Every couple months somebody shows up here to announce that this subreddit is noise. Interns asking how to break in. Tourists. No real deal people. The signal-to-noise is broken, etc.
I want to push back on that, with some shared experience because over the last several years r/privateequity has quietly become one of the single most valuable business development channels I have ever had. Not "a channel." The channel, for a bunch of things that actually mattered.
Here is a partial inventory of what I have sourced from this subreddit:
LPs. We were chasing a close on a fund we were raising and had an LP pull out late in the game. I posted something about the mechanics of what we were trying to solve for - not soliciting, and a day later I was on the phone with our potential new LPs sourced right here. Two days later the wired. That hole got filled because I had been showing up in this sub consistently enough that people knew who I was and took the call.
Team members. Our most recent associate hire came from a one-line post I made here: "looking for an associate who wants to move to San Diego.". Got a ton of great candidates, and an equal amount of criticism from users who thought it was a scam or a joke. One of those candidates packed up his life and moved here. Shoutout Campbell.
Sponsors were backing. We just shipped a letter of support to a sponsor group we're co-investing behind on a roll-up. They have a real capital need (200m+), a solid track record as operators and are working in a space where we have significant overlap. I found them because they posted a two-line question about capital structuring on this sub and I replied "DM me, this sounds interesting." If everything pencils, thats a hell of a find from strangers on Reddit.
The acquirer of my other company. A year ago I was arguing in a comment thread about some very granular points about deal origination. A guy named Tom was arguing back. Neither of us had doxxed ourselves. At some point he DM'd me saying "I'm pretty sure I know who you are based on how specific this take is." I wrote back "same." He called me ten minutes later. Two days after that he was on a plane to San Diego from Columbus. We talked for two hours on that first call. Five minutes in I basically told him he should buy my company. We announced the acquisition close this week. His company is SourceCo. My company was CAPTARGET. We're now one company, and I could not be happier about it.
Four pretty important business areas all sourced right here. Some thoughts below on why this place works well for me and how you might replicate the subs usefulness.
Show up consistently and try to be specific. Nobody is building a relationship with you off one comment. The guy who eventually bought my company and I had been crossing paths in threads for months before we actually connected. Generic takes get generic engagement. Specific, technical, lived-experience takes get the attention of the 10-15% of people on this sub who are actually operating at the level you want to operate at.
Engage in the banter! This isn’t LinkedIn. Anonymity affords us all a little wiggle room to straight talk,and be ourselves. This signals to operators and partners that you are a real person, maybe even one of them. Tom’s first DM to me literally said “I enjoy the banter.”.
Don’t treat it as a lead gen channel. It might seem counter intuitive, but all the examples of traction from this sub above came from conversation, not hard asks. If you show up pitching, this sub will come at you.
Anonymous is a feature, not a bug. Nobody on this sub cares about your title, your AUM or the tier of firm you are at. They just care if the information you are sharing is accurate. This is a much purer filter for quality than LinkedIn wills ver be, and it’s why some of the best operators I know spend much more time here than elsewhere.
The tourist-to-operator ratio here is maybe 70/30 on a bad day. But the 30% is denser than almost any other channel I've ever worked, because the anonymity strips out everyone who's here to perform and leaves the people who are actually trying to figure something out.
So, thank you to this sub. Genuinely. From helping me fund a deal, to helping me exit a company I spent a third of my life building. I cant imagine that happening on any other platform I have ever used.
If any of the above resonates, come argue with me in the comments. It’s worked out for me so far :)