E387: Where Alpha Hides in Private Equity | Josh Adams

What if the best private equity opportunities are hiding inside businesses that everyone else thinks are too complicated to touch? In this episode, I sit down with Josh Adams, Partner at OpenGate Capital, to discuss why complexity has become one of the firm's greatest competitive advantages. Josh explains how OpenGate built a specialization around corporate carve-outs, why Europe offers more inefficiency than North America, and how operational improvements drive value creation in today's market. We also discuss sourcing, specialization, alignment, decision-making, and why focus has become increasingly important as private equity continues to evolve.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Complexity to us, it comes in the form of these complex, unloved businesses, orphaned assets, that ultimately have led to the businesses being really challenged. We think about ourselves as not financial engineers, but operational engineers. How do you create value? There has to be an alpha generating kind of returns. And that to us has always come in the form of what's in your control, operational improvements.

• 0:32David Weisburd?

  Josh, you're a partner at Open Gate Capital, billion dollar firm based in New York and Paris. Before we started recording, you mentioned that you guys are shifting more towards the European market. Why is that?

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we've been investing since 2005 and originally founded back in Los Angeles, which is part of the DNA of myself and Andrew Nikud, the founder of the firm, who came from Platinum Equity, which also is based there in Los Angeles. There's a little bit of history of Europe. Europe has a tremendous amount of complexity, one of which that we've navigated since 2007.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  We opened an office in Paris, which is a little bit of a unique place to do it. Being a Brit, it wasn't something I was that comfortable with at the time. But joined in 2012, we quickly saw the amount of opportunity in the European market. Later, we've now seen many firms move to Europe, saying, oh, this is a great opportunity to be there. And with all due respect, you've seen a lot of American suitcaseing back and forth there, but you need to have a local presence with locals on the ground and in Europe more so than anywhere. So for me, it's been a great opportunity of what we invest in, complexity. So operationally focused firm, investing in industrial corporate carve outs has been one of our biggest things over the last 20 years. In Europe, they're plentiful and the complexity is plentiful. So it really has become a bigger opportunity for us.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  So still investing in North America, but also shifting, I would say to 70, 80% of our time now in Europe. And I've now actually relocated from the North American market back to Europe as well.

• 2:04David Weisburd?

  Why do you lean into complexity?

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Because it's a differentiator at the end of the day. I mean, if you want to step back and think holistically about how capital allocators and investors think. Over time, they are now looking more and more for people who can differentiate themselves. We, as a firm, have done a great job of doing that now, having, you know, kind of learned some lessons along the way of, you know, what are we really good at and how do we get there? We had 10 years of investing our own capital, which is a pretty unique story. And then in the 10 years of institutional capital that we've put to work, that in itself has allowed us to say, who are we and what are we very good at? And ultimately, the response of that has been, we play into this level of complexity where others shy away from it.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  So complexity to us, it comes in the form of these complex, multi-jurisdictional corporate carve-outs, embedded businesses within large corporations, unloved businesses, orphan assets, whatever you want to call them, that ultimately have led to the businesses being really challenged in a market because they haven't had the ability to grow, to have the capital to be put behind them, or they've gone through some market environmental shift. We've been able to come in, really push on those situations, pull on those opportunities, and create standalone entities for a strategic buyer down the line. So we see more of that in Europe. And I think it's also fair to say that the North American market, which I'm so grateful that I've had 13, 14 years of living here and breathing this,

• 3:31Speaker 00

  is such an efficient market that the inefficiency of Europe is where opportunity lies, and that's created a great opportunity for OpenGate.

• 3:38David Weisburd?

  I had this three-hour dinner with one of the chairman of the largest banks in the US, multi-billionaire, epic investor. And the way he looks at Alpha is he looks for things that are boring and hard, and ideally both. If you take a step back and if you think about where is Alpha in the private markets, or in private equity specifically, it's the areas that are hard, meaning it takes a lot of work. It's not an auction process that you just submit your bid and, you know, go back to the golf range. And it's also things that are boring, things that might not be exciting, things that you might not want to talk about at a cocktail party.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  I think that's true. I can echo those comments. Like, I think we think about ourselves as not financial engineers, but operational engineers. And the only way you create alpha today in this market, and you have to step back again, like what market we in post-GFC, we've had a shift from a cost of capital point of view. Interest rates are changing drastically, global macro dynamics happening politically as well. They are all kind of leaning into creating value. And how do you create value? It has to be an alpha generating kind of returns. And that, to us, has always come in the form of what's in your control, operational improvements, so value creation plan. I said, well, you've checked the bingo mark of value creation plan, but tell me what you believe that is. Because to the me, that means a

• 4:56Speaker 00

  lot of different things. And there's one thing about saying it, but how do you actually execute upon it? But we believe in a value creation plan of a carve out from a standalone to create a standalone entity, there are multiple pitfalls, there are multiple traps that you can fall into. If you don't do things correctly pretty soon, it doesn't just become boring, it becomes a bit of a minefield. And you have to be mindful of how you work through that. So for me, the operational kind of engineering platform that we've created, we've done 37 corporate carve outs in 20 years. It's been a labor of love now, creating our own playbook, understanding the business, and going to places where other people will shy away from, which is back to somewhat boring for some people. But for us, it's been, you know, it's been very rewarding.

• 5:40David Weisburd?

  Boring for some people, exciting for others. You guys have one of the most unique founding stories in terms of how you started from Platinum Equity. Talk to me about that and how that affects how you are as an organization today.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Obviously, I'll speak on Andrew's behalf here, and he won't mind me saying so. I think Andrew joined Platinum in 2001, left in 2004.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  He spent time, actually ironically, in LA and in Paris. Their original office was in Paris for Europe. It later moved to London, which is when I joined them. So it was kind of a nice kind of sliding door moment between Andrew and I. We didn't work together, but we got to know each other pretty quickly. The DNA that you learn through Platinum, honestly, it's an incredible firm. And you see where they are today. And you have huge credit because they've gone into other strategies like credit and others that other big firms have had to do too. But at the core of that, the DNA of how they go to market was origination, execution, and operations, three distinct pillars, which Andrew built at Open Gate. He took that founding principle and said, I've learned something here and I think this is replicable. So all of that led to foundation, but also an opportunity.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  So Andrew left in 2004, set up Open Gate in 2005. And his story is remarkable. I mean, Andrew, you know, grew up in Vancouver, moved to Los Angeles, went to USC. Basically, at the age of 25, 26, basically, he took $30,000 out of his 401K, rolled it into a formation of a company and started trying to do a deal, found someone who wanted to back him on the deal, realized that he could actually just flip the business pretty quickly and take out a significant portion of capital in a deal, almost in the form of a deal finder, if you will, and introducing a deal to someone, which was then the foundation of Andrew having capital to go and source deals, to go meet management teams, to go do diligence.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  That was in 2005, 2006, 2007. We, he brought on my partner, Julien Legretz. Julien's based out of Paris. He founded the European team and has done a fantastic job in Europe. And the story of that from 2005 to 15 was we basically invested our own capital. And for full transparency, I joined in 2012. So my story of those earlier years is I'm intimately aware of them, but they did a fantastic job of rolling all of the recycling, all of the capital they had, because it's all they had. 100% GP commit, everything they had was in that business. And they put that into recycling, any dividend. They didn't take dividends. They just wanted to use that capital to go and put in and make several other investments.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  I was there for the back end of it between 2005 and 2015. And it turned out to be an incredible story. You know, it was Europe, US. And this is kind of part of the journey. It was never really. What can we do? It was always a case of how can I take from one? If I put one dollar in, how can I make five? But it wasn't really about the equity story. That's something that came a little bit later for us. We went in by doing, coming in, carving businesses out, standing them alone, and then creating a larger enterprise by improvements of the business.

• 8:46David Weisburd?

  There are many ways making money on the buy.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was very like, I'll be candid, with value investors. To find value means you have to be willing to step into complexity and take on things that people wouldn't do. And in two thousand and seven and eight, if you go kind of all the cast their mind back to that timeframe, the global financial crisis was on us and the story of them buying a business in the automotive sector, and they turned that around and made a good outcome of it two and a half years later. So they sold it to a strategic. So they basically found a system that worked. And then in two thousand and twelve, when I joined, we then kind of accelerated that by bringing in myself and a few other individuals who I would say had more institutional background, had been at larger firms and funds. And then we really kind of accelerated that over the next three years.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  That was the vision to say, we should go raise a fund.

• 9:35David Weisburd?

  It's one of the second order effects of having a specialty is you start to be known in the market as you do this kind of thing. And the more unique it is, the more of a market position you have. Did you find that over a certain amount of time? You became this complex corporate carve out firm and people would just find you for the next two?

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, we never relied on that, to be candid. When I joined the firm, I came in and led the origination team. We always had a mindset of, we always had this imposter syndrome that we shouldn't be in the room for these conversations, but we are. And the reason why we were is because how we went to market. So we went and spoke to the corporates directly. And we never called the corporate and said, hey, Mr. Corporate, what are you selling? Because ten, fifteen, twenty other people were doing that. This is back in two thousand and twelve. Now fifty people are trying to do that, probably all through AI. What we did at that time was we were there focused on speaking to the corporate, head of M and A, CFO, the CEO of these public companies, and talking some about their business and their sectors. So we quickly took a sector approach. Which also became a distraction, which we should come back to because it's a fascinating

• 10:37Speaker 00

  lesson learnt on our side as well. But predominantly in front of these larger corporations to understand what their M&A activity was. Not what they were selling, but what they were looking at, what they were looking to do. So we were playing the long game. And so every single investment that we have made from 2006, '07 to to date, there's always been a story and a connection. We weren't just waiting for a banker to call us and go, "Oh, you guys are the corporate car buyer guys." I mean, then they're obviously making 20, 30 other calls. So we were in front of the corporate ahead of time. And there's some great stories of that leading to transactions that have come to fruition, where we've been the buyer. There was a story where we bought a business in 2016, '17, where we were in head of the

• 11:20Speaker 00

  process, we were way in front of it, speaking to the corporate team, in front of the board, presenting to them what we wanted to do and buy. And it was all because this was a business, so this was a zinc chemical business, not the most super sexy business to many people, but the parent company had sold their larger upstream part of their zinc business, their zinc mining business. So, okay, so you have two distinct divisions below that. What are you doing with them? It was just a simple question that if you're an equity research analyst, you would ask as well. What are your plans to do with the downstream elements of the business you just sold? We were in front of that, we had that conversation, we presented a scenario where we could buy both. They said, "No, no, we can't sell both." "Okay, no problem." But they wanted to sell one. We said, "Okay, great, well, let us take a look."

• 12:03Speaker 00

  We take some information, we start to enjoy, you know, back and forth conversations, we're going back to Brussels, which is where they're based, to have these meetings. And then the CEO one day pops up and says, on his public earnings, "We're considering alternatives for our zinc chemical business." So then, process stops, every man and his dog picks up the phone and says, "Well, I just saw that you're thinking about selling that business." They hired an investment bank, they hadn't hired an investment bank. And so we're now saying to ourselves, "Are we going to be able to compete?" And we did. So we were in front of the process and we had that connectivity. And most importantly, we had the credibility. Of doing so many corporate carve-outs and saying to people, this is what we're going to do, and we actually do it. That was a credibility that I think gave us a big step

• 12:45Speaker 00

  up in the European market, both with the banks involved, because there was some real banks involved. And so sourcing to us was a very critical item of how do we get in front of the corporate community as quickly as possible. And then we always talk about this as a bit of a, we're just talking off-camera about the Knicks and what they've done this year, but the triangle offense, right? The Chicago Bulls. The Chicago Bulls. Nineteen ninety. Exactly. And being a Brit, I got pretty clued up on this pretty quickly, but Andrew loved this analogy. He's a huge basketball guy. But it was very quickly the triangle offense and how do we work? So it was corporate focused, it was executives-led, so working with executives in the industry who are subject matter experts. And then you have the investment

• 13:28Speaker 00

  banking community, which is where you triangulate all of that information to make sure the intelligence you're gathering through that process of sourcing these deals really resonates and you have a higher success rate. But it's also, and this is probably the British part of me, which I think it took Andrew a little bit of time to get used to doing that, was where I was just like, we're not going to push as hard as, quote-unquote, the American kind of mindset may be. It was more consultative, and I think that really resonated. And as I said, it's put us in good stead. That's really credit to the team here, so.

• 13:58David Weisburd?

  Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction, but today investors are asked to cover more companies, move faster, and do it with leaner teams. With AlphaSense AI-led expert calls, their TGS call service team sources experts based on your research criteria and lets the AI interviewer get to work. The magic is in the AI interviewer, purpose-built and knowledgeable-based information to conduct high-quality, context-rich conversations on your behalf, acting as a trusted extension of your team. Then they take it one step further. Your call transcripts flow natively into your AlphaSense experience and become queryable, searchable, and comparable, so your primary insights plug directly into earnings props, digital work streams, and

• 14:40David Weisburd?

  pitch books with zero tool switching. And with AlphaSense expert call services, the AI-led expert calls are just One option because we know the importance of a hybrid expert research approach. AI for coverage and efficiency, humans for complexity and conviction. It's the institutional edge that scales research without scaling headcount. For hedge funds, that means validating thesis assumptions across dozens of experts before earnings instead of a handful. For private equity, it means faster pre IOI scans and deeper commercial diligence. For investment banks and asset managers, that means pulling real operator perspectives straight into models and sector positioning without disconnected tools or manual handoffs. All of it lives inside the AlphaSense platform, trusted by 75% of the world's top hedge funds

• 15:25David Weisburd?

  alongside filings, broker research, news, and more than 240,000 expert call transcripts, turning raw conversations into comparable, auditable insight. Take advantage of AlphaSense AI-led expert calls now. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Learn more at alpha-sense.com/HowIInvest. I want to distill the distinction in your sourcing versus traditional sourcing. There's different variations of sourcing, but what you're talking about is a lot of private equity firms will wait until bankers reach out to them or they'll come to corporates and they'll ask them, what are you selling today? Your process was different. Maybe you could distill as a layperson why your process was different

• 16:07David Weisburd?

  and what exactly about your process was what led to the excellence?

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Great question. I think ultimately what you see for most people is they get a banker pitch book, list of opportunities, we think these guys may do this. And what bankers are trying to do at the end of the day is to spark something that they can go back to their client on or a prospective client and say, we have a potential buyer. We were doing that ourselves. So we are in front of the corporates, spending time with them to get an advantage in the deal because back to that imposter syndrome, we didn't think we should have been in the deal because there was other people who had large funds and firms who could easily do these deals, but. We had to present ourselves differently, quickly and efficiently. So our biggest way that we focus our time and energy is speed and certainty. That's how we win deals, speed and certainty. But if we're doing the upfront work of being

• 16:55David Weisburd?

  Meaning speed, meaning you act faster than your competitors who are larger funds, have multiple layers of governance?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 17:01David Weisburd?

  And certainty, you're more likely to close or you have a reputation of closing?

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Correct, especially with the corporate community. You can continue to say, and we've bought businesses from multiple sellers multiple times. So we have a credibility in the market. And so we leaned into it with specifically with the corporates by getting in front of them, positioning ourselves early, being a known quantity to them. So we weren't just saying, hey, Mr. Corporate, what are you selling? And picking up the phone. We know the head of M and A, we know the corporate strategy team, we know the CFO. And we've had a dialogue with them over the years. And so that has really compounded over time.

• 17:35David Weisburd?

  Obviously, these M and A professionals are always thinking about what they're selling. You were a thought partner for them before they decided to sell. How are you front running that process?

• 17:43Speaker 00

  It's research driven. You're spending time ahead of time, you're looking at

• 17:46David Weisburd?

  Are you ever telling them what they should be thinking about selling as well?

• 17:49Speaker 00

  You don't like to tell people what to do, but it's you kind of plant a seed here and there. And I think that's helpful. Look, I think it's kind of the investment research is critical to it without question. But you are looking at what they've done and what they're doing. You're looking at the reporting of their businesses. But you're also kind of like now, and this has evolved. So I'm talking about originally in 2012, as we have evolved as a firm, we've become more sector focused. And that sector is within the industrials. The sphere in particular means that we can talk the language of a chemist in many deals. So on the chemistry side, we can go look at chemical deals and understand all the different nuances of those businesses. So we're now having an educated conversation with the corporate M and A guy or with the divisional lead of these businesses.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Sometimes we've gone to the divisional lead of the business unit that may be sold and built a relationship there, knowing that that will filter its way back up to the corporate M and A team. So it's all been intelligence led. And by the way, the investment banking community is a big part of that, too. I mean, friends of ours and mine that we've had now over the years, we're going to them and planting a seed with them, knowing that they're going to do the same thing. And so the triangle offense is that if people are coming together, then something will start to hit at some point. The Roger Federer kind of quotes of, you know, 51% of games, of matches he won. But the rest.

• 19:03David Weisburd?

  Dartmouth commencement.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Exactly. Well, incredible speech. I mean, it's still to this day, I think. But like, you look at those moments, like, we don't have that hit rate. Private equity, you don't. You typically have about a 5% to 10% hit rate on deals that you are in late stages on at certain points. And that, you want to increase the certainty of that over time. And for us, we've put that in a foundational way, an understanding of how we know the corporate and what's important to them.

• 19:28David Weisburd?

  Perhaps a dumb question, but certainty, why does that even matter if there's a banker process? 50 firms submit their offers. Why does it matter that you have certainty? Is it that some people win the auction, don't close?

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yes. Happens a lot because they tell them, what a lot of people will say and do, so there's two points to it. First of all, speed and certainty together is a very, very powerful kind of.

• 19:48David Weisburd?

  Even during an auction process?

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. The ability to move quickly and do the work and lean in on those things is incredibly important.

• 19:55David Weisburd?

  In many ways, speed is a subset of certainty.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 19:58David Weisburd?

  If you work really slowly, at some point, the deal might die.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And they turn around and say, well, you're not credible. The amount of times we're in a situation where they're saying, why have you not marked up?

• 20:06David Weisburd?

  Or you may not have capital, or all these downstream consequences.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  By the way, I'm going back and forth between the pre-fund stage and the institutional phase of our life. You know, in the early days, you had to be, appear to be doing everything to move very quickly. Later life, when you have, you know, the committed capital fund, you want to make sure you're doing that, and what we do. But, you know, we would pick out, because of what we did in the early days, we would pick a horse pretty quickly, and we'd go all in on it. This is what we're buying. We feel comfortable with this. The certainty point, back to that, your question, is some people will say that they can do a corporate carve out. They'll hire a big four county firm or someone. But the reality is, is that they don't. But if you look at everyone's websites and what we all do today, they all say they do corporate carve outs. So again, without.

• 20:49David Weisburd?

  And incentives there for them to do that is they want to show more deal firms.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  They want to see deals. And they've seen that.

• 20:54David Weisburd?

  They want this optionality.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  They've seen that the platinum equities of the world have created a tremendous amount of value for their investors and for themselves. By doing corporate carve outs. Corporate carve outs are unloved businesses where, you know, you're, if you can take that from a 30 million EBITDA to a 100 million EBITDA, which sounds a crazy leap of faith. But if you cleaned up a business to a strategic buyer who wants to buy or a private equity buyer, who, there's a tremendous amount of that today. So that value you're creating is significant enough for other people to say, oh, we can do this.

• 21:24David Weisburd?

  And oftentimes, these corporate carve outs are orphaned assets. No one's really invested and no one showed them love. So there, there's more upside. One of the theories that I'm evolving on private equity, venture capital, and these top managers is that what makes them great is not necessarily one or two things, although that's kind of the narrative that they put into the market. It's hundreds of little optimizations every day that they do that makes them better. And that just compounds over many years. To what extent do you believe that to be true?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Haven't been there now for 14, 15 years. I have seen, the reason why they continue to be so successful is kind of what you're saying is process. It's not about one individual. It's about a process.

• 22:02David Weisburd?

  Even less sexy than carve outs.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, honestly, what you're seeing today more than ever is private equity firms are now being consolidated into asset management companies. I mean, this has to be the theme, right? You look at LPs, we could talk for hours on this. When you look at how LPs have, their money has gone into private equity firms that have then been sold in secondary markets to different private equity firms, or being bought by other private equity firms, which is they're also invested in. The whole ecosystem has been changed drastically. And when you do that once, but then you do that 100 times and it compounds, to your point, it becomes a bit of an issue. And that issue now is becoming consolidated.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  What I mean by that is, you know, there's, there's a reason why LPs have gone, we don't want to write a $25 million check. We want to write a $250 million check. So we're going to write one, 250 versus 10 at 25. It's not just administrative. At that point, it's pretty simple, but it's also placing bigger bets in the bigger guys, the bigger, big firms we all know. And that in themselves, they've all now become true asset management companies. They are now buying insurance companies. They have their own bank.

• 23:09David Weisburd?

  It's even happening in venture capital.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  If someone shared that.

• 23:12David Weisburd?

  General catalyst is literally buying healthcare companies.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  It's amazing when you so they're now using their own balance sheets to go and do this as a management company, which credit to them. But what's going to have to change there? What really will come out of that, in my opinion, is specialist firms will continue to exist until potentially they're ever acquired by someone who says, we want that to happen. But ultimately, I do truly believe that Open Gate being a true specialist in what we do, corporate carve outs, is going to continue to grow in that environment because otherwise the whole market has shifted and they've gone to 10 private equity firms, asset management companies that now are the only guys in the game. So it's either that or option B, which is more the family office model, which is just pass, you know,

• 23:59Speaker 00

  kind of more patient capital, which they have a different cost of capital as well. So that can be a possible outcome. So I think your working thesis is a subject of a good title.

• 24:09David Weisburd?

  What is upstream of processes?

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Decision making and leadership.

• 24:13David Weisburd?

  Is it culture and hiring? Is there anything else?

• 24:15Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I would put those into the leadership.

• 24:18David Weisburd?

  Or maybe hiring and then culture is a subset of hiring.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of people lose sight of the importance of hiring, right? It's an incredibly important part of any business, any growth of business. Sometimes you're not trying to hire for the skill set anymore. You're trying to bring in the right person, which I think kind of gets lost in some larger organizations. Look, I'm a big fan, and I'm not just speaking in my own book, I'm just a big fan of smaller is better. And you've seen the growth of private equity now go, well, we want to be 500 million, we want to be 1.5 billion, we want to be 5 billion. Like, that's all good and everything, but the diminishing returns is pretty clear. I mean, the facts are out there. When you have a higher AUM or a higher fund, you know, the returns are being negatively correlated.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  So for me, I, okay, myself, Andrew and Julian, the three of us have always had a very clear distinction of let's do what we do well, and let's do it within in our own kind of ecosystem. Let's not try to be something bigger than we're not. We want to grow up to here and then just do what you do well. But that now has been allowing us to really focus on what we do. I mean, I've always had this mindset of like, the benefit of focus is immediate. The benefit of synergy is theoretical. Like, you need to have something you really hone in on. And we are as focused as we've ever been because The distractions have been distractions.

• 25:37David Weisburd?

  A couple of different things to unpack there. I've interviewed over 10 trillion in AUM from the LP side.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:43David Weisburd?

  So, once you've done that many interviews and talked to that many people, a lot of things become extremely obvious. And this whole trend of putting more capital behind fewer managers.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:53David Weisburd?

  Is one of the persistence trend in the private markets. And there's two reasons why that's happening. The first is that LPs are no longer fetishizing diversification as they once did. It's no longer seen as this infinitely free lunch and people understand the declining value of diversification. And the second one is fees. If you could write large checks, you could write smaller, smaller fees. That being said, paradoxically, the returns are probably going to actually even accelerate for smaller funds, specifically in private equity. Here's why. Intuitively, if you have more capital to deploy, you're going to get into the incrementally worse deals, you're going to go up market, all these things that hurt returns has helped. The lower middle market has outperformed large buyouts.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 26:36David Weisburd?

  That's actually only going to increase. And the reason for that is retail. 95% of retail capital today is in five firms.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:44David Weisburd?

  Five buyout firms.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:45David Weisburd?

  What does that mean? That means trillions and trillions of dollars are going into the large buyout firms. Where are they going to deploy that capital? They're not going to go into the public markets, they have to go into the private markets. And what is downstream of large buyout? It's the lower middle market and smaller buyouts. So those assets are going to get a trillion dollars in supply, waiting on the sidelines, trying to pick off those assets. So not only are we going to see declining returns in the large buyouts, we're also going to see this almost infinite supply of institutional capital going after the same smaller, smaller buyout assets.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  This is where it kind of gets a little dystopian. You have to like step back and realize kind of what's happening, but it's the broader ecosystem of the capital allocators, the LPs. I mean, they. Again, I mentioned that briefly earlier, but you see the amount of capital that goes into primaries today versus secondaries is huge. And the pocket of secondaries has now grown tremendously because secondary capital isn't just where they did secondaries. It's now where they do co-investments, direct investments, is where the majority of them pull their capital from. And as we've seen, co-investments is a way to do everything you just said, from lowering fees to have less diversification, to have direct exposure, and so a better understanding of the risk tolerance. So the blind pool concept has also taken a bit of a turn as well. And it'd be very interesting to see what happens.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  I still think that, I agree with your comment, the large five firms in particular have to invest that capital. By virtue of that, they have to go somewhere, so it's going to come downstream.

• 28:14David Weisburd?

  And it has to go into the private markets.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  And it has to go into private markets, absolutely. So, but then unfortunately, that will water down returns at the higher ends of the markets, or they're going to be overpaying the things in To Put Capital To Work, which we've all seen that movie before. So I think it's, to me, very much so a, difficult to see, but there is definitely a change happening. There is something happening in private equity today where if that continues, or now the retail capital, to your point, which is a fascinating point to pull on, it's only going to be impacting the private equity ecosystem that we've brought away. You also have to go back to like, who are the investors? Insurance companies, you know, in particular, and public pensions, and some of those public pensions go into teachers and the like.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  I mean, it's something that we consciously thought of. And so in 2015, when we raised our first fund, we were the one of the largest LPs in our own fund. One, because we wanted to have the ability to make these decisions and know that the impact wasn't just to investors we've never met, you know, kind of individuals who are getting the benefit or not.

• 29:18David Weisburd?

  The best way to show alignment is to be aligned.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Be aligned, write a check, and it was a meaningful check. But we've continued to do it in every fund. If you're going to have a bad investment, you need to feel the pain of it because it doesn't work if it's someone else's money. And that's been a conscious approach to this. And I think that's where at the higher ends of the market, the larger groups, what I've just described as the asset management companies, they, do they feel that pinch? No, they don't feel it at all. But for us, it hurts. And I think that's important where to have that realization, to have that.

• 29:49David Weisburd?

  And if you're really honest, it also changes behavior. It makes you take that incremental meeting. It makes you stay up when your kids might be at a school play, but you know you have to close this deal because it's existential, your money, your family's money's on the line. And it's a great razor to not only incentivize associates, analysts, vice presidents, but also to incentivize yourself.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Wasn't it Charlie Munger who said, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome? I mean, it's just a very specific way of saying exactly that. If you know you know what the outcome is going to be, then I'll incentivize you to get there. To me, it's a fascinating place to be where you are building something. And I feel very fortunate because I think we've, not only have we built something, but we're still learning. And if we're not learning, then why are we doing this, right? Because it's, we have made some strategic changes in our firm to make sure we're going in the right direction and really believing in that directional shift, which is, as we touched on, is Europe for us, which has been a fascinating shift. And we're kind of going very heavily into that market. That, to me, is us leaning into what we do well. And none of us will sleep until we've been successful at that. Just because you've been successful in the past doesn't mean you will going forward.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  So I think that's kind of where today we are very focused as a firm and will continue to be.

• 31:03David Weisburd?

  If you go back to when you had just started at Platinum Equity and you could give yourself one piece of timeless advice, what would that be?

• 31:10Speaker 00

  It's funny, when we say the word compounding, everyone goes through financial compounding. But to me, what I've had tremendous success in personally has been the relationship side of things. If I knew the impact of the relationships I had built in 2007, 2008 to where they are today, I would go all in on that because I know the impact it's had. I have gone all in on it, but I'm so grateful for the relationships I do.

• 31:31David Weisburd?

  Would have even gone more.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  I would have gone all in because we're at a different point in our life at that point and it's hindsight. But between that and the one thing I've always done.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  And this is my personal approach is of course back it by the understanding and analysis, but I trust my gut and my judgment. I would tell myself, always trust your judgment. Don't second guess it. We have a pretty unique way of our investment committee. There's four members of the investment committee and we all have an individual vote. And it's, you know, we kind of go down that path, but I want to hear how the analysts, the intern, the associate, the VP, anyone who's worked on that deal, I want to hear their take on it. But I have my own opinion on it, but I want to hear everyone else's. I want to look through a different lens. I wish I was given that opportunity back in 2008 because I wanted to have a voice. And I knew that pretty early on and I realized that was just kind of my maybe personality type.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  So for me, it was very much, I would want to encourage finding my voice as early as possible, trusting my guts and investing in a relationship.

• 32:30David Weisburd?

  That's the Karl Popper technique. Karl Popper was this philosopher and he talked about this epistemological search for truth. So how do you actually learn what is true? And the most effective way to do that is to go around, have conversations

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:44David Weisburd?

  and have people correct you with new information, update your priors and essentially improve your L M until you get closer and closer to ground truth. This is the exact reason why I do this podcast.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:55David Weisburd?

  I say my theory, I have the smartest people in the world correct me. And then I get closer and closer to ground truth.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:02David Weisburd?

  And a lot of people, they want to be around people that just agree with everything that they say. Yes, men, yes, women. And that is an extremely dangerous thing to put yourself into because then you become further and further from ground truth. You start to make mistakes and there's all sorts of downstream consequence.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  I would agree with that. And it's actually one of the benefits we have. Andrew, Julian and I have worked together since 2007. Andrew and I have known each other since 2010 and Julian. Ironically, we bumped into each other on a deal in 2010. We met each other at the airport. Do you remember when there was that Icelandic?

• 33:35David Weisburd?

  The volcano.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  The volcano ash.

• 33:36David Weisburd?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  I was stuck in Finland, so try and try and get home from there wasn't easy. And who do I bump into Andrew and Julian on this deal that they later acquired credit to them. So we've I've known Andrew and Julian since 2010. But the three of us in particular, as the three partners, we agree on a lot, but we have some very healthy debates about it. And all three of us don't, I don't want someone to tell me yes for the sake of saying yes, I want someone to challenge. And fortunately, Andrew and Julian both see the same side of that, too. It's been a it's been a fun kind of journey in that regard, so.

• 34:06David Weisburd?

  My wife Jessica commented one time when me and my business partner Curtis. She said, why do you guys argue like that? I'm like, what do you mean? She basically said, you keep on leaving off where the other person ends and improving upon. It's not like, why do you argue like that? I'm like, I guess that is a form of argument, which is non zero sum talking, which is you say something, somebody else improves upon it, you improve on themselves. That's just how we talk.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so those are the best relationships, by the way. Right? Isn't that the case of wanting to get better and understand that about each other? So.

• 34:36David Weisburd?

  Absolutely. Well, Josh, thanks so much for jumping on the podcast. Looking forward to doing this again soon.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  I'd love to. Thank you again. Appreciate it.