Dry Powder: The Private Equity Podcast
Previously on Dry Powder, Apollo’s David Sambur laid out his approach to buying well and building well. Today on the show, we’ll turn our attention to the hardest step of all: exiting well.
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“Almost no one talks about exiting well,” David says, “because it's the hardest thing to do, and people feel like they have the least influence over it.”
At Apollo, the exit process starts earlier than you might expect. “We got the team very focused on trying to recoup about 40% of every investment's capital within the first two years of the investment.”
On today’s episode, I’ll ask David how his team starts returning capital well ahead of schedule. We'll also explore how Apollo uses creative deal structures to return capital even when exit markets are effectively closed.
Finally, we’ll see how Apollo is deploying AI across its portfolio and how an ethos of “clean-sheet thinking” enables Apollo to rapidly evolve its investment process.
“We had a portfolio review last week—700 pages of memos spanning every company in our portfolio,” David says. “We feed it into AI, it checks it versus the last three portfolio reviews, tells us all the changes by company, tells us all the risks, all the things to look at. I used to have a team of people do that. Now it takes about 24 hours.”
The Private Equity Podcast
In our podcast series, Bain's Hugh MacArthur interviews leading experts on the trends and opportunities that will redefine the private equity industry.
First published in mai 2026