Thoughts on Golden Gate in 2022?

I know they’re a top fund but it sounds like they have a tough culture and a ton of people at all levels have left / spun out over the years. Anyone have recent insights on culture / experience there and what their top verticals are?

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Golden gate has a standing perpetuity fund. Founder is unwilling to increase the fund size over time, so not many bps of carry to go around. Means that getting the VP promote is highly competitive and the carry is pretty light when you get there. Issue just gets worse the more senior you get leading to all of the spin off funds.

 

How would you describe work life balance / culture at the firm? If you were a consultant before GGC, how much of an increase was the workload for you? Any sense for how many hours per week you average?

if you could go back in time, would you have taken your GGC offer or kept recruiting elsewhere?

thanks in advance, appreciate your insight

 
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Not OP but can give some insights here. 

Golden Gate is highly verticalized despite the overarching generalist firm model. Your experience will depend on the vertical, and thus team, that you work with. Anecdotally, have heard FS and Consumer have better culture while Industrials and Software are worse. WLB is definitely way worse than consulting, there is an expectation to work hard and that means on live deals, late nights and through weekends. Not sure how it compares to other funds but again anecdotally, seems to be the case across competitor UMM funds. I'd say average hours come out to be around ~70 hours with ~50-60 during non busy periods and 90-100 during live deal sprints. One reason why GGC tends to skew higher on hours is the team looks at A LOT of opportunities. A lot of the fund's success has come from the learning of looking at a lot of deals and developing new angles through that experience, but this obviously means more work for the team.

All in all, I would say it's a good shop to be at. Pay is top notch, folks are nice, and you learn an unbelievable amount. It's a big transition from consulting but would expect that from any transition to Private Equity. 

 

would you mind elaborating? do you have firsthand experience / are familiar with the firm? would love to know particularly re: reputation, culture, and exit opps

 

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