We ultimately want to come to the best collective answer, and we believe that shared learnings and vigorous intellectual debate are helpful in accomplishing that goal.
Advent Global Opportunities represents my second time at Advent
I’d worked closely with Advent on a transaction during my time in investment banking, and ended up joining the firm for two years. I relished the culture: everyone was smart and hardworking, and above all, they were good people. Later, when I was working for an investment firm in New York, former Advent colleagues reached out to say they were starting a public equity focused portfolio. Given my positive experience the first time around, I decided to jump at the chance. I was lucky enough to join Advent Global Opportunities from the onset.
The fast pace of public equity suits me well
In private equity, you can spend months on a transaction, then get outbid right at the end , and so there is uncertainty in your ability to make the investment. On the public side, you know the prevailing price and you can transact it at any given time. When the price changes or you learn new information, you have the ability to change your mind. That’s one thing that attracted me. The other is that I can spend the majority of my time focused on learning about and analyzing companies, which is the part of the job that I find to be most interesting.
Better discussion yields better answers
We’re always collaborative. Oftentimes, we have multiple people working on a similar workstream or investment opportunity, and we’ll be batting around ideas as colleagues. We ultimately want to come to the best collective answer, and we believe that shared learnings and vigorous intellectual debate are helpful in accomplishing that goal. And, of course, we’re interacting closely with our 200-plus private equity colleagues at Advent.
Management is everything
Unlike private equity, we have very limited governance ability in our companies. For the most part, we’re minority investors with limited ability to change management. So when we make an investment, we’re backing existing management. We’d be hard-pressed to invest in a company where we didn’t feel there was a strong team. And frankly, the best way to subjectively assess the quality of management is to speak with a lot of people who have interacted with them. We can leverage the Advent network and get access to operating partners, customers, equity analysts and other investors to obtain differentiated perspectives on the management team.