Engineering Alpha in Private Equity
Jun 18, 2026 · 14 min · 8 segments
In Episode 7, Paul Karner and Dave Mangot unpack a core thesis of the show: why "agentic proficiency" is the modern equivalent of the SaaS multiple. While the ultimate goal of any portfolio company…
No entities detected.
Dave MangotHost
Paul KarnerHost
The agentic organization or what I would call agentically proficient organization, is still trying to solve the same problems that we've always solved with software.
And I think that it's so easy to get wrapped up in the, oh my gosh, we have agents now.
I remember, you know, changing over from data center to cloud and we changed the way that we thought about things and that's fine, but Ultimately, the goal of a company is to make money.
And the more or the better we can satisfy the needs of our users, In theory, the more revenue we make, that's more EBITDA, which turns into more MOIC and all these kinds of things that we're looking for in private equity.
his job was to satisfy the needs of the user and i think one of the things that we need to keep in mind with all the agents and ai and all those other things is the goal is not to deploy fancy software like the goal is to meet the needs of the user And then now the question starts to become, well, how do we use these tools in order to meet the needs of the user? And also what's changed, like what's different or, you know, maybe what's the same.
The agentic organization or what I would call agentically proficient organization, is still trying to solve the same problems that we've always solved with software.
And I think that it's so easy to get wrapped up in the, oh my gosh, we have agents now.
I remember, you know, changing over from data center to cloud and we changed the way that we thought about things and that's fine, but Ultimately, the goal of a company is to make money.
And the more or the better we can satisfy the needs of our users, In theory, the more revenue we make, that's more EBITDA, which turns into more MOIC and all these kinds of things that we're looking for in private equity.
his job was to satisfy the needs of the user and i think one of the things that we need to keep in mind with all the agents and ai and all those other things is the goal is not to deploy fancy software like the goal is to meet the needs of the user And then now the question starts to become, well, how do we use these tools in order to meet the needs of the user? And also what's changed, like what's different or, you know, maybe what's the same.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
