How Can I Take Real Risk?

Good answer, I always maintain a mindset that what I’m doing now is just the important learning prior to attainting my next role (even if my next role could be one of three things that are closely related). Reinforcing positivity and strangely a grass is greener mindset, whilst not always easy or probably healthy, really helps. I guess I’ll fetch the bill of disillusion later down the line. By that time even if the grass isn’t greener, the money will be.

Something I often think about is, how much harder really is starting a fund these days. Relatively in the 80/90s, PE returns absolutely dominated public equities, and hence their fund size grew quickly as they offered on average outsized returns and a means of further diversification for LPs. Thus today’s schools of MFs and UMMs that first attracted a cultural best-of-best talent pipeline when they were paying ridiculous salaries, have maintained ‘prestige’ and still fairly high returns until the present day, with mgmt fees @ economies of scale serving as fair downside to employees in the worst case scenario. With the cost of debt being significantly more expensive & the level of saturation we see in today’s market, returns are less fruitful than their legacy milenial counterparts. So I really wander about the ability to scale fund sizes, thus the management fee & stock returns, thus the base case personal wealth of potential PE Partner megalodons of the future. I wander if we assumed bottom bucket of top quartile returns (argument being min needed for ctd increasing fund size) what sort of wealth a 35Yo - 60Yo could accrue as founding partner. (Too many variables/assumptions to list in one comment, but you get the point).