The Culture Test: Can You Walk Away?

Happy Thursday to all 802 of you. As always, let’s get straight to business.

Years ago, I was on the US West Coast for an on-site due diligence meeting. This wasn't a casual trip - it was a nine-hour time difference, significant travel, the kind of commitment that signals you're taking a manager seriously.

We had our 6-hour onsite diligence. It went fine, but there were a few things that stood out. As our 3-person diligence team sat together the next morning, we all reached the same conclusion: we weren’t going to present this as an investment recommendation.

That could have been the end of the story.

My superior at the time said something that caught me off guard: "I still think it was the right decision to go. I hope you're not disappointed by the outcome."

At the time, that surprised me. Because I wasn’t disappointed - not even a little.

This was my manager relationship. I'd built it, sourced it, shepherded it through preliminary screens. We'd just invested significant time and resources flying across the world for on-site diligence. And now it wasn't becoming an investment. To me, that was simply how the process was supposed to work. You do the work. You evaluate honestly. Sometimes the answer is no.

To this day, I still wouldn’t have changed anything in this process.

How could that be anything other than a success?

It took me years - and exposure to more political organizations - to understand what he was really asking.

Here's what I've learned since: in many organizations, turning down a fund or a deal you brought to the table is seen as a personal failure. Especially one you've invested this much effort in. The implication being that you either had poor judgment upfront or that you're not fighting hard enough for "your" investment.

This creates an unfortunate dynamic where people are incentivized to become advocates for their funds rather than objective evaluators. The question shifts from "should we make this investment?" to "how do I get my fund approved?"

You could call my initial surprise naiveté - you’d probably be right. But, I prefer to call it the benefit of working in the right culture.

At the firms I've been at, investment decisions were always made by the team, not led by individuals:

When you fly across the world, conduct extensive on-site diligence, build genuine relationships with managers, and then recommend against investing - that's not a failure. That's the system working exactly as designed.

The most expensive word in private markets isn't "no."
It's "well, we've already come this far."

Or to use the words of Warren Buffett: "We don't feel any obligation to do something just because we've spent time on it."

Making investments because someone needs a win, because it's "their" fund, because you've already spent the travel budget, or because walking away feels like admitting defeat is just organizational face-saving. Not proper capital allocation.

This dynamic plays out at the GP level too, which is why I've always favored team-wide carry splits over individual deal economics. When personal economics are tied to getting specific deals done, objectivity becomes nearly impossible.