Need Help Deciding What PE Firms To Go After

Hi everyone,

For some context, I am an incoming analyst in the tech group of a BB. I start training in a few weeks. I'm planning on recruiting for PE toward the end of the year, and have narrowed down my interest to tech BO firms, however I'm feeling overwhelmed at the thought of filtering through all the different possible places I could go after IB. I'm fairly location agnostic (I'll be doing my IB years in the Bay Area), but obviously would like to optimize for experience, network creation, salary, etc. I'd like to be able to connect with people at my target firms before recruiting gets underway. I'm not really sure how to decide between the different investment team, investing strategies, prestige, salary, location, etc.

So for you who have made the jump from IB to PE, how did you decide which firms to focus on during recruiting? Are there certain factors that were more/less important than others?

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Networking is somewhat important if you are targeting LMM / relatively smaller firms, although it could definitely help with larger firms as well. If your resume looks impressive enough, recruiters will give you slots for coffee chats, etc.

Having a general idea of what industry you are most interested in / passionate about is the most important, because there are a lot of firms that you might have never heard of that are actually performing pretty well. so in short, don't feel too much pressure at this point.

 

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