For most of the last decade, the PE playbook was simple. Buy a company, grow it, improve margins, and sell it within five or six years, either to a strategic buyer or to public investors through an IPO. The proceeds flowed back to limited partners (pension funds, endowments, insurers and sovereign wealth funds), who recycled them into the next fund. That cycle has stalled. IPO windows have been muted, and strategic buyers face a far higher cost of capital than they did before