17/05/22, Dakotah Rice interview
Ex-Goldman, Carlyle, Coatue, HBS and current founder of Poolit.
Hello everybody, and welcome to our very first interview!
Here’s the structure for these versions of the newsletter
The guest: summarise the guest’s background, and why we should care about them;
The interview: figure this one out yourselves;
The summary: most of you can’t be arsed to open a YouTube video. Fair enough. To ensure you laggards still benefit, I’ll include a quick summary accompanying every interview.
The guest: Dakotah Rice
Dakotah’s CV reads like every aspiring financier’s utopia: he started off in Goldman TMT investment banking, then worked on infrastructure buyouts at Carlyle, then spent a few years at esteemed long-short hedge fund Coatue. The natural step after this was, of course, to join Harvard Business School’s MBA program.
However, Dakotah bucked the traditional sell-side —> buy-side —> MBA trend by dropping out of HBS to run Poolit (all of you, have a look at the website and sign up if you’re interested). I would not be able to do Dakotah’s mission justice by trying to describe Poolit - for that, watch the interview. In essence, Poolit seeks to do for private markets what Robinhood did for public markets. It’s an incredible product that enables retail investors to have access to deeply-diligence private market opportunities.
In the interview, we talk about
how Dakotah broke into finance;
Dakotah’s experiences at Goldman, Carlyle, and Coatue;
how to increase diversity amongst sell-side and buy-side firms;
the vision for Poolit.
The interview
The summary
Linearity is overrated: Dakotah externed at BCG and Google and many others before joining Goldman, and realised whilst at Goldman that the deal process was not as enjoyable as he anticipated. So, when you see those analysts on LinkedIn with seemingly perfect paths, remember the linearity you see is rarely representative of reality;
Public and private equity investing are very different: Dakotah highlighted the considerably deeper diligence process that goes into private equity transactions before execution. This is naturally the case since public market investors have to move faster and can time their entry and exit points as they wish because of relative liquidity. In short, there are big differences between investing in different asset classes (perhaps more on this in another edition);
We still have work to do with diversity: Dakotah was an Alternatives Investment Fellow at SEO USA, and I’m a member of SEO London - both organisations seek to increase diversity in the corporate world. Dakotah made the necessary, but often ignored point, that these organisations merely represent the beginning of a big diversity push, and greater structural change is needed to ensure equality of opportunity for all.
Thank you for reading!
Many thanks to Dakotah for being our inaugural guest in what is going to be a great lineup of buyside investors, sellside dealmakers, entrepreneurs, and others.
Many thanks also go out to you guys for getting this far!
Please excuse the occasional repetition or odd facial expression - hopefully I can hone my interviewing skills over time, with your support. Speaking of support, we’re closing in on 300 subscribers now (only through posting in groups and word-of-mouth). I started this project purely for my own enjoyment (sad, I know), and the fact that this has spread so organically and quickly is almost ludicrous. Love you all.