What investment strategies are currently unsaturated?

I have been thinking a lot about growth equity recently and did some "human capital history research" on LinkedIn. I discovered that from about 2010-2016(ish) growth equity firms were frequently hiring people from all sorts of backgrounds (e.g., industrials LBO) because the number of seats open vastly exceeded the number of software investing professionals available. However, you are seeing this less frequently, as a friend of mine who is a Bain generalist has been unable for a number of years to break into growth software investing.

That is the context for my question above: I want to know what investment strategies are currently unsaturated that people with private equity backgrounds might be able to enter. Like many have recently expressed on this forum I am looking around and am uninterested in slogging my way up a large, hierarchical private equity firm. The person who founded my firm had a completely different expectation of what a career in private equity looks like and unsurprisingly the day to day, career progress speed, etc., is vastly different; in many ways they are asking of their juniors a trajectory dissimilar from one they themselves went through (I understand however that dealmaking is still dealmaking, despite the change in the profession over time - my point is more around maturation of the indsutry).

What areas would you consider nascent and prime for the more enterprising professional? How much of this should I be thinking about as markets to invest in (e.g., cybersecurity becoming attractive) as opposed to new strategies (e.g., growth's recent and meteoric rise to fit a structural market need/opportunity for that type of specialty capital)?

6 Comments
 

A lot of Search Funds these days which is effectively trying to recreate the environment that was characteristic of PE 25-30 years ago. 

 

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