Private Equity: A Memoir - Hardcover

Sun, Carrie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593654994 ISBN 13: 9780593654996

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Named a most-anticipated book of 2024 by NPR.org, Oprah Daily, Town & Country, The Millions, Financial Times, and more.

“Sun writes clearly about the demands and privileges of the job, though this isn’t a tell-all about abuses in the industry but rather a more probing inquiry into what we deem success and the values underpinning it.” —Vogue, Best Books of 2024 So Far

A gripping memoir of one woman’s self-discovery inside a top Wall Street firm, and an urgent indictment of privilege, extreme wealth, and work culture

When we meet Carrie Sun, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at twenty-nine, she’s left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program, and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she knows she can’t say no. Fourteen interviews later, she’s in.

Carrie is the sole assistant to the firm’s billionaire founder. She manages his work life, becoming the right hand to an investor who can move mountains and markets with a single phone call. Eager to impress, she dives headfirst into the firm’s culture, which values return on time above all else. A luxury-laden world opens up for her, and Carrie learns that money can solve nearly everything.

Playing the game at the highest levels, amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole by work. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one’s life. A searing examination of our relationship to work, Carrie’s story illuminates the struggle for balance in a world of extremes: efficiency and excess, status and aspiration, power and fortune. Private Equity is a universal tale of self-invention from a dazzling new voice, daring to ask what we’re willing to sacrifice to get to the top—and what it might take to break free and leave it all behind.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carrie Sun was born in China and raised in Michigan. She holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband. Private Equity is her first book.

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July 28-August 18

Yuna called me immediately after she got off the phone with Boone. "God, Carrie," she said. "I was so nervous, the first thing I said was 'I can't believe I'm speaking to a billionaire!'"

I had prepped her, of course. Yuna was my best friend from Michigan, from the part of the Mittenw where P. F. Chang's was a hot spot and going to Meijer was a pastime. After high school, I went out east; Yuna enrolled at a local community college and dipped in and out of jobs. She had finally achieved her dream of leaving Michigan, working as a field test engineer for Samsung in Kansas, when I asked her to be a personal reference for my interview process with Boone. She was the last of his calls, of which there were ten.

Eighteen days earlier, I had gone to meet with a headhunter in Midtown. Peter specialized in support roles for boldface names. His team placed candidates in positions from receptionists to chiefs of staff at major firms in finance, real estate, media, and other industries. He and I went over my background again and again.

"You're a superstar. But," he stressed in his British accent, "everyone will ask you why a math and finance dual degree from MIT, who graduated in three years, wants to be an assistant."

I looked out the window of that small, sterile room and wished the air-conditioning would work a lot harder. Three years before this, I had dropped out of an MBA program because I felt restless with the conviction that I had been wasting my life. I wanted to change paths. So, I enrolled as a non-degree student at various universities and cobbled together a liberal arts education by taking classes in the humanities. When I told my fiancé I wished to go back to school to get a graduate degree in creative writing, he asked, "But who's going to cook dinner?" Like so many aspiring writers and artists, I hoped to get a job during the day that would allow me to pay the bills while working on my craft and getting an MFA.

But finance nudged at me. My yearslong indecision about what to do next-whether I should put to better use the education my parents had climbed mountains and crossed oceans to provide for me; whether I should marry my fiancé, who paid for all our joint expenses and some of my individual expenses and in exchange wanted me to prioritize him and his career and not work myself-had cost me over half my life savings. I paid for anything my fiancé did not want me to do. We argued over my taking a fiction workshop, the reason I was alone in Manhattan for the summer even though he and I lived in Ann Arbor. Three weeks into the workshop, I received a cold email from Peter after one of his researchers had come across my profile on LinkedIn.

I looked back at Peter and explained that my objective was neither maximizing earnings nor status. "I want a job," I said, "so I can afford to figure out my life."

Peter asked about the last line on my résumé, where I had written down some interests: Creative writing. College football. I told him he had to keep them there.

"I get it," he said. "I'm a photographer."

He paused.

Then he inhaled.

"So," he said. Another pause as he looked me in the eye, smiling. Recruiters are one of the main gatekeepers for the hedge fund and private equity industries. Some jobs are posted on employment aggregator sites; many are not. After a résumé screen, a phone call, and the current interview to make sure I would comport myself in just the right way, finally, he let me in. "I'm working on a search I think you'd be perfect for," he said. "Have you heard of Carbon?"

I hadn't-but I had heard of Argon, a hedge fund that had long and widely been seen as financial royalty. I asked Peter if the two funds were related.

"Correct." The founder of Carbon had cut his teeth at Argon. "Carbon, they are a rock star of a fund. And yet"-Peter raised an index finger and lowered his voice-"under the radar. We never see any Carbon résumés floating around because once people get there, they stay. Forever. No one leaves." He let a few seconds pass. "The job is the sole assistant to the founder of the Firm, Boone Prescott. He's a billionaire. And he's young." Peter glanced down at his notebook. "Boone is, from all accounts, the nicest. And Jen, who runs his family office and personal life-she's an absolute sweetheart. The job is essentially being Boone's right-hand person: you'd manage his time and business life, help with some research, and also provide support to one of his analysts. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Can I pitch you to them?"

I left Peter’s office and went back home to a dorm room I’d rented through NYU. I was working on a short story about a woman in the middle of a quarter-life crisis when I received an email from Peter: “Pls call me!” Jen wanted me to come in at two thirty, in two hours. Could I make it?

I had had plans to meet someone for lunch, a woman named Ruth. She was one of two Americans who had sponsored my father so he could leave China and come to the United States for his graduate studies in the eighties. I felt I owed much of my life to Ruth's kindness, although I had never had the chance to share this sentiment with her. Now that I was in New York, I had reached out a week earlier in hopes of expressing my gratitude and catching up. My mother was in awe of Ruth. In Mom's telling: Ruth, after being a homemaker and raising two kids, realized how her kids respected her husband more than herself because he had a career and she did not. So, she got divorced, went back to school, and later taught at a small liberal arts college in New Jersey. It was during those years that she traveled to Anhui, one of the poorer and less-developed provinces in the middle of China; there, she met my dad, who served as her translator.

Ruth was in her garage in New Jersey when I called to cancel. "You really caught me in the nick of time," she said. She did not guilt or yell at me, though I felt her disappointment seep through the phone. I was disappointed too. But I could not say no. You don't say no to Carbon.

I headed back uptown to meet with Jen in a building near Barneys on Madison Avenue. Never before had I had a same-day, in-person interview after applying for a job. I arrived on the tenth floor and rang the bell. Maya opened the frosted-glass doors. I knew about Maya; Peter had told me that she had once been an assistant to the head of a mini-major film studio. Maya seemed warm and maternal, like someone whose fuse might extend all the way to the moon. After bringing me a bottle of water, she dropped me in a room to wait for Jen.

I had spent the short hours prior to this interview reading anything on Boone I could find. Carbon did not have a website or a Wikipedia page, and Boone was not active on social media. He did not give interviews. He did not sit for photos. Stories about him featured squiggly lines coalescing into caricatures of what appeared to be very different people. All this did not stop the financial press from crowning him Wall Street aristocracy or the society pages from speculating about his wife and kids and homes and money.

About the money: In the early part of the decade, Boone debuted on a prominent list of the youngest billionaires in America. What was special about Boone was his age, his net worth, and his industry. If Boone continued compounding his wealth at, say, a rate of 20 percent per year-a conservative estimate given some of his reported returns; a number that does not even factor in carry, the profits he'd receive from owning and managing the funds-he'd have a net worth of over $5 trillion by the time he reached the age of Warren Buffett.

About the Firm: I found a dribble of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593654994
• ISBN 13: 9780593654996
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar