Stoicism 201

There is a certain person who is employed at a Private Equity firm who not only believes, but has the gall to voice, that the highest level of humans work in PE and everyone else is necessarily a lower order human being.

The audacity is preposterous, especially given how fallacious the premise is. By definition, people in Private Equity are trying to partake of the success of people who are building a quality product or service and delivering it efficiently to the people who will buy it. The only thing that people in PE are doing is allocating capital on bets that they believe will pay.

It gets worse. Venture Capitalists in the good old days started out by investing money that they had made themselves, by having succeeded in the very game that they were now investing in; i.e. building a product or service that the market needed and was willing to pay for. They had sold their company to a larger corporation and were now trying to deploy their money, and perhaps experience, across a wider set of opportunities.

A number of today's PE employees have never really done anything real for a living. Admittedly, they have worked extremely hard through the best Business Schools to build CVs that PE and VC firms would shortlist. But for a living, these people essentially meet a lot of real entrepreneurs so that they can invest money that the founding partner of the VC / PE firm has brought in from other people entrusted to invest that money, who in turn got the money from people who have made it by, guess what, building and delivering a product or service that the market wants and is willing to pay for.

The hubris of someone who in effect lives off the success of others, to believe and to voice an opinion that suggests that the best people work in VC / PE and that others are a lower class of human beings is nothing short of atrocious.

And finally, here is where the title of this piece comes in. These people would do well to realize that they have a high paying job at the pleasure of the founder of the VC / PE fund founder, and that if they should lose this job at the whim of their boss, they would be pretty much unemployable anywhere else.  They would do even better to accept their good fortune with grace and gratitude and start building a real life skill in preparation for the day when they will lose their job.