Leadership Spotlight

The consensus in venture right now runs roughly as follows: the best founders have already found their way to Silicon Valley, and the biggest outcomes are built in one place. Don Stalter has built a fund on the conviction that both are wrong. He arrived at the Jefferies Private Growth Conference fresh off a flight from Tokyo, where he had just backed the grandson of Sony’s founder, exporting Japanese culture from a $700-a-month office near Ginza.

Most CFOs have invested heavily in the technology that governs how their companies spend money. The software governing everything that happens after a deal is signed, how they invoice and collect, until recently, has been patchwork: held together with spreadsheets, professional services, and institutional patience. Rebecca Schwartz, Co-Founder of Tabs, is building the platform she believes will finally change that.

Artificial intelligence has been a theme at technology conferences for years. At the Jefferies Private Growth Conference in Santa Monica this April however, it was the reality shaping nearly every conversation. Few are better positioned to assess that shift than Brett Rochkind, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, whose firm has placed one of the largest single bets in venture history on the AI era.

Gabriel Stengel knows the junior banker grind from the inside. He slept under his desk at Lazard before founding Rogo, an AI platform built specifically for investment banking and private markets. Today Rogo counts Jefferies among its users, works with the majority of bulge bracket banks, and sits at an unusual intersection: it is simultaneously a customer, a distribution partner, and a potential competitive target of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Omer Ismail joined Jefferies at the Private Growth Conference in Santa Monica, where he described the conference as “a great opportunity to network with other builders, hearing their stories, exchanging ideas, talking about trends in AI and the marketplace.” He sat down to discuss OnePay’s strategy, its use of AI, and why he thinks the next era of US fintech belongs to platforms. 

Evans sat down at the Jefferies Private Growth Conference in Santa Monica, where he described the event as “speed dating at its most efficient — exactly who we are as a productivity company,” to talk about context, consolidation, and what it takes to build a company that outlasts its founder. 

On the data point that seed stage deal volume was down 25% in Q1, Acharya pushed back entirely. “That doesn’t match my experience at all. There are more people trying new things than ever before because the cost of trying has gotten so low. We’re seeing more seed deals than ever before.”

As oil and gas M&A activity has surged over the past two years, a relatively new financing structure has quietly moved from the margins of the market to the centre of some of its most competitive deal processes.

In July, Jefferies’ Private Capital Advisory team released its mid-year review of the secondary market, consolidating discussions, surveys, and research from the market’s biggest and most influential limited partners, general partners, and secondary buyers. This report follows Jefferies’ H2 2023 secondary market review, which predicted near-record secondary volume, higher LP pricing, and a sustained capital […]