Amid a turbulent year, is the industry poised for more of the same or a sudden turnaround?

Read Bain's 2025 Midyear Private Equity Report here. 

Register for Bain's Private Equity Midyear Report 2025 Webinar on July 16 here.

[This episode originally aired on December 7, 2023] Today on the show, I have a lively conversation with Ashby Monk, the executive director of the Stanford Research Initiative on Long Term Investing. Ashby studies the inner workings of pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and foundations —  in short all of those LPs that sit somewhere in between the public and private sectors.

“That means that they are optimizing for things that are not entirely evident to just the casual observer,” Ashby says.

In this episode of Dry Powder, I ask Ashby to take us inside the $140 trillion universe of long-term investing and help us understand what exactly these organizations are optimizing for.

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This past December, I joined the M&A Science Podcast for a wide ranging interview about my 30 year career at Bain and the evolution of the private equity industry.  My host did a superb job of walking us through the pivotal moments when the industry was forced to reinvent itself.  In this current moment of uncertainty, the interview serves as a timely reminder of how quickly the industry can change — and is often forced to. What you're about to hear are a few excerpts from that interview, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

I'd like to thank my host, Kison Patel, for the opportunity to share this timely conversation with our audience, and if you'd like to listen to the full interview, you can visit the M&A Science Podcast here.

A 30-year veteran shares why the secondary market’s growth continues to surprise him.

We ask a leading provider of NAV loans about the enthusiasm and the skepticism around a growing trend.

In the second of our two-part series, we ask the Co-CEO of Hamilton Lane how they’re  building an analytics engine that can serve both institutional and individual investors. 

Hamilton Lane's Co-CEO takes us inside the rapid buildout of private market infrastructure.

In part two of our infrastructure series, we take a closer look at which sub-sectors are heating up, and how opportunities across energy and tech are converging.

Infrastructure deals are evolving, and private capital could play a pivotal role in the space.

Today on Dry Powder, we’re sharing a live recording from this year’s NEXUS conference in Orlando, Florida. My guest is Brian Bernasek, Co-Head of Americas Corporate Private Equity at Carlyle. We had a wide-ranging discussion about his market outlook for 2025, how he thinks about sector expertise at scale, the rising cost of alpha, and, of course, AI. 

Our conversation touches on many of the key themes in Bain’s Global Private Equity Report, which we've linked to below, but Brian is one of those rare investors who can actually bring these themes to life. 

Read Bain's 2025 Global Private Equity Report, here.