Interview With Sean Thomson: Chronograph GP’s Valuation Product Lead

Before stepping into private capital technology at Chronograph, Sean spent 15 years in alternative investment valuation at KPMG, Crowe, and Houlihan Lokey, managing complex valuations across asset classes. He also served as a technical manager at the International Valuation Standards Council, working with the standards board and global stakeholders to shape international valuation standards and guidance.

Chronograph: Sean, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. You’ve made a unique pivot from the investment world into technology and product development. What inspired this change, and why Chronograph?

Sean Thomson: Valuations require professional judgment layered on top of a robust analytical framework. Each investment has a different industry, structure, and drivers; the real value is in tailoring the model to reflect that. Throughout my career, that’s the part I always found most interesting. 

Over 15 years, I’ve valued assets across private equity and credit, real estate, infrastructure, and many other strategies. I spent most of that time looking for ways to strip out the routine work so I could focus on the analytical problems.

I moved into technology because I wanted to help build the toolkit that I’d always wanted as a practitioner. I chose Chronograph because the product was ahead of anything else I’d seen, and the culture and caliber of people were too. The first time I saw the platform, tasks that used to take me hours were happening in seconds and error-free. I was sold.

Chronograph: After 15 years of using Excel for valuations, where do you think it still works well, and where are its limitations starting to emerge?

Sean Thomson: Excel is a powerful calculation tool, and is well-suited to the nuanced, bespoke nature of private markets valuations. However, it is not a database, a workflow engine, or a governance layer, and using it in those capacities exposes its inherent shortcomings.

It’s very difficult to trace every change, every assumption, every version, and whether the model your team is running today is the same one that was last reviewed and approved. Further, relying on copy and paste as the primary method for populating data makes roll-forward processes slow and highly prone to error.

With a handful of companies, these limitations may be manageable, though inefficient. At scale, they compound quickly. For example, managing 50 different models across a portfolio in a governed and defensible way becomes extremely challenging.

When an auditor asks why an input changed, deal teams often end up opening each quarter’s file on separate screens, comparing cells one by one to reconstruct the history. Similarly, when a valuation committee requests a five percent reduction sensitivity analysis across the portfolio, investment teams could spend hours building the scenario manually.

Chronograph: You noted that despite these shortcomings, Excel remains a powerful tool for model customization. Why is flexibility critical to the valuation process?

Sean Thomson: Valuation models reflect the specific facts and circumstances of an investment. Assets span different industries, deal structures, and value drivers. For example, a pre-revenue biotech company, a mature manufacturer, and a commercial real estate asset are each driven by very different fundamentals. 

For early-stage biotech companies, the absence of traditional financial metrics often necessitates scenario-based approaches that link valuation outcomes to clinical trial progress, regulatory approvals, or patent milestones. Established manufacturers with consistent earnings profiles generally rely on a mix of income and market methodologies, with professional judgment guiding the relative weighting of each approach. 

Commercial real estate assets introduce an entirely different model architecture, often built around cap rates applied to net operating income, lease-by-lease cash flow projections, and comparable sales analysis. No standardized framework can adequately capture the nuances of these assets. Even within the same industry, firms can arrive at different views on value depending on how they interpret the underlying drivers at the company level. 

Equity allocations are another bespoke component, shaped by increasingly complex mechanics across shareholder classes. Arriving at security-level ownership will vary significantly depending on an asset’s capital structure and the chosen allocation technique. 

I’ve worked on thousands of valuation models throughout my career, and capturing this level of bespoke logic and specificity is where Excel thrives. 

Chronograph: How has balancing Excel’s flexibility with the need for stronger governance and auditability shaped Chronograph GP’s valuation philosophy and offering?

Sean Thomson: Our philosophy and capabilities are rooted in this reality of the market. Firms have built highly sophisticated valuation models in Excel and rely on its flexibility to value their assets effectively. What they lack is the governance, efficiency, and auditability needed to support the scale the industry is reaching. 

Chronograph GP is designed to let firms retain their existing operating models across the end-to-end valuation process, preserving the flexibility they’re accustomed to in Excel. They can maintain custom calculations, adapt methodologies over time to reflect changes in the underlying assets, and keep full control of their models without dependence on vendor-built templates or methodology libraries.

However, the platform enables them to wrap their process in cloud-driven governance, automate roll forwards with validated data, and centralize outputs in a single source of truth. Business rules can be enforced, existing approval layers replicated within the platform, and a trusted audit trail captured for every input, output, and model change. Together, these capabilities remove the manual work and reconciliation firms face today, driving efficiencies across every stage of the process — from data input to review and approval.

Chronograph: How do you see human judgment continuing to shape valuations in an increasingly AI-driven world?

Sean Thomson: At Chronograph, we see clear opportunities for AI to add value across portfolio monitoring and valuation workflows. That said, we’re realistic about its place in the valuation process. 

AI and ML are well-suited to the manual, repetitive, and data-intensive parts of valuation: extracting and harmonizing financial data, identifying relevant comparables, and accelerating research. However, the defensibility of a mark ultimately depends on a professional’s ability to explain every comp, methodological choice, and assumption. That’s not going away. 

A recent bid might exceed a model’s output by 20%, an asset’s comp set could fall 15% while the company itself remains insulated, or an original assumption may turn out to be overly generous. In each case, human judgment is essential. 

Chronograph’s ability to collect and memorialize qualitative adjustment rationale alongside valuation outputs reflects this reality, ensuring every decision is defensible and that supporting context is easily accessible to auditors, valuation committees, and other stakeholders who need to understand how a mark was reached.

Chronograph: Can you speak to how you’ve seen our valuation philosophy resonate across the market and firm stakeholder groups? 

Sean Thomson: We are agnostic across every layer of the valuation process — allocations, methodology, and asset class. This has led to adoption across the full spectrum of private market managers and operating models. 

Today, Chronograph administers roughly $1 trillion in valuations each quarter across a diverse client base, ranging from some of the world’s largest asset managers to middle-market firms, private credit managers, and venture investors.

At the firm level, we’ve seen broad adoption across front-to-back office stakeholders, which I believe distinguishes us in the market. We’re not asking teams to change how they work, which has led to active participation from both investment and finance teams within the platform.

Chronograph: How are our GP clients benefiting from using Chronograph to administer their valuations?

Sean Thomson: When everyone works from a single, trusted view of every input, output, piece of commentary, and a complete audit trail, the valuation process becomes less about model distribution and version control and more about the additive elements: running scenario analysis and portfolio sensitivities, having robust valuation committee discussions, and stress-testing assumptions.  

Reliable valuation outputs also generate meaningful benefits downstream. Valuations feed into exit modeling, LP and financial reporting, and value creation analysis. Starting these workflows from a reliable output unlocks significant efficiencies and reliable insights for firms.

Chronograph: What broader themes are intensifying the pressure on GPs to administer more robust, automated, and governed valuation processes?

Sean Thomson: Rising valuation frequency is the main force at play, driven by a convergence of factors. For one, LP private market allocations have scaled to 10–30% of their portfolios, creating much larger unrealized positions than they’ve historically held. 

As a result, they’re pushing for greater insight into what’s driving valuations and more frequent NAV updates, particularly amid persistent geopolitical uncertainty and volatile public markets. The ongoing democratization of private markets through retail-focused evergreen funds is another driver, with these vehicles typically requiring monthly valuations.

What I find particularly interesting, however, is the accelerating consolidation across private markets. Pure equity or credit investors are increasingly a thing of the past. Many large firms operate across strategies, geographies, and asset types. As firms consolidate and portfolios expand, they’re managing valuations at a scale that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago.

As these forces compress valuation cycles, the industry has reached an inflection point where technology is needed to streamline roll forwards. In my conversations with firms, they’ll often note that nothing is fundamentally broken in Excel models, but that the inefficiencies simply can’t keep pace with monthly cycles or ad-hoc market adjustments. 

Chronograph: What excites you most about the valuation tools you’re building at Chronograph? 

Sean Thomson: There’s an old adage about technological change: do you want the faster horse, or a car? A lot of the solutions out there are “faster horses.” They centralize and standardize and get you to the finish line quickly — but you miss everything else the “car” (Chronograph) has to offer.

I get to work closely with our client development team and observe first-hand all the edge cases in firms’ valuation processes. I was on a call recently where the team discussed how they factor a management team’s historical approach into their valuations. Some teams are more aggressive, others more conservative, and the valuation team needs the flexibility to adjust marks accordingly.

It’s in those moments — when firms inquire about the bespoke aspects of their processes — and I can respond, ‘Yes, we can accommodate that’ — that I know we’re building something that truly addresses the needs of the industry.

Chronograph was built by former private equity GPs and LPs to address the challenges they faced firsthand. Request a demo to see how Chronograph GP automates private equity data collection, valuations, reporting, and analytics.