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Matthias Knab, Opalesque for New Managers: Outside the room:
More than 6,000 decision-makers from over 80 countries converged on the InterContinental in Berlin for SuperReturn International 2026 (June 8-12), the largest edition yet of what the industry now routinely calls "the capital of private capital." Inside were the celebrity speakers - Al Gore, Malala Yousafzai, Anthony Scaramucci, Carlyle's David Rubenstein, Thoma Bravo's Orlando Bravo - the VIP networking, the selfies, the people rushing from meeting to meeting. Outside, with protests against the private equity industry growing in Berlin, a significant police presence was safeguarding the event.
Six thousand delegates walked past those officers every day. As far as I could tell, no one was talking to them. So I stopped, and I told them a story. A story about why the police have been my heroes ever since 1991.
A pair of earrings, and a vase full of matchboxes
Back in Munich in 1991, someone I thought was a friend stole a pair of diamond-studded gold earrings from the bathroom of our house. They had been a Christmas gift from my girlfriend's father, and they meant a great deal to us. I knew exactly who had taken them.
I went to the thief's apartment and asked her to simply return them - we would forget the whole thing. Instead, she called a friend, who physically pushed me out the door. So I went to the police. To my surprise, they acted immediately. Two officers went straight to her apartment to search it. I was so curious that I secretly drove behind them and waited nearby.
After more than two hours, I followed them back to the station and nervously asked whether they had found anything. They had. As it turned out, the woman kept a huge glass vase in her living room, filled with hundreds - perhaps thousands - of matchboxes. The officers searched the apartment top to bottom, and eventually found the earrings hidden inside one of them. I never forgot that.
So when I told this story to the officers outside SuperReturn, they laughed and smiled. Over the days I ended up speaking with various teams - two of them led by women - and something unexpected happened. They started asking questions. "What exactly is going on inside?", "Who attends this conference?", "Why are there protests?", "What do all these people actually talk about?"
It turned into a fascinating conversation about entrepreneurship, capital markets, investing, and how businesses raise the funding they need to grow. So here, for the officers who asked - and for everyone who has ever wondered what those 6,000 people are really discussing - is the honest answer: the seven themes that defined Berlin 2026.
1. From access to execution
The single clearest through-line was that the edge in private equity has moved from access to execution. With cheap leverage and multiple expansion no longer doing the heavy lifting, operational value creation has become the core lever for generating returns. GPs increasingly position themselves as operating partners rather than pure capital providers - and several speakers were blunt that genuine operating talent has to be senior, embedded in investment decisions and paid like partners. Operating professionals parachuted in after a deal to dress up the story were dismissed as the wrong model.
2. The DPI reckoning
If one metric dominated the allocator conversation, it was DPI. Limited partners are scrutinising realised distributions far more aggressively, and that pressure is reshaping how managers think about exits. Continuation vehicles, NAV-based facilities and partial liquidity solutions were everywhere in the discussion - but framed honestly as tactical bridges, not substitutes for full exits. The working assumption among GPs is that a more normal exit environment returns across 2026 and 2027, though that recovery is contingent on rates stabilising and on buyers and sellers finally agreeing on price. Bain's framing of an industry that is "stuck" rather than in crisis captured the prevailing mood.
3. AI becomes infrastructure
Artificial intelligence graduated from conference novelty to operating infrastructure. The discussion centred on four practical domains: operational efficiency inside portfolio companies, sales enablement, code generation and investment research. The repeated warning was that AI is now a source of durable differentiation rather than a passing theme, and that firms which fail to build genuine internal capability risk being left behind. That, in turn, sharpens an already widening divide between scale platforms with proprietary data and sub-scale managers without it.
4. Private wealth as the next frontier
With institutional fundraising still constrained, the retail and private wealth channel was treated as the industry's most important new source of capital - particularly outside the United States. The "Great Wealth Transfer" narrative and the rapid build-out of semi-liquid and evergreen structures featured heavily. Speakers were candid, however, that this channel is not a quick fix: it demands serious investment in operational infrastructure, investor education and brand trust before it scales.
5. Private credit grows - but the caution is new
Private credit remained a growth engine, with direct lending having expanded many times over in recent years and asset-based finance flagged as the next area of blue-chip attention. What had changed from 2025 was the tone. Where last year's mood was an unqualified "golden era," 2026 carried explicit warnings that heavy inflows into large-cap direct lending are compressing illiquidity premiums and pushing capital out regardless of whether the opportunity merits it. The widely circulated warning from Sixth Street's Alan Waxman - that the asset class risks being commoditised into a lower-returning business - set the cautionary frame. Selectivity and underwriting discipline were the watchwords.
6. Europe back in favour, geopolitics reshaping deal form
Tariffs and de-globalisation were treated less as a macro risk to fear and more as a lens for sourcing. There was a renewed sense that Europe looks attractive again as managers seek to deploy a mountain of dry powder, with particular appetite for specialist strategies where supply chains are localised and tariff exposure is contained. Deal structure is shifting accordingly - toward carve-outs, preferred equity and bilateral, trust-based origination rather than competitive auctions.
7. LPs in the driver's seat
Finally, the balance of power has tilted toward allocators. Today's LPs are assertive: co-designing co-investment vehicles, pressing for extended investment periods, demanding separately managed accounts and shaping fund economics to align interests more tightly. Underpinning all of it was a recurring reflection on saturation - the observation that the industry has gone exponential, with more private equity funds now operating in the US than there are McDonald's restaurants, feeding a bifurcation between mega-platforms and the genuinely differentiated specialists able to prove an edge.
The people outside the room
Taken together, the seven themes describe an asset class that is maturing under pressure rather than retreating. The enduring advantage may lie less in access and more in execution - operational excellence, digital enablement and institutional-grade governance. For managers who combine scale with genuine differentiation, Berlin 2026 suggested the prize is not merely survival but sustained outperformance. For everyone else, the bar just went up.
But the conversation I will remember longest from this SuperReturn did not happen on a panel. It happened on the pavement outside, with the officers who keep the whole thing safe and whom almost everyone treats as background. For me, it was another chance to say thank you - 35 years later.
The original post (with a photo) is here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7471148982002606080/
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