Who’s Ludo?

Formal Academic CV -- Available Here

Formal Short Bio -- Available Here

Else, here you go: I ride road bikes, routinely taste great wines and in my spare time, I am a Faculty member of the Said Business School at the University of Oxford. I am also a Fellow at The Queen’s College, and sit on its investment committee, and manage its wine cellar; the latter being a much more serious affair than you may think.

Over the last twenty five years, I have been actively researching the private equity industry. It was a baby back then compared to today but people continue to be intrigued by this business of businesses. Data point after data point, article after article, I found that virtually everything sold as a fact was not quite so. I published several articles in leading academic journals on the subject; they have been downloaded about 200,000 times and cited over 5000 times (source: ssrn.com; Google scholar). This research has also been presented in multiple (over 100) universities as well as at major academic and practitioner conferences around the world, and featured in the media internationally (including The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times). I have been fortunate to work directly with a number of large institutional investors regarding their private equity investment decisions as well as benchmarking systems.

I have been teaching private equity for fifteen years to MBA/EMBA students, and developed a variety of executive education courses, including customized programs for leading consulting companies and asset managers.

I have also received some awards, none of which I deserve but these things go into biographies to show that the author is a serious dude. Besides some teaching awards, including Oxford SBS Teaching Excellence award in 2025, I have been honored to be named as one of “The 40 Most Outstanding Business School Profs Under 40 In The World” by the business education website Poets & Quants in 2014. In 2016, realdeals magazine listed me as one of the 20 most influential individuals in private equity in Europe – the only academic listed, won the Treynor Black prize in 2019, and probably the best award of then all, joining an impressive list of practitioners and academics: won the 2026 James R. Vertin Award that "recognize individuals who have produced a body of research notable for its relevance and enduring value to investment professionals."

Finally, I stayed at school for a long time, thanks to many generous scholarships, ending up full of degrees and of myself: Bachelor in Economic Engineering from Toulouse School of Economics; a couple of Master degrees (Economics, Mathematical Finance) from the University of Southern California; and a PhD in Finance from INSEAD.