The Carry: The 100-Day Plan Is Dead

THE CARRY

1. Cross-Podcast Themes

Post-Close Operating Plans Shrink From 100 Days to Zero

For two decades, buyout shops rode cheap debt and hid behind static 100-page value creation binders that rarely survived the first quarter. Lee McCabe points out that those passive governance models have run out of road, forcing sponsors to replace the mega-deck with a focused, five-point quarterly sprint. “I think private equity has had a very easy time,”▶ 5:33 McCabe observed, warning that firms treating value creation as an accounting exercise have already raised their final funds.

That realization is pushing top-quartile general partners to pull operational planning forward, effectively skipping the traditional post-close calibration phase. Carr Preston at Akoya Capital finalizes the commercial alignment and value creation strategy during confirmatory diligence. Moving the operational debate to the pre-close window forces alignment between the deal team and the rollover seller, eliminating the organizational friction that usually stalls momentum right after funding. Watch full episode

Bureaucracy Suffocates Execution Speed

A buyer acquires a fast-moving software company for its technical edge, then immediately forces legacy enterprise workflows onto the new team. Praveen Ghanta watched his engineering output plummet by roughly 70 percent after selling HiddenLevers to Orion Advisor Solutions. “We know where that is. Apples to apples with sort of the rest of Orion and it was somewhere between two and three times higher,”▶ 1:02:43 Ghanta recalled, noting how corporate tracking software turned an autonomous engine into a stalled integration project.

The physical equivalent of that speed trap happens when legacy aerospace programs stall behind multi-disciplinary committee reviews. Bryon Hargis at Castelion uses the SpaceX Responsible Engineer model to eliminate the speculative debate that gridlocks legacy prime contractors. Giving a single technical operator total authority from design to factory floor produces actual data from test failures, rather than losing quarters to theoretical risk debates. Watch full episode

General Partners Turn AI Inward on Sourcing and Underwriting

Most private equity firms focus their machine learning budgets entirely on portfolio companies, hunting for marginal operational gains while ignoring their own underwriting flaws. John Maldonado flipped that script at Advent International by deploying an AI observer directly onto the firm's Investment Committee. The tool reviews historical deal memos and committee queries to flag underwriting drift, instantly highlighting when parallel deal teams use conflicting macroeconomic variables like interest rate assumptions. Listen to the full episode

Early-stage venture firms are similarly automating their top-of-funnel pipeline to replace manual analyst work with digital scale. Byron Ling at Twelve Below uses autonomous agents to detect subtle changes in digital writing habits and code commits, surfacing technical founders months before they officially launch. “The biggest thing so far has been increasing the throughput and quality of founders that we can meet,”▶ 38:14 Ling explains, proving that algorithms can scale discovery even if competitive deal allocation still requires human judgment.

2. Best Of the Week

Dry Powder: Robert Smith instituted a portfolio mandate requiring every Vista company to build a working agentic angle before going to market, proving to buyers that they can retrofit operations safely behind corporate firewalls. “Less than one percent of the enterprise data can be absorbed by these large language models.”▶ 1:33 Read more

How I Invest: Scott Malpass argues that massive institutional endowments suffer from extreme manager bloat, creating distinct asset buckets driven by career risk rather than compounding logic. “I think the big endowments had way too many managers, too many buckets, some ways too riskaverse that some ways they should been leaning in more.”▶ 50:23 Read more

Karma School of Business: Carr Preston treats a founder-led facility walkthrough as a massive red flag, noting that capable CEOs delegate investor tours to their VP of Operations. “If the CEO is kind of leading the plant tour versus the VP of ops or the COO because you like someone else kind of being able to do that and they have trust and confidence.”▶ 22:47 Read more

M&A Science: Praveen Ghanta defeated an aggressive 50% purchase price retrade from Orion Advisor Solutions just 24 hours before diligence expired by leveraging the massive free cash flow of his bootstrapped balance sheet to threaten a walkaway. “And then you get to 24 hours before due diligence ends and they're like, 'The board has decided that the offer on the table is no longer acc'.”▶ 32:26 Read more

Private Equity Funcast: Devin Mathews and Lee McCabe warn buyout shops against hiring strategic enterprise CMOs in year one, arguing that newly acquired platforms actually need tactical analysts to fix broken CRM pipes. “The person you need in the first year to set that data foundation and the tech stack and get it all right and do all that really boring tedious stuff is the wrong pe.”▶ 22:06 Read more

3. Most Quotable

"I love the founder who says, 'Hey, you mentioned something that might be relevant to my business... I'm going to interrupt this meeting, and I'm going to pull all that information out of your brain.'"

Byron Ling on How I Invest · Sept 6, 2026. Top founders treat pitch meetings as intelligence extraction sessions, viewing venture partners as free data rather than mere checkbooks.

"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're not onto it, and if you're not fully embracing it by then, of course, it's all too late."

Rob Lucas on Dry Powder · Sept 6, 2026. CVC tracks weekly AI adoption across its investment teams because human intuition chronically underestimates compounding technological shifts.

"It wasn't really in our culture to have sharp elbows... Some of the Ivy League schools had sharper elbows. They looked out for themselve."

Scott Malpass on How I Invest · Sept 6, 2026. Notre Dame built a $20 billion endowment by intentionally trading fee discounts for guaranteed capacity and enduring goodwill with top-tier managers.

Bottom Line: Buyout shops are pulling operational interventions ahead of the closing date, while venture allocators quietly weaponize algorithms to rewrite the top of the sourcing funnel.