Silver Lake Culture

I always cringe when I see people ask if associates get carry. Carry takes 5 - 7+ years to pay out and associates are 2/3-year meat shields at most funds. That timeline doesn't match up. Think of how much of a headache it would be to administer carry documents and get a fresh batch of associates into the legalese / tax obligations of paying out carry every year. In what world would a GP do that every year, especially when 90% of the associates will be gone before the carry starts paying out? Also, if the market for a lower/upper middle market/megafund associate is x in cash comp, what makes you think any fund would pay you substantially more than x cash comp, especially in a precious tax-advantaged currency important for retaining the people who actually source the deals and have relationships in the industry and the portfolio companies? What's their incentive? There's a huge market of bright and hungry banking analysts / consultants who can do the job.

If someone tells you they have carry at an established private equity fund as an associate, you should check if their last name matches up to someone higher up on the food chain. 

It is almost always co-invest, UNLESS you are joining a startup / first time fund, in which case you might have a bite at some carry if you're going to be "building the firm together", but GPs have been known to be shifty on those promises a couple years afterwards...

How do 

I worked on the LP side and during my time I sat in on many PE LP meetings and have done diligence on Silver Lake and many of its competitors. When you get exposed to a lot of PE firms pitching you start to see patterns and build an intuition on whats BS and whats not (usually it comes down to whether the data backs what they are saying). Based on how they pitch their team and experience you also start to see the places where the juniors are miserable. A good indication is when the GP is trying to hard to please LPs, that's when you know that the juniors are pressured to do a bunch of BS work on artificial deadlines along with keeping up the investment pace. Places like Silver Lake don't need to please LPs, they have enough demand so in general less BS work. Also, I have noticed that their DD has less BS in general and they do TRY to support the junior talent. But I could be wrong and it would be best to talk to someone there.