Private Equity Quotes

“Practice. That’s all it is. If you practice enough, you can sense things. You know where the open ice will be.” Watching the three men interact I could not help but notice the banality of genius. It occurred to me that Carbon did not have any superpowers beyond the boring and total efficiency of the enterprise. People worked like machines, which was to say they made goals, they accomplished them—this was the genius of following through. The genius of training your brain through practice and more practice to encode as much as possible into procedural memory so there would be no deliberations of the “Do I feel like doing this now?” sort; no excuses of the “I’m tired” or “I’m having a bad day” sort. There was will, followed by action. Mean it, do it. There was no such thing as a slump. But I wondered if the genius here could also be the horror: Your brain might not have full control over exactly which parts of your experiences in daily practice to encode. You might, through no conscious fault of your own, encode a lack of moral sensitivity if every second of every day your attention was fixated on self-interest, winning, profits, money, crushing it, killing it, and destroying your competition.”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“A gift weighed down by the imposition of gratitude becomes an expectation; over time, it becomes debt.”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“If you have the highest returns and the highest pay, nearly everything will solve itself because the people—internal workers and external LPs—will convince themselves that they want to be a part of your mission. Greed is good because it makes things predictable. No need to coerce or enforce or foist any delusions when you have people volunteering to do the labor of self-persuasion.”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“An alienation that is then exacerbated and exploited, as Karl Marx predicted, by the system that is capitalism. The trauma plot and the capitalism plot are increasingly the same plot. Each one rewards you for staying inside the other. What will it take to break free?”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“People were here because they believed in this gospel of wealth. Earn a lot first. Give a lot later. But who is to say that the process of earning won’t compromise the person doing the giving?”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“Asymmetric knowledge is asymmetric power. Carbon wanted to know everything about you while you knew nothing about them.”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“If the rate at which a billionaire’s net worth increased was more than an average person’s rate of increase, then inequality would widen and widen until infinity, bound only by his generosity, his choices—or a new world order. —”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“The best investors are masters of psychology: they buy up your mental real estate before you realize it’s for sale.”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“You are at work on yourself, though there is, as yet, no real you; your wants are themselves a work in progress. —Agnes Callard,”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“People worked like machines, which was to say they made goals, they accomplished them—this was the genius of following through. The genius of training your brain through practice and more practice to encode as much as possible into procedural memory so there would be no deliberations of the “Do I feel like doing this now?” sort; no excuses of the “I’m tired” or “I’m having a bad day” sort. There was will, followed by action. Mean it, do it. There was no such thing as a slump. But I wondered if the genius here could also be the horror: Your brain might not have full control over exactly which parts of your experiences in daily practice to encode. You might, through no conscious fault of your own, encode a lack of moral sensitivity if every second of every day your attention was fixated on self-interest, winning, profits, money, crushing it, killing it, and destroying your competition.”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

“I thought of how moving work relations onto the register of kinship, invoking concepts like lineage and fatherhood, normalized the way power and wealth flowed and compounded through patrimonial structures. Moreover: The language of family acted as a subliminal defense against charges of favoritism. Most people consider it natural to favor one’s own offspring over those of a stranger.”
― Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir