I was having dinner the other day with a friend who works in private credit, and I remember him being visibly frustrated with a few LPs that invested in one of their funds. He complained that the LPs took way too long to respond to their communications.
The following day, I had a meeting with a large U.S. pension fund. And in a great example of poetic justice, the first complaint from their end was that they get hundreds of emails from GPs (either pitching new opportunities or sending reporting material on existing funds) and it’s a slog to get through all of them.
That’s when it hit me: neither party has a complete picture of what the other deals with day to day.
From the LP’s perspective, the GP is either diligencing deals or looking after portfolio companies. What they often miss is that those same GPs are fielding questions from hundreds of other LPs across different funds. Every reply chips away at the time meant for actual value-accretive work.
On the GP side, it’s no different. Many underestimate the sheer volume of inbound material an allocator has to process just to get to their specific email, and that’s before answering to their beneficiaries or committees.
It’s a broken loop of good intentions and limited bandwidth.
We’re working with several LPs right now to help them move through that slog without sacrificing diligence depth. I guess we indirectly help GPs by making LPs more efficient, but the goal is bigger than that. We’d like to see a future where that GP-LP chasm starts to close with something a little more elegant than another email thread.