How long for Carlyle to wind down?

Last year associate at a top BB and still yet to work with a decent Carlyle portco.

It's almost a joke what they've done with some investments in the broader industrials space, building materials, consumer and others.

Then you have to deal with unrealistic value expectations from their teams trying to get 1.5x MoM from investments that are clearly worth less than what they paid 5 years ago (hint: lots of deserted auctions, desperately trying to move stuff to continuation funds, etc)

Sure, they've got the brand and Rubinstein tries to be cool on YouTube - but how can LPs still fall in the trap?

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Not true...Carlyle is actually one of the large cap funds that everyone admitted has fallen from grace. They struggled to raise their last fund, had to do some restructurings and lay off a good bunch of people, and pulled out of Consumer

If they are not able to show recovery, LPs can just go to other large cap funds that are 'safer' to park their money

You cannot survive in PE anymore just by brand name...look at some of the most respectable names that are suffering right now

 

Beyond even just where their marks are, I find their team structure a little…bizarre. I get that PE is a reverse funnel but it’s a bit ridiculous in their DC office. Of the three verticals there, their tech team is like 6 bodies desperately strewn across various offices, their industrials team is like 3 midlevels, and A&D is…2? I get that they’ve always been leaner but when your execution team is smaller than ACP’s next door in similar verticals, it’s hard to say you’re competitively positioned to deploy a true megafund while monitoring a sizable portfolio.

 

Any have more insight on this? Always super interesting to hear why such a large name fund would perform badly

 

a large name fund and performance aren't correlated

bottom line is that the people at a fund make things happen, and Carlyle isn't the fund that the most hungry seniors look to join / stay

incentives trumph ethics
 

Analyst 1 in Consulting

Any have more insight on this? Always super interesting to hear why such a large name fund would perform badly

Most large (publicly traded) firms performance is no better than just buying SPY and their latest 2-3 vintages are all 3rd/4th quartile. They're just an asset manager looking to increase mgmt. fees as much as possible.

 

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