The Bridge by iCapital

What’s actually breaking in private credit—and what isn’t?
Sonali Basak, Chief Investment Strategist at iCapital, is joined by Vivek Bantwal, Co‑Head of Private Credit at Goldman Sachs, to unpack a market where selectivity is returning. Bantwal explains why this moment is revealing a clear divide—between strong and weak borrowers, and between managers who underwrote for downside risk and those who didn’t.
The conversation moves from there into what’s behind recent volatility. Bantwal separates technical pressures from fundamentals and explains how redemptions and capital flows are stress-testing the market in real time. His core argument is that this isn’t a breakdown, but a shift to a world where discipline and underwriting quality are increasingly defining outcomes for investors.

Sonali Basak, Chief Investment Strategist at iCapital, is joined by Jason Thomas, Head of Global Research & Investment Strategy at Carlyle, to discuss how more value is being created before companies ever reach the public markets, and why that shift is changing how investors access growth. As private capital has expanded across the lifecycle of companies, Thomas explains why there are now significantly more privately backed firms than public ones, and why a growing share of lifetime returns is realized prior to IPO.
The conversation moves from there into the forces reshaping portfolio construction. Thomas outlines how passive flows are weakening price discovery, why concentration risk has become more acute, and how shifting stock-bond correlations are challenging traditional diversification. His core argument is that investors are not just adapting to a changing market cycle, but to a different structure altogether—one where accessing growth, managing risk, and navigating a higher-for-longer environment increasingly requires a more deliberate allocation to private markets.

Sonali Basak, Chief Investment Strategist at iCapital, sits down with Cliff Asness, Co-Founder AQR Capital Management, to discuss why today's "expensive" and "bubble" are not the same thing, and why the difference matters more than most investors think. With pockets of froth across today's market, Asness explains why he sets a deliberately high bar before calling a bubble, and why profiting from a bubble you correctly identify is far harder than it looks.
The conversation moves from there into the mechanics of staying disciplined when markets get extreme. Asness makes the case that quantitative investing is an extension of valuation discipline rather than a replacement for it, that value has evolved beyond simply buying cheap toward paying a fair price for quality, and that crowding has quietly become one of the biggest risks to any strategy as more capital chases the same trades. His core conviction is that the edge is not calling turning points, but in navigating dispersion, respecting the limits of prediction, and avoiding false precision.

In this episode of The Bridge, Sonali Basak, Chief Investment Strategist at iCapital, sits down with David Breach, President of Vista Equity Partners, to discuss why AI is rewriting the rules of software economics. Breach explains how AI is pushing the long-standing Rule of 40 toward a new bar closer to a Rule of 60 or 70, resetting valuations and raising expectations for what a high-quality software company actually looks like. As he sees it, the so-called "SaaS apocalypse" missed the point. AI isn't displacing software, it's structurally lifting both growth and margins at once.
 
The conversation also explores why cost rather than capability may be the real choke point in AI adoption, and why matching the right model and chip to the right job has become central to protecting profitability. Breach makes the case for the underappreciated edge incumbents hold through trusted data relationships, distribution, and embedded workflows, and why the biggest long-term opportunity lies not in chips or models but in the application layer. His conviction is that as AI reshapes software, the companies that translate it into measurable performance will capture the majority of the value, while laggards see downside.

In this episode of The Bridge, Sonali Basak, Chief Investment Strategist at iCapital, sits down with Steve Tananbaum, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of GoldenTree Asset Management, to discuss why today's software correction may be only halfway complete, how a structurally complex credit environment is creating selective opportunities for disciplined investors, and why this moment calls for valuation and downside protection rather than predictions about where the market is headed.
 
The conversation also covers how AI is emerging as both a source of opportunity and a structural risk for software business models, why dispersion rather than broad systemic distress is the defining feature of this credit cycle, and what the pace of AI adoption will reveal about which companies are true contenders and which are simply pretenders. Tananbaum shares his conviction that as business models keep evolving and uncertainty rises, outcomes will diverge sharply, rewarding investors who underwrite to a disciplined base case over those leaning on broad macro assumptions.
 

In this episode of The Bridge, Sonali Basak, Chief Investment Strategist at iCapital, sits down with Jack Weingart, Chief Financial Officer of TPG, to discuss why the 2026 IPO surge is an anomaly rather than a trend, how the most significant value creation is increasingly happening in private markets before companies ever go public, and why today's IPO moment is masking a deeper structural shift that Weingart says is unlike anything the market has seen in decades.
 
The conversation also covers how private credit is mirroring private equity's structural evolution, why AI is emerging as the primary driver of operational value creation over financial engineering, and what the speed of AI adoption will reveal about which companies are truly built for this cycle and which aren't. Weingart shares his conviction that over the next ten years, accelerating innovation will push more companies toward private markets, not away from them.

In this episode of The Bridge, Sonali Basak sits down with Victor Khosla, Founder & CIO of Strategic Value Partners, to discuss why "private credit" has become too broad a term to be meaningful, how opportunistic credit has evolved from distressed paper trading to actively owning and operating real assets, and why today's credit environment is unlike anything Khosla says he has seen in decades.
The conversation also covers the structural stress building across high yield, leveraged loans, and private credit markets, why software is emerging as the biggest fault line for private equity and credit portfolios, and what the coming shakeout will reveal about who was truly positioned for this cycle and who wasn't.

In this episode of The Bridge by iCapital, Rob Sechan, Co-Founder of NewEdge Capital, joins our Chief Investment Strategist Sonali Basak to unpack why AI concentration in markets is more justified than it looks, and why the investors who get it wrong are often watching the wrong risks entirely.
From the arms race driving AI infrastructure spending to the disciplines that separate durable portfolios from reactive ones, Sechan offers a grounded framework for navigating elevated valuations alongside constant macro noise. He makes the case that quality, diversification, and opportunistic allocation still win across cycles, and that the next major risk is almost certainly not the one investors are focused on.

In this episode of The Bridge by iCapital, John Waldron, President & COO of Goldman Sachs, joins Soali Basak to unpack why the economy is stronger than it looks, where AI fits into the growth picture, and why the next major opportunity in private markets may be closer than investors think.
From persistent inflation and elevated rates to the structural shift toward private credit and the evolution of capital markets, Waldron offers a grounded, cautiously constructive view of where we are, and what it will take for AI to deliver the growth the market is pricing in.

In this episode of The Bridge by iCapital, Sadek Wahba, Founder and Chairman of I Squared Capital, breaks down how investing in essential, hard assets—from airports and water systems to power generation, fiber, and data centers—can play a critical role in portfolio construction.
He explores:
- Why infrastructure can offer long‑duration, inflation‑linked cash flows
- What digital infrastructure really includes — beyond just data centers - How diversification across sectors and regions helps manage risk
- Why the U.S. has underinvested in infrastructure for decades
- How public‑private partnerships are increasingly stepping in to fill the gap
From water and transport to AI‑driven digital demand, this conversation connects the fundamentals of infrastructure investing with the forces shaping its future.