The Scoop
Sixth Street Partners is hiring as its chief financial officer a JPMorgan banker whose specialty is taking investment firms public, people familiar with the matter said, a move that will only add to Wall Street speculation about its next steps.
Mark Feldman spent three decades as JPMorgan’s dealmaker to dealmakers, guiding the IPOs of Apollo, Ares, TPG, and Carlyle, and more recently the merger that produced Blue Owl, a competitor to Sixth Street in the fast-growing world of private credit.
Sixth Street was founded in 2009 by a breakaway group from Goldman Sachs and with seed money from TPG. It was a pioneer in the kind of complex lending that’s now taking Wall Street by storm. Credit has replaced equity as the jewel of private investing, and Sixth Street, which separated from TPG in 2020, is among its leaders.
Its playbook is “opportunistic investing,” which mostly means going where others can’t or won’t. The firm invested in avocado farms, made a mint saving Airbnb during the pandemic, and was the first investment firm to own a sports team, in San Francisco’s professional women’s soccer club.
Sixth Street and JPMorgan declined to comment.
Liz’s view
Sixth Street hasn’t had a true finance chief before, and Feldman’s hiring is a sign that it’s inching toward its own listing, however coy its executives are in public. “Our future plans are just continuing to do what we do,” CEO Alan Waxman told Fortune in April when asked about an IPO, which he said is “not on radar.”
But it will be. The siren song of a public listing has been virtually impossible for asset managers to resist. Everyone gets rich, and companies get a publicly traded stock that they can use as currency for acquisitions in the race to build financial superstores.
The holdouts are mostly buyout specialists like Warburg Pincus and Hellman & Friedman, for whom the model of raising a big fund every few years, doing good deals, and sharing the spoils with a small group of partners still mostly works. But lending is a scale business, even in the bespoke, “between-the-box strategies” Sixth Street prefers. Blue Owl went public in 2021, and another competitor, HPS, is on its way.