Happy Thursday and welcome. As always, let’s dive in.

This week: co-investments.

Specifically, how we built a program that could move fast, stay disciplined, and scale - without re-underwriting every deal from scratch.

There are two schools of thought on how LPs approach co-investments.

I'll tell you which one I was in, why, and exactly how we executed it.

Let's get to it.

The key question is this:

Do you see co-investments as a deal exercise or a manager selection exercise?

In the programs I've been in, we have seen it mostly as a manager selection exercise - with some important exceptions.

My view is, that if you get the manager decision right - and you continuously validate it through monitoring - then the co-investment decision becomes much simpler.

You’re no longer asking:

You’re asking:

That shift changes everything.

We built a lightweight, highly scalable approach.

We defined a strict eligible universe - only funds where:

This wasn’t decided deal-by-deal. It was predefined.

That’s it.

No new relationships. No “opportunistic” co-investments.

This meant every co-investment started from a position of earned trust, not assumed trust.

One of our key filters was simple:

If the GP earns additional fees or carry on the co-investment, we’re out.

We wanted:

If the deal is good enough to go into the fund - where their economics sit - then we’re aligned.

If not, we're out.

This is often where the line between manager underwriting and deal underwriting starts to blur.

But we were not asking: "Is this a good investment?" We were asking: "Is this a good investment for this manager?"

That meant we checked one thing rigorously:

Sector, geography, value creation case, entry multiple, etc. All had to be within their strategy.

If it didn’t match what we documented at commitment, we were out.

We were taking a larger position - so we needed evidence this was a space where the GP had already been successful.

We pulled pre-recorded comparable deals from our GP history:

What made this possible wasn’t better judgment - it was having the institutional memory available when we needed it.

If they hadn’t been successful in that space before, we were out.

Sidebar: In effect, this is often the case. The GP is likely taking a larger-than-normal stake in this company. So, they naturally want more conviction and downside proection than for deals taking up a smaller share of the fund.

Trust is good. Structure is better.

We ensured:

This removed:

Without this kind of setup, you don’t get a faster process - you get a riskier one.

This approach is:

Fast → because the work is done before the deal arrives

Scalable → because decisions rely on a pre-defined system, not individual judgment

Consistent → because every deal is measured against the same underwriting and monitoring data

My record is a co-investment signed in 13 days.

The speed didn’t come from skipping diligence - it came from having already done it, and having it stored.

But it only works if:

It does not work for:

That's another process and a matter for another day.

There’s a temptation in private markets to equate more work with better decisions.

More models. More memos. More diligence.

But in co-investments, the real question is:

Do you have a system that lets you trust your past work - or are you forced to redo it every time?

Because if you have to start from scratch on every deal,
you don’t have a co-investment process.

You have a recurring fire drill.

If you're thinking about your own co-investment process, it might be worth asking:

If this resonates, just hit reply - we’ve been spending a lot of time on this recently and happy to share what we’re seeing.

Last week I ran a half marathon - and I trained for it.

But, when you’re building something like FundFrame, it’s very easy to let everything else slide. There’s always more to do, and it all feels important.

Skipping a run is short term gain for long term pain.

Running is not a hobby. It's maintenance. I've learned what happens when I skip it for a week - the decisions get worse, the patience gets shorter, the hard conversations get harder. My body is the hardware everything else runs on.

Some of my clearest thinking happens at kilometer 8. Not because I'm trying to solve something. Because I'm not.

I want FundFrame to succeed. But if we hit our targets and I'm burned out, physically broken, and absent as a father and partner - I don't count that as a success.

I count that as a failure with a good financial outcome.