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

HEC Paris recently published their latest top 20 private equity ranking for the lower middle market.

The list is solid. In fact, a few of the GPs I'd put in my top-5 I've evaluated across my entire career.

And that's exactly what makes it dangerous.

Every time a ranking publishes, a version of the same thing unfolds.

LPs who weren't previously tracking some of these names start tracking them. Placement agents update their pitch decks overnight. Funds that were "monitoring" become "prioritize."

And right now, Gridiron are seeing an influx of interest based on their #1 position.

The mechanism is simple. A published ranking creates social proof. It signals that other smart people validated this. It makes the fear of missing out concrete — not just "this might be good" but "the data says this is one of the best, and if I don't move, someone else will."

The natural response to that feeling is to compress. Compress the diligence timeline. Accept terms you'd normally push back on. Overlook signals you'd otherwise investigate.

Some of the managers in the lower and middle market segment of this ranking are genuinely exceptional. A few are on my personal shortlist of the best GPs I've seen — not just strong performers, but managers with real, repeatable edge.

The list is not wrong.

But here's what the list also shows, if you look carefully: not all of these funds are holding one-and-done closes.

Some are. The truly elite names close efficiently — strong LP retention, clean processes, oversubscribed before the data room closes. You'd expect that.

But others are taking longer. And that gap matters.

It can mean many things. A volatile track that's harder to underwrite on the next vintage. Succession questions that other LPs have already identified. Strategy drift that isn't visible in the headline TVPI. Execution risk the historical performance doesn't yet reflect.

Other informed LPs — with full access to the same data — are hesitating. The ranking says the past was excellent. The fundraising timeline is a live signal about what people who've done the work think about the next fund.

Those two signals don't always point in the same direction.

Here's how I'd frame it.

The HEC Paris top 20 is a very good screening tool. If I were starting out today, I'd use it. It narrows the universe. It surfaces names worth investigating. In a market with thousands of managers, that's genuinely useful.

But screening and underwriting are different exercises. And the FOMO that rankings generate tends to collapse the distance between them.

The ranking answers a historical question with precision. It cannot answer the question that actually matters for your next commitment: can this team repeat it, in this market, at this stage of the firm?

That requires looking at things no ranking captures. Whether the people who built the track record are still running deals. Whether fund size has grown past the strategy's natural ceiling. Whether the sourcing edge that drove the best exits still holds in today's competitive environment.

Process discipline is most valuable precisely when you feel least like using it.

When a ranking lands and the names are good and the social proof is real and other LPs are starting to move — that's the moment your process has to hold.

Not because the list is wrong. But because the list is only the beginning of the question.

The LP who gets into a great manager through FOMO and compressed diligence isn't better positioned than the LP who gets there through a proper process. They're more exposed. They said yes faster, with less information, under pressure they largely manufactured for themselves.

The HEC Paris list is worth reading carefully. Then take a breath.

And do the actual work.

Before I started FundFrame, I often wondered why me and most of my peers didn’t have better software. After all, we were managing hundreds of millions of dollars.

While there are many answers I think one of them is this:

Every time a five-person investment team inside a big organization tries to buy software, procurement asks the same question: how many FTEs does this save?

The team looks at each other. That's not really the point.

A team this size isn't thinking about headcount when they evaluate tools. There's no slack to cut. The question they're actually asking is: how much of my day is spent on non-value-add work that doesn't need my judgment? Chasing data, updating spreadsheets, formatting reports.

The case for better tools for LPs isn't efficiency in the procurement sense. It's reallocation. Reallocation of time to higher value tasks.

Large organizations evaluate software by what they can stop paying for. Small teams evaluate it by what they can start doing.