What turns a single investment vehicle into an institution capable of delivering long-term growth? For Matthew Kebble, the answer lies in the interplay between the right partners, integrity, trust and clear communication.

Having spent the better part of his career building investment businesses and raising capital, Kebble has seen what happens when the right foundations begin to compound, and long-term growth ensues.

In this interview, Matthew shares his insights on his journey beginning as a lender to private capital funds. That became the foundation for all that came next. Along the way, Kebble has developed hard-won views on the ingredients of a great business, choosing the right partners and the value of clear communication - all of which go well beyond conventional wisdom.

To explore these and other topics, market analyst Roux Jordaan sits down with Matthew Kebble, a leading institutional investment specialist, to unpack the lessons from a career spent building the machinery that most never see.

You didn't start in fund management, you started by lending to funds. How did that shape everything that came after?

More than any other single thing. Early on in my career, I worked in the fund financing team, lending to private capital funds, and it was a masterclass I didn't fully appreciate at the time. I had the opportunity to observe the full spectrum of private capital market strategies, the people, the players, their differences and how they interacted in the ecosystem.

Being able to observe these dynamics gave me the confidence, context, and high-level strategic know-how I needed to build a very successful investment management business.

I learnt a fortune about private capital, particularly in North America, from the credit side of the table. I interacted with a very diverse set of strategies across venture capital, growth, buyout, infrastructure, real estate, secondaries and GP stakes, many of which have continued to influence my thinking today. 

My honest advice to anyone early in their career: don't always optimise for the prestigious seat, optimise for the one where you'll learn the most about how the machine really works.

You've described being the underdog in that market. What did that position teach you?

That when you can't win on cheque size, you win on getting creative. We found transactions and part of the market that didn’t make sense for larger institutions to play in, with varying levels of high complexity, requiring both strategic thinking and for us to roll up our sleeves.

We were competing against far bigger institutions in the North American fund finance market, so we couldn't outmuscle anyone.

Instead, we built fantastic relationships with people in specific niches by being genuinely useful, straightforward and fast: we leveraged open communication as a differentiator, not a slogan.

If we could do something, we said so quickly: if we couldn't, we said that quickly too, and explained why. It turns out sophisticated counterparties value honesty at speed more than almost anything else, because it's so rare. That lesson - to differentiate through openness when you can't differentiate through scale - became foundational to everything I built afterwards.

Starting with a blank canvas terrifies most people. Why did it excite you?

Because of the mission attached to it. Building institutional investment capability from nothing was the most exciting thing that I could have imagined doing at the time. The mission of it made light of the real work: that kind of passion sustains you through the unglamorous middle, because there's an enormous amount of unglamorous middle.

Building step by step is the only way to fill the blank canvas: there's no version where you strategise your way to a platform without rolling your sleeves up.

You've said the ingredients for a great business existed but the platform didn't. What do you mean?

The institution had serious heavy machinery: a decade-old sourcing engine, deep borrower relationships, real underwriting track record. What didn't exist was everything required to launch and run an institutional-grade fund around that engine: the structures, the processes, the governance, the administration, the investor infrastructure.

My starting hypothesis was that my fund finance years had taught me how these things worked: I'd financed private capital funds, so surely I could help build one. That was partly right and importantly wrong. Seeing funds from the lender's side taught me about the inner workings of private market eco-systems, but that is very different to the skillsets required to build investment management businesses. 

So, we hired an experienced COO, a veteran of nearly three decades in asset management, and I had the privilege of learning the craft properly from him. The platform came together when three parts connected: the machinery that existed, the fundraising capability we developed, and the operational engine that we built. The business grew from a single modest first fund to a multi-billion platform by the time I left.

You've said choosing partners was the most essential decision of all. Why partners above everything else?

Because you don't build an institutional platform alone, you build it as a network of firms, and the quality of that network is your ceiling.

Administrator, oversight functions, counsel, service providers: we ran rigorous selection processes, but the criterion that mattered most wasn't on any scorecard. It was resonance: whether the actual people inside those organisations matched our energy and could be genuine thought partners, not just vendors executing a contract. You want a team that will navigate through, and solve problems, with you.

Our partners helped the platform scale by more than 10x, and they deserve real credit for that journey.

The test I'd give anyone choosing: don't just conduct due diligence on the firm's capability. Meet the people you'll actually work with and ask whether you'd want them beside you in a crisis. You're not buying a service. You're choosing colleagues who happen to have a different logo.

Was there a moment when you realised the platform had become a franchise?

When capital started arriving because of the machine rather than the moment. The first fund was carried by energy and relationships - hand-cranked, deal by deal, investor by investor. By the later stages, when the second fund closed at several times the size of the first and a strategic partner committed more than a billion, allocators weren't underwriting a pipeline anymore, they were underwriting an institution - the governance, the repeatability, the durability.

What have you learned about what truly earns investor confidence?

Transparency - definitely transparency. Sophisticated investors don't expect perfection: they expect to never be surprised. That means telling them about a problem before they find it, being as open about what went sideways as what outperformed, and answering the question they asked rather than the one you wish they'd asked. The commercial consequence is direct: trust built on openness, competence and integrity compounds into re-investment, referrals and referenceability - which are the most important forms of capital a manager will ever raise.