A Proactive Approach

Adams Street Partners makes partnership investments with the objective of selecting groups that will have excellent risk-adjusted performance. Adams Street Partners is a proactive and value-added investor and seeks to build a superior performing portfolio by combining top-down portfolio construction and bottom-up investment selection.

Over the last 25 years, the partnership investment selection process has been developed and refined, and involves the assessment of both objective historical performance of the managers of each partnership, as well as extensive due diligence and the exercise of judgment regarding subjective issues that may affect future performance. Adams Street Partners believes this process provides the framework to select the partnership investments within each subclass that will have the best risk-adjusted performance going forward.

In order to select the best opportunities over time, Adams Street Partners compares groups within each subclass to all others in the subclass, whether or not they are raising money currently. Adams Street Partners’ proactive approach to selecting the best opportunities provides clients with access to high-quality opportunities that are not readily available in the marketplace.

Adams Street Partners believes that a portfolio, which is diversified across the various private equity subclasses, should produce superior returns with lower volatility, and therefore, lower risk, than strategies that focus on a single subclass, such as venture capital or buyouts. Adams Street Partners actively seeks to invest in areas within the private equity partnership universe where it perceives value to be the greatest, including areas outside the venture capital and buyout subclasses. Adams Street Partners applies its top-down judgments regarding the risk/return characteristics of each subclass to its bottom-up subclass weightings and individual investment selection in order to generate attractive risk-adjusted returns.