Eliot Merrill
Eliot Merrill is a career private equity investor with roughly 25 years of experience: 22 years at The Carlyle Group (2001–2025) and about four years earlier at Freeman Spogli & Co. He joined Carlyle in 2001 and was promoted to Managing Director in the class announced in January 2007, focused on U.S. buyout opportunities in the telecommunications and media sectors.
In 2014, Carlyle launched Carlyle Global Partners (CGP), its first long-dated private equity fund, and Mr. Merrill became Co-Head alongside Tyler Zachem. Carlyle announced in October 2016 that CGP had raised $3.6 billion, with a mandate to invest alongside owners and management teams for 10 to 15 years, far longer than the industry's typical three-to-five-year hold. A second fund, Carlyle Global Partners II, followed beginning around 2019. In later biographies, Mr. Merrill is described as sole Head of Carlyle Global Partners.
Among the deals he led or was closely involved in: the 2012 acquisition of Getty Images from Hellman & Friedman for $3.3 billion, where he joined the board; CGP's investment in NEP Group, the outsourced broadcast and live-event production company; and CGP's 2019 investment in TAMKO Building Products.
His deepest, most citable credential is board governance: across his career he has served as a director of public and private companies spanning media, entertainment, asset management, industrials, and building products. A full list appears on the Track Record page.
Before Carlyle, Mr. Merrill was a Principal at Freeman Spogli & Co., a buyout fund, and worked in the Mergers & Acquisitions group at Dillon Read & Co. from 1995 to 1997. He holds an A.B., magna cum laude, from Harvard College. He now teaches as an adjunct professor at NYU Stern, leading FINC-UB 32, Private Equity Finance, in the spring semesters, and serves on the National Board of the Trust for Public Land.
Why Arcadia
Long before Mr. Merrill founded his advisory practice, Arcadia was the name of his own sailboat, home-ported in St. George, Maine. Sailing runs through his earliest career, too: his first job was as a sail consultant and special-project coordinator at Doyle Sailmakers.
The same patience and stewardship a long ocean passage demands is the philosophy behind the firm: durable, long-term thinking over short-term exits, the same instinct that shaped Carlyle Global Partners' decade-plus investment horizons.