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I spend most of my day avoiding phone calls and emails from Setter Capital.

 

What isn't wrong? That's what you should be asking. Pay is as low as you can get. It's a boiler room style cold calling / email spam centre run by a lunatic. The owner's brother is also a bit of a nutbar that runs a sleazy secondaries fund.

 
Most Helpful

Have a friend from my analyst class at a ~$1Bn secondaries + co-invest fund. He really enjoys what he does, gets access to good dealflow and looks at a lot of businesses. Diligence is less intense than PE, given you're never taking significant ownership and lot of the work is already done on your behalf from your PE partners. In secondary situations, you need a differentiated POV from the seller - believe that you're buying at a fair or below fair market value price. He almost always has his weekends and gets paid decently for the lifestyle he's given. Cons is that he gets less exposure to portfolio company management and with all minority investing, you're exerting influence via board seats but you don't have direct control over portfolio outcomes. Less "pedigree" than direct investing if you care about that stuff, but being a senior at one of these funds is probably one of the best positions (great worklife balance, high carry and upside potential, networking, etc)

 

A couple of questions for you if you don't mind:
1. What's the comp progression like from Analyst to Partner?
2. What's your fund size?
3. Average hours worked per week?

Thank you very much!

 

1. Low six figures / IB street pay up to high six / low seven figures.

2. Latest fund is $2-300M range. LMM shop.

3. 55-60 hours typically. At most 70 and that was anomalous, closed 3+ deals the same week. I came from a stereotypically sweaty group on the sell side so I’m enjoying the better lifestyle. I plan to just stay in secondaries as long as I can because I love private markets. It’s the private market junkie’s dream job. Really interesting asset class.

 

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