Kelly Williams
I got a chance to meet with Kelly Williams, Director of Milestone Venture Group, after he talked to a class this morning. His talk was much more interesting than most I’ve seen because he used Q&A throughout - as opposed to the more common hour-long lecture.
He’s working in private equity, but the way he discussed it was much different from how I had viewed PE. He finds small companies (where $5-10MM will get a majority stake) with great management teams which are having trouble growing the company. My only knowledge of PE groups were the ones taking public companies private with billion dollar buyouts, which seems to happen every day now.
An over-simplification of my view was that VC’s bring private companies to the public market, and PE’s take them back private. While I’d still prefer to be a VC - I find going from $0 to $5MM much more exciting than $5MM to $50MM - this just shows that there’s a lot more to private equity that I don’t know.
He was a great guy and I hope to meet him again soon.
[Update:] Ah, one of my favorite VC’s, James Chen of CXO Ventures helps me out with the difference between VC’s and Buyouts. Thanks!