Morning Coffee: The art of making money from private equity does not involve working in it. Reasons to work for Millennium
As US private equity firms battle to hire junior bankers before junior bankers have even begun their jobs and as junior bankers complain that the big private equity firms aren't even reimbursing their expenses for travelling miles to interviews, maybe there's another way. Maybe you don't even have to actually work in private equity at all.
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Mark O'Hare, a 65-year-old Cambridge mathematics graduate with an MBA from London Business School, has illuminated the alternative path, although whether anyone else can follow him along it is questionable.
O'Hare has never worked in private equity himself and yet he and his wife — an English and contemporary arts graduate — yesterday made £2bn from the sale of Preqin, their company which sells data on private equity and other alternative asset providers, to BlackRock. O'Hare's co-founder, Nick Arnott, who studied computing at the University of East Anglia and who left Preqin in 2011, is possibly kicking himself. 300 Preqin employees will also share £500m.
O'Hare has never worked in private equity. He has never even worked in banking. He began his career at Boston Consulting Group in London and has since been a serial entrepreneur. Pre-Preqin there was a range of other businesses, including Citywatch, which he sold to Reuters in 1993.
While private equity professionals struggle to exit underwater investments and to earn thecarried interest that might, possibly, bring them a fraction of O'Hare's riches, the man who trod the alternative path is therefore becoming more financially endowed than BlackRock founder Larry Fink. O'Hare and his wife own an estate and outdoor theatre in Suffolk and although O'Hare is joining BlackRock as vice
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