Operator-Led Private Equity at Ethos - Erik Brooks (EP.504)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Ted Seides – Allocator and Asset Management Expert
4.7 • 841 Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2026
⏱️ 63 minutes
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Summary
Erik Brooks is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ethos Capital, a middle-market private equity firm built to bring seasoned C-Suite operators into every aspect of the investment process. Erik's experience prior to founding Ethos in 2019 spanned privatizations in Eastern Europe, value investing at Baupost, and twenty years at Abry Partners.
Our conversation covers Erik's path to private equity, lessons learned about risk, the importance of betting on people, and the evolution in his thinking that led to forming Ethos. We then cover Ethos' focus on durable business models, one-deal-a-year cadence, operating system to evaluate and improve companies, and an investment example that brings it all to life.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | you would be sitting in a management meeting. If I'm asking a management team questions, |
| 0:06.5 | there is this heaviness that exists. You try and break through, but just naturally exists, |
| 0:12.0 | where the management team, okay, here come the private equity folks. The private equity folks |
| 0:17.3 | walk in like, okay, here's the management team. The weight exists. You break through that |
| 0:21.9 | and try and connect. Even in the best scenarios, my asking questions is a little bit of an interrogation. |
| 0:29.0 | Asked in the nicest, most open way, it's still definitionally a bit of an interrogation. |
| 0:35.6 | When Fadi would run the management meetings, it was a conversation. |
| 0:40.1 | It was Fadi saying to the head of sales. When I ran business services for IBM in the Middle East and |
| 0:47.1 | Africa, I noticed in some countries it was important for you to show up with multiple products. |
| 0:52.4 | In other countries, they really wanted you to specialize. |
| 0:55.3 | I see you set yourself up geographically. Tell me a little bit more about some of the reasons you |
| 1:01.4 | decided to do it that way. That's two people speaking Portuguese to each other, and I speak Spanish. |
| 1:08.2 | I'm getting a lot. There's a level of depth. There's a level of understanding. |
| 1:12.9 | The information you get back is different. I know that because I've sat in hundreds of management |
| 1:18.3 | meetings, sitting in those meetings, listening to Fadi conduct them. And the answers that were |
| 1:24.3 | being shared by the management team were just different. |
| 1:28.5 | Better. |
| 1:29.0 | They were deeper. |
| 1:30.2 | Then add on to that, my interpreting the information is different than somebody who's been a CEO |
| 1:38.1 | or a CIO or a CRO listening to the answers and interpreting it. |
| 1:43.1 | The quality of that interpretation is going to be better. |
| 1:46.6 | We don't make anything in our business. |
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