Private equity partners disclose their first jobs: "Laundry at a tennis club"

Correlation is not causation, but if you want to become a partner in private equity, it might help if you get your very first job working at a tennis club.

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Speaking at this week's Milken Conference in Beverley Hills, partners at four private equity firms disclosed their first ever forms of employment. Two of them worked in tennis clubs.

Pete Stavros, global head of private equity at KKR, said his first job was "doing laundry at a tennis club in town." Per Frantzen, managing partner at EQT, said his first job was not dissimilar and involved, "stringing rackets at my tennis club." 

The other two partners had less auspicious beginnings. Eric Wilmas, president of the Americas for GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, said his first job involved packing food for $7 an hour. David Gross, co-managing partner at Bain Capital, said he started out "working in a hardware store."

Does this mean that a teenage tennis job will get you into private equity? Probably not. It may, however, mean that if your parents are able to assist you with a first job in a tennis club you may also progress to private equity partner later in life. 

Following these first positions, the assembled partners typically went into banking or consulting before private equity. Stavros worked in M&A at Salomon Brothers (like Jim Esposito). Frantzen worked in M&A for Morgan Stanley. Gross skipped banking and went into consulting. Wilmas worked in merchant banking for Morgan Stanley. The only woman on the panel - Julia Karr from Cinven - who didn't disclose a menial job - started her proper career at the Boston Consulting Group.

Are these career paths still possible? The private equity partners didn't say they won't be, but did acknowledge that having fallen down a "memory hole" in relation to the first Trump presidency, funds' hopes for the second presidency haven't yet born fruit for the industry's fortunes. 

Despite this, Gross said Bain is still hiring juniors. In the future, though, he said a higher percentage of Bain people will be focused on AI and its uses in the private equity context. AI is a "massive tool", declared Gross, and yet you still need to change business processes to make a difference, and that's not something that AI itself can accomplish. 

Stavros acknowledged that even private equity partners don't really know what AI will do, but said it can sift so much information that firms will be able to look at more investment scenarios than they do now. Wilmas, however, said it wouldn't surprise him if in 20 years AI is "all but running some of the best investment houses in the world." 

He probably won't go back to the tennis club if it does.

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