Starting in growth equity and later doing buyout
Hey everyone, so as many of you know there are many traditional tech buyout funds that also have separate late-stage growth strategies apart from the main flagship fund.
Just to name a few you have: Insight Partners doing both buyout and growth equity, Apax Partners doing the same, SilverLake has their Waterman fund, Warburg Pincus has their global tech fund, you have Permira Growth Opportunities Fund, etc.
Most of them run teams completely separate from the buyout fund given that they are mostly minority investments.
I have personally worked in growth equity before and truly enjoyed the work and the space. However, I have always had an interest in buyout and for that reason I'm going to be returning full-time to IB this summer at a mid tier BB tech group (Citi, Barclays, JPM) in order to have a better shot at buyout in general.
Recently, however, I ended up getting very lucky and received an offer at one of the above mentioned growth equity funds to start as an analyst upon graduation. My questions is, if I take the offer will I be killing my chances to possibly transition to buyout later on if I want? Do you guys think that it's possible to internally move between the growth and buyout fund?
As I mentioned I really enjoy investing a lot more and I wasn't particularly excited about biting the IB bullet for 1-2 years after already gotten previous buy side experience. Also I'm not even sure if buyout is what I want to do, but I want the to keep my opinions open and that's why IB made more sense. But with an offer like this now, I'm not sure what do to.
Just take the growth equity spot. Those are great funds, and you're still young in your career such that you can make a transition to buyout. There's absolutely no guarantee you'll place at any of those funds coming out of those banking programs.
Separate topic but do you have any recommendations in terms of books or interview prep sources for growth equity? Highly interested in the GE space and wanted to learn more. Appreciated!
Bumping this thread
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Growth equity analyst programs have not been around that long. You can actually pretty easily track/trace a ton of people who went through them and go look at their exits. When you do, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the variety of outcomes (yes some buyout, other growth funds, large tech companies, startups, b school, etc.). If you look at the growth funds that have analyst programs (Insight, Silversmith, Battery, Spectrum to name a few), they generally place very, very well.
Can I pm you?
Take the growth equity option everytime, it's becoming a larger and larger space with more interest -- also way fewer seats so you differentiate yourself way more
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