Sixth Street Strategic Capital Views

I interviewed with Sixth Street's strategic capital group and received an offer. Will caveat this by saying it wasn't for SF and, based on what I noticed, there is a lot of autonomy within Sixth Street itself – which means my experience might be very different from your experience recruiting with them.

Based on my conversations, strategic capital is comparable to the tactical opportunities team at BX, or special opportunities at other bigger funds. Within strategic capital you can invest across the capital structure (debt, structured equity, buyout-equity, etc.). As a result, you invest out of either Tao (which is Sixth Street's flagship fund) or any of the side-pools of capital. Based on my understanding, strategic capital can be divided up into sectors (I interviewed directly with a sector team) and, at least for my sector, what differentiated strategic capital from similar groups across other funds was that the sector team wasn't competing internally with other teams. The biggest downside of a tac-opps, etc. group is that you are usually left with the breadcrumbs that the more-focused teams didn't want but this was not the case at sixth street in my experience.

From my experience the firm is very tight-nit and there is a big focus on fit – specially because it isn't a 2-and-out program like so many other UMMs / MFs. Hence, a lot of my interview process was focused on making sure I was truly interested in being at Sixth Street. The first round was focused on my experience as well as "integrated" technicals (that were worded in terms of more-so my deal experience as well as industry knowledge). The case study was probably the hardest one any of the analysts in my batch undertook during PE-recruiting. I had a week to do it and involved me modeling out the cash flows of a publicly-listed company and then assessing whether it would make sense for Sixth Street to refinance the company's debt or any other structure that I thought would make sense (the company itself had a lot of nuances around existing debt so part of the exercise was to see whether you caught on to that). Then there was a debrief with basically the entire team that covered that sector within strategic capital. Based on the conversations, it looks like the group tries to find creative ways to go in on an investment they like and can also participate at various levels within the same company. Honestly, I came away more impressed with the group than I was when I started recruiting with them. 

Culturally, I really liked the team – it was deliberately small and relatively young and the hours didn't seem that bad. From 8:30-9:00am in the morning to around 6:30-7:00pm in the evening and remaining wound be WFH till 11-12am. Weekends seemed relatively safe.

The one comment on pay that I'll have is that it was at the top of the street and very generous.