The real story here is capital in the form of private equity. Engineering is a commodity, it can be bought, there are tons of great engineers in the world. Getting access to capital to take these big bets requires some serious clout, influence, and connections that the average joe doesn't have. Check out the background of ANY private equity firm, it's full of very wealthy people from Ivy League schools (Skull & Bones anyone?).
These guys create a firm, pitch their friends to get a seed fund off the ground and then start fundraising from larger institutions. They then hire some real talent and they are off to the races. Not everyone makes it, but the ones who do are featured as geniuses on Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. Survivorship bias for sure. Most Hedge Funds and Private Equity firms don't do well, similar to any start-up.
What are the returns of the competitors' infrastructure funds compared to GIP?
If everyone (including GIP) has modest (much less than the historic 24% of GIP) returns, then we might think the opportunity was simply about untapped inefficiency, and that any team with the massive capital + reasonable human talent would have had the same results as GIP in the past decade.
If GIP continues to outperform vs the competition even as the space gets crowded, we could consider their human talent to be a differentiator.
If all the infrastructure funds are doing great, even in a world of high competition, then again we can consider the access to capital and access to the counterparty stakeholders to make the deal happen to be the differentiator, not the operational or engineering talent of any firm.
Personally I'm willing to believe that operational experience at massive scale is much rarer than simply "great engineering talent" at the individual contributor level, but am open to be proven wrong.
These guys create a firm, pitch their friends to get a seed fund off the ground and then start fundraising from larger institutions. They then hire some real talent and they are off to the races. Not everyone makes it, but the ones who do are featured as geniuses on Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. Survivorship bias for sure. Most Hedge Funds and Private Equity firms don't do well, similar to any start-up.