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 question: Deal selection or manager selection
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:
“Is this a good deal?”
You’re asking:
“Is this exactly the kind of deal we trust this manager to execute?”
That shift changes everything.
The framework we used (and why it worked)
We built a lightweight, highly scalable approach.