Michael Woolhouse

And they're actually taking a proactive choice not to do that.

They're realizing five times the money, creating a lot of liquidity or potential liquidity for the general partner.

But instead of putting it into the bank, which they could do if they could sell the business today, they're not.

They're rolling it all into the new deal.

at our core in investing in single asset continuation vehicles, we as a group are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into single companies.

And hopefully it's almost self-evident why approaching that investment activity like a private equity firm, like a private equity investor just makes intuitive sense.

By contrast, the origin story of the secondaries market is actually not doing that.

Six or seven, seven or eight years ago, if a single asset deal was brought to the secondaries market, the incumbent firms would have said, what's this?

You've called the wrong person.

That requires a private equity skill set.

We don't have that.

But what's one of the tremendous things about the secondaries market is innovation and where the innovation started was in the LP business.

And just by contrast, in my time at CPP, just to talk about the specialist skills that were required for that kind of investment activity, the largest at the time portfolio that we ever acquired was 65 fund interests.

15, 20 companies per fund, a thousand companies, like literally a thousand companies.

So as you think about the skills that are required to do that and the people and the systems and the know-how, underwriting individual companies, frankly, almost irrelevant.

There's a thousand of them.

What you need to be is, I used to say, right on average.

So half the companies could underperform whatever you were expecting, so long as the other half outperform.

You work out okay on average.

You can't use that average concept in putting six, seven, $800 million into a single company.