Minorities in PEVC - ask me anything

Hi,

I'm a long-time user of the forum, and I want to offer an Q&A for anyone who might find my experience interesting and potentially helpful. And to put it upfront, I'm especially interested in learning how my experience can be helpful to those whose personal backgrounds are not mainstream in PE.

On my own background - Currently ~10 years into my career, at a decent sized PE fund. My own background can be classified as "minority" across a few lenses. Earlier in my finance career, I frequently doubted if I could "make it" - I came from a low income background also, so I needed to really work hard to gain the soft skills and polish that many of my peers were accustomed to when I was younger. My professional background has been finance oriented; I've not always been in a role /at a firm that would've naturally positioned me the best for "next step" (part of it was correcting and making up for what I was lacking when I was younger in the early years of my career), though I have been able to generally do my best to keep moving my career forward so far.

While there are still many things I need to figure out for myself to advance my career, I want to offer my experience in this Q&A to anyone who might be interested. A few things that I spent a lot of time thinking about when I was starting out include:

- How to understand white-collar work place politics when you didn't come from that world
- How to gain sponsorship /mentorship when you have no natural overlapping interests with the more senior professionals in your firm, how to build relationships with seniors/peers/management team if you came from a very different background
- How to be a good professional if your starting job was not stellar
- As this is a job that involves a lot of soft skills and perception management, how to best be situation-aware and position yourself well in different settings

I'm also curious to know what others who are perhaps minorities in this industry want to know - what are some common problems people are trying to solve, and how we can get there together. If you have questions, feel free to PM me; I may anonymize all the questions and write a general resopnse on my experience and thoughts in them at the address below as well:
https://minoritiesinpevc.business.blog/

My motivation is to help in any ways I can. Yes, I may get monkey shits from certain people for doing it, but I still want to see if I can help.

Best,
A middle aged monkey