Golden Gate Capital 2025 Recruiting / Outlook & Perspective
Recently was contacted by Ratio about Golden Gate recruiting for 2025. Was wondering whether anyone had any insight into their recruiting process (coming from banking if that matters) as well as overall culture, trajectory, and comp?
Know that they've had a bunch of spinouts as of late (e.g., Arcline, Percheron, Lone View, etc.) but wanted to get the community's perspective on whether this is still a reputable shop to start a PE career. Looking for a place that will also preferably sponsor for bschool but that's more of a nice-to-have rather than a necessity.
bump! can you pm me too? would love to connect
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Still a reputable place to start your career, but they are really far down the list because of culture and trajectory. Culture is incredibly tough at GGC. There’s an ongoing joke that every time you refresh the team bio page, a new person quits the team. The founder holds all the power and takes a large chunk of the economics, which is why you see so many spin-outs. You may not think this would effect the day to day life of an associate, but it absolutely can. If the partner on your deal team has power and sway, it reduces one less layer of review/sign off and much easier to get time with a partner than the CEO of a firm for any last minute tweaks and changes. At firms where the founder holds all the power, even the partners are going to overpromise on work/timelines to impress whereas if power is more distributed, you’ll only face that with principals and VPs.
Firm growth and trajectory is a big concern. GGC had the right investment approach in the 2000’s and 2010’s, so much so that they were able to create an evergreen fund and got above market carry (more than 20%). But they haven’t been able to adapt those investment theses to the newer trends that have emerged since. For example with consumer, retail and restaurants used to be attractive to invest in, but lately the shift has been towards consumer services. GGC didn’t pivot as quickly as others and have been stuck holding the bag on a lot of these investments. Part of that may be because of all the spin-outs. As I mentioned the founder taking so much of the economics means they faced an unprecedented brain drain where all of their rockstar partners ended up leaving to start their own funds. I remember Arcline’s founder claims his track record at GGC was 40% gross IRR (or something incredible like that), so you can imagine how difficult it can be to continually replace rockstar talent over and over again across all the sectors.
Having said that, the PE job market isn’t what it used to be so I think if you’re set on PE and you’re deciding between a garden variety MM shop or GGC. I’d probably take GGC and suck it up for 2 years and go to b-school.
Ignore title. I agree and culture has been known to be tough. What I’ve heard tho is that it was a covid thing and with the spin outs, culture had improved. Just from friend of a friend so not sure how accurate
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