Bob Long, chief executive officer at Conversus -- which manages the Conversus StepStone Private Markets Fund -- returns to the NAVigator to discuss private equity and how investors looking for success must commit to overcoming the J-curve, the start-up period when private-equity investments tend to lose money in the early days in order to be positioned for long-run success. Individual investors wanting to avoid the pain of those start-ups through diversification are increasingly turning to interval funds and business-development companies in the space, finding assets that are less correlated to the stock market, but which can ride out the volatility of the J-curve to benefit from start-up and private-equity exposure.