Perspectives from Mavros.
Analysis and thoughts on family wealth, markets, building enduring enterprises and the global economy from across Mavros.
Buying Into a Team
The leagues just opened the door to private equity. But a minority stake in a team comes with the worst terms you will ever see in a private investment, and the value hides in a place most buyers overlook.
Read postWhite paperPrivate Equity: Where the Return Actually Comes From
Private equity has become the largest private asset class and one of the least understood. This is what it is, how a fund actually works, where its returns come from, what it costs, and how to tell a real edge from a well-told story.
Read postQuality of Earnings: What a Buyer Actually Checks
Before a buyer pays your multiple, they test whether your profit is real. Quality of earnings is that test, and understanding it before the letter of intent is worth more than any negotiating tactic after it.
Read postPre-IPO Liquidity: Selling Before the Bell
Companies stay private roughly twice as long as they did a generation ago, which leaves founders and early employees rich on paper and short on cash. There are honest ways to take a measured amount off the table before the IPO, and good reasons to.
Read postWhite paperThe Estate Freeze: Moving the Upside Before the Event
The cheapest time to give away a company is before it is worth anything. A freeze fixes your value today and sends tomorrow's growth to the next generation, but only if it is done before a price is on the table.
Read postWhite paperThe Three Lenses of Due Diligence
Underwriting a private investment means answering three separate questions, each with its own rigor: is the deal good, is the manager good, and will the operation hold. Most diligence failures come from answering the wrong one thoroughly.
Read postWhite paperGoing Public: A Founder's Guide to the IPO
An IPO is a financing and the largest personal liquidity event of a founder's life, at the same time. Almost all of the planning goes to the first and almost none to the second. This is the whole arc, from the decision to the morning after the bell.
Read postMavros Launches MOSAIQ, Its Proprietary Private-Markets Intelligence Platform
An in-house intelligence engine, built by and exclusively for Mavros, that sharpens how the firm sources, prices, and executes across private markets.
Read postIPO Readiness: 18 Months to a Listing, and the Years Before That Decide It
IPO readiness is not a finance-team checklist that starts a year out. The moves that decide your after-tax outcome and your control happen two to three years earlier, and most founders miss the window.
Read postDirect or Through Funds: How Family Offices Actually Invest
Family offices are built by people who once ran a business, so the pull to invest directly in companies runs deep. The data says most of them do both, and the reason is worth understanding before you copy either one.
Read postThe Secondaries Market in 2025: From Backdoor to Mainstream
The market for used private-equity stakes was once where underperforming assets went to be quietly sold. It has become one of the most reliable ways to build a private portfolio, often at a discount, and it is worth understanding why.
Read postThe Shrinking Public Market
The number of American public companies has halved since the 1990s. The market you can buy is now a small, late, picked-over slice of the economy, and your index fund misses the part that grows.
Read postFrom 60/40 to 50/30/20: The Case for Private Markets in a Portfolio
The 60/40 portfolio worked for forty years because bonds hedged stocks. Then inflation came back and the hedge broke. The response taking shape is a third sleeve of private assets, and it is worth weighing honestly.
Read postBuilding a Private Allocation
The hard part of private markets is not picking funds. It is the portfolio-construction traps no one warns you about, the ones that forced endowments to sell at the bottom.
Read postThe Dynasty Trust Playbook
Most estate planning asks who gets what when you die. The families who compound wealth across generations ask a sharper question, and answer it with a structure most people have never used.
Read postWhite paperThe Great Transition
The largest transfer of business ownership in history is here as the boomer generation retires. It reads like a seller's market. For most owners it will be the opposite, and the reason is preparation, not the economy.
Read postThe Stay-Private Era
The most valuable companies in the world now stay private for a decade or more, and grow to rival the public giants. Why the public exit narrowed, what a private valuation is actually worth, and how the founders and families whose wealth is locked inside these companies can turn it into liquidity, protect it, and pass it on.
Read postStructure Your Estate Before You Sell Your Business
Selling your company is likely the largest financial event of your life. The work that decides how much your family keeps happens before the sale closes, not after.
Read postThe Zeroed-Out GRAT: Passing the Upside to Your Heirs at Almost No Tax Cost
A grantor retained annuity trust lets you move an asset's future growth to the next generation while using little or none of your lifetime exemption. Here is how the zeroed-out version works, and when it shines.
Read postSell-Side vs. Buy-Side in the Lower Middle Market
In the lower middle market, private equity now drives most deals. Your most likely buyer is not a strategic paying for fit. It is a sponsor solving for a return, and that changes everything about how you should sell.
Read postThe Economics of a Franchise
Teams do not make their money from tickets or from winning. They make it from media rights and scarcity, and the most valuable thing about owning one may be the tax code.
Read postConcentration in the Index Era
You bought the index for diversification. You own a concentrated bet on a handful of stocks and a single factor, and the flows that inflated it can reverse together.
Read postThe Case for an Integrated Merchant Bank
Why founders, families, and institutions are better served by a single relationship spanning advice, capital, and opportunity instead of a patchwork of vendors.
Read postWhite paperThe J-Curve, and How to Beat It
Everyone knows private funds lose before they earn. Fewer know the curve is a function of how you enter, not a law of nature, and that much of the premium you are promised is an accounting illusion.
Read postReading Your Term Sheet Like a Banker
Founders read the valuation. Bankers read the waterfall. The headline number is the least important term on the page, and a higher one often leaves you with less.
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Occasional research and points of view on private markets, family office, and the decisions that define a company. No noise.