Michael Carmen
The Convener
The room, the network and the deal, brings the right people together.
Michael Carmen embodies The Convener by recognizing early that companies staying private longer was a secular structural shift, not a cyclical blip, and then building around that insight rather than merely trading on it. As Co-Head of Private Markets at Wellington, he constructed institutional capability at the boundary between private and public markets, positioning the firm as a strategic bridge.
“So my first fund that I ran when I was at Montgomery was a mutual fund. So it was all individual investors. And that was the period of time where you can be in some news publication and your fund would become hot and you would get hundreds of millions of dollars in assets in a short period of time.”
“No, we underwrite to a two to three X return on our investment. And when you look at the performance of our funds that are more mature, fund one and fund two, we're right in that camp about net 2x or so. But we're doing it over a shorter period of time in terms of how long it takes.”
“No, but you are talking about a product that I think is very interesting in terms of the hybrid space where you have public-private products. And so it's something that we have actually in our fintech product. We have a public-private product that can do just that.”
“So we're thawing. I think we're in the thawing Moment, right? We're starting to get there. And if you look historically, and we've looked at data from the last 40 years, generally the IPO market, when it shuts down, it shuts down for about a year. Occasionally it will shut down for two years plus.”
Masters in Business: “Michael Carmen on Late-Stage Venture Capital and IPOs”
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