Infrastructure Private Equity: direct investor to fund manager

Have any of you Monkeys made the move from a Canadian Pension Fund (as a direct infrastructure investor) to an infrastructure fund manager with more traditional brand name value (i.e. Brookfield, KKR, GS, BlackRock, Carlye, GIP, Macquarie, JP Morgan, UBS)?

I know we do the exact same work as we often compete head to head on deals, and so I figure it's only natural to make the transition given the upside in salary and carry.

For all you prestige whores who don't know a think about infra investing, I suggest you fact check before you share your unvaluable opinions. Thanks!

 
Best Response

Having known quite a few people who worked at Canadian pension funds and in the infrastructure space, it's very uncommon mainly due to 2 issues. First, the Canadian pension funds are also some of the worlds largest LPs so PE firms generally don't want to piss off their existing / potential investors and they tend not to directly recruit pension funds employees. That being said, this can be alleviated if you do an MBA, especially if you fund's team is willing to call their GPs (but that involves telling people you are not coming back). But I think the main issue is that international funds still perceive the pension fund (and to be fair Canadian) experience to be a step down from what they do so it can be a hard sell. Again, to be fair, not all pension funds are made equal and some have better reputation than others (and it's definitely not related to size) and fund reputation matters a bit less for junior employees.

 

Good points. Though it's worth nothing that most Canadian pension funds are direct investors when it comes to infra. Worth mentioning: my fund has over $10B in infrastructure AUM and more than 90% of them are direct investments (the LP portions are only legacy investments). Your points on relationship mgmt and perception are interesting, but I think those working directly in the infrastructure space would know better...

Double Doubler
 

Below said it well, but I think this is much less true with infra. Pension funds do almost all direct investing, and for all intent and purpose are pure play infra funds in the space. So in this case you'd be going more than likely to a competitor / someone they would be in a bidding process against vs. a fund they are invested in themselves.

 

while it's absolutely true that most pension funds have gone to a 100% direct model for their Infra investments, the fact remains that all pension funds still invest tens of billions with outside managers in other assets classes (RE, PE, etc). all the funds listed in the OP (apart from GIP which is pure-play Infra) either have existing relationships (or even partnerships as with KKR & CPP, Brookfield & OTTP / Oxford, etc) or view pension funds as top-tier potential investors in other assets classes. Banks see pension funds as massive fee generators. Given the amount of talent that want to work for top-tier PE, these firms are very unlikely to risk a deterioration of their relationships by hiring someone directly from a a pension fund.

 

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