Capital Allocators

GSP only invests in businesses at least 17 years old (average age much older), because they need to diligence what multiple economic cycles look like for the underlying business model.

The two primary killers of roll-up strategies are excess leverage and lack of technology/integration infrastructure—not deal pricing or market timing.

GSP targets a ~25% gross IRR for investors (roughly 3x money) and structures founder incentives with 20–40% equity rollover, management option pools, and 'super options' triggered at 3–4x outcomes to maintain alignment through exit.

GSP's largest investment, Authentic Brands, was seeded with a $20M equity check four years ago and has grown to a several-billion-dollar enterprise—their preferred model of back-loading capital into proven winners rather than sizing up front.

GSP's auto services consolidation, started 3 years ago with under $5M EBITDA, has grown to $25M EBITDA and competes in a $250 billion industry with ~150,000 acquisition targets remaining.

GSP's Burger King franchise improved store-level EBITDA margins from ~7% to 12–13% primarily by deploying food cost software that identified variances from waste, re-portioning, and theft.

Technology implementation in GSP's portfolio companies—spanning food cost software, labor management, and site selection—consistently adds 200–300 basis points to organic growth rates, which flows ~40%+ to the bottom line.

GSP targets bolt-on acquisitions trading at 5–8x cash flow in industries where strategic platforms trade at 12–16x, capturing the valuation arbitrage as the platform multiple re-rates.

Speed in buy-and-build roll-ups is strategically critical because each individual unit carries concentrated micro-market risk (single customer, weather, traffic), which diversifies away rapidly as scale increases—a 25% customer becomes 2% at platform scale.

GSP deliberately avoids upfront leverage in consolidations, only adding debt once a business reaches 15–20M EBITDA and has a full G&A infrastructure—typically 12–18 months post-investment.

GSP's quality bar for restaurant investments requires at least 20% store-level margins, new unit paybacks within 3 years, and the #1 average unit volume in their micro-category.

GSP estimates roughly $10 trillion in business assets will change hands over the next two decades, of which they see ~$1.2 trillion as their addressable market.

Vanguard is actively applying AI and large language models to codify 25+ years of institutional portfolio management knowledge—particularly around corporate actions and trade execution decisions—in order to reduce operational risk from employee turnover and improve decision consistency.

Vanguard has partnered with HarbourVest to offer private equity access to high-net-worth retail investors via a fund-of-funds structure, with Comegys framing low cost and top-quartile manager selection as the only viable way to succeed in private markets.

Comegys believes companies like SpaceX and Stripe, sitting at enormous private valuations, will eventually come public, and expects some of the larger private companies to IPO within the current year.

Vanguard returns approximately 95% of securities lending revenue directly to the fund and retains only ~5% to cover program expenses, positioning securities lending as a meaningful source of positive excess return for index fund investors.

Average holding periods for investors in Vanguard funds—both ETF and mutual fund share classes—are 5 to 10 years, empirically contradicting the assumption that ETFs primarily attract short-term traders.

Jack Bogle opposed ETFs for over a decade, viewing intraday trading as harmful to investors; Gus Sauter had to pitch Jack Brennan multiple times before Vanguard agreed to launch ETFs, framing them as a distribution vehicle rather than a trading product.

Most companies bring only 5–10% of total shares to market at IPO; Vanguard and peers successfully pushed index providers to adopt float-adjusted weighting to prevent indexers from oversizing purchases and artificially inflating opening prices.

Vanguard's index fund managers simultaneously optimize four competing objectives—tracking error, excess return capture, tax efficiency, and market impact minimization—rather than treating tracking as the sole mandate.

Vanguard owns on average approximately 8% of every free-float-adjusted US company across its index fund complex, making it a de facto permanent owner and reinforcing its stewardship obligations on behalf of ~50 million American investors.

The number of US publicly listed companies declined from a peak of roughly 6,000–7,000 around the year 2000 to approximately 4,000 today, with the losses concentrated almost entirely in small- and micro-cap names rather than large caps.

Moving from the S&P 500 to a global market-cap-weighted portfolio increases the investable universe by roughly 50% and cuts US concentration in half, with the addition of ~40% bonds providing further natural diversification.

Approximately 30% of the S&P 500 is concentrated in roughly seven companies, which is why Comegys argues the S&P 500 should not serve as either a benchmark or a portfolio for serious investors seeking diversification.