I’m Booked: These Are the Plunderers
I picked up this book to study private equity’s growth curve—what I got instead was a warning shot for venture.
When people say, “Venture is maturing like private equity did,” I wanted to see what that really meant.
So I read These Are the Plunderers by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, expecting a history of LBOs and the arc of institutionalization. What I got was something darker—and honestly, more revealing.
This book is not a celebration of scaled finance. It’s a postmortem on what happens when competition, capital, and control collide over decades.
Here’s what stuck with me:
The 1978 Revenue Act kickstarted the shift from employer pensions to 401(k)s—exposing regular workers to market volatility while Wall Street reaped gains from buyouts.
PE firms became experts not in building value, but in extracting it—fees, financial engineering, dividend recaps.
Public pensioners lost billions in long-term return due to excessive PE fees—and communities paid the price.
As more money chased the same playbooks, returns diminished, and deals got riskier. The leverage piled up.
What’s this got to do with venture?
Well, if the lesson from PE is that scale without discipline erodes purpose, venture should pay attention.
We’re entering an era of mega-funds, recycled operators, and constrained exit paths.
We say we’re funding the future—but are we building value or inflating noise?
I picked this book up looking for patterns. I found a mirror.
This made me reflect on why Stresswood needs to exist. A fund built for signal, not extraction. For compounding trust, not just capital. For actual outcomes, not just optical ones.
Two Questions I’m Holding:
If venture follows PE’s arc, who ends up holding the risk?
What would it look like for our industry to mature without losing the plot?
If you’ve read a history of private equity that’s more balanced (or tells the story from a strategy lens), send it my way. I’m booked—but always looking for my next one.