Senior Managing Director & Co-CEO
Justin Johnson
He prices the assets the market can't see - and signs his name to the answer.
CFA Charterholder
Private Equity
VRC, est. 1975
San Francisco
He prices the assets the market can't see - and signs his name to the answer.
When a private equity fund needs to know what an illiquid asset is actually worth - not the round-number guess, the defensible number - it calls people like Justin Johnson. He is Senior Managing Director and Co-CEO of Valuation Research Corporation, a firm that has been doing exactly one thing since 1975: telling clients what their hardest-to-price holdings are worth, and standing behind it.
The "Co" in Co-CEO is not ceremonial. Since August 1, 2017, Johnson has run the company alongside PJ Patel under a deliberate split: Johnson takes the West Coast and Central regions from San Francisco, Patel takes the East from Princeton. The design has a purpose. Both men kept their hands in the technical work and their relationships with clients instead of disappearing into management. Johnson co-chairs the Opinion Committee, the internal body that signs off on every formal opinion the firm issues. A chief executive who still reviews the math is a rare animal.
His specialty is the unglamorous, deal-critical middle of finance: solvency opinions, fairness opinions, capital surplus opinions. These are the documents that decide whether a dividend recapitalization is safe to pay, whether a transaction is fair to the people on the other side, whether a board can sleep at night. Johnson has spent more than twenty years producing them.
Before the corner office, there was an empty one. Johnson started VRC's San Francisco practice and grew it from the ground up into one of the company's leading offices, with an emphasis that became his signature: private equity funds and the portfolio companies they own.
That focus is sharper than it sounds. He built a comprehensive approach to serve a fund across the entire investment lifecycle - the platform acquisition that starts a deal, the add-ons that bulk it up, the earn-outs and rollover equity and incentive awards that align the people running it, the dividend recapitalizations along the way, the quarterly portfolio marks that limited partners scrutinize, and the impairment tests when things go sideways. Most valuation shops pick a moment in that arc. Johnson built a practice around the whole thing.
Before VRC, he passed through three of the most demanding training grounds in finance: Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The résumé reads like a tour of the institutions that taught a generation how to value things - and in one case, how quickly an institution can vanish.
Can the company carry this debt and still pay its bills? The opinion that protects a board from a fraudulent-conveyance claim.
Is the price fair to shareholders? The number that gets read aloud in the boardroom before the vote.
Quarter after quarter, what is each holding worth? The figure limited partners trust - or don't.
Johnson's practice serves some of the most active names in private equity - the funds whose portfolio marks and deal opinions face the most scrutiny.
Degrees in Accounting and Mandarin Chinese - a pairing that says as much about curiosity as it does about ledgers.
Member of the CFA Institute and the CFA Society San Francisco. The credential that separates an opinion from a guess.
Member of VRC's Board of Directors and Executive Committee; co-chair of the Opinion Committee that vets every formal opinion.