Buyside Tier List - Any ideas?

I was always wondering what is the general consensus around PE tier list (not trying to shit-post). Obviously, we have various tier lists for IBs, but not sure how does it look like for PE. I was thinking something along this:

Tier 1a: Top US MF(Apollo / BX / CarlyleKKR / Bain / H&F / Silver Lake / Thoma Bravo)

Tier 1b: European MF (Permira / CVC / Apax / EQT) and other US MF/UMM (TPG / Warburg / Advent / CDR / Vista)

Tier 2a: Value/credit-DNA shops (Oaktree / Ares / Centerbridge / HIG / Cerberus) and top growth (General Atlantic / Summit / TA / Insight)

Tier 2b: PE arms of banks (GS MBD / MS PE), active sovereign investors (GIC / Temasek / Mubadala), some UMM names (Berkshire / GTCR / MDP / TH Lee etc)

Tier 3: Rest of MM buyout (Bridgepoint, Genstar, ABRY, WCAS, Platinum, too many to list), SoftBank + a few others on the growth side (Vitruvian, PSG etc)

Tier 4: Anything with <$10bn AUM 

Tier 5: Anything with <$1bn AUM

18 Comments
 

Are you going to actually say what those changes are, or are we just going to have to read your mind here?

 
Most Helpful

Stop tier listing everything. For PE, it should/is for a lot of people trying to find the place they would consider spending their career in if it all goes to plan. Things like Promote Cycles/MBA requirements/strategy/fundraising record/return records/culture/group are all things that muddy the water when compared to IB. Ik people who would have picked 2A or 2B seats over 1A seats because they want to do sovereign wealth or credit or value investing. It all really depends, and although this forum doesn't like to acknowledge it because it's mostly prospects there's a pretty big difference between working on government business at Vista versus doing pure play B2B tech investing at Thoma Bravo. Also as someone who was exclusively recruiting for MM PE(I was looking for MM firms that have grown rapidly in my industry with strong promotion prospects/culture to be more specific) from a top BB/EB, it's important to note that not everyone is going for MF PE, different strokes for different people. Not everyone wants banking 2.0 and that's okay. 

 

your analysis makes sense, but how's that different in IB tier lists? After all, you can make the same arguments for kids picking eg Barc over GS/MS (better hours/lifestyle etc). Yet, there are still tiers and generally GS/MS are considered better than Barc  

 

Because no one sane wants to stay in banking long term and frankly no one is picking barc over gs for 'better wlb' purely because the aim is to go somewhere that you can exit best from

 

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