David Toll

All the debating and lobbying and sweating about whether one day buyout professionals will have to pay regular income taxes, not capital gains, on their profit share sometimes obscures two human-resources-related truths. One, firms have been hiring at a fast clip. And two, already-generous compensation packages have been racing skyward across the industry. Ample evidence for these developments […]

Riverside Co continued to diversify its business with the closing of a $50 million fund earmarked to provide enterprise software companies with growth capital in the form of loans with royalty-like characteristics. The fund is called Riverside Acceleration Capital. The move is part of broader effort by Riverside Co, best known for sponsoring consolidations in the lower middle market, to […]

Mike Nugent, a co-founder and chief executive of Bison, a five-year-old company that provides an online platform for investor-relations professionals, left the company earlier this month. Why Nugent left is unclear, although a source familiar with the situation noted that the venture-backed company has brought in a strategic investor. Buyouts was unable to reach executives at Bison […]

Pension giant Massachusetts PRIM has outdistanced many of its peers in the race to achieve top-quartile private equity returns. Are the superior results just a fluke? A working paper issued last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that its outperformance stems from skill and not just chance. The four authors compared the returns achieved by investors with those that would have resulted had they picked funds […]

Madison Capital’s recent push into technology lending is bearing fruit. The Chicago mid-market lender, which in the first quarter formalized and beefed up what had been an ad hoc approach to technology, has racked up six tech platform deals so far this year, with two more expected to close by the end of October and as many as four more […]

JMK Consumer Growth Partners, an investor in skincare-product company Supergoop, could be heading out soon to raise a debut fund earmarked for growth equity investments. In an interview with Buyouts, co-founder John M. Kenney said he’d like to raise $100 million — and no more than that — for the fund. In fact, Kenney said, should the first […]

Ready to get your first fund raised?  Better make sure not to give up too much of the economics to an anchor investor. That early, anchor investor can play a key role in your fundraise by convincing other investors that your fund is viable. But give up too much carried interest and investors will wonder if […]

The long-simmering question of whether buyout shops have to register as broker-dealers erupted this month in the form of a Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action against Blackstreet Capital Management LLC. In a June 1 order, the SEC found that Blackstreet Capital had violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by performing its own brokerage services — prospecting […]

Chalk up one more reason that internal rates of return can be misleading — and one more reason that the industry needs to emphasize that they are not equivalent to compound annual growth rates. With interest rates low, growing numbers of buyout firms use capital-call bridging facilities to cover the equity portions of their deals in the early months. Sometimes the loans cover […]

How carry gets divvied up among senior partners has more to do with who founded the firm than with individual performance, according to recent research. Moreover, investors have been right to worry that carry distributed in this way can lead to departures. Such are the findings suggested by a recent examination of 717 private equity funds — largely buyout […]