Since I am from the PE industry, I felt I have to say something.

1) PE is a small industry in Singapore, and the people hiring are mainly the banks, family funds, government funds (like GIC, Temasek) and a few institutions. I am excluding the funds of funds from this. By 'small' I mean the number of prospective employers and not necessarily the fund size they are managing.
2) story of Army Captain making the switch to PE directly does seem implausible as I definitely would not hire someone straight from the Army. Unless of course, he joins his family fund or he took an MBA from Harvard and had some internship before making the switch. Even so, at best he joins as an associate.

back on the topic on making transition to private sector. I worked in a statutory board for 5 years but managed to switch to an investment related role under one of the government holdings for another 5 years. In between, I took 2 years off to do an MBA in Stanford before joining the private sector in the PE industry. First based in HK and now in China.

I hope that helps.

Nice. A BB IB person available for hire here...

No way, there are hundreds of boutique asset management firms out there and the industry is by no means "small" in Singapore. Banks, GIC Temasek and large institutions are just the more popular ones that every layman on the street knows.

I worked as IT engineer for an outsourcing firm last year. Many of these companies outsource their IT maintainance and support & my team have been looking after their networks for a lot of them.

They are usually small with <20 employees and tend to take up offices in less expensive areas instead of the usual Raffles Place / Marina Bay area. Take a stroll along Amoy St / Club St / Tanjong Pagar area and you will see a lot of them tucked in some small shophouse 2nd or 3rd floor. Beach road area like Key Point, Concourse, Fortune Centre also got quite a bit.

Another kind of company that largely similar to PE are the private foundations. Their investment process is not too different from PE, but they tend to be more conservative. Sometimes when I talk to them, many are from big banks and institutions, but took a pay cut for more control over their lives or other non-monetary fulfilment.

Did you manage to switch to PE?

Bro, there is a major difference between private equity and asset management, which by and large buy mainly public equity counters.

Also, if you want to do meaningful PE work, you work with one of the major players, not a 5 man operation, just like if you want to do IB, you work with a BB and not with an accounting firm (with apologies to the hard working corporate financiers in the big 4).

Hi, I know what I'm talking about. These firms hardly dabble with public equities or derivatives, it makes no sense for them to do that. Most retail investors or pension funds who want to dabble with listed instruments will simply go to the big mutual fund companies or banks or do it themselves. They will starve to death if they position themselves as yet another "trader" or "stock picker".

And no, contrary to popular belief, PE is not some labour intensive operation where you need truck loads of people. A 10 man team with the intellectual capital and correct connections plus a few admin people is enough to run the show. Many of them tie up with bankers, lawyers, tax advisors on an-adhoc basis depending on needs.

The reason why PE creates this wrong perception of some humongus financial institution with super sophsiticated business modelling is because of the few mega billion dollar LBOs or privatization that gets reported in the papers. Another misconception is that only big banks and players can afford to pay well, big mistake.... Incentives are dependent on performance and the type of scheme the company offers, there is nothing inherent that makes big players pay better than small ones.

I do not doubt you. Cannot fake the indepth info you have provided above.

Let me clarify my comments.

The smaller houses you speak of are not likely to be hiring from the the govt sector, or from MBA schools. They would only hire either persons with connections or persons with very specific industry knowledge. For general experience hires in the context of this thread, it would only be the big houses which will be providing jobs of any significance, and even so, only very very selectively to top talents.

Continuing from my above comments and looking at the follow-up, my humble views as follows:

1) to the IT engineer that claims that there are many PE firms in Singapore, you are partially right. Anyone can invest in private companies, pre-IPO deals or just tag along a lead investor, but doesn't make one a PE firm. It simply makes private equity an asset class in the entire portfolio.
2) to the guy/gal that says that there is difference between PE firm and asset management companies, I agree with him or her.
3) a PE firm is one where the entire fund is dedicated to Private Equity. Partners take active role (which include board positions) in the deals they invest and take it public or exit via trade sale.
4) very few firms can survive by taking on one asset class.
5) family foundations or a few rich individuals can come together with a few hundred million to form a fund. But most of them take on a portfolio approach and spread their investment across various asset classes. They are fund managers and they definitely will not take board positions in several companies. Their private equity are at most passive. Again, these are not PE firms.

Hi there, thanks for sharing, but I differ from some of your views which I think are too black & white in a world where all sorts of hybrids exist:

Firstly from my observation, smaller firms tend to be more flexible and will seize whatever investment opportunities that come along as long as they think can get superior returns. They may start out with a focus on PE (the way you defined it) but invest in other instruments or tag along as joint junior partners when the opportunity arise.

I don’t see how a firm that ends up making some additional non-PE investments that results in a portfolio weightage of say 75% PE / 25% Others is suddenly not a PE firm. There is no international professional body that stipulates that a firm can only be called PE if 100% of its assets is in PE – I do agree that this is usually the practice in banks and large houses, but it is by no means a definition of what constitutes a PE firm itself.

As for your comment that partners take active role in ultimately unlocking value through IPO or M&A activity, that I do agree. But the problem with that is what exactly is meant by “active”? At what level of “activeness” does it qualify as a PE firm and at what level of “inactiveness” does it qualify as passive investor?

My own take is that control and influence in a firm can be roughly classified into 3 tiers:

a) Strategic level – Management of enterprise risk, capital allocation, capital structure, appointment of key executives
b) Business level – Formulation of key strategies like marketing, sales, supply chain management, R&D, etc.
c) Operational level – Nuts and bolts of the planning and executing of the company’s strategy

Depending on the investment and firm in question, deals can range from deep control even up to the operational level to just maintaining a strategic oversight, i.e. meet once every quarter during board meeting to approve and make decisions at the strategic level. Of course there are a lot of in betweens where partners make key decisions at the strategic level while maintaining a heavy influence at the business level.

There is also the question of control vs influence. Depending on the structure of the deal in question, a firm with an investment can end up just being one of the several key stakeholders that can influence decision, but not the sole authorizer. At what level of the sliding scale between control and influence does a firm cross over to become “active” and qualify as a “PE firm”?

Of interest also is that there is a debate now over what sort of property fund is considered as private equity since they seem to share some common characteristics of "nomral" PE fund while still having perculiarities unique to the real estate industry.

What I’m trying to articulate from all this is that while there are some general characteristics that most people can agree on what makes a Private Equity firm, I would not agree to box them up into defining traits such as "portfolio must be 100% private equity investments". There are always shades and hybrids in any industry as every company is unique and will not fall in nicely into solid well defined boxes.

From my observation, many small firms are surviving precisely because they take niche in a particular asset class or industry. Their claimed specialization in specific instruments is also usually their unique value proposition. I hardly see any small firms that go about on a broad based approach diversifying across multiple asset classes in their funds, this is the area of mutual funds and they will be outclassed by the BBs due to branding and access to capital.

Larger foundations sometimes have a specific team that focuses on PE that is separate from the general fund, but they are quite few and I think it’s probably not a good example, thus will retract my statement with apologies.