Thinking about looking for a new role after a handful of years in PE. How do people determine if they want to continue investing? Want to explore corp dev? Or want to do a start up? I know there’s monetary differences to each of these and trade offs. How do people even go about weighing these
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At some point you have to do some soul searching and understand what makes you happy. Are you prioritizing for a chill life where you can enjoy time outside of the office as much as possible? Then corp dev or corporate finance is probably the way to go. Are you excited working on building something new? Then maybe you’re better off at a startup. If you just want to maximize risk adjusted comp then you can go back to banking. Ultimately you need to be in a role that aligns with what’s important to you vs. just the right “next” step from your current role.
If you like investing and are good at it, stay in PE. You can solve for work life balance or other priorities through firm selection (go down market, family office, etc.). Working at a start up or corp dev is a completely different experience.
I find it interesting how often this take gets thrown around. In my experience, private equity is private equity. If a partner wants to chase a deal, if your shitco is about to bust covenants for the nth time, if you’re gearing up for fundraising, you don’t have the benefit of a balanced life just because you’re at a small T3 fund. If anything, I’d argue LMM is as bad or even worse from a WLB perspective. At a small firm, you’re head of IR for fundraising and LP reporting, you’re a single point of failure on deals and portcos and can’t truly ever take time off because the team just isn’t big enough to cover for you for a week, and you’re dealing with companies that need handholding every single day. I’m sure there are lifestyle firms out there, but from what I’ve seen it’s the exception not the rule.
If I were OP, I’d take advantage of having a secure job and reach out to people in industries you might find interesting. Don’t ask for a job, just try to get a feel for the roles those people occupy. Do they seem stressed when they pick up the phone for you? Do they seem excited about their work? Their team? Do they have the ability to talk about things not related to work, or are they robots? You’ll be surprised by how much people are willing to share with a stranger. Use the info to piece together your next move.
Can confirm. LMM almost killed me.
Related thread about whether PE is worth it that can maybe provide you some color.
I think chatgpt can actually give you some pretty good answers on this - there's been a ton of words written on the internet about these careers and where you should go depending on what you like to do.
Ignore my title - ultimately I left PE because I felt deeply unfulfilled (and was a little burned out) - I didn't feel like I was building anything, my learning curve was flattening, and running at deals I knew we weren't going to do felt like ground hogs day everyday. YMMV
What did you move into?
Where did you end up going?
Ended up doing something entrepreneurial. Sorry for lack of specificity on a public forum - feel free to DM for more details.
I don't understand the question. You choose it just like you chose PE - you weigh the trade offs/pros & cons of various roles and pick whichever one suits you best and interests you. It's just like picking what courses you took in school.
So you are giving up your carried interest ?
Did you give up your CS stock?
Perspiciatis laboriosam nostrum rerum minima. Vel tempora error eius perspiciatis sed.
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