Europe is the Goldmine?

Europe looks like a nightmare for investors: dozens of countries, languages, and laws.

That mess is a moat

Thread on CVC’s report Fragmentation = Opportunity.

Europe’s fragmentation keeps deals bilateral, local, and less competitive.

That means:
•More proprietary deals
•Lower entry multiples

The market is massive.
•$20T+ GDP
•500M+ consumers
•12,000+ companies with >$300M turnover

The 2nd largest buyout market globally, but still underpenetrated by international players.

Timeless Lessons from 200 Years of Tech Investing

Railways, Radios , Dot-Coms, and EVs show the same patterns.

Thread Breakthroughs start as a joke

Disbelief is the default response to disruption.

Every major technology was first dismissed:

Railways: “Passengers will suffocate.”
Telephone: “Impossible to transmit voice.”
Internet: “No bigger than the fax machine.”

Instant masterpiece by @ganeumann.

One of the clearest frameworks on who actually captures AI value.

Amazing essay published in @joincolossus

Here are my notes Every major fortune in modern capitalism has come from riding technological waves.

Railroads. Steel. Electricity. Cars. Microprocessors.

But not every revolutionary technology makes investors rich.

The best private equity deals look like trash to everyone else:

- Buy a broken dot-com
- Fix it in 2 years
- Sell it to Google for $3.1B

8x in 24 Months

You don’t make money buying darlings. You make money buying wrecks that still throw off cash

Thread Spotting the Opportunity

Once a dot-com darling, DoubleClick was struggling after the crash.

DoubleClick provided the software that decided which ad you see when you load a website.

It had two primary businesses, but the focus was scattered. They weren't operating at their full potential.

H&F took a hard look at what was broken:

1. The management structure was outdated.
2. The businesses were misaligned.

The SaaS Cowboys

Texas Oil patch kids turned dusty courthouse records into the world’s top energy SaaS.

Blackstone just bought it for $6.5B

A Texas startup became the world’s energy brain The idea was simple:

Oil & gas data was trapped in filing cabinets, county offices, and dusty archives.

If you could digitize it, you could give producers a competitive edge.

DrillingInfo’s mission: Bring energy into the digital age.

The Distressed Champions: Oaktree

Howard Marks built his fortune buying what others fear.

He turned a €275M loan into a €1.2B Football giant

The Investment Strategy⬇️

(Slides by ClioFinance) 1/ In 2021, Chinese conglomerate Suning Holdings was drowning in debt.

To keep Inter Milan alive during COVID, they took a €275M bridge loan from Oaktree Capital.

The collateral: Suning’s majority stake in Inter.

A high-interest lifeline… that became a trap.

Blackstone is putting BILLIONS into the most disruptive shift of our lifetime

The Energy Transition

The Playbook⬇️ We’re in the middle of a once-in-a-century shake-up:

Data centers + AI are sucking power like never before.

EVs & electrification are stressing old grids.

Governments are throwing money at decarbonization.

It’s chaotic, expensive, and full of opportunity

How to buy great businesses that nobody wants and make a fortune doing it.

Corporate orphans. Neglected divisions.

The Carve-Out Guide⬇️ So… What’s a Carve-Out?

You’re buying a business from someone who doesn’t want it…

and selling it to someone who finally does.

Some giant conglomerate has a perfectly decent business, but they’ve got 87 divisions, 14 layers of management, and they forgot this one even existed.

You come in, offer a fair price (or maybe a little less), and voilà, you just bought a future IPO.

They analyzed 10,000+ PE deals.

54% of Private Equity value creation comes from one thing.

Let’s break it down⬇️ Value Creation

Across all deals globally, value creation comes from:

-Revenue Growth: 54%
-Multiple Expansion: 32%
- Margin Expansion: 14%

In today’s high-rate regime, revenue growth is no longer optional.

It’s the core driver.

The Modern Rainmaker

From a kid in Texas to $30 BILLION AUM.

$20B+ in profits.

He built one of the most successful family offices ever.

The full arc of John Phelan’s story⬇️ Dallas, 1986.

John Phelan graduates Phi Beta Kappa from SMU.

Economics. Political Science. Top of his class.

He has hunger for the game.

He heads to Goldman Sachs, Investment Banking Division.

Mentors; Hank Paulson. Byron Trott.

Private Equity Legend: 3i

The most legendary PE deal in Europe.

40% IRR. 15x MOIC

Thread The Target

Action – a non-food discount retailer offering simple, functional products at ultra-low prices.

•~6,000 SKUs, 2/3 below €2
•Mass-market focus on convenience & affordability

Founded 1993. Low-margin, fragmented space.

Largest LBO Failure in History

In 2007, KKR & TPG bet on the “safest” asset class.

In reality, it was a ticking bomb.

The biggest PE bankruptcy ever.

Thread TXU looked like a dream LBO:

- Largest coal power operator in Texas

- 3M retail customers

- $4B EBITDA

- Stable utility cash flows

KKR & TPG thought they’d locked in a “safe” annuity.

Instead, they set a ticking bomb.

Private Equity Legend: Ted Forstmann

- Buy a dying jet company.

- Make it the Rolex of aviation.

- Sell it for $5.5B.

Now every billionaire wants one. The Opportunity

Gulfstream was once a pioneer in business aviation.

In 1990, it was stagnating:

- Aging aircraft models (GIII near end-of-life)

- Bloated org chart, low productivity

- Undifferentiated in an increasingly crowded market
- R&D cutbacks = innovation freeze

Wall Street investor bought a dying startup for $6M.

Turned it into a $10B biometric monopoly.

The playbook ↓ In 2010, Caryn Seidman-Becker bought CLEAR for $6M… out of bankruptcy.

Angry customers. Airport hardware rotting in storage.

She was a hedge fund manager. Not a tech CEO.

What she built is a monopoly in motion!

Private Equity Legend: €236M Toilet Turnaround

Terra Firma turned ugly rest stops into a 7.5x return

By fixing toilets, launching vouchers, and licensing urinals.

Thread Tank & Rast owned 90%+ of service areas along the German Autobahn.

A real estate monopoly with 500M annual visitors.
But...

🚗 Only 6% of cars actually stopped
🍔 Only 50% of those bought anything
⛽ They made profits only by overcharging fuel.

A sleeping giant.

The Ghost of American Investing

- Buys oil wells, telecoms & venues
- Finds hidden asset rights
- Spins cashflow into more deals
- Stays silent

He owns the Lakers, Coachella, and the fiber under your feet.

Own What People Depend On 🧵 Phil Anschutz is 27, broke, and standing in front of an exploding oil well.

No cash to stop the fire.

So he calls Universal Studios.

He sells them the rights to film Red Adair putting it out—for $100K.

- Pays Adair.
- Buys up leases.
- Turns a crisis into millions.

The Cheapskate Billionaire

German immigrant executed a brutal LBO play:

- Take control.
- Strip it down.
– Extract $4.6B selling what public markets mispriced

Thread From Immigrant to Empire

John W. Kluge arrived in the U.S. from Germany.

He started in food brokerage and spotted an opportunity:

A tiny TV company, Metropolitan Broadcasting, with 2 radio stations.

He bought control in 1959.

Then came the build-up.

The $70 Billion Hollywood Buffett

Todd Boehly turned insurance float into media dominance.

Golden Globes. Dodgers. Chelsea FC.

His formula:

Insurance float × distressed assets × media arbitrage.

🧵👇 The Cash Engine: Insurance

Like Buffett with Geico, Boehly powers his empire with Security Benefit Life — a $52B annuities business.

In 2023 alone, it threw off $1.1B operating income, up 50%

That cash gets funneled straight into assets.

The best IRR zone in Europe.

🇨🇭🇩🇪🇦🇹 is what the U.S. mid-market was 20 years ago.

Fragmented. Founder-owned.

Here’s how to catch up 🧵 Valuations ≠ US heat.

DACH doesn’t price like the U.S.
You’ll still find:

• 6–8x EBIT for niche leaders
• 2–3x revenue for profitable SaaS
• Sub-5x EBITDA for cash-cow industrials

Boring on paper. Beautiful in IRR.

The Greatest Private Equity Deal of All Time?

One $8M deal became a $30 BILLION empire.

5275x MOIC

The Power of Boring Industries

Thread Start with a search fund. End with $30 BILLION

They found a niche roadside assistance biz: Road Rescue.

$5.9M revenue
$1.5M EBITDA

Paid: ~4.5x EBITDA

The Best Private Equity Model?

$17M turned into $1B+.

Will Thorndike (author of The Outsiders) is building the future of long-term compounding.

A new kind of HoldCo.

Let’s break it down👇 Who is Will Thorndike?

Author of The Outsiders, praised by Warren Buffett as one of the best business books ever written.

– Was an early architect of the search fund model

– Backed the greatest PE deal of all time (5,000x MOIC)