Disruptive Forces in Investing
Jun 9, 2026 · 26 min · 11 segments
Private credit headlines have been anxiety-inducing — but not all corners of private markets face the same pressures. Roughly $4 trillion in equity investments remain inside private equity funds…
David LyonGuest
Anu RajakumarHost
We've seen return compression, public traded lenders under pressure, defaults ticking up.

David, what's your read on all of that and how much of it is relevant to what you do?

What we've seen is a panic about what could happen, right? So you've obviously seen amazing advances in AI and it's caused people to step back and say, oh my God, how do these software models work? What is the revenue paradigm? Who's going to take what profit pools going forward? And people hate a vacuum.

So in public markets, stocks are down 30%, 40% because people don't understand the enterprise value.

Now, at the end of the day, does that mean that every software company will be disintermediated by AI? No, it does not mean that.

In fact, many of these AI companies are still trying to figure out their go-to markets.

So what's going to happen is a lot of software companies will partner with AI and go to market that way.

And what's happened is in direct lending, which is the biggest part of private credit, is that a lot of the deals they financed were in software.

And because 25% or 30% of buyout activity was in software, if you were a direct lender, that's how your book is indexed.

And just to give you some comparison, the high-yield market software exposure is probably 3.5%.

And what's happened is people have posited absolute worst case scenarios for a quarter of these books.

And then unfortunately, you have some large public lenders you referenced who got a lot of money from retail.

We've seen return compression, public traded lenders under pressure, defaults ticking up.

David, what's your read on all of that and how much of it is relevant to what you do?

What we've seen is a panic about what could happen, right? So you've obviously seen amazing advances in AI and it's caused people to step back and say, oh my God, how do these software models work? What is the revenue paradigm? Who's going to take what profit pools going forward? And people hate a vacuum.

So in public markets, stocks are down 30%, 40% because people don't understand the enterprise value.

Now, at the end of the day, does that mean that every software company will be disintermediated by AI? No, it does not mean that.

In fact, many of these AI companies are still trying to figure out their go-to markets.

So what's going to happen is a lot of software companies will partner with AI and go to market that way.

And what's happened is in direct lending, which is the biggest part of private credit, is that a lot of the deals they financed were in software.

And because 25% or 30% of buyout activity was in software, if you were a direct lender, that's how your book is indexed.

And just to give you some comparison, the high-yield market software exposure is probably 3.5%.

And what's happened is people have posited absolute worst case scenarios for a quarter of these books.

And then unfortunately, you have some large public lenders you referenced who got a lot of money from retail.
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