Before stepping into private capital technology, Paymun began his career in 2006 at the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) — the pioneer of the renowned Canadian Model — working across private equity and infrastructure. He later spent six years at the CAAT Pension Plan, where he served as a Private Equity Portfolio Manager. We spoke with him to explore how the challenges of being a pension allocator inspired his transition into technology and how he channels that experience into leading product efforts for Chronograph LP.
Paymun Saket: Before joining Chronograph, I spent 13 years as a fund allocator, where I witnessed both the incredible diversification and returns private markets offer LPs and the strain managing these assets can place on internal resources, often deterring pensions from increasing their exposure.
For example, I remember the asset/liability studies and projections of PE outperformance all indicating a logical increase in the PE allocation, but the additional resources needed to support increased data collection requirements and reporting needs ultimately held us back.
Further, traditionally, diversification in the private market portfolio was achieved via investing in fund of funds and secondary managers. However, as we grew, we wanted to diversify more actively by investing in a larger number of funds across strategies, geographies, and managers. The challenge, once again, was managing resources and keeping track of information across a larger portfolio.
Recognizing these challenges, I wanted to be a part of the solution and develop technology that could make information more accessible and bring much-needed transparency to private markets for LPs.
Paymun Saket: Chronograph was an obvious choice for me given its exact positioning as a tool that would have dramatically reshaped my day-to-day as an investor. I saw the toolkit I could have only dreamed of as an LP.
All fund reporting is harmonized and portfolio company metrics are accessible. Plus, you can splice and dice the portfolio across endless dimensions, access GP reported data alongside your own tracked net data, and see your exposures in seconds — what I wouldn’t have given for this kind of visibility.
Paymun Saket: When I joined OTPP in the mid-2000s, they, like much of the investment world, were significantly ramping up their private equity exposure. Then the GFC hit. Similar to the downturn we all felt in 2022, the public markets reacted instantly and our portfolio felt the weight of the denominator effect.
Distributions were muted in the years following, leaving more unrealized value sitting in our portfolio for longer. With more unrealized value came more risk and an acute desire to understand what was happening at the company level.
Further, assessing impact across the portfolio, understanding the real risks portfolio companies faced, and applying appropriate discounts required manually piecing data together to identify everything from sector exposures to leverage levels at individual holdings. Getting the right data with the right level of granularity was a painful process. Not just for us, but the entire market.
Paymun Saket: During my tenure at pensions, timely analysis of exposures remained a consistent theme well beyond the GFC. Years later during my time at CAAT, I was in London for an AGM only to wake up the next morning to the news of Brexit. By Monday morning the barrage of questions hit.
What’s our exposure to the UK? Not just of the funds based there — but of the underlying companies invested in across hundreds of globally focused managers. How much of their revenue is actually coming from the UK? What’s the vintage year of those companies? Are any nearing exit horizons?
Similarly, when Blackberry’s troubles unfolded in the public markets, internal stakeholders wanted to know how comparable private tech companies might be impacted. Like the GFC, digging into the valuations of those positions or trying to understand our exposures required significant document searching and ad hoc data aggregation. With Chronograph, you can access these insights in real-time and have confidence in the decisions you make based on that information.
Paymun Saket: Sitting on an investment team, you feel the weight of not being able to easily access metrics on portfolio company health. I remember mark ups would come in from fund managers. IRR and TVPI would go up. More unrealized value is on the line. But is it real? You had such limited visibility into what’s driving the valuation.
Is this increase driven by broader industry trends, or is it the result of the GP’s value creation efforts? With hundreds or thousands of companies in your portfolio, you can’t dig into each if you don’t have readily available data.
I recall situations where I’d see two companies in the same sector and stage, yet their valuation trajectories were completely different. Was one company struggling operationally, or was there a broader market factor at play that the other wasn’t reflecting? Getting those kinds of insights was a real challenge.
You also feel the pressure from internal stakeholders. Boards, CFOs, and investment committees want to know what is underlying performance so they can trust those marks. After all, valuations feed into NAV, which informs if you’re within your target band or not, forward-looking commitments, the overall risk level of the portfolio, and most importantly, for pensions, whether you are meeting your return targets to keep the pension well funded.
Chronograph gives LPs access to the detailed data on underlying portfolio companies they need to form their own views on valuations, spot early warning signs, build stronger conviction in their holdings, have more informed conversations with managers.
Paymun Saket: As a pension allocator, one of the most critical factors in evaluating your roster of managers is determining whether they invested as they originally marketed their fund. I remember sitting through quarterly calls with fund managers, often feeling at the mercy of whatever deck they were walking us through,
Based on the data we could track, it was at times, difficult to tell if they had followed through on what was promised or if our data was lagging. We didn’t have the resources, nor was it feasible to track the level of detail they had on these documents, especially at the company level.
Chronograph unlocks the transparency I wish I had in these scenarios. If a fund manager claimed they’d cap tech exposure at 50% or sold themselves as a “global fund” with no more than 60% in North America, you can pull up their fund page during calls to see if they stuck with their thesis.
Further, real-time visibility into exposures and performance across your entire portfolio and down to individual funds, managers, and companies sharpens commitment decisions. You can easily see if a fund is really offering something differentiated to your existing portfolio composition.
Paymun Saket: Most of the process for co and direct investing decisions was ad-hoc and manual. If the investment team was evaluating a pharmaceutical co-invest opportunity, for example, it was very difficult to efficiently understand our existing sector exposure.
When a co-investment or direct opportunity came up, we also wanted to understand the fund manager’s rationale, often by looking at the fund’s current composition. For example, if the fund was overweight in a particular sector or region, it could help explain why the opportunity was being presented. Gathering this data was often fragmented and tough to pull together.
On top of that, running valuations for co and direct investments was very tedious and required copy and paste of the latest financials into Excel models. With Chronograph, LPs have instant access to sector exposure, gain a consolidated view of fund composition, and can seamlessly integrate financials into valuation models.
Paymun Saket: LPs store a wide array of data and documents in Chronograph across quarterly reports, SOIs, partnership financials, and much more.This past year, it was incredible to launch Chrono AI, which allows LPs to instantly query across millions of documents for insights that would otherwise require scrolling through lengthy PDFs and data rooms.
What is a GP’s outlook for the fund or the market? Who has joined or left the organization? Do they have an ESG policy or did they experience any ‘ESG events’? Chrono AI can answer questions in seconds that would have historically required a lot of reading or ‘ctrl+f’ usage.
Another exciting feature we recently introduced is private comparables. On every company page, LPs can now search their entire instance of Chronograph to find the right portcos to choose as comparables based on a large array of categories such as sector, geography, EBITDA ranges, etc.
This will allow LPs to examine underlying metrics such as revenue, leverage levels, and EBITDA within peer groups to assess a holdings’ performance compared to broader industry trends and identify underlying value creation drivers.
Paymun Saket: LPs are dealing with a murky investment climate. There’s a mountain of unrealized value sitting in buyout and venture portfolios. Rising interest rates have raised the bar for value creation. Industry trends and risk factors are changing daily. Return dispersions are set to widen, and manager selection is more critical than ever. I know how hard these conditions make the job on the other side. Having real-time insights is paramount to making the best decisions, which is something that continues to guide our product roadmap.
Chronograph was built by former private equity GPs and LPs to address the challenges they faced firsthand. Request a demo to see how Chronograph LP delivers deeper insights into private equity portfolios, provides real-time exposures, and allows for more informed decision making.
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