Eliot Merrill
Eliot Merrill is a career private equity investor with 30 years of Financial Services experience, including 24 years at The Carlyle Group (2001–2025) and four years earlier at Freeman Spogli & Co. He joined Carlyle in 2001 and was promoted to Managing Director & Partner in 2006, focused on U.S. buyout opportunities in the telecommunications, media, and financial services sectors.
In 2014, Carlyle launched Carlyle Global Partners (CGP), its first long-dated private equity fund, and Mr. Merrill became the firswt leader of CGP, creating the strategy, creating the fund parameters, fundraising from institutional investors, and building the investment team. Carlyle announced in October 2016 that CGP had raised $3.6 billion in it's first long dated fund, 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.
Among the deals he led or was closely involved in: the 2004 acquisition of PanAmSat Corporation, the 2006 acquisition of Neilsen (VNU, NV) a dutch public company at the time, the 2013 acquisition of TCW, and all of CGP's investments including: TAMKO Building Products, NEP Group, Asplundh Tree Expert, Sciens Building Solutions, and Orsini Specialty Pharmacy.
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. In addition, he now teaches as an adjunct professor at NYU Stern, focusing on Private Equity Finance, in the spring semesters, Mr. Merrill also serves on the National Board of the Trust for Public Land where he chairs the Transaction Committee and is a member of the Finance Committee.
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.