Just locked down an offer to join a startup as a Senior Finance Manager and figured I'd have this Q&A before I start my new gig later this month. Going to keep this post short and sweet and open up the floor to questions - happy to provide more color about my prior job, decision to move to an operating role, interview process, etc. Quick background / context below:
- Left after 2.5 years in PE at a large family office
- Did a mix of LP investing / co-invest / secondaries / occasional direct deals
- Was an early promote to senior associate
- Previously spent just over 3 years in IB at a MM (left as an A2A)
- Bay Area-based
From below: Came down to a combination of better WLB, wanting to do something more meaningful, getting hands on operating experience and truly understanding how businesses are run and work, and just being a bit disillusioned with the world of "high finance" in general.
But to expand on the operating piece - wanted to be intimately involved in the daily operations of a single organization instead of jumping from deal to deal (personally found PE to be too transactional still), and also understand how a business really works because we all know that a lot of things aren't just a % of [insert whatever metric here]. It's also easy to say "CAC is too high" or "need to reduce churn" as an outsider and maybe giving some advice on how to solve those, but firsthand being involved with executing on both of those problems is a very different story.