Private Equity Spotlight

This episode is sponsored by AlixPartners The Disruption Matters special podcast miniseries is back for its fourth season, and this year, leading industry experts will discuss how private markets can still deliver growth, despite the headwinds of a revolution in tech, geopolitics and global markets. In our fourth episode this season, we focus on how best to drive innovation at portfolio companies, and how to ensure such efforts deliver on their promise. That means finding the Goldilocks level of structure that measures and substantiates the process, without smothering good ideas with bureaucracy. Guests include Lara Nemerov, a partner with Alix Partners; Jason McDannold, Americas co-leader of private equity at AlixPartners; Hoyoung Pak, chief AI officer at AlixPartners; John Griffin, a partner with the Sterling Group; and Ben Hanessian, a principal of Baird Capital’s portfolio operations.

This episode is sponsored by Brookfield In recent years, industrials and manufacturing companies have attracted relatively modest levels of interest from private equity managers. However, a reappraisal may now be overdue. In the US and other developed markets, trade tariffs and the need for more resilient supply chains are driving a resurgence in homegrown industrials. And given the advent of new technologies – including artificial intelligence – the opportunities around reimagining processes and finding valuable efficiencies could be huge. In this episode, Anuj Ranjan, CEO of Brookfield’s private equity group, and David Bonasia, a managing partner and head of operations for the firm’s Americas group, explain why industrials could offer excellent openings for PE investors. After all, companies in this space tend to avoid the drastic swings in valuations that have been problematic for investors in other sectors, they say. And with AI on hand to boost value creation efforts, there’s plenty of upside to capture.

This episode is sponsored by Lexington Partners, Proskauer and StepStone Group and first appeared on Secondaries Investor's Second Thoughts podcast The secondaries market is benefitting from private markets' push into the private wealth space, with managers either launching secondaries-focused vehicles or secondaries making up a meaningful component of many evergreen funds. Evergreen funds raised $16 billion in the first half of 2025 alone, 60 percent of which is dedicated to secondaries capital, according to estimates from Campbell Lutyens included in its H1 Secondary Market Overview Report. In this episode, Secondaries Investor editor Madeleine Farman is joined by Lexington Partners' Taylor Robinson and StepStone Group's Brian Borton, both of whose organisations run evergreen vehicles deploying into the secondaries market. Proskauer’s head of its registered fund group John Mahon also joins the conversation. In the wide-ranging conversation, Mahon, Borton and Robinson discuss appropriate ways to structure these vehicles, where to invest evergreen capital, regulatory updates, the long-term trajectory for these vehicles, and how they may impact the secondaries market.

At a time when distributions from private equity funds are slowing and GPs are holding on to assets for longer instead of selling them and returning cash to investors, many LPs may be wondering whether to hold off on making fresh commitments to PE funds. While this might be tempting, it's just about the worst thing an investor can do, says Tim Yates, president and chief executive of Commonfund Outsourced CIO, which offers investment advice and manages capital for non-profit perpetual pools of assets, such as colleges, university endowments, foundations and other charitable organisations. The firm over the summer published a white paper, Mind the Gap: The Strategic Risk of Skipping a Vintage in Private Equity, which explores the downsides of making inconsistent commitments to PE funds. "We continue to believe there's return generation potential from private markets and that those over time will outperform public markets," Yates says. "You need great managers to be able to do that, [but] it's really hard and can be expensive to time vintage your cycles." In this episode, Yates discusses the three core principles that private markets investors should keep at the front of their mind when faced with a challenging investment environment; why the secondaries market isn't necessarily a panacea for vintage diversification; the risks of skipping a vintage; and whether manager selection is more important than consistent annual commitments.

This episode is sponsored by Arrow Global and first appeared on The PERE Podcast Germany’s property market is facing the highest insolvency rate in Europe. Years of cheap credit and rising prices encouraged aggressive development, but when interest rates jumped, buyers paused, sales collapsed and projects ran out of cash. The result: a wave of bankruptcies across the sector. However, in this episode, CEO of Arrow Global Germany Bernhard Hansen explains that there’s opportunity within this dislocation. Stalled projects and smaller developments are waiting for investors with the expertise and capital to finish them. With housing demand far outpacing supply, especially in cities like Munich, he believes there is still strong long-term potential. That potential of course comes with challenges: stricter sustainability rules, tougher financing conditions, and wary buyers mean projects take longer and require deeper due diligence. Yet Hansen is optimistic. International investors and alternative lenders are stepping in, and he says the correction is less of an ending, and more of a recalibration of Germany’s real estate market.

The rise of semi-liquid and evergreen funds is reshaping private equity, with over $30 billion raised since 2020. A deep dive into the 2-and-20 fee model raises questions about its relevance for these new structures. The discussion highlights the need for alignment between managers and investors, examining how management fees impact capital deployment. Unique fee structures differentiate semi-liquid funds from traditional models, focusing on total returns and the treatment of realized and unrealized gains.

This episode is sponsored by AlixPartners The Disruption Matters special podcast miniseries is back for its fourth season, and this year, leading industry experts discuss how private markets can deliver “weatherproof growth”, despite the headwinds of a tech revolution, geopolitics and volatile global markets. In our third episode this season, we focus on how best to decide where, when and how to use AI tools to deliver growth, no matter the weather. These are groundbreaking technologies, but like any other tool, they’re only as good as the people using them. Even today, the buck still stops at the human leadership of the portfolio company and the private equity firm. Guests include Jeremy Lehman, a director at Alix Partners; Jason McDannold, Americas co-leader of private equity at AlixPartners; Hoyoung Pak, global co-leader, AI and data, at AlixPartners; Sanjay Ravi, managing director at Partners Group; Lou D’Ambrosio, the co-lead of Goldman Sach’s global portfolio operations and value accelerator; Cory Eaves, partner and head of portfolio operations at BayPine; and Jay Park, the co-founder and managing partner of Prysm Capital. For further reading on this show’s topics: Practical AI For Private Equity Operating Partners | AlixPartners

Tariff turmoil, trade wars and real conflict in the Middle East – these are just some of the challenges private equity participants have had to navigate so far this year. Speaking to senior editor Adam Le, David Gross, co-managing partner at Bain Capital, said volatility and uncertainty is nothing new for investors. “I’d be the first to agree that it’s a very disorienting time period,” Gross said. He points out, however, that volatility and uncertainty have characterised almost the past two decades. “Since the global financial crisis, we’ve seen heightened volatility in the investing world. If you just look at the VIX [volatility index] and other metrics, and the market windows that are open in the public market, you’ve seen heightened volatility." Gross, who has been with the firm for 25 years and is also managing partner of Asia, discusses what effective investors need in uncertain environments, the attraction of defence investing in Europe, the exit environment, and why the firm has no current plans to launch a secondaries investment business.

This episode is sponsored by Bouwinvest Real Estate Investors and first appeared on The PERE Podcast The Dutch residential market has remained resilient despite economic turbulence and rising interest rates and is now emerging as a prime destination for international investors. In this episode, Paul van Stiphout of Bouwinvest Real Estate Investors and Jorrit Arissen of Van Lanschot Kempen Investment Management unpack the forces driving the market’s strength – from a deep-rooted rental culture and robust occupancy levels to increasing demand for senior and student housing. With the Netherlands facing a housing shortfall, Van Stiphout and Arissen discuss how foreign capital will be essential to bridge the gap. They also explore how demographic trends and public funding cuts are creating opportunities in niche sectors, such as senior living, which saw investment jump to €724 million in 2024.

This episode is sponsored by Pomona Capital and Proskauer and first appeared on Secondaries Investor's Second Thoughts podcast While the Trump administration's tariff announcements and the subsequent unfurling of uncertainty globally does create some headaches, it also creates a tailwind for the LP-led secondaries market. "What the market has trouble adjusting to is uncertainty. And what happens in times of uncertainty, like the times we're dealing in now, is that [M&A and IPO] transactions tend to pull away," Michael Granoff, founder and chief executive of Pomona Capital, said in this episode. "That uncertainty does tend to push more sellers into the secondary market... And so, in a funny way, it's not that we're uncorrelated to the world – we are – but on the other side of things, all of those things that keep us up at night that we're talking about actually create more opportunity for a buyer in the secondaries market." While market participants continued to put their heads down and get deals done that were far along when the tariff announcements occurred, secondaries professionals are still working to digest second- and third-order impacts, Galen Lewis, a partner in Proskauer's private funds group, explained. "Normally, distress of some sort is something that creates additional volume in the secondaries market." In this far-reaching discussion, Granoff and Lewis discuss a variety of issues affecting the LP-led market and the drivers of underlying deal volume, including the regulatory developments that may spur or hinder LP-led portfolio sales in the coming year, the rise of '40 Act capital, as well as new entrants.