From Outsider to Insider: Cracking the Code of Private Equity/Venture Capital Careers: An MIT Sloan Career Development Office Conversation with Barry E. Griffiths, Senior Advisor at Arctos Partners

Q. With a 0.5% acceptance rate being the norm for some venture capital firms’ recruitment efforts, the selection process makes the 14% admit rate for MIT Sloan[1] seem easy.  From your earlier years at Goldman Sachs’ Private Equity Group to your current advisor role at $10.7 billion Arctos Partners, what were the steps that enabled you to enter into a career path that seems to be extremely exclusive in terms of the selection process?

A. (Barry E. Griffiths):

Attending one of the feeder programs to this industry, including MIT Sloan, is a good point of access.[2] Still, this career track is very challenging to enter. At one of my previous employers, our analyst program hired about four people per year and the typical candidate pool was around 400. So, even if you are from a feeder graduate program, it is not guaranteed that you will gain access.

The good news is that sometimes the saying “luck is when preparation meets opportunity” rings true since I had a very unplanned entrance to PE/VC. The first 15 years of my career were in aerospace research, working for a couple of small engineering companies that supported primarily US Navy and Air Force contacts. Projects involving submarine navigation and missile guidance may not appear to be building blocks to the PE/VC world but those mathematical tools such as modeling, estimation, and optimization of random processes have eventually served as valuable building blocks throughout my career.

Now as the first point of entry, a CFO of a Boston-area tech startup asked me to help with analyzing the economics of a small business that had been purchased by some local investors. I guess we did a pretty good job as one of the investors, Phil Cooper,[3] asked me to become Chief Scientist of a venture-funded software company that he had co-founded. At the time Phil was the head of Rogers Casey, a PE consultant, and his co-founder was Bill Sahlman, the go-to professor for entrepreneurial finance at Harvard Business School.[4] My job was to introduce some automated modeling algorithms – for example, to automatically generate sales forecasts from historical data.

We built an interesting product but it needed some major revisions which was expensive. Unfortunately, that was 1996 and the VCs thought the Internet looked like a much bigger opportunity, so I was out of a job.

At the same time, though, I had been working with Phil on an idea he had for an improved private equity fund-of-funds. Unlike other products at the time, this would involve systematic fund selection, diversification, and risk management. It turned out that my background in modeling, estimation, and optimization fit right into these tasks. And then somehow this project turned into the Goldman Sachs Private Equity Group (PEG), and consequently, my first real finance job was as a Vice President at Goldman Sachs.

For your readers, they should recognize that my earlier preparation enabled me to capitalize on an opportunity that others had not identified.  When we started in 1996, our team had just four employees with zero customers, zero products, and zero AUM. The idea for PEG was to provide private equity funds-of-funds to a range of investors — this was supposedly the first GS unit that put firm money (the GP contribution) with external managers. Our first product, Private Equity Partners, came out in 1997 with a $250 m cover. We actually raised just under $1 billion. The group’s first secondary fund, Vintage, came out in 1998.  PEG grew explosively from there. As I recall, by the time I left at the end of 2004, PEG had approximately $13.7 billion in AUM in 14 funds with about 45 dedicated staff. Phil had a strong belief in the value of bringing quantitative tools into private equity fund management and I became the Head of Quantitative Research for PEG. That was a terrific experience, and I got to work with quant finance professionals like Bob Litterman[5] and Kurt Winkelmann.[6] Again, a terrific learning experience. I contributed the chapter on private equity to Bob’s book “Modern Investment Management,” and worked with Kurt on developing early models of the risk/return structure of private equity.

When I left Goldman I was introduced to Landmark Partners, a secondary PE shop – that is, their funds would buy interests in other existing funds. Since secondary buyers are just limited partners in those underlying funds, they have no management rights – it is all about pricing and portfolio management. At Landmark, I worked alongside Ian Charles,[7] who led a lot of the deals and, again, a strong believer in quantitative methods. We built up the Landmark Quantitative Research Group (QRG), which developed a number of useful tools for private equity. The most well-known of these is Direct Alpha, which measures the outperformance of a private equity manager relative to a liquid benchmark.[8]Direct Alpha has become a standard tool in the PE business, and was recently mentioned in a Bloomberg article.[9] We also developed tools for risk budgeting, cashflow forecasting, and related problems in private markets.

If I had to summarize the key takeaways from my career path for your readers to consider, they would be:

  • Be open to interesting opportunities, even if they are not exactly in line with where you think you are going.
  • Be sure to develop some differentiated skill set that can add value in a variety of different ways.
  • Do not be afraid to propose unconventional solutions – sometimes that is what opens the door to new classes of opportunities.
  • Build a great team that can accomplish more than you can on your own.

Q. With such fierce competition to enter the PC/VC industry, what are your top three recommendations for individuals to stay employed in this sector?

A. (Barry E. Griffiths):

First, you will need basic financial modeling and valuation capabilities, along with solid communication skills, just to get in the door. This is table stakes – necessary, but not sufficient. Everybody you are working with, or competing with, is expected to be reasonably competent with these skills from a very early stage.

Second, you will need to find a distinctive way to add value to your firm. This expertise could be specialist knowledge about particular industries, skill at devising customized transactions, due diligence experience, or (as in my case) developing novel ways to take advantage of information. Or something else – sometimes a firm does not know they need a particular skill until you show them. This is how you move on to become a valuable individual contributor. Just being an Excel wizard is no guarantee of a continuing career.

Finally, you will need to be able to work with others on your team – especially learning from the senior members, and mentoring the junior ones. No matter how good you are as an individual, you will be more valuable as part of a good team – it is a force multiplier.

Barry E. Griffiths is a Senior Advisor at Arctos Partners.  Mr. Griffiths has been a leader in the innovation and application of quantitative analysis within private markets for over 25 years. 

In 2023, Mr. Griffiths retired from Ares Management Corporation as a Partner and Co-Head of the Quantitative Research Group (QRG). Prior to joining Ares in 2021, he was a Partner in Landmark Partners’ Quantitative Research Group, which filled similar roles for what is now Ares’ Secondaries Solutions unit. Prior to joining Landmark in 2009, Mr. Griffiths was Head of Quantitative Research at Goldman Sachs Private Equity Group, which he helped launch. 

Mr. Griffiths is a CFA® charter holder, who received a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University and an MS and BS from Michigan State University.

Partha Anbil is a Contributing Writer for the MIT Sloan Career Development Office and an alum of MIT Sloan. Besides being VP of Programs of the MIT Club of Delaware Valley, Partha is a long-time life sciences consulting industry veteran, currently with an NYSE-listed WNS, a digital-led business transformation company, as Senior Vice President and Practice Leader for their Life Sciences practice.

Michael Wong is a Contributing Writer for the MIT Sloan Career Development Office and an Emeritus Co-President and board member of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association. Michael is a Part-time Lecturer for the Wharton Communication Program at the University of Pennsylvania and his ideas have been shared in the MIT Sloan Management Review and Harvard Business Review.


[1] https://www.topmba.com/admissions/all-you-need-know-about-getting-mit-sloans-mba

[2] Ingram, Eliot, M7 Business Schools Continue to Dominate in Venture Capital and Private Equity Finance Careers, Clear Admit, March 17, 2024

[3] Phil Cooper – Pilot Growth Equity

[4] William A. Sahlman – Faculty & Research – Harvard Business School

[5] Innovative Black-Litterman Global Asset Allocation Model Is Developed at Goldman Sachs | Goldman Sachs

[6] https://navegastrategies.com/about/

[7] https://www.arctospartners.com/team/

[8] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2403521

[9] Lee, Justina, Wall Street Math Wizards Are Decoding Private-Market Returns, Bloomberg, November 10, 2024

By MIT Sloan CDO
MIT Sloan CDO