The Carry: The 100-Day Plan Is Dead

The Carry: The 100-Day Plan Is Dead

The Carry · September 6th. 6 min 18 sec.

Cold open

Advent International is not just experimenting with artificial intelligence in their portfolio. They just put an autonomous observer directly on their Investment Committee. It watches the deal flow. It scans historical memos. And it flags underwriting drift in real time. If two deal teams use conflicting interest rate assumptions, the machine catches it.

Intro

This is The Carry for September 6th. I went through the top private equity podcasts this week so you do not have to. Here is what actually mattered in the market. I am West. Let us get straight into the signal.

The End of the Post-Close Plan

For two decades, buyout shops rode cheap debt and hid behind those massive, static one hundred page value creation binders. The ones that rarely survive the first quarter. Lee McCabe pointed out on Private Equity Funcast that passive governance models have completely run out of road. Sponsors are finally replacing the mega deck with a focused, five point quarterly sprint. McCabe observed that private equity has had a very easy time for a very long time. Buyers treating value creation as a simple accounting exercise have likely already raised their final funds. The era of financial engineering alone is ending. That realization is pushing top quartile general partners to pull operational planning totally forward. They are effectively skipping the traditional post close calibration phase. Carr Preston at Akoya Capital talked on the Karma School of Business about finalizing the commercial alignment and value creation strategy during confirmatory diligence. Moving the operational debate to the pre close window forces immediate alignment between the deal team and the rollover seller. It eliminates the organizational friction that usually stalls momentum right after funding. Think about what that does to velocity. Closing day becomes day one of execution. No theoretical debates. No wasted quarters. The strategy is baked before the wire hits the escrow account. Buyers are pricing this in. General partners who wait for the closing dinner to start planning are simply losing deals to sponsors who arrive at the final pitch with a fully baked roadmap. The one hundred day plan is officially dead. It is now a negative thirty day plan.

Automating the Underwriting Funnel

Most private equity firms are focusing their machine learning budgets entirely on portfolio companies. They hunt for marginal operational gains while completely ignoring their own internal underwriting flaws. John Maldonado flipped that script at Advent International. He talked on Dry Powder about deploying an artificial intelligence observer directly onto the firm's Investment Committee. The tool reviews historical deal memos. It analyzes committee queries to flag underwriting drift. It instantly highlights when parallel deal teams use conflicting macroeconomic variables, like different interest rate assumptions. No human in the loop. The machine simply enforces intellectual consistency across the partnership. Early stage venture firms are doing the exact same thing at the top of the funnel. They are replacing manual analyst work with absolute digital scale. Byron Ling at Twelve Below discussed on How I Invest how his firm uses autonomous agents to detect subtle changes in digital writing habits and code commits. The algorithms are literally surfacing technical founders months before they officially launch a company. Ling explained that the biggest shift is the sheer throughput and quality of founders they can meet. Algorithms can scale discovery indefinitely. Competitive deal allocation still requires human judgment, but the machine finds the target first. Allocators are quietly weaponizing these tools to rewrite the sourcing game. General partners stuck relying on warm intros and analyst cold calls are competing against autonomous agents running twenty four hours a day. That is the signal.

Byron Ling

Byron Ling brought up a fascinating dynamic on How I Invest this week. He was dissecting how top tier founders completely invert the power dynamic during a venture pitch. Ling said, I love the founder who says, hey, you mentioned something that might be relevant to my business... I am going to interrupt this meeting, and I am going to pull all that information out of your brain. That fundamentally changes the room. Elite operators view venture partners as free data nodes rather than just checkbooks. They treat the pitch as an intelligence extraction session. Investors expect to do the interrogating. The best founders are interrogating right back.

Rob Lucas

Over on Dry Powder, Rob Lucas walked through why CVC capital partners is tracking weekly technology adoption across its entire investment team. He noted how human intuition chronically fails at grasping compounding technological shifts. Lucas pointed out, being an engineer, I think the ability to imagine and visualize exponentials is very, very difficult... it really ramps up so fast that if you are not onto it, and if you are not fully embracing it by then, of course, it is all too late. Markets price linearly. Technology compounds exponentially. General partners who fail to map that curve end up holding obsolete assets. The gap between those two lines is where equity gets wiped out.

Scott Malpass

Scott Malpass shared the playbook on How I Invest for building Notre Dame into a twenty billion dollar endowment. He detailed how the fund intentionally traded fee discounts for guaranteed capacity and enduring goodwill with top tier managers. Malpass said, it was not really in our culture to have sharp elbows... some of the Ivy League schools had sharper elbows... they looked out for themselves. That is a structural edge disguised as Midwestern manners. Endless fee negotiations burn institutional capital. Being the easiest limited partner on the cap table guarantees access to oversubscribed funds. When allocations shrink, the sharpest elbows are the first ones cut from the roster.

The bottom line

The market is moving faster and punishing hesitation. Buyout shops are pulling operational interventions ahead of the closing date, forcing alignment before the wire even hits. Meanwhile, allocators quietly weaponize algorithms to completely rewrite the top of the sourcing funnel. The edge belongs to firms frontloading their diligence and automating their internal blind spots. Passive capital is permanently on the way out. That is The Carry. See you next Sunday.