the growth and the transformation that was happening. But I was doing it as part of a larger organization that had a very established sales function. We had distribution coverage all over the world. There was deep investor knowledge. The reach was very broad. It was organized by channel, meaning type of investors, endowment and foundations, consultants, pensions. And I learned about the nuances between all of those different types of investors from those salespeople. And they knew how to run a campaign very distinctly. It is a machine. And you learned from being a part of a very well-oiled machine. I

don't want to say you were a cog in the wheel, but that was a big, strong wheel.

Interacting with the capital sources for the firm, people that were running communications, managing any sort of transparency. I was hire number five or six on that team. And for many years, it was three or four people. You can imagine what needed to be built at a time that the firm was trying to move from private equity into credit, into real estate, into growth. We had to very quickly apply some form and function and structure and hire in order to accomplish what we needed to accomplish. And it was learnings from Goldman that we were able to apply. And there were a few of us that had come from that big Goldman Sachs infrastructure and other banks. That was certainly not by mistake. It was by design because they needed to establish those processes inside the organization. So

when you show up, you're drinking out of a fire hose. Somehow, even though there weren't people in the role, there was $40 billion in assets, probably hundreds of LPs, questions coming in. And then you have to go try to build the infrastructure to help the firm grow as it did. You mentioned some of the components, but what was it when you started to 10 years later when you left that created the base of what that infrastructure became?

Ted, just to overlay the fire hose that we were drinking from, I wanted to say most of our clients hated us at that moment because it was 2010. Just on the back of the financial crisis, TPG had raised a $20 billion fund that it started to deploy very quickly into mega buyout deals right before Lehman fell and the financial crisis began. The first deal in that fund was Washington Mutual, which went to zero before the capital was called. That is the framework. I had no idea. I really respected the firm. Goldman was an investor. I knew people there. All of the talent from Goldman was going to places like TPG. I thought this was the best job that I could possibly have and to build something from scratch. But it was somewhat of a hostile environment when I stepped in. What we needed to build was basically three things that I think now define what is the role of capital formation. We had to establish strong investor relations. That's just the administrative layer of how does a client efficiently interact with an organization to get its annual reporting, to attend an investor meeting, to update its address when it needs its capital calls sent to someone new. that at that point was built on very limited infrastructure. There's what I would call product management, which is how you source capital for a given strategy. What is the right capital base for the investment strategy that I wanna pursue? Who are the right investors for that strategy? What is the campaign around that? And as the capital gets invested, is the strategy reflecting what your investors expect? There is an involvement from people in my role that around the course of how a fund gets invested, that where you constantly need to weave that in to the investment strategy, and you need to communicate that in some way back to your investors. The third piece of it is what I would call relationship management, distribution, sales. How do you raise new capital? How do you build new relationships? How do you maintain relationships and putting some organization around that? Before

you're able to jump into all of that, you can't quite gloss over jumping into a firm that you think is going to be great, that's getting crushed by the markets. What happened in that period of time as you're trying to build out some of this infrastructure where your clients don't like you, you can't imagine what fundraising is going to be like, and the relationships may have soured a bit because of performance in the short term.

You learn so much in those moments. I tell all of junior people that I work with or people that I mentor, if shit goes wrong in an organization, start listening and just hang on tight and write everything down. Because I look back at that moment in time and so much of what I've learned about how to communicate well, how to respond to investors' needs and how to be resilient as an organization came from that time. We had to do what we called at the time a contrition tour, which was essentially David Bonderman and Jim Coulter traveling all around the world apologizing to our investors. We gave people an option to take their money out. We gave people an option to reduce their commitment. It was a $20 billion fund, so we still had a lot to work with. But those were the types of motions that we had to undertake in order to start to turn around relationships. It was humbling for a lot of people around the organization, but I think it made the organization so much stronger at the end of the day. 10 years, we had very high NPS scores from the clients that we did retain and the client relationships that we built over time that came from the increased transparency, the increased humility, the personal connections that you needed to make during that time to build from the bottom. How

much of the success of that effort do you feel could have come from the bounce back that started in 2009? Not

as much as you would think. I don't think that performance is sufficient. First of all, we're in private markets, so it takes a very long time to bounce back. And we didn't have the time because the opportunity set in some of these other asset classes that we wanted to expand into was so immediate and tactical. The credit opportunity was in 2009 to build. The talent acquisition strategy that was happening by the firm because of the displacement of so many talented investors from other banks and other institutions that had faltered. That was the now. And so we didn't have the opportunity to wait for a performance bounce back. All of it came from great communication and great relationship building when I think back about that.

Yeah. As you do think back, was there an example of maybe a meeting that you had, that you had some trepidation going in? And because of the nature of that humility and that transparency, you felt a real shift in someone who might not have been happy with you going in and then was excited about where the direction of the firm was headed coming out? I

recall a very specific meeting with a California state pension plan, one of the big ones. You can imagine the boardroom with 30 people. I'm with Jim Coulter. I'm with some of the other investors from the TPG Capital team. I'm with the relationship manager. And I was very lucky to be in the room just representing product and product strategy and prepared to go through details to the extent that we went there. But the first 25 minutes of the meeting were just venting. It was an hour long meeting. It might have been even 35 or 40 minutes. powered group of people in the room, including Jim Coulter, who is an incredible leader in investment management and has many things to bring to the table in a discussion around private equity and TPG. But Jim just sat and listened with great humility. And that is the biggest lesson that I took away from that moment is you can't move forward until you really understand where someone is coming from and letting them voice their concerns and their frustration is so critical. As

you went to help build TPG from the $40 billion when you got there to triple that size when you left. What did you see that worked in the addition of adjacent investment strategies? What

works best and what I would still say to people as they're building new businesses is you cannot just fundraise for the sake of fundraising. It has to come from a very tangible opportunity set that is immediate and actionable. And what I mean by that, it is not enough to say we took this team from Goldman Sachs who ran the special situations group there and aren't they very talented and we're going to build what we built there now here at TPG under the banner of TPG Special Situations, which is now called Sixth Street. It was coming to people with a specific list of opportunities and a specific hunting ground to say, you don't want to miss this opportunity. This is a market opportunity that's tangible today, bottoms up based on everything what we're seeing. This is the amount of capital that we need to go after it. And this is why it has a place in your portfolio, even though no one really understood private credit. People understand deals. They understand actionable opportunities. It's not enough to be hand wavy and say we deserve to be in a market because we've got a great group of people. What

were some of the maybe experiments or strategies that TPG tried to pursue that didn't get the legs that a 6th Street did in your time there? We

had very few failures, which is good. We tried to scale biotech. And if you look back to 2010 to 2020, there was a biotech winter happening in the asset class. It made it very difficult to scale. And once you have difficult scaling, then you have some team dysfunction, people get frustrated. And as a snowball, that starts once you have trouble getting real traction. My reflection there is not because we made any footfalls on our marketing. My reflection there is because there was a winter going on in the asset class and the macro matters a lot. That's the key question. I look at the last few years and make a comparison. People that wanted to raise growth, it doesn't matter how great your growth tracker was, very few people able to raise growth in late 2022 and 2023. The tailwinds just aren't in your favor. It doesn't matter how good you are.

So you have this great run, great success at TPG. What led you to leave and join Brad? And now what's effectively a single sector, maybe you could say single strategy firm. When

I left TPG, I was co-leading the fundraising group there, which was a team of about 40 or 50 people with a partner of mine that I had worked with. From the time that I was an intern at Goldman. It was a dream role for me and it was fantastic. But I realized that I craved an entrepreneurial role. Again, I craved a building and growing versus a scaling to the moon. And TPG was on the precipice of going public. You could see where that was heading. And when I really did the soul searching that we all did during COVID, I came out on the other side of it. And so I took some time to reflect on that, helped some friends in the venture community that were thinking about their fund. And I was thinking about what I was going to do next when I was approached by Brad. Altimeter seemed like a really unique fit for me, particularly because I had these curiosities around what was happening in venture as an asset class. There were clearly things happening in venture in 2020 and 21 that I saw so similar to what happened in buyout in 05, 06, 07, and the years that followed. And I had a thesis around that, what was going to happen to LPs, what was going to happen to venture firms. And Brad and I shared some great conversations around that. And so that with the combination of being able to work in technology, which is on the advent of AI, really created the best role that I could think of. Altimeter to level set is 30 people, very different than the several thousand and the tens of thousands that we had at Goldman.