Aug 19, 2026

PE Beat: Nobody Blinks

Q2 deal value fell 38% while buyouts still clear at 2021 prices. PitchBook's first-half data shows a stalemate nobody will break.

Q2 deal value fell 38% from Q1. The average US buyout still clears at 12.5 times EBITDA, level with the 2021 peak. Volume collapsed and prices did not move. That is 2026 in two numbers.

PitchBook's Steven Buibish, who directs its US private equity research, walked through the first-half data and led with the composition problem: headline PE numbers have been a mega-deal proxy for years. "84% of the run-up from trough in 2024 to the peak in 2025 that we see here was driven by mega deal." The sub-$2.5 billion market has been flat to stable for two years. So the industry looked healthier than it was, and now looks sicker than it is.

Aug 18, 2026

AI Weekly: Who Owns the Skill

Datadog runs an LLM judge in front of every agent skill and finds malicious ones in public marketplaces. The skill became a corporate asset.

Datadog's security team built an LLM judge that reads the intent behind a piece of code, originally to scale review of third-party contributions. It turned out to catch injected code in real supply chain hijacks, then turned out to work on markdown. So now it sits in front of every agent skill entering the company, and what it finds is the news: "we put this judge in front of every skill that wants to get introduced. We actually find quite a bit of malicious skills in all these marketplaces."

That is Emilio Escobar, chief information security officer at Datadog, where more than 4,000 engineers work with coding agents. A quarter ago a skill was a text file on somebody's laptop. This week, in three unconnected conversations on three continents, it was a corporate asset with a gatekeeper, a budget line, and no named owner.

Aug 17, 2026

AI takes the admin work, not the judgment

Four people in four different trades, twelve days apart, drew the same line: automate the low-judgment admin, keep the judgment human.

Aug 17, 2026

SaaS Says: The Missing Before

A $3 billion company guessed LLMs sent half its traffic. It was 1%. The year AI had to prove a return, and the baseline was missing.

Aug 14, 2026

Weekend Listens: Who Owns the Number

Three episodes on who controls the money inside a business: an employee ownership trust, a broken apparel P&L, and a manager denied the numbers.

Aug 13, 2026

The Other 5%

MIT says 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail. Inside three that worked: Checkr's fluency levels, Plaid's AI program, and Adobe's agentic security pipeline.

Aug 12, 2026

PE Beat: Nothing Private About It

Scaled LPs are forcing public-market transparency into private equity: raw data over PDFs, active portfolio management, and a leverage warning from Ted Seides.