YouSaid · the spoken record

Meghan Reynolds

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-03-31
most recent: 2025-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Have to use a lot of different channels of communication because we're a very small team and we can't get to everyone in a timely way. And so you have to be flexible in the way that you communicate. We move from an annual report that was not particularly powerful and maybe was hiding some good news and maybe some of the bad news if you deep into the reporting.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Area around that, the plans for the organization are you going to try to expand into new businesses? Are you going to fire your team? Are you going to make changes? Are you going to hire? Or if they're not clear on what's going on in the portfolio, you're going to have a lot of trouble raising new capital from them.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If your investors are hearing something from someone else in the network that you haven't told them, it's a problem. And likewise, how hurt are your employees if they're finding out something that you've already been talking about externally? So make sure that we've level set of all the key messages that we're sharing with each constituent is consistent and clear and timely. The second piece of it is just do people really understand what really matters? Are you communicating to your existing investors what really matters? Your plans for the organization over the long term. In the existing portfolio, where are the problem children and where is the promise in the future? Where is the return going to come from going forward? If people have a good handle on that, then they will continue to support you with more clarity and more conviction. If there's any”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes people take for granted. Let me give you an example. You could have change in your organization. Someone's going to leave. Your investors need to know that. Your employees need to be on message. And the portfolio companies that that person may have worked with need to understand. If you're communicating different things to different people or communicating those things on a different time frame, you have a problem.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's start with existing investors. There is A framework of communication that I think about as it relates to the communities of people that you're interacting with, the communities that are most critical to your business. I put those in three categories. They would be your investors, your employees, And then the companies that you're invested with. We level set the communication patterns at the organization to make sure that our messaging is consistent and clear and concise across those three sets of constituents. And I think that's really important. And I think it's something that”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could have just stayed on the sidelines and waited, but I knew that my skill set. Was needed and that I would have fun getting my hands dirty. Turns out I joined Brad the first week on the job, our largest position in both our public fund and in our venture funds that we had distributed some, but far from all, was down 30%. My first week on the job. Brad looked at me at the end of the week and said, Are you okay? Are you going to stick around? And I said, I think this might be divine intervention. I'm here for a reason. I know what to do. And we linked arms and here we are.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How did you think personally about you could be having this conversation with Brad and hang out for a couple of years and then come in after the crash as opposed to jumping in when you thought it might happen, knowing there's pain to come”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is because capital formation becomes more valuable in a world where you get by just on returns. If you can get by just on returns and returns go up and to the right forever, Don't need me. You're never going to value me. You're going to think I'm administrative, that I just accept the checks. But where I become valuable is in knowing how real relationships are built, how to build a sustainable firm, how to weather storms, ups and downs. It didn't scare me that venture was going to go through a down cycle because cycles happen. I've been through so many of them. Things come back and technology isn't going anywhere. Technology is going to lead us into the future and ventures will be around. And new models will present themselves for how to invest in technology opportunities. That's what happened. Maybe my move to TPG was somewhat naive and I didn't see that then, but that is actually what I learned, that when you get through the other side of it, you've created stronger relationships. You have new opportunities.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the first times I met Brad, he had just raised a $1.6 billion fund, which was three times the size of any previous pool of capital he had raised. We are in late 2021. Maybe the market's starting to wobble, but really not. I told him, your next fund, you should expect that half of the capital will come back from your existing investor base. He looked at me like I was crazy and he said, why do you say that? And I walked him through my thesis. And I think that made him want to hire me because I was a truth teller, first of all. I think he saw, he could understand the risks to the business that nobody else was really talking about. I think the value in my role and why that opportunity attracts me.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was going to be a reckoning of firms to say should you be as big as you are? Does it make sense to have mega venture funds? Should this be a cottage industry? All of this is just pure periodic recognition. If you apply what happened in 050607, it is identical to what happened to venture.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are an endowment, you had incredible returns coming from your venture pool. But if you actually looked inside of that, a lot of that was paper returns and had yet to be returned back to investors. So everyone felt great about your venture and growth commitments and supporting your GPs because they had performed so well for you. But eventually investors tap out. And eventually people start to question what happens to the track record of a fund that gets very large. And I knew that either capital was going to remain free and we were going to have a problem because we're just going to start scaling beyond how venture was historically defined. Or interest rates were going to rise. There's going to be some downturn in the markets and investors were going to be totally overallocated to the asset class.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The boom that happened in venture during the period that capital was free in 2020 and 2021 felt very similar to me as the boom of excessive leverage in 050607 in that you had investors that were increasing allocations to an asset class which were allowing firms and funds to scale to meaningful size to a level of scale that we had never seen before. And a lot of value that was captured within the asset class in terms of TVPI or total value sitting on investors balance sheets that helped like great returns on paper that fueled new commitments, but that was stuck within a fund.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Altimeter seemed like a really unique fit for me, particularly because I had these curiosities around what was happening in venture as an asset class. There were clearly things happening in venture in 2020 and 21 that I saw as so similar to what happened in buyout in 05, 06, 07, and the years that followed. And I had a thesis around that, what was going to happen to LPs, what was going to happen to venture firms. And Brad and I shared some great conversations around that. And so that with the combination of being able to work in technology, which is on the advent of AI, really created the best role that I could think of. Altimeter to level set is 30 people, very different than the several thousand and the tens of thousands that we had at Goldman.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Left TPG, I was co-leading the fundraising group there, which was a team of about 40 or 50 people with a partner of mine that I had worked with from the time that I was an intern at Goldman, it was a dream role for me and it was fantastic. But I realized that I craved an entrepreneurial role again. I craved a building and growing versus a scaling to the moon. And TPG was on the precipice of going public. You could see where that was heading. And when I really did the soul searching that we all did during COVID, I came out on the other side of it. And so I took some time to reflect on that, helped some friends in the venture community that were thinking about their fund. And I was thinking about what I was going to do next when I was approached by Brad.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had very few failures, which is good. We tried to scale biotech. And if you look back to 2010 to 2020, there was a biotech winter happening in the asset class. It made it very difficult to scale. And once you have difficult scaling, then you have some team dysfunction. People get frustrated. And as a snowball that starts once you have trouble getting real traction, my reflection there is not because we made any footfalls on our marketing. My reflection there is because there was a winter going on in the asset class. And the macro matters a lot. That's the key question. I look at the last few years and make a comparison. People that wanted to raise growth, it doesn't matter how great your growth tracker was. Very few people able to raise growth in late 2022 and 2023. The tailwinds just aren't in your favor. It doesn't matter how good you are.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was coming to people with a specific list of opportunities and a specific hunting ground to say, you don't want to miss this opportunity. This is a market opportunity that's tangible today, bottoms up based on everything we're seeing. This is the amount of capital that we need to go after it. And this is why it has a place in your portfolio, even though no one really understood private credit. People understand deals. They understand actionable opportunities. It's not enough to be hand wavy and say we deserve to be in a market because we've got a great group of people.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Works best and what I would still say to people as they're building new businesses is you cannot just fundraise for the sake of fundraising. It has to come from a very tangible opportunity set that is immediate and actionable. And what I mean by that, it is not enough to say we took this team from Goldman Sachs who ran the special situations group there and aren't they very talented and we're going to build what we built there now here at TPG under the banner of TPG Special Situations, which is now called Sixth Street.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Jim just sat and listened with great humility. And that is the biggest lesson that I took away from that moment is you can't move forward until you really understand where someone is coming from and letting them voice their concerns and their frustration is so critical.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I recall a very specific meeting with a California state pension plan, one of the big ones. You can imagine the boardroom with 30 people. I'm with Jim Coulter. I'm with some of the other investors from the TPT Capital team. I'm with the relationship manager. And I was very lucky to be in the room just representing product and product strategy and prepared to go through details to the extent that we went there. But the first 25 minutes of the meeting were just venting as an hour-long meeting. It might have been even 35 or 40 minutes. And here you have a very high powered group of people in the room, including Jim Coulter, who is incredible leader in investment management and has many things to bring to the table in a discussion around private equity and TPG.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as much as you would think. I don't think that performance is sufficient. First of all, we're in private market. So it takes a very long time to bounce back. And we didn't have the time because the opportunity set in some of these other asset classes that we wanted to expand into was so immediate and tactical. The credit opportunity was in 2009 to build the talent acquisition strategy that was happening by the firm because of the displacement of so many talented investors from other banks and other institutions that had faltered. That was the now. And so we didn't have the opportunity to wait for a performance bounce back. All of it came from great communication and great relationship building when I think back about that.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But those were the types of motions that we had to undertake in order to start to turn around relationships. It was humbling for a lot of people around the organization. But I think it made the organization so much stronger at the end of the day. And I think when we look forward 10 years, we had very high NPS scores from the clients that we did retain and the client relationships that we built over time that came from the increased transparency, the increased humility, the personal connections that you needed to make during that time to build from the bottom.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You learn so much in those moments. I tell all of junior people that I work with or people that I mentor if shit goes wrong in an organization start listening and just hang on tight and write everything down because I look back at that moment in time and so much of what I've learned about how to communicate well, how to respond to investors' needs and how to be resilient as an organization came from that time. We had to do what we called at the time a contrition tour, which was essentially David Bonderman and Jim Coulter traveling all around the world apologizing to our investors. We gave people an option to take their money out. We gave people an option to reduce their commitment. It was a $20 billion fund, so we still had a lot to work with.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sales, how do you raise new capital? How do you build new relationships? How do you maintain relationships and putting some organization around that?”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calls sent to someone new. There is this whole component of basic administration that at that point was built on very limited infrastructure. There's what I would call product management, which is how you source capital for a given strategy. What is the right capital base for the investment strategy that I want to pursue? Who are the right investors for that strategy? What is the campaign around that? As the capital gets invested is the strategy reflecting what your investors expect. There is an involvement from people in my role that around the course of how a fund gets invested where you constantly need to weave that in to the investment strategy and you need to communicate that in some way back to your investors. The third piece of it is what I would call relationship management distribution.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lehman Fell and the financial crisis began. The first deal in that fund was Washington Mutual, which went to zero before the Capitol was called. That is the framework. I had no idea. I really respected the firm. Goldman was an investor. I knew people there. All of the talent from Goldman was going to places like TPG. I thought this was the best job that I could possibly have and to build something from scratch. But it was somewhat of a hostile environment when I stepped in. What we needed to build was basically three things that I think now define what is the role of capital formation. We had to establish strong investor relations. That's just the administrative layer of how does a client efficiently interact with an organization to get its annual reporting, to attend an investor meeting, to update its address when it needs its capital.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to overlay the fire hose that we were drinking from, I wanted to say most of our clients hated us at that moment because it was 2010, just on the back of the financial crisis, TPG had raised a $20 billion fund that it started to deploy very quickly into mega buyout deals right before.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You show up here drinking out of a fire house somehow, even though there weren't people in the role, there was $40 billion in assets, probably hundreds of LPs questions coming in. And then you have to go try to build the infrastructure to help the firm grow as it did. You mentioned some of the components, but what was it when you started to 10 years later when you left that created the base of what that infrastructure became?”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People that were running communications, managing any sort of transparency, I was higher number five or six on that team. And for many years, it was three or four people. You can imagine what needed to be built at a time that the firm was trying to move from private equity into credit, into real estate, into growth. We had to very quickly apply some form and function and structure and hire in order to accomplish what we needed to accomplish. And it was learnings from Goldman that we were able to apply. And there were a few of us that had come from that big Goldman Sachs infrastructure and other banks that was certainly not by mistake. It was by design because they needed to establish this processes inside the organization.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to say it was like going from being a member of the crew on the Titanic to going and being on a speedboat. Though the firm was 40 billion in assets, which is large, it was a very small operation in terms of the people that were managing our client relationships, people that were doing any sort of interacting with the capital sources for the firm.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to say you were a cog in the wheel, but that was a big, strong wheel that you were implementing. And then you go over to TPG, where back then it was private equity. How did you think about coming into that role to run this group now that you have to be the whole wheel?”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was doing it as part of a larger organization that had a very established sales function. We had distribution coverage all over the world. There was deep investor knowledge. The reach was very broad. It was organized by channel, meaning type of investors, endowment and foundations, consultants, pensions. And I learned about the nuances between all of those different types of investors from those salespeople. And they knew how to run a campaign very distinctly. It is a machine. And you learned from being a part of a very well-oiled machine.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very lucky in that it's a huge organization, but I was part of a very entrepreneurial group. We were building from the ground up. We were creating marketing materials from scratch. We were creating reporting and a fundraising function for an asset class that was new to most institutional investors and high net worth investors in the world. exposure to private equity and venture capital for most institutional investors when I started there was probably less than 1% on average. And by the time I left, it was probably five or ten. So you can imagine.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 2021, I joined Brad Gersner at Altimeter, which is a technology focused investment firm, to help Brad really change the face of his investor relations capital formation in what I think is one of the most interesting places to be in the world right now, which is technology.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happy to. So I started my career at Goldman Sachs, spent 10 years at Goldman, very lucky to start my career in private equity and alternative investments at the time that asset class was just beginning exponential growth. I spent a decade there always focused on the investor side of the business. product management, fundraising, campaign management, investor relations, jack of all trades. After 10 years, I was recruited to join TPG, very lucky to spend the next decade there as alternative investments expanded, grew, and we had the advent of big multi-product platforms and mega firms, of which TPG was one of them. So I joined the firm when it was $40 billion in assets at its peak when I left. It was about $125. That's 240 billion today.”
2025-03-31 · Capital Allocators · Meghan Reynolds – Art of Capital Formation (EP.438) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source