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What I Learned Between Airports

Nearly 800 conversations

There is a particular moment that I have come to appreciate over the past year. It usually arrives late in the evening, somewhere between an airport lounge, a delayed flight and the journey home. By then, the meetings are over, and for the first time all day there is enough silence to reflect. It is often in those moments that individual conversations, which initially seemed entirely unrelated, begin to form a much bigger picture.

Over the past six months I have travelled across every corner of Europe and beyond. From Copenhagen to Madrid, London to Singapore, Paris to Milan, and from the Baltic countries to the Iberian Peninsula, I have had the privilege of meeting entrepreneurs, private equity managers, family offices and institutional investors. By this time of the year, those conversations numbered close to eight hundred.

Different businesses, the same questions

Every entrepreneur described a different business. Every investor looked at the world through a different portfolio. Every private equity manager presented a different strategy. Yet despite this extraordinary diversity, I repeatedly found myself hearing remarkably similar questions.

Where should long-term capital be allocated? How should investors navigate a world that appears increasingly fragmented? Where will the next generation of exceptional businesses emerge? And perhaps, even more fundamentally, what kind of new era are we entering? What sort of world will our children inherit?

These questions are hardly new. Every generation of investors has asked them in one form or another. What changes is the environment in which they are asked.

Why this letter

This year, more than any I can remember, those conversations took place against a backdrop of profound change. It is impossible to separate discussions about investing from the world in which those investments are being made. Markets do not operate in isolation. They reflect politics, technology, demographics, culture and, above all, human behaviour. Understanding businesses increasingly requires figuring out the forces shaping the environment in which they operate. That observation, more than anything else, inspired this letter.

Rather than reviewing fundraising activity or discussing individual transactions, I wanted to step back and reflect on the themes that repeatedly emerged throughout those conversations. Some concern the global economy. Others relate to technological innovation. Many challenge assumptions that have become deeply embedded within the private equity industry itself. Together, they have shaped the way I think about investing today.

Welcome Back to Normal

The return of higher interest rates

If there is one conclusion that became increasingly evident throughout the year, it is that we are no longer investing in the world many of us became accustomed to over the previous decade. For almost fifteen years, exceptionally low interest rates influenced virtually every aspect of financial markets. Cheap capital rewarded growth, compressed risk premia and encouraged investors to assume that liquidity would always be available. Entire investment strategies were built around an environment that, historically speaking, was highly unusual. That period has now come to an end.

A more Darwinian market

The return of higher interest rates has undoubtedly created challenges across private markets. Fundraising has become more selective. In many respects, private markets have become more Darwinian. Exit activity has slowed. Financing costs have increased. Valuations have adjusted. Many participants understandably describe today's environment as significantly more difficult than the one that preceded it. While all of this is true, I am not convinced it should be viewed exclusively through a negative lens.

The previous decade was, in many respects, a historical exception rather than the norm. Capital was unusually abundant. Financing was exceptionally inexpensive. Asset prices benefited from a combination of expanding valuation multiples and declining discount rates that cannot reasonably be expected to persist indefinitely. Normality has returned, and normality rarely feels comfortable. Yet normal markets tend to reward precisely the qualities that define outstanding investors: discipline, patience, selectivity and sound judgement rather than abundant liquidity.

Business fundamentals are back

Perhaps the most encouraging consequence of this transition is that investment decisions once again depend primarily on business fundamentals rather than financial engineering alone. Revenue growth, pricing power, operational excellence, management quality and thoughtful capital allocation have returned to the centre of the investment discussion. For long-term investors, I believe this is ultimately a healthier environment!

Investing in a Different World

Geopolitics is now an investment variable

Interest rates, however, are only one part of a much broader transformation. Geopolitical fragmentation has accelerated. Governments across Europe and North America have rediscovered industrial policy. Defence spending has returned to the centre of political debate after decades during which many assumed peace was the default condition. Supply chains are being redesigned to prioritise resilience alongside efficiency. Energy security has become a boardroom discussion rather than merely a political one.

The events in the Strait of Hormuz since February have once again reminded the world how interconnected the global economy remains. A relatively narrow shipping route briefly became the focal point of financial markets because investors immediately understood what was at stake. A local geopolitical event rapidly translated into questions about inflation, energy prices, shipping costs and monetary policy. It served as another reminder that geopolitical developments are no longer distant headlines. They have become integral components of investment analysis.

Artificial intelligence is a platform, not a product

Running alongside these developments is another transformation that may ultimately prove even more significant. Artificial intelligence is no longer a niche technology discussed primarily by software engineers and venture capitalists. It has become one of the defining investment themes of our generation. More importantly, it represents something far larger than technological innovation alone. It is reshaping productivity, labour markets, infrastructure investment, healthcare, manufacturing, defence and national competitiveness. Like every major technological revolution before it, its consequences will extend far beyond the sector in which it originated.

History suggests that technological revolutions rarely transform the economy in the way people initially expect. The railways were never simply about trains. Electricity was never simply about light bulbs. The internet was never simply about websites. Each became the foundation upon which entirely new industries were built. Artificial intelligence will be no different. Today, much of the public discussion revolves around models, chips and computing power. Those topics are undoubtedly important, but they are merely the infrastructure. The real transformation will occur over the coming decade as entrepreneurs discover thousands of applications that none of us can yet fully anticipate. Productivity will improve. Entire professions will evolve. Some business models will disappear, while entirely new ones will emerge. Hopefully, placement agents will survive as well. Selecting investment managers has never been just about information. It is about understanding people, trusting your judgement and, occasionally, listening to your intuition. Those things, at least for now, are not easily replaced by AI.

I suspect future generations will study this decade much as we study the Industrial Revolution, the widespread adoption of electricity or the emergence of the internet. We do not yet know which companies will define this new era, just as investors in the early 1990s could not have predicted every business that would eventually come to dominate the digital economy. What we do know is that those companies are being built today, and that may be the greatest privilege of investing.

We are not merely observers of history. Through the allocation of capital, we are participants in it. Few people have shaped the current technological landscape more profoundly than Jensen Huang, the founder and chief executive of NVIDIA, whose chips have become the essential infrastructure of the artificial intelligence era. As he once put it: "The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create." (Some, admittedly, create it more than others. But the rest of us are not simply watching from the sidelines either, and on most days, that is more than enough.)

Uncertainty Is the Price of Opportunity

Action beats perfect visibility

There is, however, another reason why I found this past year particularly stimulating. What struck me most over the past months was not how differently people viewed the future, but how differently they responded to exactly the same environment. Faced with the same uncertainty, some chose caution, others preferred patience, while the individuals who impressed me the most consistently chose action. Not reckless action, nor optimism for optimism's sake, but thoughtful, disciplined execution despite recognising that perfect visibility never exists.

That observation may sound almost self-evident, yet I increasingly believe it lies at the heart of successful investing and perhaps of life more generally. We often tell ourselves that we will start a new project, make an important decision or pursue a long-held ambition once things become calmer. The reality, however, is that life rarely obliges. There is always another election, another geopolitical crisis, another economic slowdown, another perfectly reasonable excuse to wait just a little longer. Waiting for complete certainty has a way of becoming the most sophisticated form of inaction there is. (I say this as someone who knows a thing or two about procrastination.)

Modern Portfolio Theory teaches us that higher expected returns exist precisely because uncertainty exists. If the future were obvious, opportunities would already be priced accordingly and excess returns would disappear. The uncomfortable truth is that uncertainty is not an obstacle to investing; it is the very reason investing exists. This is also why consistently investing through uncertainty has historically proved more effective than trying to time markets or waiting for complete clarity.

History illustrates this point remarkably well. Every exceptional company we admire today was built during a period that appeared uncertain to those living through it. Every successful investment required someone to commit capital long before the outcome became obvious. By the time complete clarity arrived, the opportunity had almost invariably disappeared. Visibility is a luxury markets seldom provide. Judgement is what they reward instead.

The discipline of saying no

The best investors I encountered this year drew their confidence from somewhere else entirely. It came from knowing exactly what kind of businesses they wanted to own, what kind of people they wanted to back and, perhaps most importantly, which opportunities they were prepared to walk away from.

The older I become, the more convinced I am that successful investing is defined less by the quality of the opportunities one accepts than by the discipline with which one declines the rest. Every experienced investor has stories of investments they regret missing, but the truly exceptional ones are distinguished by something far less visible: an extraordinary capacity to say no. They understand that capital is finite, time is finite and attention is finite. Every investment pursued inevitably means another opportunity abandoned, and preserving the discipline to remain selective becomes increasingly valuable as markets grow more competitive. Growing up as a millennial, I am acutely aware of how social media places a glittering veneer on everyone's life, cultivating a constant sense of FOMO, the fear of missing out, and the feeling that one must always say yes. The best investors I know have learned to resist that instinct entirely.

Conviction before consensus

Several investors I met this year did not wait for the market to confirm their views before acting. They had done the work, formed a view and were prepared to be early. Conviction, in their hands, was not arrogance. It was the product of preparation. They were also, without exception, the first to revisit their assumptions when new information arrived. Confidence and intellectual humility, it turns out, are not opposites. In the best investors, they coexist.

What Fundraising Is Whispering to Us

DPI is fashionable again

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is whether fundraising has become significantly more difficult than it had been only a few years ago. The answer is undoubtedly yes. Fundraising takes longer. Investment committees ask more questions. Due diligence has become considerably more extensive. Reference calls are deeper and limited partners have become increasingly selective in deciding where to allocate fresh capital.

It would, however, be inaccurate to conclude that capital has somehow disappeared. Quite the opposite. There remains an extraordinary amount of institutional capital seeking attractive opportunities across private markets. Pension funds continue to require long-term returns. Family offices continue to seek diversification. Insurance companies, endowments and sovereign investors continue to allocate significant resources to alternative assets. What has changed is not the availability of capital but the threshold of conviction required before that capital is deployed. That, in my view, is probably the best thing that could have happened.

One consequence of today's more selective fundraising environment is that certain themes have returned to the centre of almost every conversation. None more so than DPI. Judging by this year's fundraising meetings, one could be forgiven for thinking the private equity industry has just uncovered one of finance's greatest revelations: investors quite like getting their money back! A remarkable breakthrough. Fortunately, that insight predates private equity by several centuries.

There is something quietly amusing about watching timeless principles suddenly become the industry's latest obsession. Limited partners did not wake up in 2026 and unexpectedly discover that realised returns are preferable to paper gains, or that liquidity has value. Those truths have always been obvious. What changed was not the principle, but the environment. After several years in which exit activity slowed dramatically, distributions naturally became one of the defining topics of every fundraising discussion. Limited partners were no longer evaluating opportunities solely through the lens of long-term return potential. They were also thinking about portfolio liquidity, commitment pacing and the practical realities of funding future allocations. The renewed focus on DPI is therefore entirely rational. What is slightly harder to accept is the impression that it represents some profound new way of thinking about investing. It does not. Good investing has never been about marking value. It has always been about returning capital. DPI is simply the scorecard. The acronym may have become fashionable. The underlying principle never stopped mattering.

When gross became the new net

Financial markets have always had a habit of rediscovering old ideas and presenting them as new. Every cycle crowns a different concept. Conferences revolve around it. Fundraising decks are rewritten. Panels are organised. White papers appear. Consultants produce new frameworks. Before long, one could almost believe the industry has entered an entirely new era. Sometimes it has. More often, it has simply rediscovered something that sensible investors never forgot.

A French investor said something to me recently that I have not stopped thinking about: "Le net est devenu le brut." Net has become gross. The conversation moved on. I did not. For years, fundraising presentations led with net returns: net IRR, net TVPI, net multiples. Managers wanted to be judged on what investors actually received. Today, more and more presentations begin with gross performance. Nobody announced the change. Nobody made a speech about it. It simply happened. Perhaps fundraising became more competitive. Perhaps headline numbers became more important. Perhaps managers simply realised that gross performance tells a better story. Whatever the reason, the shift itself is revealing. Markets communicate a great deal through the language they use. When the words change, it usually means something underneath has changed first. People often focus on data and forget to pay attention to vocabulary. Language tells you what people want you to notice. Just as importantly, it tells you what they would rather you did not. Perhaps that single sentence says more about today's private equity market than another hundred fundraising presentations.

The Real PPT of Private Markets

People

Over the course of this past year, I gradually came to realise that the questions I was asking during meetings were becoming remarkably consistent. How does one choose the companies and managers to represent? The answer, as straightforward as it may sound, is that we chose to work with people we genuinely like. And the people we like as investors and entrepreneurs tend to be those who are reliable, structured and trustworthy. This brings us to what I believe is the real foundation of private markets today: People, Process and Transparency.

The difference between organisations almost always came down to something considerably more fundamental than strategy or track record. It came down to people. I am increasingly convinced that we systematically underestimate the importance of character when evaluating investment organisations. Financial models can be refined, investment strategies evolve and market conditions inevitably change, but integrity, intellectual curiosity and sound judgement remain remarkably consistent over time. The individuals I admired most throughout the year were not necessarily those with the most impressive track records or the most sophisticated presentations. More often than not, they were those who displayed a rare combination of humility and conviction: confident enough to make difficult decisions, yet equally comfortable admitting what they did not know. It is worth acknowledging that private equity managers are well compensated, and rightly so. The quality of work that the best professionals in this industry deliver, the complexity of the decisions they take and the weight of responsibility they carry on behalf of their investors is genuinely extraordinary. Some decisions cannot be outsourced to algorithms. They are ultimately expressions of character, and they rest on the shoulders of remarkable individuals.

Process

Throughout my travels I was repeatedly reminded that the strongest investment organisations rarely rely on brilliance alone. Instead, they rely on discipline. Their success is seldom the result of a single exceptional investment or one particularly gifted individual. Rather, it reflects the existence of a repeatable process capable of producing consistently good decisions across different market environments.

Every experienced investor has made successful investments, and every experienced investor has made mistakes. I will not start listing mine here, otherwise this summer letter would become considerably longer than intended. Jokes aside, the difference lies in whether those outcomes improve the process or simply become anecdotes.

The best firms I encountered possessed an almost quiet confidence in the way they made decisions. They understood that consistency matters more than excitement, that saying no is often more valuable than saying yes, and that protecting capital is every bit as important as compounding it. Their investment committees were not designed to confirm existing opinions but to challenge them. Debate was encouraged, dissent was welcomed, and intellectual honesty appeared to matter more than hierarchy. These are organisations that had managed to remain successful across multiple decades rather than a single market cycle.

Transparency

The final observation may be the one I value most. Private equity funds remain blind pools, regardless of how much capital a fund has already deployed into portfolio companies. Even a meaningful general partner commitment does not, on its own, prevent misalignment. What ultimately matters is whether the people involved are genuinely good and reliable, because without trust, and without the sincere belief that a manager is acting in the best interests of their investors, no partnership can endure. Over the years I have become increasingly convinced that transparency is one of the most underappreciated competitive advantages in our industry. Not because investors enjoy receiving bad news, but because long-term partnerships cannot be built without trust, and trust cannot exist without transparency.

A man was once asked how he and his wife had divided decisions over sixty years of marriage. "When we married," he replied, "we agreed that she would handle all the small decisions and I would handle all the big ones." "And how did that work out?" "Perfectly. In sixty years, there has not been a single big decision."

It is a good joke, but it contains an uncomfortable truth. Life is largely the accumulation of small decisions: the conversations we choose to have, the opportunities we decide to pursue, the compromises we are willing to accept and, above all, the people we choose to trust.

The same applies to character. It is rarely revealed in the extraordinary. It is revealed in the ordinary, in the hundreds of small, unremarkable decisions that eventually define who we are and who we become. The same is true in investing. In the end, decisions are not simply tests of intelligence, they are tests of character.

Working Hard Is Hard Work

Beyond being a placement agent

These are also, perhaps unsurprisingly, the principles that increasingly define the way we think about our own business. At Soledar, we often describe ourselves as a placement agent, although I have become increasingly uncomfortable with that description. It is accurate, but incomplete. If our role consisted merely of introducing investors to fund managers, we would not be able to survive. Databases already contain thousands of managers. Meetings can be arranged with remarkable efficiency. Information has never been more accessible. What remains scarce is judgement.

Judgement as a business model

Our responsibility is not simply to identify good investment opportunities. It is to determine which organisations deserve to become long-term partners for sophisticated investors whose capital may remain invested for ten or fifteen years. That responsibility extends well beyond analysing track records or reviewing due diligence questionnaires. It requires understanding people, organisational culture, decision-making processes and the subtle characteristics that rarely appear in marketing presentations but often determine outcomes over time.

Matchmaking, not distribution

Increasingly, I believe our profession resembles long-term matchmaking far more than traditional distribution. We spend our time trying to understand not only whether a manager is exceptional, and this reveals itself gradually: in conversations struck up in airport lounges when a flight is delayed, in the way someone treats a waitress in a café, in the questions people ask rather than the answers they give, and above all, in the simple act of spending time together.

Summer Homework

Becoming better investors starts with becoming better people

As I close this letter, I find myself returning to the same place where it began: an airport lounge, another delayed flight, though this time not rushing to an investor meeting but to a Greek island. I realise that the most valuable insights I gathered these past months did not come from financial models, conference presentations or market forecasts. They came from people. From listening more than speaking (which is not always easy for an Italian woman).

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to engaging with you in the years ahead. For many of us, summer has arrived, bringing with it holidays, family and time. The goal of that time away is also to become better and happier people, because in the end, that is what we bring to every meeting and to every working day, wherever we are. Life is short, after all.

Enjoy the Summer.

Alessandra Mazzucchelli

It Is What It Is

Getting the assumptions right

In mathematics, as in life, solving a problem starts with getting the assumptions right. And sometimes I wonder whether we spend too much time looking for answers without questioning the assumptions themselves. What if life was never meant to be easy?

A competition over who is to blame

As an Italian born and raised in France, I have been following with particular attention what is happening in both countries. And of course, these are far from being the only places where young people are protesting, expressing frustration and, in many cases, genuine fear for their future.

I read newspapers from different countries, and what strikes me is how much of the discussion seems to have become a competition over who is to blame. Governments, previous generations, institutions, the economic system. There is always someone who should have done something differently.

I am not suggesting that these problems are not real, or that people should not protest. Quite the opposite. But I sometimes wonder whether we have, almost without realising it, made the idea that life should not be difficult into some sort of established right.

Looking after the soul

Modern society offers us countless ways to make life more comfortable, to relieve discomfort, avoid effort and find immediate solutions to almost everything. We invest enormous amounts of time and money in physical wellness, longevity, nutrition, beauty and taking care of our bodies. All very good things, of course.

But I sometimes wonder whether we have become so focused on looking after our physical well-being that we have forgotten to take care of something equally important: our soul. Our inner strength, our values, our ability to deal with frustration, uncertainty and the simple fact that not everything in life can be fixed or made comfortable.

And perhaps this is why I find that the famous expression “It is what it is”, as banal as it may sound, contains more wisdom than we sometimes give it credit for. Not as an excuse to do nothing, but as a reminder that accepting reality is often the first step towards dealing with it.

Zooming Out

For most of human history, surviving was an achievement

Sometimes I think we could all benefit from zooming out a little. Many of our grandparents lived through wars, hunger and times when simply putting food on the table was a daily concern. Go back a little further, and more than one in three children did not even make it to their fifth birthday. Giving birth was a genuine risk to a woman's life. As recently as 1900, global life expectancy at birth was only 32 years. For most of human history, simply surviving was already an achievement.

13.8 billion years, and no instruction manual

And if we zoom out even further? Our universe is around 13.8 billion years old. The Earth around 4.6 billion. Somehow, life appeared on this little planet, and billions of years later here we are, still trying to understand how it all began.

We arrive in this world without having asked to be here, without an instruction manual and with absolutely no guarantee of what lies ahead. And yet, somehow, we seem to believe that life owes us an easy ride.

I don't know about you, but almost everything I have ever tried to do has been harder than I initially imagined. Building a business, learning something new, relationships, even understanding myself sometimes.

Fortunate Is Not the Same as Easy

“How difficult can life possibly be?”

And I can already imagine someone reading this and thinking: Come on. A young Western European woman working in private equity, with a loving family behind her and plenty of opportunities. How difficult can life possibly be?

Fair enough. I am very aware of how fortunate I am. But isn't that precisely part of the problem? We sometimes assume that hardship belongs to people born into certain circumstances. As if opportunities, a supportive family or a successful career made us immune to suffering or disappointment.

And this creates a double problem. Those who imagine others have it easier become increasingly dissatisfied with their own lives. Meanwhile, those who supposedly have everything they need to be happy feel almost guilty when they are not. Of course, some people face objectively much greater obstacles than others. But having a fortunate life and having an easy life are two very different things.

Lives as publicly listed companies

I wonder how much social media contributes to all this. We have almost turned our lives into publicly listed companies, with thousands of shareholders commenting on the valuation without ever having read the full accounts. And by comparing our reality with everyone else's highlights, we risk becoming so attached to our own dissatisfaction that it almost becomes part of our identity.

Your Personal Board of Directors

Expecting difficulty makes life more enjoyable

Personally, I have come to believe that expecting life to be difficult can actually make it considerably more enjoyable. We stop interpreting every obstacle as something unfair and start thinking about what we can do with it.

The most important board we will ever build

And having the right people around us makes an enormous difference. I often think everyone should build their own personal board of directors. A handful of people we trust, who challenge us, tell us the truth, support us through difficulties and share our happiness. Friends, family, people we love. Probably the most important board we will ever build.

What I look for in fund managers

In my professional life, I spend a considerable amount of time meeting private equity fund managers and deciding which teams I genuinely want to help raise capital. I can usually tell quite quickly which ones I admire most. Not necessarily those with the most impressive presentations, but those who are willing to get their hands dirty, question their assumptions and admit their mistakes.

In the Same Boat

Perhaps this is something we could bring a little more into the broader public debate. Governments have responsibilities, institutions should be questioned and inequalities must be addressed. But perhaps the first change should start with the way we think, the way we look at our own lives and, as a consequence, at those of others.

Despite our different backgrounds and circumstances, we are all in the same boat as human beings, probably much more than we realise. We all have our hopes, fears and battles that others know very little about.

And perhaps understanding this is what allows us to look at life, with all its imperfections, and simply say: “It is what it is.” With a smile.

Alessandra Mazzucchelli