value-creation
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Wind Point Hires the CEO First. Then It Goes Shopping for a Company.
For 42 years the Chicago firm has run the buyout playbook in reverse - recruiting a billion-dollar operator before it writes a check. In July it closed a $3.2 billion fund to keep doing it.
The Firm That Buys the Companies Nobody Puts on a T-Shirt
In Rye, New York, a former Blackstone dealmaker built a private equity firm around a contrarian bet: the least glamorous companies in America - the ones that make labels, insulation, and water pumps - are where the returns hide.
The Quiet Compounders of Park Avenue
For 40-plus years, Harvest Partners has bought unglamorous middle-market companies and held them long enough to matter. Here is how a relationship-first shop on Park Avenue turned patience into a $20-billion franchise.
The Firm That Buys Broken Software and Runs It on an AI Playbook
EVA Equity Partners treats software turnarounds like a manufacturing line - a five-phase method, a two-week diligence cycle, and an AI platform trained on two decades of operating enterprise software. Here is how the Austin firm is trying to make growth repeatable.
Lock 8 Partners Is Building the Software Buyout Firm for Workhorses, Not Unicorns
The New York firm buys overlooked B2B software businesses, installs operating muscle and stays focused on the unglamorous work of making a good product into a durable company.
The Private Equity Firm That Refuses to Fire the Founder
For 40 years, RLH Equity Partners has bet on a contrarian idea in private equity: that the founder is the asset, not the problem. Here is how a $1.2 billion Los Angeles firm turned 'high touch meets high tech' into a portfolio worth $4.2 billion in exits.
The Baltimore Firm That Waits for the Boring Part
For 35 years, a growth-equity shop outside Baltimore has skipped the seed-stage lottery and bought into companies once they already work - then rolled up its sleeves.
David Andrews
R. David Andrews is the Founder and Co-CEO of Gryphon Investors, a San Francisco-based middle-market private equity firm he launched in 1995 with a distinctive 'Deal-Ops' model that integrated deep operational expertise into every investment long before it became industry fashion. A triple Stanford alumnus (B.A. Economics, J.D., M.B.A.), Andrews spent his early career at Salomon Brothers, Shearson Lehman Brothers, and Oak Hill Partners before charting his own course managing $10+ billion in assets across healthcare, business services, industrials, consumer products, and software - serving as chairman or director of over 50 companies along the way.