Thoughts on Summit Partners

I personally have mixed opinions on Summit -

On one hand, they’re obviously a top “historic” growth equity firm, and did growth equity before it was cool. They have a massive fund, invest across sizes (do everything from venture funding to full buyouts), and have been very successful.

On the other hand, heard pretty terrible things about the experience. Pay is pretty significantly below street (at the associate level, I’d assume applies to analyst as well). It’s also almost entirely sourcing.

The sourcing point has been debated a ton here but I’d argue summit is the worst type of sourcing - it’s not about industry expertise or developing a thesis, it’s literally just a volume shop. Allegedly there is some quota in place for outreach made by associates and it’s a huge part of comp.

They’re also very annoying from the banker side, they’re inbound to basically everyone (see the above), and then all these companies assume summit is super interested. Then they see a CIM and bail out and the associate who was calling the ceo twice a week doesn’t have the ability to actually progress a deal. They’ve become more value oriented recently as well, and are trying to do more non-banked deals (very tough in this climate) so that they don’t need to pay auction prices. Makes sense from a returns perspective, but means as an associate you run hard at a lot of stuff and then end up massively low on bids and get dropped from the process

In terms of people I know who recruited for GE, I’d say top tier is definitely Insight/GA/TCV/etc, and I’d definitely take TA over Summit as well.

Overall definitely a top shop but not as great in terms of junior experience