Private capital is a relationship market. Who gets into a fund, who sees a deal first, and who gets the call when a mandate opens are all decided by a graph that is not written down anywhere in public.
Network, People, Relationships and The Tape are Boardroom's attempt to write part of it down.
Relationships as data
A relationship here is an edge between two real entities: this LP committed to that fund, this manager co-invested with that one, this advisor ran that process. Because both ends are entities rather than free text, the edges compose. You can ask who has backed a manager, and then who else those same LPs back, and get an answer instead of a search result.
People are the track record
Funds do not make decisions, people do. A firm's track record was earned by a specific set of partners, and the useful question is how many of them are still there. People holds the individuals and where they sit, which is what turns "this firm returned 2.4x on Fund III" into "the two partners who ran Fund III left in 2024".
The Tape
The Tape is the running record of capital events: commitments, closes, raises, as they are sourced. Its value is that it is chronological. A directory tells you the state of the world; a tape tells you the direction it is moving, which is what you need to spot a manager gathering momentum before the final close is announced.
What the graph cannot tell you
An edge records that a relationship exists, not whether it is warm. Two firms that co-invested once in 2019 have an edge and possibly nothing else. Use the graph to find the path and a person to judge whether the path is worth walking.