Tom Duffy

Is there an attributable track record that we can point to?

Are there references, warm references from others in the industry who have worked with them before or peers who have looked at them?

We spend a lot of time on that.

If you give us five references, we'll likely make 20 calls.

We go above and beyond in that sense because this is, again, a long-term relationship.

We don't want this to be a one, two, three-year thing.

Private market investments is a long-term commitment.

Other factors that we look at, what's extremely important to us because we put so much time into it on our end is sourcing.

Everybody says they have a differentiated sourcing process, but let's dig into the weeds.

What does that really mean and what are you doing that's different than the hundreds or thousands of other firms that we could be investing in?

And finally, one important question is, how do they deal with adversity?

What have they learned from any potential mistakes or bad investments?

It's not a deal breaker if there is a bad investment in their track record.

We want to look at that and dig in and say, what have you learned?

What have you done since then?

And what's changed?

These sponsors tend to commit a significant amount of capital to their own deals, which really does create an increased alignment that leads the sponsor to view each deal as critical and focused deeply on the company's operations and growth to drive great outcomes.

What we typically see, and there's no broad blanket answer, but speaking averages here, these type of sponsors tend to commit 5% to 10% to their own deals compared to traditional private equity GPs who on average can be closer to the 1% to 5% of their total funds.

A particular focus for TIFF is identifying trained and motivated investors that have more often than not spun out of established private equity firms.

And a lot of them are specialists in a specific sector, industry or geography, etc.,