PE Co-investment vs Consulting

Hello WSO,

I'm currently a few months into a Corp Fin gig at a F500 company (non-tech) and am looking at lateral offers as a Business analyst at Deloitte S&O and as a PE analyst at a well regarded PE FoF with well defined co-investment and secondaries arms (think: Adams Street/Coller/Pantheon Ventures/Partners Group).

Both seem like great opportunities, and I am trying to gauge them based on my future goals. Ideally (and this is subject to change of course) I would really like to be at a VC or growth equity shop somewhere down the line in my career, not certain if I want to stay within the PE asset class (this might change after spending time at the FoF if I were to take the offer).

The reason this decision is somewhat difficult is because I read making the jump to solid VC/Growth shops is already quite competitive for those with banking/MBB experience. Some of my own research, however, has led me to believe that I might have a better shot at one of the aforementioned PE FoFs compared to Deloitte. While I agree that there are limited exit opps for pure-play primary fund investing positions, I have heard that there is heavy transactional and valuation experience from secondaries and co-investment platforms. Accordingly, a few Linkedin results and posts on this forum have shown that there have been more than a few occasions of people jumping from co-investments in PE FoF to MM PE and the like. While many junior hires at places such as Sequoia and other prominent VC/Growth shops have MBB backgrounds, I have yet to see anybody coming from Deloitte S&O. While there is the occasional LEK/Parthenon hire, I have definitely seen more make the direct buyside jump from Adams St/Coller/Pantheon Venture/Partners Group type shops than from Deloitte S&O.

The problem is, however, this jump is principally to PE and late stage investing, whereas I would like to position myself in VC/growth stage. Also, I might even consider working in a corp dev/strat role at a large tech company at some point, and S&O would take a point here as consultants feed heavily into those programs. In addition, I've heard that S&O can sometimes tend to be very operations as opposed to strategy focused (where MBB dominates), which is a skillset that can lend itself really well to larger companies (hence the funnel to corp strat programs) but less so to early stage companies.

Ultimately, while I really liked the S&O team (Chicago office) I feel as though doing direct co-investments and secondary deals at the PE shop-particularly if some of them are done with a VC or growth equity sponsor-will provide better exit opps to VC/growth equity shops than S&O would (this would be a different conclusion if I were comparing to MBB). I would, however, love for anyone to chime in and give opinions. Thanks a bunch!