Min Park: Private Equity at Hg, Venture Capital at Unreasonable

Min Park (0:00)

I think that meant that I was a little bit out of place, or I felt out of place. And I felt like I needed to make them move quite quickly, because the allure of the job, I think, is no matter what sort of doubts you have, they shower you with money.

I didn't want to get trapped in a gilded cage, and I just thought if I need to break out of this cycle early on.

Aayush Sonthalia (0:25)

Welcome to Secrets of the City, the show where we uncover the stories behind the people who work in the highly lucrative, yet enigmatic jobs of the City of London.

I'm your host, Aayush Sonthalia. And today we speak to Min Park. Min is originally from South Korea and lived in New Zealand for 12 years before moving to the UK for university.

He studied economics at Cambridge University before starting off his career in consulting at the firm OC&C Strategy Consultants in London. He now works for a company called Unreasonable, which is a venture capital firm slash accelerator that focuses on climate tech ventures only. And we'll talk about that later in the episode. But in between OC&C and Unreasonable, Min had a brief stint at Hg, the private equity firm, a very common exit path for people in consulting.

Min Park (1:15)

Private equity is essentially the buying and selling of companies and private equity kind of stands for, the word equity stands for like the ownership and private equity means it is like a private transaction, meaning a business will come in and take over a business that's not on the public market.

Because you then own the business, you make some operational improvements to it, either make it leaner, make it more efficient, help it grow faster and further, in order to create more value so that by the time you sell the business, the business is worth more. Historically, private equity has a pretty bad rep.

The typical, or at least in the past, the ways in which the private equity firms would generate value from the businesses they would buy would be to kind of shave costs. They would be like, well, if we make the business very lean, there will be more profit left over. And so, and obviously the easiest way to shave costs is to shave off the labor costs of the business. So, firing people, so obviously that doesn't go down well with the business that you've just bought. You come in and you're like, I'm the owner, I'm now gonna fire loads of people. This is great for you as this holistic idea of a business, but actually the business at the end of the day is a bunch of people working in an office or a factory or you name it. And so, you can see why it doesn't get a good reputation, but the other side of it is, is it is a very well remunerated industry. The scale of money that you're talking at is like starts at the millions and ends at the billions. And so like the money that you're talking about and the money that it flows down through as a profit on the transaction is just pretty astronomical from like an individual's perspective. So it's a very well remunerated industry. It can be quite complex. So, you know, you have the kind of banker type people with the suits and the lawyers who support you on the deals and not everyone can understand the specific type of lingo or the financial engineering that is happening.

That can be interesting and hard to do. So it's just the combination of those factors of, oh, it's very well paid. Not many people have the experience to go and do this is probably the reason why private equity feels very appealing to a lot of people who have started off their careers in consulting or banking or remuneration. Because that's sort of the idea that they've been brought up with. It's like, yeah, let's do something that's hard to do, that requires a bit of thinking, but it's really well paid.

Aayush Sonthalia (4:01)

Is that why you left OC&C to join HG? Was it, as you say, the remuneration, doing difficult problems, doing something that maybe not necessarily everyone can do?

Min Park (4:13)

Yeah, I think so. I think before going in, there is this allure of private equity being this, you know, this holy grail of jobs, where if you go, you make it out, you're a millionaire. And obviously in these circles, people talk about it like, oh, you went into private equity. Oh, wow, which fund? And what deals are you doing? And you're like, you know, it has a sort of like status around it.