You get to choose your deals. The sponsor chooses what to show you.
Co-investing - putting capital directly into a single company alongside a private equity sponsor, often with little or no fee and carry - is one of the most powerful levers an investor has to improve net returns. It is also one of the easiest ways to get hurt.
The Co-Investment Practitioner is the field guide for the professionals who do this work and the newcomers who want to. Written for LP investment teams, GP deal and investor-relations professionals, advisers, and analysts breaking into private markets, it turns a fast-moving, high-stakes discipline into a repeatable practice you can build, staff, govern, and improve.
Across four parts, you will learn how to:
- Understand what co-investment really is, and how it differs from funds, secondaries, and direct deals
- Read the economics: fee savings, the J-curve, and the dispersion that makes concentration cut both ways
- Build a program - mandate, governance, resourcing, and limits that let you say yes fast and no gracefully
- Source deals and earn a place near the top of a sponsor's call list
- Reach sound conviction under compressed timelines without cutting the corners that matter
- Underwrite both the asset and the sponsor, and pressure-test any model with a return bridge
- Structure terms, manage concentration and portfolio risk, and steward a position after the close
- Navigate the career: the roles, the skills, the interviews, and a plan for your first ninety days
This is not a book of shortcuts or promises. It teaches durable method - how to think about adverse selection, speed, concentration, and alignment - illustrated with clear, hypothetical worked examples and hard-won practical wisdom.
If you want to co-invest well, selectively, quickly, and with discipline, this is where to start.
