Private Equity

PE Due Diligence: What Matters Most

You're in a private equity interview and the partner asks: "We're three weeks out from an Investment Committee meeting on a platform acquisition, and our diligence budget only covers two of the three major workstreams in full — commercial, financial, and operational. Which two do you prioritize, and does your answer change if I tell you we're a generalist buyout fund versus a sector-focused operational investor?" Walk me through how you would prioritize commercial, financial, and operational due diligence under time pressure, and explain how the priority order shifts depending on the type of PE firm running the deal.

Writing an Investment Thesis

You're a private equity analyst, and the deal team is heading into an Investment Committee meeting on a potential platform acquisition. The partner turns to you and says: "I don't want twenty pages of diligence findings — I want the one-page investment thesis. Walk me through how you'd structure it: what's the market thesis, what's the operational thesis, what's the financial thesis, and how do the three need to fit together for me to actually approve this deal?"

PE Waterfall and Carried Interest

As a private equity fund analyst, you are asked to walk through how a distribution waterfall works — comparing the European (whole-fund) and American (deal-by-deal) waterfall structures, explaining the GP catch-up mechanism, and identifying when a clawback provision is triggered.

Club Deals and Co-Investments

As an investment professional at a private equity firm, you are tasked with analysing a club deal in which two sponsors and a co-investing limited partner fund the equity together — explaining how governance and risk are shared between them, and quantifying how the very same deal returns differently for fund capital than for fee-free co-investment capital.