For those that decided to pursue MF PE, why? Was the private equity strategy actually interesting to you, were you trying to maximize long term career optionality, or just felt like it was the natural transition?
Incoming at solid "s tier" group that is thinking about long term opportunities
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Because we're all deeply insecure and thought the prestige would help fill a void of some sort or another. Then we found out that within 5 minutes of hitting the desk that (i) our grandma's still don't know what we do and (ii) our reference shift now makes us think that "just MF PE" isn't prestigious enough.
I firmly believe this answer applies to 95% of the people in the business. There does exist a rare 5% who truly love investing.. and you'll know them when you see them.
At this point, it’s pretty clear the large public MFs operate more like asset aggregators than PE partnerships. I also know the probability of promotion after two years is very low based on history. The reason I still chose a MF is that I want to defer the “what do I want to do long term” decision for a couple more years while getting broad exposure to how large-scale private markets investing works. If I were certain I wanted to stay on the PE path, I’d probably pick a MM/UMM platform where I really believed in the strategy and had a clearer route to grow with the firm.
What the MF gives, more than anything, is optionality. Even if I don’t land at a top UMM/MM later (which I understand I am not likely to do), I should still have a credible path to stay in private markets, access strong HF opportunities, place well into business school, or step into roles within large portfolio companies. I basically view it as buying a call option on multiple careers.
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