Lindsay Goldberg’s foray into the hedge fund business recently received some in depth treatment with a detailed article in Bloomberg Markets magazine, outlining the firm’s 2007 $100 million dollar working capital investment to jumpstart Phil Duff’s newest hedge fund group Duff Capital Advisors.

The article talks more about how quickly the $100 million disappeared than the investment group that financed it. However, the spread does give some attention to Lindsay Goldberg’s frustrations, finally resulting in Duff’s dismissal.  Today, Duff Capital Advisors is now known as Investment Risk Management and despite just being a zombie shell of itself, the business is still listed as a current portfolio company.

Lindsay Goldberg is well known for it’s patience, stating it can hold an investment for up to twenty years, but it’ll be interesting to see when it finally writes this one off.

Forbes just released its latest compilation of the largest US-based private companies with the help of Capital IQ.  This year, Forbes finally acknowledged the fact that private equity firms are responsible for a solid chunk of the list, noting that roughly a third of the 248 entries are backed by investment groups.  There’s even an interesting slide-show covering notable firms (Bain, TPG, KKR, etc.) and their largest holdings.  

However, I find it interesting that #27, Platinum Equity with $11.35 billion in consolidated current portfolio revenue (I assume this includes international company investments as well), is considered a “conglomerate” within the list versus a private equity group and excluded.  I’m not sure where the confusion is, but this seems to be a yearly error.  Going with this logic, if we break out all of KKR’s US based and privately held portfolio companies, we come up with $123 billion in revenue.  That would make KKR a solid #1.