Hello there and Merry Christmas! ‧₊˚🎄✩ ₊˚🦌⊹♡
We know many of you are already in holiday mode and may finally have some time to engage with thoughtful, long-form content. With that in mind, we have prepared a private equity “Experts’ Thoughts” recap that reflects on a year that has been anything but ordinary.
2025 has been a year marked by the rise of evergreen funds, growing secondaries activity, deeper AI adoption within private equity teams, and an apparent reshaping of what sustainability truly means in private markets, with fewer buzzwords and more measurable results.
Over the past year, we have spent a great deal of time listening. Through interviews and podcast conversations with private equity investors, LPs, family offices, and operators, one pattern became apparent very quickly. Despite different strategies, geographies, and market cycles, there was remarkable alignment among industry leaders in how they think about value creation, risk, liquidity, and execution.
Across the board, the conversation changed. Founders, GPs, LPs, and family offices spoke less about ambition and more about execution and more about resilience.
Rather than asking how investors theoretically plan to adapt, we focused on what they are doing in practice. The answers were strikingly consistent. So instead of recapping individual episodes, this edition distills the themes that surfaced repeatedly, regardless of fund size, strategy, or geography.
Below are the key learnings that defined private equity in 2025.
Value Creation Starts With a Clear Exit Plan
Across discussions with François Candelon at Seven2 and Maximilian Buttinger at Warburg Pincus, value creation comes through as less about applying a standard playbook and more about practicing real discipline.
Instead of launching dozens of initiatives, both mentioned narrowing the focus early to just a few priorities that truly move the needle, and sticking to them relentlessly.
François described how this starts with a clearly defined exit vision from day one. At Seven2, every portfolio company aligns around a specific “exit profile” that serves as a filter for decision-making. The goal isn’t to do more, but to do what matters most for the future buyer.
That clarity helps management teams avoid distractions, move faster, and allocate their time and capital to the two or three levers that will ultimately shape the equity story at exit.
Maximilian reinforced this idea from an operational angle. In today’s market, where valuation multiples are tighter and external tailwinds are weaker, execution speed and focus have become critical.
Operational excellence, in his view, is about delivering results faster and more efficiently than competitors, not through grand strategies, but through sharp execution. When multiple expansions can’t be assumed, disciplined execution is no longer optional; it’s the primary driver of returns.
Co-Investing Has Matured, and Relationships Matter More Than Ever
Co-investing came up often, but what stood out was how much the conversation had changed. It’s no longer talked about as a tactical add-on or a way to save on fees.
Instead, both Volker Wende of SwanCap and Jørgen Blystad of Argentum described co-investing as a mature, highly structured strategy that experienced LPs use with real intent.
For them, the value goes far beyond economics.
Co-investments give LPs a front-row seat to how GPs actually operate over time, how they make decisions, how they work with management teams, how they handle governance, and how they execute when things don’t go to plan. That kind of visibility is hard to get through fund commitments alone.
A similar perspective came through in our conversation with Vahit Alili, Senior Investment Director at Schroders Capital, who looks at co-investments through the lens of portfolio construction and access.
Vahit explained how combining fund-of-funds exposure with co-investments helps investors reach the small and mid-market segment, where returns tend to be driven by primary buyouts and specialist knowledge rather than scale.
Co-investments work best when they are part of a long-term LP–GP relationship, with shared underwriting and real alignment of capital at risk. In fragmented markets like DACH, this approach not only improves access to specialist managers but also leads to better decision-making and more balanced risk over time.
Flexibility - Your Competitive Advantage in Today’s Market
As higher interest rates and slower exits reset the private equity landscape, flexibility became a real competitive edge.
In discussions with Stefano Zavattaro at CAPZA and Raffaele Legnani at H.I.G. Italy, the small and mid-market consistently stood out as more resilient. These deals typically use lower leverage, which reduces pressure in a higher-rate environment.
They also benefit from a wider range of exit options, from secondary buyouts to strategic sales, making them less dependent on perfect market timing. Just as important, value creation in this segment is deeply operational, with hands-on work on consolidation, international expansion, and digital transformation driving returns even when exits slow.
The same preference for flexibility showed up on the LP side.
Luigi Croce from Schroders Capital explained how semi-liquid and evergreen fund structures are gaining momentum as investors seek smoother capital deployment and greater liquidity control.
In a world where traditional drawdown funds can take years to invest and return capital fully, these structures offer immediate exposure, ongoing compounding, and the ability to adjust allocations over time without abandoning long-term private market exposure.
ESG Is Being Used as a Value Creation Tool
The ESG discussions this year were focused on how sustainability is applied in practice. To find out more about this, we talked to Fredrik Franke at Norvestor, and April Tissier at Ardian described a change toward using ESG as a lever for value creation.
At Norvestor, sustainability is structured around two objectives. The first is exit readiness, ensuring portfolio companies meet buyer expectations through appropriate policies, processes, and reliable data. The second is the use of ESG themes to support commercial outcomes, such as revenue growth, cost efficiency, and stronger competitive positioning within portfolio companies.
At Ardian, ESG data collection efforts are now being used more actively. The data supports benchmarking across GPs, informs investment and portfolio decisions, and helps influence GP practices over time. ESG information is treated as an input into decision-making rather than a standalone compliance exercise.
Stay Tuned With 0100 in 2026!
Private markets continue to change, and the conversations around them are only getting more nuanced. We’ll keep digging into these changes through honest conversations with GPs, LPs, family offices, and operators who are navigating this market in real time.
If you’d like to stay close to these discussions and get our latest interviews, podcasts, and deep dives as they’re published, make sure to subscribe to 0100 Weekly Brief. We have many more in-depth private markets conversations ready for 2026, and we’d love to have you along.