The last time Chris Schelling was on the show, the episode carried a title I still think about: Private Detective to Private Investments. He is back, and the seat has changed. Chris recently made the move to Aksia as a Managing Director, which hands him the kind of cross-asset vantage point over private markets that most of us only get to guess at. Alexa and I took full advantage.
What struck me this time is how much of the AI conversation happened on the allocator’s side of the table. Everyone asks how AI changes the companies we underwrite. Chris is just as interested in how it changes the underwriting. He gets into using AI for diligence and memos, training analysts with it as a kind of behavioral coach, and what it would actually mean to seat an AI agent at an investment committee. That last one sounds like a bit until you hear him walk through it.
On the bubble question, Chris threads it the way only someone who has lived a few cycles can: “You can have a bubble without true technological disruption occurring.” Both things get to be true at once. The technology is real. The prices can still be wrong. And he applies the same discipline to the fashionable short thesis of the moment: “It’s not legacy SaaS goes boom. Like that’s way too simplistic.”
Then there is the section I suspect people will replay. Chris walks through SPV sandwiches, layers of access stacked on layers of fees, and why the structure rhymes uncomfortably with 2008. He even sketches the start of a checklist for evaluating SPVs and the access claims that come with them. I will not spoil it here. If you have wired money into an SPV in the last couple of years, that stretch alone is the episode. Nick Cassin, who heads Sidley’s secondaries practice, joins the episode as well, and the back half moves through how the mega RIAs are building private markets platforms and what product diversity across the wealth channel actually requires.
The line I keep coming back to is the one Chris lands near the end: “In a world of AI tools, differentiated relationships, networks, and deep domain expertise matter more than ever.” If you read The Delusion Requirement last week, you can guess why that one stayed with me. The tools are getting evenly distributed. The human parts are not.
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with gratitude,
earnest