Help me figure out how to think about private equity vs. "startup" offers

You are making a mistake thinking that your secondaries offer is the same as a true private equity offer. Your question would be framed accurately if this was a decision between a scaleup (what people call maturing startups who have raised nine or ten figures and are booming) and a pure-play buyout shop.

A FoF / secondaries job is not the same thing as a classic private equity associate role.

The latter lets you recruit for anything you want: vertically within the same firm, lateral to another private equity firm, hedge fund, b-school, corp-dev or strategy, etc. The former, unfortunately, offers significantly less mobility. You are on the LP side, so your moves will tend to be limited to that: an allocator at a pension fund, endowment or foundation, or different FoF.

The only truly repeatable (meaning it does not require extraordinary luck or connections) and proven way to transition from a role like that to a direct investing role is to first move to a shop that also has a direct or co-investment function in addition to whatever primary or secondary fund commitment strategy it runs.

In light of all that then, your scaleup offer seems more attractive. You will get strong operational experience. Teams like that tend to run lean, afford a lot of responsibility and autonomy, and you will wind up with your fingerprints on many of the major strategic developments that happen at the company during your time there (acquisitions, fundraising, new category launches, and the like).

That's very attractive to a private equity shop. You're correct to say that VCs will love it, but the majority of opportunities in VC is in funds that play in the Series B-D range. This can be called "growth equity." Growth equity has two definitions from two different sets of people.

• One is 'growth capital for a proven business that wants to expand'. That is the private equity universe, and it tends to be capital for businesses that are targeting 15-30% annual growth. The hockeystick potential is either behind it or never existed because it wasn't that type of business to begin with.

• The other is 'more fuel for a startup that is still early in its hockeystick'. That is the Series B, C, D for startups that have a massive addressable market and are starting to enjoy economies of scale (fixed development cost of the product, uncapped sales potential). That is the venture capital universe.

My point is that you could recruit for growth equity in either definition.

If you went the venture route, the majority of headcount is in the mid-stage (funds that do growth rounds as per that definition). There are way fewer seats available in seed and fewer in Series A.

If you went the private equity route, you can target the funds that aren't focused on financial engineering as the central component of their investment strategy. These funds are investing in businesses with strong growth prospects without any tweaks necessary, and if leverage is involved, it's simply a way to optimize returns even further. The check may be 100% equity.

Insight Venture Partners is an example. They do do buyouts, but it's rarely a heavily-levered transaction. Their bread and butter is the Series B or C of a fast-growing enterprise software business.

Accel-KKR is another example. Accel is a venture firm. KKR is a buyout firm. They realized the synergy that existed between their two respective areas of expertise and created a hybrid strategy for "middle market" (read: lower TAM) software businesses (read: venture-esque in the return profile).

Those are different from an Advent or Leonard Green or Thoma Bravo who are all about buying mature businesses and engineering the transaction meticulously because 10-25% of the deal value may result from the structure alone.

So, you are correct to say that two years in your scaleup job would make you a candidate with experience valued by "VC" shops more than "PE" shops, but I am trying to illustrate the nuance that exists in the term "growth equity".

You could take the scaleup offer and decide whether to recruit directly for a third job or to pursue the MBA route as your third 'thing' after undergrad. Depending on how name-brand the scaleup is, you may actually benefit in the b-school admissions process from a slightly different trajectory versus the horde of banking to buyout candidates applying.

If you are smart about leveraging your personal network, being proactive to initiate conversations with people in the first June-December period of your b-school time, and being sharp in all those interactions, you'd have no real trouble getting to the type of shop I described above out of b-school with only two years of banking and two years of scaleup experience on your resume.

Good luck.