Does being bought by a PE company ever end well for employees? It’d be interesting to have a Glassdoor for PE firms, so if you see a specific PE company has bought your co you can decide to start your job hunt straight away…
But honestly things got better, and the employee experience was at least as good as it had been during the “oh shoot we’re not growing anymore” crisis which attracted PE attention in the first place. They also returned us to growth and gave us a nice payout on the magical mystery tokens which had replaced our equity.
As someone who tries to be intellectually honest: I was wrong, and across the 100s of such deals each year there is variation between in employee outcomes.
PE firms are run by very smart and practical people who understand incentives and finance really well. In many cases their incentives and the incentives of the teams they acquire align - they want the teams to be highly motivated and they understand how to use money to make that happen.
Not defending PE overall - smart and practical != nice - but PE doesn't exist just to do evil. They're bad guys in the vein of Slytherin, not Vlad the Impaler.
With near 0% interest rates, revenue multiples went crazy, and most of the time, the purchase price was too high to do anything other than squeeze employees and customers and try to pawn off the business on greater fools.