In 1998, Paul Capital, a San Francisco-based firm that had carved out a niche for itself as a pioneer of the market for buying secondhand private equity interests, struck a deal with the fledgling private equity arm of French insurer Axa to source deals in the US and Europe.

The partnership was a coup for Axa, which had just launched its private equity fund of funds business and wanted to learn how it could make money from the secondaries market, one of the industry's most complex yet lucrative areas.