Thoughts on Alpine Investors in 2024

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Realize this isn’t what you asked, but I’ve worked on some CDDs for them and have found them to be consistently reasonable. They place really young CEOs who are involved in market discussions with my teams, and I’ve been impressed by them. The junior staff who run the diligence processes seemed fine. 
 

And as a general note, as you interview for different shops, it’s worth asking your consultant friends what the shop is like as a client. Just as you don’t want a boyfriend who doesn’t tip a waiter, the PE shops that are shitty to their consultants are typically not where you want to work. 

arent they just slapping together shitcos now? i don't think their aggregator model is sound at larger scales + most pe shops that saw a massive aum increase in the past few years are in a fair amount of imminent trouble 

i have also noticed that they are quite lax about their recruitment from an ethical standpoint. they will advertise roles to young undergrads as "private equity analyst," when in reality the role is M&A/corp dev at a portco. now im not shitting on corp dev, but it sets students on a fairly different career trajectory from PE investing. i feel bad for the kids who think it's a pe role and then get pigeonholed to lmm corp dev. they do something similar with their famous MBA CEO program, where they place MBA grads as "regional presidents" of their portcos, but call them "CEO" of that specific part of the company. it's not that the roles are bad roles i just don't think i would want to work for a firm that tries to mask roles as something they're not. 

saw something similar with someone who works at the firm while i was networking with them. they have "morgan stanley menlo TMT" in their LinkedIn experience section, which gives you the impression that they did a 2 year analyst stint right? turns out they did a summer internship, and not only did they not receive a return offer, they didn't even make it to the end of the internship. 

this was enough for me to want to stay away from the firm but i can understand if it's no big deal to others 

Any sense for comp at VP / Principal level?

JAMMBO

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what does analyst comp look like

Don’t work there but know someone who does. Culture seems pretty good with visibility through principal level. I was told pay is higher than the MFs through VP but I am unsure about that claim. Not entirely sure about exits but my friend gets emailed frequently about joining processes at most of the MFs and they had one analyst exit to Thoma Bravo in their most recent Aso class. Pay as an analyst is 220k, and scales from there (not sure mix between carry + cash, but everyone Aso+ gets a decent portion of carry)

Don’t these guys not have real exits, like it’s a secondaries sale or something given the strange type of company they’re aggregating? Just Seems like slightly different / not true traditional PE. Not hating

Also would be completely shocked if that was true on cash comp. Don’t think you can take carry into account for new joiner given market last couple years

Culture seems weird. At least externally, they talk about add-on deals and new platforms the same. I got an email asking if I was interested in working at a private equity firm that "did 75 deals last year" or some ridiculous number like that. When I spoke to them, they wanted me to add up all my platform deals + my portCo add-ons plus deals I worked on in banking so they would know how many deals I've worked on. 

I have 2 friends who work here and here’s what I was told:

1. Promotion pipeline is visible through Principle and time to each promotion is much quicker than any other PE firms of its size (28 year old Principal is normal).
2. They pay top of street (for the junior ranks) since they match MF PE base but carry is dependent on your investments
3. Firm is a pod-structure where you are on a lean team of 3-4 people, and you allocate capital individually starting at Sr. Aso (receive carry from your pod’s performance)
4. Starting at Sr. Aso you can pitch investable themes (ex: rollup civil engineering companies in the Midwest) directly to IC and they will give you capital to deploy + allow you to run your strategy if approved (this is the path from VP to Principal usually when you start running a pod)
5. Starting at Principal you gain carry from the entire fund + you manage multiple pods that you get carry from
6. Exit ops are skewed since largely the only people that leave do so because they won’t get promoted (most common exits are portco operator or startups)
7. They have exited to MF PE firms in the past (WP and TB recently), and both of my friends had offers from legacy MF PE funds but chose to stay at Alpine (they had just received Aso promotion at Alpine and wanted to ride that ship)
8. More on the pod structure: Last year (or maybe the year before) a Forbes 30 under 30 awardee was a 26 yo investor at Alpine who had been at the firm for 4 years. In that time she had directly led $200mm+ of investments
9. Average check size is $25mm and they have an insane sourcing team that effectively avoids all bank processes 
   
   My overall thoughts: If your goal like seemingly most undergrads on this site is the glorious 2+2 to get a seat at a top SM, then Alpine is not the spot for you. If your hard set on MF PE, Alpine will give you interviews at those firms, but again you’d be better off going to a top bank. Alpine is a great (probably the best) seat if you want to climb your way up a growing PE fund where you get to lead investments early on. In the end it depends what you’re optimizing for, but it seems like a risk-off path to Principal (and 7 figure income) at a $20B+ fund that has amazing returns where u don’t get grinded nearly as hard as trad banking/PE