Ed Fanshawe, Managing Partner of H.I.E.C in conversation with the superb Adam Turtle, Founder and Senior Partner of Rede Partners.

Given the ongoing disruption in Private Equity, with monster fund raising so visible, in stark contrast to failing fund raises from household names, and further emphasised by substantial first-time funds being launched successfully and the queue of new potential funds popping up, I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Adam Turtle, Senior Partner and Founder of Rede Partners. He is one of the most respected voices in global private markets fundraising for a wide-ranging conversation about the forces reshaping the industry, from AI and democratisation of fundraising to natural selection and the forces of creative destruction so clearly evident in global Private Markets.

At H.I.E.C, a significant part of our work sits at the intersection of executive search and private markets – supporting funds and their leadership teams across the full investment cycle. It is precisely because people remain central to success in this industry that conversations like this one matter. Why are some funds thriving while others stall? Are the forces reshaping the market structurally or contextually? And what does it mean for the talent and leadership strategies that underpin long-term performance in private equity?

Before we get started, I wanted to set the scene and give a little background on Adam and the tremendously successful organisation he and his team have created and led over the last decade, so you can see the value in his commentary.  For any entrepreneurs in the making out there, too, his story is remarkable and inspiring, and I hope that comes across in this short discussion.

Few have a vantage point broad enough to see the shifts in the Private Markets fundraising market clearly as they happen. Adam Turtle is one of them, having built Rede Partners over 14 years from a two-person startup into a global private markets advisory platform employing 150 professionals across 6 offices and advising on over €100 billion of capital across 60+ primary fundraisings. He has been named five times on Private Equity News’ list of the Fifty Most Influential in Private Equity 2025, and has created the Rede Liquidity Index, a twice-yearly industry barometer that has become essential reading for fund managers and institutional investors alike.

During our conversation, I was able to ask Adam not just about the state of the fundraising market, but how a founder who has watched this industry evolve for two decades thinks about where it is headed and what it takes to build a lasting franchise, whether you are a fund or an advisory firm. What stood out was not market pessimism nor easy optimism, but a sense that private markets are maturing, becoming more selective and far less tolerant of anything vague, generic or weakly differentiated.  A process of natural selection and evolution is underway, but the opportunities for success are as great as ever.

Key messages of the market we discuss in more detail include:

-The fundraising market is difficult, but not equally difficult for everyone; some firms are still raising very quickly, while others are stalling completely.

-The current environment is accelerating a creative-destruction dynamic in which strong platforms compound their advantages and weaker, less differentiated managers lose ground, and new funds rise to fill the clear gaps in the market that exist.

-Performance still matters hugely, but LPs increasingly want performance combined with genuine specialisation and an institutionalised edge. Specialisation and differentiation cover a variety of key areas we discuss in the coming pages.

-AI is likely to have a bigger near-term effect on portfolio company value creation than on the relationship-led reality of fundraising itself, but the impact is certainly being seen at all levels. It offers risk but in equal measure, opportunity.

-Investor relations has evolved into a real professional capability and, in a tougher market, can become a competitive advantage in its own right.

-First-time funds are still very much possible (and desirable/welcome), but only when the team, market gap, track record and differentiation are genuinely compelling. Having the right team dynamics can move the platform from purely an ability to transact and elevate it to a dynamic, growing enterprise in its own right with long term sustainable value.

-Successful ‘Operator-led’ funds do exist, but the involvement of senior operators alongside a team of professional investors is still the most often seen route.

-The market is alive and open for business.

Setting the Scene: Rede Partners and the Evolution of the Advisory Business

We asked Adam to paint a picture of where Rede sits today and why he chose to build rather than join.

“The reason we launched the business wasn’t because we were desperate to be entrepreneurs. It was that we thought there was a market gap, and we were right… It has not been easy, but it is one of the best things I have ever done.”

Prior to founding Rede in 2011 alongside Scott Church, Adam spent 7 years in Credit Suisse’s Private Fund Group before becoming Director of Fundraising at Actis, a leading emerging markets private equity firm. The gap he identified was not just in capacity but in approach and a conviction that the placement agent model needed to be rethought around genuine strategic partnership rather than transactional deal-by-deal introductions.

The business now spans primary fundraising for PE, Credit, Infra and Impact funds as well as Strategic Advisory services for long term fund success and a Capital Solutions platform to cover GP-led secondary transactions, fund financing, GP management equity and other emerging market demands. What began as a specialist fundraising boutique has become, in Adam’s words, ‘a comprehensive global lifecycle partner’, reflecting a deliberate philosophy of walking alongside GP clients through every phase of their business, not just appearing at fundraise time and allowing Adam and his team to develop cross-sectional visibility into LP appetite, portfolio positioning and allocation timing that very few individual funds can replicate cost-effectively. Maintaining active relationships with thousands of global LPs requires scale and infrastructure that only makes sense at the platform level, and having an outside-in approach with fund clients affords a strategic objectivity and ability to see a manager’s positioning and messaging in a way that partners (often deep in day-to-day deal execution) understandably may not have the luxury of doing.

The Fundraising Market: Paradox or Natural Selection?

The fundraising environment looks, on the surface, contradictory. Media headlines describe fundraises collapsing, established managers accepting reduced fund sizes and timelines stretching well beyond expectation. Yet in the same market, elite managers are achieving record closings in record time, often oversubscribed and first time funds are also announcing closings well beyond the reach of even established regional platforms (Joe O’Mara’s recent stunning fund launch of Aspirity Partners and one of Rede’s clients is a shining example). We asked Adam what is actually going on, and he compared today’s moment to the period after the global financial crisis: not a clean sweep, but definitely a changing of the guard where strong groups compound their advantage while new entrants emerge to address gaps the incumbents are not filling.

“It’s in times of volatility and downturn, when the tide isn’t rising, you start to see cracks emerge, and that precipitates change. The private markets industry and the way it’s constructed means it’s a bit of a “creative destruction business”. People who win, win well. Fast fundraisings, they grow their funds, they hire the best talent and continue to grow. Groups that struggle often go by the wayside, and then new groups pop up to address that and keep the market evolving.”

The apparent contradiction is, in fact, the market working as it should. What separates winners from the rest comes down to three interlocking factors: performance, specialisation and timing.

“Specialisation by definition sounds narrow… it’s not. You can be specialised in many different ways. It’s not just sector specialisation; it’s also about deal-craft.”

‘Deal-craft’ is not a term you will find in an LP due diligence questionnaire, but it is precisely the quality institutional investors are increasingly probing for. This includes factors such as specific methodologies, operational approaches, technology, people and operational firepower, network, scale, geography, reach and competitive positioning that separate genuine specialists from generalists claiming focus. Performance alone no longer suffices. LPs have become highly sophisticated at distinguishing between funds that merely invest in a sector and those with real, defensible, repeatable edges.

“It’s very hard to just be a smart deal doer and have that be your edge. That’s maybe necessary but not sufficient. This is an increasingly competitive business, so you’ve got to institutionalise your edge in some way or form. What increasingly matters is whether a manager can explain, in a credible and repeatable way, why they will keep winning. That is a much higher bar than it was a decade ago.”

The Three Forces Shaping the Next Five Years

We asked Adam to look ahead at the critical themes we can expect to see and what can be done to address them:

1. Perpetual Creative Destruction

The alternative asset management industry has always had winner-takes-most economics, and Adam sees no reason that changes. Superior talent, scaled infrastructure, proprietary deal flow and enhanced LP access all compound across fund cycles for established winners. But the market simultaneously ensures continuous renewal as new entrants emerge to fill genuine gaps and push alpha generation in ways incumbents often cannot or will not pursue. The implication for fund managers is stark: you either scale to capture winner-takes-most dynamics, or you develop such distinctive specialisation that traditional scale advantages become irrelevant within your niche. The undifferentiated middle will keep feeling pressure.

“People often ask me ‘, What is the single most important thing for a GP to be successful?’. My belief is that you have to have a genuine, continual improvement culture. If you don’t, you may be successful for a while, but eventually you won’t.  Whereas, if you do, you can continue to win. Business as usual doesn’t really exist. Business as usual is adapting.  To me, that’s the single most important trait of a successful GP over the long term.”

2. AI as the Next Value Creation Frontier

Adam is clear-eyed about where AI will and will not change private markets. In fundraising itself, the relationship-driven mechanics remain stubbornly human.

“A lot of this business does remain person to person. Do I trust you? Do I believe in you? AI hasn’t yet changed the game much in terms of what we’re doing day-to-day when it comes to actually raising funds. It’s still a lot of shoe leather and somewhat traditional processes but in the back office, AI offers substantial simplification and productivity gains and that will have a meaningful impact, including market connectivity, information gathering, transparency, reporting and other such aspects of the wider business.”

Where AI does matter already and will matter enormously is portfolio company value creation. Funds that help portfolio businesses navigate AI adoption will generate differentiated performance. Those that treat it as peripheral risk being outcompeted.

“AI is obviously a substantial threat to some portfolio companies, but it’s also a massive opportunity in terms of GPs’ ability to bring it to those companies. The GPs that really harness that are going to make a big impact. Also within their funds, the impact of AI in such things as reporting, deal sourcing, network activation, hiring, transformation tracking as well as new product and service development for portfolios is clear. It’s also allowing GPs to take advantage of investing in more traditional businesses where AI can deliver a step change in growth and profitability.”

Rede itself has begun building AI into its workflow.  One example is the developing a sentiment index that uses AI to analyse the thousands of investor notes crossing the platform. At this stage, and Adam is convinced this will continue to evolve and change and become a significant opportunity, it is still very much an augmentation of human judgment, not a replacement for it.  For anyone who has not seen this, it’s very worth a look: Rede liquidity index 2h 2025.

3. Capital Source Diversification, Democratisation and Hoarding!!

The largest bulge-bracket managers are now raising a billion dollars a month from retail investors. Semi-liquid evergreen structures that were once complex and costly have become standardised. We asked Adam whether this is a good thing.

“What I love about private markets is the ownership structure. It promotes longer-term value creation in a less exposed way than public markets on a quarter-by-quarter basis, with good alignment between owner and capital. I think it’s a profoundly good ownership structure so I think it’s good that retail investors get access to that. Otherwise they’re missing out on really great opportunities which savers and pensioners should have access to.”

Beyond retail, Adam also pointed to substantial capital sources that remain structurally underpenetrated: insurance capital (particularly in private credit), defined contribution pensions as regulatory frameworks evolve, and high-net-worth intermediary platforms such as Moonfare and iCapital that aggregate individual investors into institutional-scale tickets. Developing market family offices (particularly in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America) are also growing rapidly in both scale and sophistication. The picture Adam paints is one of a market where, historically, you were either in high-return alternatives or in public markets with nothing in between. That binary allocation is giving way to a full spectrum of risk-reward profiles and for all of those gradations there are capital-raising needs.

In addition, Adam also pointed to the ways the fund structures are evolving to fill gaps, meet demand and allow for more efficient returns, evolving from a 10 year blind pool structure to many more innovative platforms with long term capital, single deal vehicles and many more. Adam sees this is positive and has geared his business to advise and enable similar innovation and intelligent fund design for a given context.

The one watch out being discussed in the market is the focus of the very largest managers on asset accumulation. This is for the better generally but can also offer future challenges with incentives to collect management fees and not Carry or equity returns in a challenging market being seen.  The lack of exits is market driven but with incentives not always aligned with returning capital, there are a number of careful market observers commentating in that regard for the first time.

Geography, IR and the Innovation Question

We explored whether regional differences in fundraising strategy are as important as people assume. The short answer: it depends to a large extent on fund size, focus and expectations.  It’s very hard to generalize given such a breadth of cultural differences and associated requirements to cost of access, trust banks, maturity and drivers.  At a very high level, it’s much more likely that large-cap managers find Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American LP bases highly receptive with deep institutional pools actively seeking private markets exposure. For smaller managers, however, the calculation can be different. Cultivating these markets requires multi-year investment with repeated in-person meetings, local presence and patient relationship building that may not produce commitments for several fund cycles. Adam’s advice is to apply the 80/20 rule ruthlessly: concentrate effort on the geographies and LP segments demonstrably open to your fund profile, rather than pursuing blanket and undifferentiated global coverage. Perhaps this is also where a professional placement agent organisation can support, with global infrastructure and insight to ensure the right pools of capital are brought into play for the right funds and strategies in an efficient manner.

On investor relations, Adam sees a function undergoing genuine structural change. The profile of the IR professional is evolving alongside the expectations of the LP base.

“It’s not just a relationship game anymore. It’s about a professional service you need to provide your clients as part of their experience. It’s an asset class that’s much more mature, and all the participants in it are more informed, with higher expectations of reporting, returns and participation. We have to match that in our approach and capability, constantly improving and absolutely relentless in our rigour and diligence.”

LP expectations have intensified across transparency, co-investment access, portfolio visibility and responsiveness. Meeting these expectations requires structural IR resource rather than relying on busy investment professionals to manage LP relationships as a secondary responsibility. In a competitive market where returns are harder to generate, IR can itself become a competitive advantage.

“One way or other, you need to make sure your investors love you more than they love other GPs and that’s a mixture of performance and similar critical factors, but it’s also about how you service your clients consistently over time.  We can also help fund clients structure and think about their IR function as they grow and scale but we are always on hand to support whatever the market.”

First-Time Funds: Harder, But Far From Impossible

One of the most common questions we hear from people in the market (and there are a lot of them) is whether first-time funds are still a viable proposition. Adam’s view is that the appetite is genuinely there, but the requirements have sharpened considerably.

“We actually see a lot of investor interest for new managers because LPs are changing their roster. Part of that is investing in the best established firms you’ve wanted to get into but part of it is also asking, what’s new and what’s interesting? We are seeing real demand for that. In the right elements of the emerging manager category you can see substantial returns and a genuine point of difference and a hunger, with the founders directly linked to high quality deal doing and operational performance of the invested assets. In many ways, first time funds are an appealing proposition if structured in the right way.”

Success for first-time funds, in Adam’s experience, hinges on four non-negotiable elements. First, team cohesion where LPs need to see that key members have genuinely worked together, not just been at the same firm. For teams without that shared track record, deal-by-deal vehicles are often the right starting point. Second, credible and attributable track record visibility. Third (and this is where many miss) is identification of a genuine market gap.

“If you’re an LP, why do you back a new GP versus an old one? One reason is because you believe they’re addressing a market gap that you think is attractive. A classic example at the moment would be defence in Europe — there just aren’t that many managers in that segment because it hasn’t been a robust part of the market for the last ten years. Big area now.”

The fourth element is appropriate sizing — first-time funds must be honest about what the market will bear, not what managing partners have been accustomed to at prior platforms. And running through all four is a single piece of positioning advice that Adam gives to every emerging manager:

“When you’re a new group, you don’t pitch better, you pitch different. You’re almost always pitching, ‘We’ve done great things, but now we’re going to do something that takes it to the next level.’  It’s this thinking coupled with ability to mobilise deals in the market and capture value during the ownership that sets many apart.”

On the question of operators building investment funds and whether they survive, Adam is candid. He cites the success of Monterro, a software-focused fund established by highly regarded operators, but commented that, on the whole, LPs still find it easier to back those with formal investment expertise and interestingly that the most successful models typically integrate operational expertise alongside experienced principal investors, rather than relying on pure operator-led or investor-led approaches.

Building Rede: Lessons from the Journey

We saved our most personal questions for last. Building any business from scratch is hard; constantly growing that company successfully, globally and through multiple economic and political cycles sustainably… and still staying at the top of the sector… is even harder. We asked Adam what he has learned over the last decade with Rede.

On the thing he would absolutely not do again, his answer is immediate and emphatic: under-investing in a new area while hoping it will prove itself first.

“There’s always a temptation to say, well, we’ll try this out, hire a person, wait till we’re successful and then start reinvesting. As far as I’ve seen, that just never works. What you need to do is say: we love this area, we’re going to properly invest in it, it’s potentially going to be tough for a little while, and then we’re going to thrive on the other side of it. You need the courage of your convictions and to properly resource things.”

His proudest accomplishment is not a commercial milestone. It is culture.

“I really like the Rede culture. We have made this the key driver of the business and have a bunch of very smart, driven and successful people who also don’t take themselves too seriously. They like spending time with each other and their clients… genuinely. There’s a community feel. It’s real. And there’s an ambition to keep doing things better and better. I realised about a decade ago that if you want that to happen, you have to talk about it quite a lot. You can’t expect it to happen organically. We are consistent, work really hard on it and hire well and it works.  I love what we do and who we do it with.”

Rede’s three stated values of excellence, community and leadership are not aspirational abstractions. Adam is clear that they require constant reinforcement, particularly as the firm has scaled and direct founder influence has necessarily diluted.

On whether he would build a business again:

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my professional life. It’s extremely hard, and there is that classic line: if you knew how hard it was going to be, would you do it? I don’t know. But you don’t know so… The reason we launched wasn’t because we were desperate to be entrepreneurs. It was that we saw a market gap and we were right. I would definitely do that again. We haven’t got close to finishing the mission here though and we will have many more successes ahead of us, I am sure of that.”

Final Thought

Adam Turtle has built something unusual: a business that is both commercially formidable and genuinely good to work in. His view of private markets is that of someone who has seen multiple cycles, has advised through many disruptions, and still finds the PE ownership model, the alignment, the long-termism, and the commitment to genuine value creation compelling. The firms and funds that share that conviction, and back it with the discipline to specialise, institutionalise and continuously improve, are the ones he expects to be standing and winning in many years’ time.

Much of this is about money and deals, but much of that, in turn, is about people.  It’s only through great people and relationships that deals can be sourced and money raised. It’s through people that businesses grow and transform.  No matter how much money or how sophisticated the technology, people, culture and trust are still absolutely central to success.  On these key things, at H.I.E.C, we find ourselves in full agreement.

With our thanks to Adam for his generosity and openness, and for such an enjoyable conversation.  We will follow progress and world domination closely!

About the author:

Ed Fanshawe, Managing Partner
Private Equity Practice Lead
Email: efanshawe@hiec.com
LinkedIn

About H.I.E.C:
World-class executive search for private equity, portfolio companies and large corporates. People-driven deals, data, insights and due diligence. A full-service solution for those wanting to build insight, influence and deep global access, on demand.