Private Equity Value Creation Podcast

On this episode, Blair Garrou, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Mercury Fund, details the Mercury Method—a post-investment approach that borrows from private equity to lower loss ratios in early-stage venture. Learn how a 100-point operational hygiene audit surfaces the most urgent risks and how fractional executives fill weak functions until they hire their own replacements.
Hear how an in-house AI lab supports assessments and AI transitions across the portfolio, why building brand voice with a human first makes agent-written content work and how a $500 million portfolio company runs marketing with three people. Then learn why a formal liquidity program that starts two to three years before exit keeps companies ready to transact and why vertical software companies with real data moats, systems of record and deep industry expertise aren't going anywhere despite the SaaS apocalypse.

The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.

On this episode, Jon Lange, Managing Director at THL Partners, unpacks how private equity firms decide when and how much operational support to deploy into a portfolio company, and why that decision is never one-size-fits-all.
Learn why the old software moat no longer holds up on its own, and what still makes a company defensible in an AI-native market. Then learn how AI is already automating work that used to take entire teams, from appointment scheduling to weeks-long demo production, and why the firms willing to stay humble about what they don't know yet are the ones pulling ahead.

On this episode, Jim Toth, Managing Partner at Riverside Acceleration Capital, discusses how an in-house operating team works with portfolio companies to drive growth. Learn how pattern recognition across hundreds of companies helps identify who's ready to scale, how tracking over 100 data points on every company can reveal which growth investments move the needle and why a structured, benchmarked assessment across sales, marketing and customer success decides exactly where to focus first.
Plus, hear why matching capital type to a company's stage matters as much as the size of the check, and learn a simple three-category framework for sorting AI's impact on a business.
The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.

On this episode, Doyl Burkett, Managing Partner and Founder at Integrity Growth Partners, joins the show to talk AI-native deal sourcing. Learn how a two-person team can out-source firms ten times its size, and where that same system gets pointed once a company is in the portfolio.
Learn how to filter investments for AI risk using a simple framework of defensible moats, and see why the lower middle market may be where AI-driven sourcing creates the biggest edge.
The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.

On this episode, Jesse Bendit, Principal at Apax Digital, joins the show to unpack how a private equity firm builds and funds a 30-person internal operating team without letting it become bloated. Learn why a pull model beats a push model for utilization, how staying concentrated in 15 to 20 investments per fund lets a team build real sector depth, and how that depth shows up during diligence, not just after close.
Hear why trust—rather than traditional SEO signals—is the new currency of visibility as search moves into LLMs. Plus, learn how to separate genuine AI risk from AI opportunity in a portfolio company, including why seat-based SaaS pricing is losing its power as a value proxy and how deep data and integration advantages can make AI a moat rather than a threat.
The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.