Which fund has best relationship with GSB/HBS

Agreed that “feeder funds” per se aren’t a thing as much as clearing a minimum bar of recognizability. HBS isn’t googling the latest flagship fund IRRs or even sizes but they obviously know what size generally is and where they’ve seen students / applicants from before. Even “on the rise” funds can clear this bar without a lot of digging by adcoms because they’ll see / read that a lot of HBS/GSB types are writing the rec letters and use that as a heuristic for prestige. That’s at least my theory as to why the even newer MM funds in the Boston market play so well at HBS, for example.

In terms of getting in, the rates above sound right. The PE/VC percentage bucket is pretty constant year-over-year, b-school class sizes have stayed the same, and PE ASO class sizes exploded in the bull market up to 2022 while only flattening during the slowdown since, which has an obvious effect on rates. Add in the fact that it’s in fashion for adcoms to want “diversity” of jobs even within PE/VC and there’s going to be a lot more, ahem, creative roles to fill that bucket, from impact investing to chief-of-staff roles to energy transition to infrastructure to search funds to any of the various flavors of growth equity these days to crypto to venture vehicles owned by strategics to straight up vanilla CorpFin.

Since about 2018, schools have made it somewhat clear that they think 2+2+2 aspirants who aren’t military are basically snores; they have to take a critical mass of us because of test scores and legacy relationships, but in response we have to join a junior board or two and pretend like we’ve secretly wanted to run for office to build water wells in the Sahara this whole time in our application essays. Or have suffered some immense trauma. I’m losing the thread here, so I’ll stop digressing by saying no “feeder fund” is really going to change those dynamics.

I’ll end by saying that though feeder funds don’t truly exist, I do think there’s a subtle culture difference between funds who really have an ethos of midlevels writing “best-in-class” letters for their associates, maybe because they received those kinds of letters when they were applying, whereas others require a little more office politics in terms of getting on teams with particularly good writers, good personalities, etc. in addition to being the kind of intra-class performer who would warrant such praise on the merits. My anecdotal sense is, for example, that Berkshire and Carlyle midlevels tend to push pretty hard across-the-board for HBS/GSB, but CD&R probably only has 3 or so of its class members that get that kind of effort, even though of course they’d like to go 10/10 or whatever their applying class size is.

The rough, though imperfect in many ways, analogy I’d draw is to those maybe old jokes about Jefferies and Harris Williams really “going to bat” for analysts when it comes to buyside recruiting. Thematically, that aspect is absolutely a part of those firms’ cultures and shows up in subtle ways relative to their MM peers, but it doesn’t transform them to “feeders” even at the funds where they have a lot of historical traction. The dynamics here are much different than Exeter or TJ High School kids applying to Princeton.