Daniel Rasmussen is the founder and managing partner of Verdad Advisers, an investment firm with over $1 billion in assets under management across multiple asset classes. He is the author of The Humble Investor (2025) and American Uprising (2011). Prior to founding Verdad, he worked at Bain Capital Private Equity and Bridgewater Associates. In this podcast, we discuss: Investing as Meta-analysis The Evolution of Private Equity Stranded Software Assets The Private Credit Mirage The &quot;Adjusted EBITDA&quot; Trap Small-Cap Growth Dangers The AI Capex Cycle AI Productivity Mindset

Ep. 362: Dan Rasmussen on Private Equity's Stranded Assets, Private Credit, and the AI Bubble

Macro Hive Conversations With Bilal Hafeez

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**Podcast:** Macro Hive Conversations With Bilal Hafeez

## Transcript

Welcome to the Macro Hive Conversations podcast. I'm Bilal Hafeez, Head of Strategy at Macro Hive. Before we dive in, a quick update. Following Macro Hive's acquisition by the BGC Group, BGC has launched a new regulated business called Macro Hive Markets. For the first time, onboarded clients can also access execution services via Macro Hive Markets. This new workflow will allow macro institutional investors to benefit from strategy and quant insights, alongside access to

global liquidity. Please contact Andrew Simon or Guillermo Cibrián on Bloomberg or click the link in the description below for more details on Macro Hive Markets and its service offering. Now onto this episode's guest, Dan Rasmussen. Dan is the founder and managing director of Verdat Advisors, an investment firm with over $1 billion in assets under management across multiple asset classes. He's the author of The Humble Investor, published in 2025, and American Uprising, published in 2011.

Prior to founding Verdat, he worked at Bain Capital Private Equity and Bridgewater Associates. On to our conversation. Greetings and welcome, Dan. It's fantastic to have you on the podcast show. Thanks for having me on. This is fun. Now, before we go into the main part of our conversation, I do like to ask my guests something about their origin story. So in your own words, it would be great to hear where you went to university, what you studied, was it inevitable you would end up in finance? Yeah, no, I studied history and literature at Harvard. I had no real intention of going into

business of any sort or really any idea what I was going to do. But my dad is a lawyer and he'd gone to law school and he said, you know, Dan, I was the top of my class at law school and I went into law and the people at the bottom of the class who weren't as smart went into business and they made three times as much money as I did, retired 10 years ago, didn't work as hard. So you know, I was good advice. And he also said, you know, I get paid by the hour. You try to find a

job that pays you by the decision. And so really my dad had a lot of influence in suggesting that I go into business. And so I basically just applied to a bunch of random places and ended up getting investing jobs for whatever reason. And that's sort of what led me in here. So there's a lot of randomness or fate or God or however you want to look at it. Okay, that's great to hear. And we'll talk more about your firm a bit later, perhaps. But I did want to get into some of the themes that you'd like to talk about. I did read your book that came out, I think last year, 2025, The Humble Investor, which I'd recommend to everybody.

And in there, you talk about investing is meta analysis. And you've talked about this in your writings as well. It'd be good to hear what you mean by that. Yeah. So, you know, in the market, you know, everything is priced, right...

Ep. 362: Dan Rasmussen on Private Equity's Stranded Assets, Private Credit, and the AI Bubble

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Ep. 362: Dan Rasmussen on Private Equity's Stranded Assets, Private Credit, and the AI Bubble

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.