Dry Powder: The Private Equity Podcast
Many private equity firms today build their strategies around themes or subsectors. My guest in this episode prefers to avoid them entirely.
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“We like to invest in areas before they have become themes,” says Peder Prahl, the founding CEO of Triton, one of Europe’s most value-oriented and innovative investment firms. Over the past 30 years, Triton has been laser-focused on investment opportunities across healthcare, industrials, and business services, often discovering themes before the market has named them, let alone built strategies around them. Doing that consistently, however, requires discipline.
“One of the hardest things to do in private equity,” Peder explains, “is to buy when everybody says no or nobody else wants to buy. But if you have the facts and have done your homework, that is when you should buy.”
Today on the show, I ask Peder how he’s scaled that entrepreneurial spirit and strict discipline across the organization. We’ll also explore how Triton navigated the era of “easy money,” as Peder calls it, and why at the height of the cycle, when the industry was speeding up, Triton chose to slow down.
“We saw that the prices were going way above average,” Peder says, “and we invested our Triton V fund over six years when most people deploy two or three, doubling the sizes of the funds in that period.”
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.