The End of the
Thirty-Year Rulebook:

A conversation on what replaces the old rulebook

For thirty years, private markets ran on a familiar set of assumptions: money was cheap, the best exits were public, and venture capital and private equity were two versions of the same business. Those assumptions no longer hold.

Higher rates have made time expensive again. Exits have moved into private markets. AI makes some companies far cheaper to build and others far more expensive. And the state is back as allocator, customer and rule-maker.

The result, Pascal argues, is that venture capital is splitting in two, while private equity converges into something closer to a balance sheet.

In this live episode, Pascal Bouvier and Benjamin Epstein will explore what these forces mean for managers and LPs, why fintech sits where they meet, and what tokenisation changes for the plumbing of funds. The conversation follows the first episode with Nicolas Colin.

What we’ll cover:

Venture capital splits in two
How the new cost of capital, private exits and AI are pulling venture towards a barbell of sovereign-scale platforms and specialist funds, and what happens to the traditional generalist in the middle.

The return of the state
Why governments are back as allocators, customers and rule-makers, and why the real sovereignty opportunity may lie in the financial plumbing rather than in defence hardware.

Private equity converges
Why the same forces push private equity towards credit, insurance and retirement income, and what the opening of private markets to individual savers means before its first real test.

Fintech after the software era
Why the moats AI cannot easily erode, such as licences, proprietary data and systems of record, are the ones fintech is built on, and how European regulation turns compliance into demand.

Money with a memory
What stablecoin rules, the digital euro and tokenisation change for money itself, for fund units and registers, and for the day-to-day operations of private markets.