By Dan Bienvenue, CAIA, CFA, Managing Director at General Atlantic and Board Director at CAIA Association
With a new role in private equity after more than 20 years at CALPERS, I’ve now seen our industry from both sides of the table. As an asset allocator, my team and I spent years evaluating external managers by testing for culture, process, and repeatability while knowing we were trying to assess what we couldn’t fully observe. Then several months ago, I crossed over from LP to GP, and finally had an inside view.
Dynamic Problems Call for Dynamic Solutions: Moving Beyond Buckets
GPs can benefit from a similar shift in perspective and approach, especially as the world begins to explore the Total Portfolio Approach as an alternative to SAA. Personally, I don’t see TPA and SAA as opposing ends of a spectrum. Instead, the real divide is between holistic and siloed thinking, and top-level portfolio optimization vs. numerous low-level optimizations coming together at the top. GPs, in particular have a unique opportunity to prove their value as the world becomes more complex and portfolios more deeply integrated.
That said, a shift towards TPA (or any integrated program) has enormous implications. When LPs adopt a TPA framework, the relationship with GPs moves from a simple bucket-filling exercise to shared problem-solving. The conversation is no longer, “Do you fit my private-equity bucket?”, it becomes, “How do you help me achieve total-fund objectives (e.g., risk, liquidity, sustainability, resilience) across the entire portfolio?”
That change demands a new mindset from managers: solutions provider, rather than product vendor.
The Rubik’s Cube and the Bowl of Soup
When discussing the change in thinking required for GPs, I often use a simple analogy: SAA is like a Rubik’s Cube, where each color lives in its own box. TPA is more like a bowl of soup, where everything mixes together. Most of us in investment management, especially those with quant backgrounds like mine, were trained to think in Rubik’s Cube terms: tightly defined variables, clear borders, elegant optimization.
But real-world portfolios, and how they’ll perform through dynamic markets, are more like soup, being messy and requiring flexibility and fluidity. Correlations change, liquidity ebbs and flows, and human behavior and governance constraints shape outcomes as much as math and its underlying assumptions do. To work effectively with LPs embracing TPA, GPs must learn to think less like cube-solvers and more like chefs, balancing flavors, adapting ingredients, and recognizing that no two recipes are the same.
Becoming a True Solutions Provider
The first step is listening. Every pool of capital exists to solve a different problem. For a public pension, it’s paying benefits decades into the future. For an endowment, it’s balancing current spending with perpetual capital. For a family office, it’s often about multi-generational wealth and legacy. If you don’t start by understanding the problem that the LP is trying to solve, you’ll inevitably misdiagnose the solution.
As an allocator, I often challenged managers with a simple thought experiment: If you had $500 billion to deploy on behalf of millions of retirees, how would you expose it to risk in an effort to generate returns to pay pensions? How would you build something sustainable, with enough upside to meet obligations but enough downside protection to survive market shocks? The GPs who could think in those terms, who could sit in my chair for a moment, were the ones who stood out.
A “solutions mindset” also requires breadth. Too many firms operate like hammers looking for nails, pushing a single flagship fund regardless of whether it fits an LP’s needs or not. In a TPA world, the ask might be for co-investments to accelerate deployment and manage fee load, customized vehicles to for specific desired or avoided expossures, or knowledge transfer to help an internal team skill-up. The firms that can meet a variety of needs will be the ones invited back to the table.
Versatility also depends on talent development. Junior professionals need both depth in a particular area of expertise, but also breadth of knowledge with an ability to connect dots across asset classes and risk factors. As artificial intelligence begins to automate parts of our analysis, human value will increasingly come from synthesis that captures the total picture and presents creative solutions.
Asset Owner in Focus: Working with Public Pensions
Regardless of whether an organization has adopted TPA or still remains in an SAA framework, GPs can and should find ways to become a better partner.
Public pension plans occupy a special corner of the LP universe, and certainly a special spot in my heart. They operate under intense public scrutiny, with fiduciary obligations to generations of beneficiaries, and they carry a unique set of constraints, including liquidity, transparency, and politics that private capital sometimes underestimates.
For GPs looking to build successful relationships with these institutions, I’d offer four practical reminders:
- Understand the mandate. Know precisely what problem the pension is solving. It’s not “generate a 15 percent IRR”, it’s the ability to pay benefits over something like a perpetuity. Every investment decision traces back to that mission, so for a strategy to be accretive, it must be framed in those terms and contribute to long-term, risk-adjusted, inflation-sensitive returns. Then, you’re speaking the pension fund’s language.
- Lead with partnership, not transaction. The “P” in both LP and GP stands for partner. Some firms approach the relationship as purely commercial, where others take a long-term view, knowing that if they consistently add value, the economics will work themselves out. The second camp builds trust that survives market cycles, and as the industry moves toward more holistic portfolio construction, partnership beats transaction every time.
- Align on enduring priorities. LP concerns remain largely unchanged over time: generation of liquidity, fees, alignment of interest, and genuine value creation rather than financial engineering. They may weigh those factors differently in different environments, but they never disappear.
- Practice radical candor. GPs know they’re paid to take risk. Be explicit about what could go wrong, when it could go wrong, and how you will respond if it does. And when it does – own it! Nothing builds credibility faster than transparency and accountability.
The Human Element in an Age of Integration
As portfolios evolve toward TPA, and technology increasingly supports total-fund views of risk, exposure, and performance, the soft factors of trust, empathy, and communication matter more than ever. Tools can model cross-asset correlations or simulate liquidity stress tests, but they can’t replicate the judgment required to align incentives, manage expectations, and navigate governance.
That’s why I believe the industry’s next great unlock isn’t another dataset or model; it’s relationship architecture. GPs who invest time in understanding an LP’s ecosystem—board structure, reporting cadence, regulatory pressures, and political context—can tailor solutions that fit not only the portfolio but the organization itself. That’s what partnership looks like in practice. When we talk openly about what each side needs, what constraints we face, and what success truly looks like, we move from a zero-sum negotiation to a positive-sum partnership, and that’s where the magic happens.
Closing Thoughts
The shift toward total-portfolio thinking is more than a technical evolution—it’s a cultural one. It asks all of us, LP and GP alike, to zoom out, connect dots, and remember why we’re in this business in the first place: to create lasting value for the people who depend on these portfolios.
So as you think about your next LP meeting, try looking at the world from their chair. Ask what problem they’re really trying to solve. Offer ideas, not just products. Be candid when things go sideways. And above all else, think like a partner.
About the Contributor
Dan Bienvenue, CAIA, CFA is a Managing Director at General Atlantic on the Capital Solutions team and focuses on the firm’s solutions for pensions. Before joining General Atlantic in 2025, Dan served in several leadership roles at the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), including interim CIO on two occasions and Deputy CIO on a permanent basis. He was at CalPERS for nearly 21 years.
Learn more about CAIA Association and how to become part of a professional network that is shaping the future of investing, by visiting https://caia.org/