Accounting has been around for five thousand years. The modern profession has been around for one hundred. And for most of that century, almost nothing about it has actually changed.

Then in five years, it all moved at once. Over $200 billion of private equity capital across roughly 150 deals. Eleven of the top thirty US firms now PE-backed. AI absorbing workflows that hadn't been touched in a generation. The industry that quietly underwrites every business decision in the economy, being rebuilt in real time.

In this episode of Why We Like It, Sam Tidswell-Norrish sits down with two people on opposite ends of the same grid.

Frank Longobardi spent forty-five years inside the profession, the last of them as CEO of CohnReznick. He explains what private equity actually saw that the partners didn't - the capital problem, the governance trap, and the moment a generation of partners realized their equity was worth multiples of what they'd been told.

Ariel Harmoko is the co-founder and CEO of Artifact, the agentic AI platform now cleared by HMRC to file tax returns directly with the regulator. A former Formula 3 driver and Cambridge machine learning researcher, he delivers one of the sharpest unscripted answers we've had on the show - on where the $900 billion value-creation story actually lives, and who really wins the next decade.

Two generations. Two vantage points. One profession being re-engineered in real time.

Conference realignment. The transfer portal. A $20.5M-per-school revenue-sharing mandate that didn't exist two years ago.

Streaming platforms spending north of $14B on rights. Sports is being rebuilt from the ground up and on this episode, Sam talks to two people whose careers have shaped many of the defining moments along the way. Chris Bevilacqua built the proof of concept that became every conference media network you know today.
Chris Marinak spent nearly two decades inside MLB, helping deliver innovations like the pitch clock and the ABS challenge system.

Now both at Playfly Sports, they discuss media rights, college sports, hyper-personalization, and what fans should expect over the next five years.

Every year, the private equity industry gets more competitive. More capital chasing a similar supply of deals. Valuations staying firm. The arbitrages of buying low and selling high evaporating. For over a decade, outcomes were supported by multiple expansion and leverage. That era is over. Performance now depends on operational improvement and revenue growth, and the firms that can deliver real value creation are pulling away from those that cannot.

In this episode of Why We Like It, Sam Tidswell-Norrish sits down with Sean Mooney, founder and CEO of BluWave. Sean is a 20-year private equity veteran who went from PE partner and investment committee member to building BluWave, a platform now trusted by hundreds of top PE firms and thousands of portfolio companies to connect investors with pre-vetted operators, consultants, and interim executives across due diligence, value creation, and exit preparation.
They go deep on where firms consistently get it wrong, why people remain the single biggest lever in value creation, how revenue growth has overtaken cost cutting as the primary driver of exit valuation, and why AI is rapidly shifting from buzzword to tactical deployment. Sean shares what he calls the three board meeting problem, a pattern he sees play out across the industry, and a decision-making framework from US military doctrine that changed how he operates in uncertain environments.

The conversation closes with four factors Sean believes every founder should evaluate before taking PE capital for the first time. Together, they explore why operational value creation is no longer a marketing narrative but the primary source of returns, and why the firms that run the business of private equity like a business are the ones building durable, long-term performance.