PRIVATE-EQUITY

The firms that will dominate the next decade are the ones that control origination — not the ones that just allocate capital.

We have done 400 software deals. The playbook works every single time because the economics of software are simply that good.

Vista Consulting Group is our secret weapon. We take best practices from 80 portfolio companies and deploy them across all of them. Everyone gets better.

The rest of PE woke up to software about ten years after we did. By then we had already done 200 deals and knew the playbook cold.

Fortress was the first alternative investment firm to go public. Everyone said it was a mistake. We proved them wrong, then sold to SoftBank for $3.3 billion.

Corporate carve-outs are the purest form of value investing in private equity. The seller is motivated by strategy, not price. That is your edge.

We raised $7 billion for a climate fund inside a PE firm. Five years ago people would have laughed. Now every major firm is copying us.

Operational improvement is more sustainable than financial engineering.

We don't buy companies to strip them. We buy companies to make them better.

Private equity has a bad reputation. But the returns speak for themselves.

I buy what the big tech companies throw away. Their garbage is my goldmine.

Every carve-out is a turnaround in disguise. The parent company starved it. We feed it.

The opportunity in enterprise software is not in building the next unicorn. It is in taking proven businesses and making them excellent.

We focus on established software companies with loyal customers and strong switching costs — businesses that can be improved operationally rather than reinvented from scratch.

The three aspects of building a private equity firm are knowing the entrepreneur, operating with the spirit of trust through partnership, and nurturing the dream.

Multiples would be built with a long-term perspective, which meant no short cuts, no compromise of the long-term prospects for quick wins.

What private equity is doing today is buying small, expensive companies with a lot of debt.

I wanna go do what Bain Capital, and KKR, and Blackstone did 20 years ago. Not what they're doing now, I don't like what they're doing now. I want to do what they used to do, and just copy it, because it worked.

Our best returns are in Japanese PE.

Private equity firms are now, I think, being respected as partners who can add value well beyond the capital that they provide.

South-east Asia and, in particular, Indonesia continue to present compelling medium to long-term investment opportunities.