At the Private Equity and Venture Capital Symposium, a Day of Candid Conversations on a Complex Field

On a cold February morning in midtown Manhattan, nearly 300 investors, allocators, founders, and students filed into the Cure Innovation Ecosystem building on Park Avenue for the Yale SOM Private Equity and Venture Capital Symposium. In the full day of conversations that followed, we didn’t always agree with each other—but we were all better for it.

The day opened with a fireside chat between Syaru Shirley Lin, founder and chair of the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation; and Lindsey King, head of investor relations at Crestview Partners. The conversation moved quickly past deal stories and toward something less comfortable: what it actually takes to sustain a career in investing over decades, not just quarters. The speakers made a case for treating early-career years less as time for “dues-paying” and more as a fast feedback loop, one where the relationships and self-knowledge you build compound long after the tasks themselves get automated. Luck, they argued, isn’t random. It finds people who have stayed in the arena long enough to act when the window opens.

That theme of discipline over flash carried into the following panels. A discussion of middle-market private equity featuring investors focused on companies with between $5 million and $10 million in EBITDA made a straightforward case: at that scale, there is nowhere to hide. Every assumption about talent, growth, and valuation is quickly proven or debunked in the numbers. Panelists returned again and again to the primacy of people, reflecting that evaluating leadership is the single most important skill in PE, and that the best operators in the middle market are often the most operationally grounded, rather than the most credentialed.

Across the hall, an emerging markets panel pushed back on the very idea that “emerging markets” is a useful category. Panelists contended that the designation is merely a packaging innovation, a structure that once let investors access diverse developing economies through a single vehicle. Instead, they suggested, investors interested in those economies should pay close attention to how individual ventures are structured and governed. One allocator described a model that delegates investment authority to a single decision-maker rather than a committee, on the theory that committees in high-volatility markets often optimize for career-risk management at the expense of opportunity.

The healthcare and AI panels, which took place simultaneously, ended up circling the same question from different directions: where does the money actually flow, and does it match where value gets created? In healthcare, panelists traced a customer chain that runs from VCs that fund early-stage research, to the pharmaceutical companies that acquire drugs years later, to insurance payors ultimately controlling reimbursement. In AI, the sharpest distinction drawn was between AI as a noun and AI as an adjective. Investors on the panel said they don’t back “AI companies;” rather, they look for domain-specific applications where founders bring something the model alone cannot: regulatory knowledge, proprietary data, or a relationship with the end customer.

By the evening reception, speakers and attendees were synthesizing insights from all the day’s panels. But an understanding of the importance of discipline—in valuation, in governance, and in self-awareness—was the thread that connected the strongest track records in the room. New technologies are powerful, and hype is also powerful. The investors navigating that tension best can hold both ideas at once, while recognizing that innovations are only as good as the human judgment behind them.

For us, leading the symposium felt like an extension of the work of investing. We wanted to build a program that reflected how we actually think about the industry—not siloed by asset class, but organized around the judgment calls that cut across all of them. The hardest part wasn’t logistics but curation: deciding which conversations deserved a stage, and which speakers would challenge the room rather than repeat conventional wisdom. Those considerations forced us to articulate our own views before we could ask anyone else to share theirs, which was uncomfortable and useful in equal measure.

The highlight of the day was watching those curatorial bets land. We loved witnessing panels where an audience question redirected the conversation entirely, or where two speakers who had never met found real disagreement worth exploring. The experience taught us that the most valuable skill in investing isn’t modeling or pattern recognition. It’s designing the conditions where good judgment can surface—in a diligence process, a boardroom, or a conference program.

The symposium took place at Cure Innovation Ecosystem, with Crestview Partners, Nebrodi Partners, and Wiggin(x) as gold-tier sponsors.