In 2009 and 2010, I worked for a similar private equity fund that also raised a billion dollars to invest into infrastructure and real assets.
A few random things I learned:
* While a billion dollars may seem like a lot of money, it's actually fairly small in the infrastructure world where you are building massive projects like airports and power plants.
* For that reason, our fund focused on higher-risk, smaller projects in the developing world, which made it a tough sell to the cautious pension and endowment type investors who invest in infra.
* The secret to doing well is deal access. We were always envious of GIP because they had an incredible network.
A few random things I learned:
* While a billion dollars may seem like a lot of money, it's actually fairly small in the infrastructure world where you are building massive projects like airports and power plants.
* For that reason, our fund focused on higher-risk, smaller projects in the developing world, which made it a tough sell to the cautious pension and endowment type investors who invest in infra.
* The secret to doing well is deal access. We were always envious of GIP because they had an incredible network.