Private Equity by Carrie Sun

PRIVATE EQUITY by Carrie Sun is a memoir from a young MIT alumna about her career in high finance. If you know anyone in this business, you have heard the stories and the media regularly publishes tales of burnout and the difficult culture, especially for young women in tech and finance There's a strange feeling - both happy and sad and mixed with disbelief - when you finish this book-length memoir. Carrie Sun begins this story when she is in her late 20s and interviewing for a job with an investment firm as a personal assistant to one of the principals. That in itself is an amazing process, conducted over multiple days and requiring nearly a dozen reference calls. Even her recruiter calls it “by far the most intense search he had ever worked on.” Honestly, I would have stopped well before she did, but she persists, ultimately struggling with the workload and burns out.  This is a tough, tough business and that is the reaction I had when I mentioned this text to people: “oh, it's going to be a hard read.” Yes, but it was also looking at a culture or a world that seems glamorous (all those catered lunches!) from the outside and then being better able to appreciate the expectations, the very long hours, and the striving. Kirkus describes PRIVATE EQUITY as “a measured account of how soul-devouring the corporate world is …. a useful cautionary tale...” Vogue named it one of the best books of 2024 so far.  Sun dedicates the text to “my mother, my father, and all those who have the courage to quit.”