This episode is sponsored by Davis Polk and DC Advisory

Senior dealmakers at established firms increasingly seem to be choosing to strike out on their own, much like those firms’ original founders once did during the surge in mid-market firms during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But in those years, institutional capital was flooding into a PE market that had proven its model repeatable, whereas the landscape for new firms today is markedly different. Not only do LPs want to see differentiated strategies with a compelling story and outsized returns, they want the young managers with whom they invest to have institutional-level operations and infrastructure.

In this episode, Buyouts senior editor Graham Bippart sits down with Michael Hong, a partner in the Investment Management practice at Davis Polk, and Donato de Donato, co-lead of DC Advisory’s GP Strategic Advisory practice, to discuss the state of the emerging manager market.

They point out that there is no shortage of challenges and complications lying in wait for would-be new managers, who often may be more restricted by their previous employers than they thought, make all-too-common mistakes in their pitch decks, and may even have notions about the most important first hires they should make. But in an ever-more-crowded market, those who can carve out a unique and compelling strategy are best poised to lure LP interest away from long-established managers.

This episode was produced alongside Buyouts’ annual Emerging Managers Report, done in association with Gen II.

Over the past year, LP appetite for private equity has shifted noticeably. Private Equity International’s latest LP Perspectives Study revealed that 38 percent of respondents plan to invest more in private equity in 2026, which is down from 45 percent in 2025. Meanwhile, 12 percent plan to invest less, up from 7 percent the prior year.

What is driving this change? To unpack the data, PEI Group senior content producer Evie Rusman is joined by Hong Kong bureau chief Alex Lynn and senior research manager Evie Taylor to analyse the findings and discuss how these trends are shaping LP sentiment towards private equity.

This is the first episode in PEI’s new miniseries Data Dive, where we'll dig into PEI's proprietary data, surveys and rankings, as well as recent market data sets, to understand what investors and fund managers are thinking, where capital is moving and how the asset class is evolving.

Stay tuned for the next episode, which will provide insight into affiliate title Secondaries Investor’s inaugural global survey of the secondaries market.

Have expectations for private equity changed? What’s the role of the asset class in the portfolio these days?

These are the questions that Dale Burgess, executive managing director for equities at Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, and David Nowak, president of private equity firm Brookfield, tackle in the second episode of PEI Group's new Commitment Issues podcast miniseries.

As the industry works through a backlog of unrealised assets, questions have arisen about performance, asset valuations and firms’ ability to acquire and sell companies in the time frame LPs have come to expect. For instance, average investment hold periods in private equity have now risen to around seven years, according to data from Bain & Company. Performance has to be even greater to achieve the same types of returns that private equity generated in past eras of cheaper debt.

As Burgess and Nowak explore, this can present a significant challenge for some firms, while for others – particularly where operational improvement is an established part of the toolkit – the game hasn’t really changed.