An endowment manager recently suggested to me that private equity funds could soon face the same type of fund-raising chill that VC funds have been shivering through for the past four or five years. He basically argued that median PE returns have been unimpressive, particularly due to excessive fee-taking (a practice that has not really abated, despite all the talk that it would).

Just like some institutions have virtually stopped investing in any VC funds outside re-upping with their own top-performers, the same thing could happen to private equity.

So I pitched the theory to a couple other institutional investors, but couldn’t find agreement. Or, as Erik Hirsch of Hamilton Lane, put it: “LPs are very bad at saying no and private equity GPs are very good at asking people to say yes.”

Hirsch and others do believe that there will be some PE shakeout, in part because so many firms who raised in 2006-2007 must return to market in the next 12-24 months. But not anything close to what venture capital has faced, in part because top-quartile PE outperforms while outperforming VC is often confined to the top decile. And this sentiment is supported by the most recent Coller Capital Barometer of LP sentiment.

But it’s still an interesting theory, and I’ll be keeping tabs to see if it materializes even a little bit…