Adam Turtle: Private Equity Has Split Into Three Speeds
Rede Partners co-founder Adam Turtle reports closing funds in as little as three months from first to final close, marking some of the firm's fastest fundraisings in twelve months.
Theme
Fundraising: what the top podcasts are saying.
How founders raise money, and what investors look for. 20 write-ups from 9 shows so far, the newest from November 2026.
20 write-ups9 shows
The short version
AI and capital abundance are fracturing standard fundraising timelines for both startup founders and private equity managers. Investors increasingly require working software and cash distributions to justify new commitments, bypassing pitch decks and subjective accounting marks.
Top talking points
Generative models disrupt standard early stage rounds
Founders skip standard 12-month build cycles by shipping software for under $800,000 using code generation. Teams now jump directly to growth rounds, while Nnamdi Okike warns that raising $50 million early on destroys operational discipline and removes experimentation filters.
- Why AI Coding Replaces Seed Ladders with Token Rounds How I Invest · Oct 11
- Why Mega Seed Rounds Damage Startups How I Invest · Oct 4
Founders force fast timelines to build momentum
Prolonged investor negotiations drain company resources and act as a negative market signal. Nico treats extended market time as a sign of weakness, and Trina Spear considers slow venture capital responses to be immediate rejections that drag down pipelines.
- FIGS Got 400 Rejections by Hunting for Fast Nos How I Built This · Nov 1
- Nico's $2.5B Rule: Never Take The Highest Fundraising Price 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 31
Institutional capital consolidates into mega firms
Limited partners aggressively shrink manager rosters to secure fee breaks and priority deal access from large firms. Cash distributions currently drive allocation decisions, punishing managers who rely on accounting subjectivity or present audited marks that contradict performance claims.
- Anuj Ranjan: Multiple Expansion Will Not Save Private Equity Dry Powder · Nov 1
- Why Sandbagged PE Marks Backfire on Fundraises Private Equity Spotlight · Sep 13
Working software replaces slide presentations
Standard pitch decks operate as commoditized skills that hide actual building talent during early evaluation. Canva forces teams to present functional software prototypes created with AI tools to secure budgets, bypassing roadmap documents entirely.
- Why Will Robbins Ignores Pitch Decks to Underwrite Social Graphs How I Invest · Oct 11
- Why Canva Killed Pitch Decks for Working Prototypes Cheeky Pint · Aug 30
Permanent balance sheets replace 10-year funds
Average private equity managers spend 18 to 24 months securing capital and routinely offer co-investment concessions to close. Public closed-end structures solve this delay by letting managers raise debt and equity directly without constantly launching new vehicles.
- Adam Turtle: Private Equity Has Split Into Three Speeds Fund Shack · Nov 1
- Permanent Capital Beats the Venture Fundraising Treadmill How I Invest · Aug 23
Most interesting insights
Rory O'Driscoll explains that the classic bargain of slow compounding (lower growth in exchange for lower risk) is broken because AI creates high obsolescence risk across slow-moving software.
From Why the $3M Seed Round and Quiet Compounders Are Broken, 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 4
Regent closed a $240 million Series B round on the back of a $10 billion commercial backlog and over $20 million in defense contracts.
From Regent's $240M Play: Skip the FAA and Build for the Coast Guard, TBPN · Sep 6
Nico, the co-founder and CEO of Corgi, a $2.5 billion insurance company, follows a counter-intuitive fundraising rule from Brian Chesky: "never take the highest price." Corgi consistently opts for the second or third highest offer.
From Nico's $2.5B Rule: Never Take The Highest Fundraising Price, 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 31
Heather Hasson and Trina Spear pitched between 300 and 400 venture capitalists before finding investors who understood medical apparel.
From FIGS Got 400 Rejections by Hunting for Fast Nos, How I Built This · Nov 1
People quoted on fundraising
Latest write-ups
Adam Turtle on Why Private Equity Capital Isn't Squeezed
Host Ross Butler points to five consecutive down years in global private capital fundraising, but Rede Partners co-founder Adam Turtle rejects the popular excuse that LPs lack cash.
Anuj Ranjan: Multiple Expansion Will Not Save Private Equity
Institutional capital is freezing commitments as sluggish private equity distributions collide with strong public market benchmarks.
FIGS Got 400 Rejections by Hunting for Fast Nos
Heather Hasson and Trina Spear pitched between 300 and 400 venture capitalists before finding investors who understood medical apparel.
Quinton Farmer Thinks Personal AI Needs to Forget
Quinton Farmer raised a $30 million Series B for Tolen from Keith Rabois at Khosla Ventures and Mike Mcdano at Union Square Ventures to build personal AI companions.
Daksh Gupta on Why AI Coders Cannot Grade Their Own Work
Greptile raised a $50 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures to build independent, automated code testing and validation software.
Why Will Robbins Ignores Pitch Decks to Underwrite Social Graphs
Pitch decks and founder storytelling have become commoditized skills that obscure real capability, making traditional pitch meetings unreliable for early-stage evaluation.
Why AI Coding Replaces Seed Ladders with Token Rounds
Generative coding models have compressed the standard 12-month engineering build into roughly 50 billion tokens, breaking the historical seed de-risking ladder.
Why Mega Seed Rounds Damage Startups
Managing partner Nnamdi Okike draws on five fund vintages at 645 Ventures to warn that raising $50M seed rounds ruins early-stage operating discipline.
Lo Toney on Why Product Managers Rule Seed Rounds
Product management at a top tech firm shares the exact operational playbook required to evaluate and support pre-seed and seed startups.
Why the $3M Seed Round and Quiet Compounders Are Broken
Jack Altman argues the traditional $3M to $6M seed round buying 8% to 15% ownership is evaporating as top founders leap straight into massive AI rounds.
Why Sandbagged PE Marks Backfire on Fundraises
Distributed to Paid-In capital (DPI) has displaced internal rate of return (IRR) as the primary allocator metric because cash distributions remove accounting subjectivity.