Starting Career in Primaries or IB
What is a better path towards MM PE? Starting at a FoF or boutique investment bank?
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Boutique IB. PE firms tend to be skeptical of FOF experience even if you have significant experience in directs/co-invests. It will usually be quite difficult to convince them of your technical skillset.
If you start in FoF it may be hard to move into PE.
Boutique ib has somewhat slim chances but depends what type of shop it is and whether or not you’re able to get meaningful deal experience. If not, lateral to another place, but if you’re at a decently good boutique you can have a chance at many lmms. Still try to move to a stronger bank regardless
Skillset in primaries is very different than direct PE. Unless you moved into a banking role before, you’d have essentially zero chance of moving to direct PE from a FoF doing primaries. If you’re also doing co-invests and secondaries, MAYBE, but even then you’d probably still have to go through banking to get there. So might as well start in banking.
This is coming from someone that started in the FoF space.
How difficult was the switch to IB after starting in FoF for you?
In what sense? Once I started or trying to get in?
Getting in took me 7+ months and only god knows how many interviews and case studies... and this was in 2021/2022. So just shows how discounted the FoF experience is that it took me that long in a hot hiring market.
I ended up in secondaries advisory, so the transition was pretty seamless. I'd say I was fully up to speed in 6 months to a year. I definitely did a lot of work on my own time to improve my corp finance skills, modeling and just general understanding of secondaries transactions and the complexities of the market.
Definitely IB. You can lateral to MM IB and then head to PE from there. FoF is not a great place to start your career if you want exits
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