Info on Clearlake?
Does anyone have info and details on Clearlake? They seem to have grown rapidly in recent years with some strong fund performance recently. I'm curious if anyone has views on the firm, culture, worklife, comp, and reputation?
Smart investors. Have been crushing it for a while. They're targeting a $10B fund - have no doubts that they will surpass that. Definitely well respected. Have heard the work life balance is pretty brutal. Know a guy who lateraled with two years of experience and he was getting guided toward total cash comp of ~$400K.
Thank you so much for the info. Did your friend have any experience in credit before lateraling? I know they invest across the capital structure.
He came from a tech buyout group (no credit exposure to my knowledge)
Out of curiosity, is worklife balance (and culture) comparable to an Apollo or tough similar to other large funds? I know that may be a minor difference, but it sounds like you know people with first-hand experience.
From an investment perspective, they do a lot of interesting deals. They invest all along the capital stack, even in their buyouts, and can put a lot of structure on deals to give downside protection. Their returns have been largely top quartile and they've been getting a lot of liquidity for LPs recently through single-asset continuation vehicles. Returns and liquidity have kept LPs happy but LPs are also getting a little restless because they've grown the fund size quite significantly over the last few funds and have deployed very quickly (they came back to market with Fund VI roughly 18 months after raising Fund V and then came back 18 months later for Fund VII). If you were an early employee there, you're insanely rich now. If you're a junior person considering a job there, you'll learn an incredible amount as the team is really smart.
Know someone in the incoming class. Extremely flexible investment mandate provides for an expansive learning experience for juniors across different stages (growth to distressed) in addition to credit exposure and theoretically anything else. Top quartile returns; new 10b+ fund will surely be oversubscribed. Comp is phenomenal for As1. Won't go into specifics but well above 300+.
Do you know how large their incoming class is? And do you know anything about their training given the flexible mandate?
NA
Has a reputation for being sweaty, comp is great
My question is - what is Clearlake's 'edge' if you will? They participate primarily through auction processes - and have recently emerged as the winner of several and therefore, topped the field in valuation. It's very easy to deploy capital - it's less easy to generate a return on that capital, particularly in broad auction processes (although in an environment when multiples go up and up, it's not as hard either...).
Genuine question if anyone has a perspective - what is their edge?
We’ll find out after the cycle turns lmao
This is something LPs are concerned about. They have had a lot of success in earlier vintages by not participating in auctions, being smart in how they've structured deals, doing M&A, etc. They've also managed to generate some early liquidity in more recent vintages by doing some single-asset continuation funds for a few of their early winners, which boosts their DPI numbers in those funds and helps LPs get more comfortable with the re-ups in the bigger funds. But you're totally right, that still doesn't fully mitigate the fact that they've deployed funds that have been growing in size almost exponentially in very short timeframes over the last few years and that the jury will be out on those larger funds for years to come (despite early top-quartile numbers).
Can anyone provide insight into their interview process?
Do these guys do any due diligence at all? Seems like they buy anything at any price..
Clearlake is index-fund for UMM PE - which at this moment and looking a few years out is not a great neighborhood to hang out in IMO.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Not sure I understand
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