Thoughts on Thomas H Lee Partners?

Very old name in the private equity industry. If you want to work in Boston MM/UMM PE, this is probably about as good as it gets outside of Berkshire. There are a bunch of other great funds in Boston (Advent / Bain for large cap, TA / Summit for large growth, Audax / Charlesbank / Abry / Great Hill / Cove Hill for other solid MM and UMM funds).

As mentioned above, they’ve had a couple of duds over the years (retail is a very hard place to play, just ask Bain), but performance has generally been pretty strong (second quartile or higher across last several funds, with first quartile performance on multiple). Had a stronger recent fundraise (~$4B), which as you mentioned, was larger than their prior fund. They had that massive fund in 2006 - my guess is that the fund didn’t perform amazingly well but they either downsized because Thomas H. Lee himself left (which may have made fundraising harder) or they thought they were better suited for MM space (think MDP similarly decided not to upsize several years ago).

Boston PE culture is definitely a lot less cutthroat when compared to that of NYC. The one notable exception is Audax, which I have yet to hear good things about with respect to culture / lifestyle. Still a well-respected firm in the industry.

THL seems to have strong business school placement, even relative to larger funds (this may have to do with Boston location to some extent). They take fairly large associate classes but seem to pursue a lot of deals (from standard MM deals to massive, $5B+ ones like D&B, in which they partner with LPs).