Private Equity Rarely Loses

At twelve, George Baker was in downtown Dallas at six in the morning sweeping his family's commercial parking lots so they could be striped. "Party with the boys, wake up with the men." He hated it at the time. It also handed him the domain expertise he would build a company on eighteen years later.

Baker founded ParkHub in 2010 to solve one problem: cash leakage in a $40 billion industry that had barely been touched by technology. Digitizing the transaction produced revenue lifts of 30 to more than 50 percent for parking operators. Then in 2014 he did the thing most founders will not do. He shut down the consumer reservation engine he had spent four years building, called Ticketmaster, and rebuilt the company as a B2B platform selling into the people who already owned the demand. Growth ran 400 percent, then 300, then 200. Jerry Jones came in on the Series A in 2015. Inc. 5000 seven years running.

What the company was actually selling by then was not parking. It was data: fan journey mapping across transactional, transitional, and stationary zones inside a venue. Payment time fell from more than 20 seconds to under five, congestion dropped, and the venues measured a 30 percent carbon reduction, guest satisfaction up nearly 20 percent, and food and beverage sales up 19 percent. When COVID closed every venue, Baker repackaged that same product as contact tracing and helped Live Nation reopen at 2,500, then 5,000, then 15,000 people.

He raised $100 million of growth equity from LLR Partners in 2022, merged with the UK's JustPark, recapitalized with FTV Capital in 2024, sold some equity, and stepped from chairman to director of a 1,300-person global business. He is candid about the trade in a way sellside advisors rarely hear. "Private equity rarely loses." He does not regret it, he has made peace with it, and he is clear that the culture he had as a founder is not the culture that gets a company to the top of Everest under institutional ownership.

Now he runs 2 the Moon Ventures, a founder-backing-founders shop in Dallas with a bench of operators he can drop into a portfolio company on a fractional basis. He explains why he moved from SaaS into consumer brands like Tiff's Treats, Rujo Boots, Alvies, and Maplehouse, why western wear is a $130 billion market growing 8 percent, and what he actually looks for when someone walks in with a company: not the company at all, but whether the founder knows where their limits are and how coachable they are.