The Deal That Made Audax’s Chief Sick

The Audax Group co-founder shares candid details about a motorcycle investment that nearly crashed the recently launched firm.

Just two years after the founding of Audax Group, the Boston-based private equity firm made an investment in a motorcycle company that threatened its future.

In a recent interview with Privcap, Geoff Rehnert, an Audax co-founder, shared the financial and psychological toll that the Indian Motorcycle deal took on him and his partners.

Having invested $45M into Indian Motorcycle in 2001, by 2003 the company had collapsed, creating a big hole in Audax’s debut private equity fund.

In this interview clip, Rehnert, a former Bain Capital partner, describes the hard lessons Audax learned from that deal as well as how it made him sick, literally:

Watch the rest of Geoff Rehnert’s fascinating interview here.