Mitch Truwit and the work that comes after the deal

Mitch Truwit has a small, unusually candid monument to persistence. Inside his wedding ring, his wife had five letters inscribed: “I LY PM.” They stand for “I love you, persistent man.” In his telling, the courtship required some effort. The joke is at his own expense, which improves it considerably. A private equity executive explaining tenacity through romance has at least spared everyone another mountain-climbing metaphor.

Persistence also offers a useful entrance to his professional life. Truwit is Apax’s co-CEO, sharing the job with Andrew Sillitoe. But the part of his career that makes the title interesting happened before he joined the firm. He spent years running online travel businesses. He has been the executive with investors looking over his shoulder, as well as the investor looking over someone else’s.

That change of seats gives his story its shape. Buying a company produces an announcement. Improving one produces a long sequence of decisions, many too ordinary to warrant an announcement at all.

The signature beneath the strategy

In an October 2003 amendment to a Worldspan agreement, Truwit’s name appears beneath a familiar corporate ritual: a signature and a title. He signed for priceline.com as executive vice president and chief operating officer. The document concerns booking arrangements. It is a modest glimpse of what operating a travel business actually involves, below the level of brand names and investor presentations.

Travel websites offer a neat proposition to the customer: find the trip, make the reservation, go somewhere. The executive’s responsibilities extend into the agreements and systems that make that apparent simplicity possible. A reservation is a promise with a great deal of machinery behind it. The machinery rarely enjoys the advertising budget.

Truwit held Priceline’s COO role from 2001 to 2005. He then became president and CEO of Orbitz Worldwide, serving from 2005 to 2006, before joining Apax that year. His education included political science at Vassar and an MBA at Harvard Business School. His route to investing included the practical obligation of keeping a business moving.

Two desks, one succession

Apax announced its next leadership team on December 5, 2013. Truwit and Sillitoe would become co-chief executives on January 1, 2014. Martin Halusa, the outgoing CEO, would become chairman. It was a planned succession inside a partnership, with two people taking responsibility for the next chapter.

The pairing brought different working histories together. Sillitoe had joined Apax in 1998 and worked in technology and telecommunications. Truwit came from operations and the Services team. His investment experience already included HUB International, Bankrate, Advantage Sales & Marketing, Dealer.com, Trader Canada and Garda. These were established responsibilities, rather than a new title in search of a job description.

A shared title is easy to print. Shared leadership has to survive the calendar, the choices and the disagreements. Apax’s current governance assigns its executive committee, comprising the two co-CEOs, responsibility for strategy, management and governance. The arrangement puts cooperation into the structure of the firm. It also gives the biography a useful corrective: Truwit’s work belongs within a partnership, with other people holding substantial parts of the story.

What a useful investor brings into the room

By October 2015, the question occupying Truwit at Apax’s KnowledgeNow conference in Miami was how companies could perform in a less forgiving environment. His discussion linked expensive acquisition prices and uncertainty to the need for early operational improvement. He also stressed the value of sharing experience across the portfolio.

The conference made that idea concrete. It gathered executives and partners, including representatives of 28 portfolio companies. Seth Brody, who leads Apax’s Operational Excellence Practice, discussed collective experience as an advantage. Truwit addressed operations at the core of performance. The agenda treated running companies as a subject worth assembling people to examine.

There is a practical distinction between owning knowledge and making it available. An executive confronting an unfamiliar problem needs access to someone who has dealt with it, at the moment the problem matters. Otherwise, expertise can become an expensive reference library. KnowledgeNow is a recurring attempt to make those connections: managers comparing experiences, specialists meeting teams, and lessons travelling beyond the company that paid to learn them.

An operating claim with a date attached

In Berlin in 2019, Truwit returned to the same subject. Apax attributed approximately 84% of the value created in Apax IX at that time to operational impact, including revenue growth, wider margins and improved profit. That is a historical attribution for a particular fund, not a forecast or a promise about the next investment.

The distinction matters because a percentage can easily take on a life of its own. Here, the number describes how Apax understood the contribution of improvements within its businesses. It gives the operating philosophy a measurable expression while keeping the period and the fund in view.

Truwit described the specialists’ role as providing “specific expertise where they need it most to accelerate growth.” The phrase places the need inside the management team. Help has a purpose and a recipient. A business might require a particular capability, rather than another general opinion on the importance of execution. The approach asks investors to bring something that can be used.

The geography of a marketplace

The same year brought the acquisition of Trade Me. On May 8, 2019, Apax-advised funds and co-investors completed the purchase of the New Zealand marketplace at NZ$6.45 a share, valuing it at approximately NZ$2.56 billion. Its markets included vehicles, property and jobs, alongside auctions and fixed-price sales.

Truwit’s stated ambition was to use Apax’s experience with digital marketplaces to support Trade Me’s management. The acquisition was the funds’ eighth investment in that subsector. Earlier marketplace investments included businesses in Britain, Canada, the United States and Spain. That history gave the proposed exchange of knowledge a specific commercial setting.

A marketplace has a deceptively simple task: bring the right buyer and seller together. Its usefulness depends on the experience of both. Scale, search and trust all enter the transaction, even when the customer only sees a listing. Trade Me put Truwit’s operating interests into a business far from his New York office, while keeping the central question familiar: how does an established digital business become more useful?

Make room for the people doing the work

Capability also depends on who gets invited to contribute. In a WinPE fireside conversation with lawyer Zia Mody, Truwit addressed diversity within an investment firm. WinPE’s account described Apax’s diversity representation moving from 7% to 24%, alongside changes in culture, policies and practices.

He spoke about commitment to change and the willingness to acknowledge flaws. That is a more demanding position than approving a principle in the abstract. It asks a leader to examine the institution he helps run, including the arrangements that can make an otherwise welcome ambition difficult to achieve.

The conversation adds another dimension to the operating theme. People make investment decisions, recruit colleagues and work with management teams. An organisation that wants different contributions has to consider the conditions under which those contributions become possible. Truwit’s discussion put responsibility within the firm itself. The published percentages describe that conversation’s context; the underlying work is the less photogenic business of changing practices.

A bigger fund, and more hands

In March 2024, Apax announced the final close of Apax XI, with more than $12 billion committed across related vehicles. Truwit described it as the third global buyout fund raised since he and Sillitoe became co-CEOs a decade earlier.

His explanation of those years included a decision to concentrate on familiar subsectors and nearly triple the size of the Operational Excellence Practice. He also pointed to adjacent strategies, including digital growth, global impact and credit. The expansion involved both capital and the capabilities surrounding it.

By March 1, 2025, Apax’s published operating figures recorded 28 specialists and engagement with 146 portfolio companies since 2010. Its practice spans areas including revenue growth, technology, cloud, cybersecurity, people and data science. Those are team figures, not personal achievements assigned to one executive. They show the scale of the apparatus behind the argument Truwit has been making.

In a March 2025 interview, he identified technology and consumer businesses as areas of opportunity in India. Geography continued to change; the interest in building businesses remained recognisable.

The other scoreboard

Outside investment meetings, Truwit’s connection to StreetSquash began with a friendship. He had known founder George Polsky since high school. After Truwit returned from Chicago, Polsky drew him into the organisation. By 2009, he was chairman of its board.

In a 2013 conversation, Truwit described a board responsible for strategic support and dependable funding. The students’ progress was the purpose. Getting into college was one milestone; completing it mattered too. His affection for squash was equally plain, and his competitive ambition had a name: George. Asked whether he had managed to beat his friend, he declined to disclose the result. Even a candid executive is entitled to protect a scoreline.

The fundraising scoreboard was public. In 2014, the sixth StreetSquash Cup raised $1.05 million through ten team captains and more than 600 donors. Truwit had called for reaching the million-dollar mark the previous year. His R&T team, co-captained with Scott Mackesy, raised $200,000. The total belonged to the whole event. Persistence had plenty of company.

A 2016 letter jointly signed by Truwit and Polsky discussed results, efficiency and financial durability. The vocabulary was familiar, but the work was centred on students and their futures. Classrooms and squash courts needed support that would continue after the excitement of a tournament subsided.

“Love the journey.”

Mitch Truwit / StreetSquash, 2013

That is where the personal story comes back into focus. Truwit’s advice to the students began with three words: “Love the journey.” Across his public career, the journey contains signatures, shared responsibilities, specialist teams and repeated attention to what happens next. The wedding ring makes persistence amusing. The work gives it somewhere to go.