Committing capital to a blind-pool infrastructure fund is an exercise in trust, as limited partners (LPs) underwrite a decade or more of managerial discretion over largely unidentified assets. This partly explains the tendency for capital allocators to gravitate toward the industry’s largest and most well-known names. Familiarity carries genuine underwriting value.
As Taylor McManus, principal on the infrastructure and real assets team at Hamilton Lane, puts it, “A brand name is effectively an accumulation of trust earned through repeated interactions and demonstrated performance.”
But brand only goes so far. Performance can open the door, but culture, alignment, communication and transparency determine whether capital stays. “The first meeting starts the relationship; diligence is where the manager gets pressure-tested, but real trust is earned over the years — through seeing wins put on the board and watching how a manager handles the issues that inevitably
