Private Equity Senior Associate at Apax LP

>> My name is Ariel Goldblatt. I work at Apax Partners; I'm a Senior Associate in their Healthcare Team. Prior to Apax, I worked in banking and also in mezzanine debt. And got my MBA at Warden after having graduated from undergrad from Penn State, Honors College. Apax is a global private equity firm. So we've got about 15 billion dollars under assets. And we invest across 5 different sectors, health care being the one that I focus on. And we look to invest in, you know, growing companies, but a little bit more mature, the ones that we think we can take to the next level. So bring them to a new geography or, you know, open up new product lines, help them buy a potential competitor, that makes sense. So that's kind of what we do in terms of what we look for to buy and then in terms of portfolio management we spend a lot of time with the management teams. So it depends, when you're on a live deal, basically I'll be coordinating with advisers, setting up scopes of work that we want to work on. I'll be helping the analysts with the financial model, making sure the returns, we're testing the model and making sure that the returns are what they should be based on what price we're paying and what we think the company's really going to grow at. I'll be talking to lawyers sometimes during the day and banks to make sure we're getting the best intelligence and that they're helping us value companies and that I know what's going on in the market. So it's busy right now because well I think one, the debt markets are just very hot. So the debt markets, as you know, during a lot of the crisis had kind of slowed up and stopped up, making it much harder to do private equity, because we do what's called a leverage buyout. So you basically put in a certain amount of equity when you buy a company, but you also add in a lot of debt, so when the debt isn't available, it makes it much harder to do the math. So the debt markets are very hot, so I think that's also playing into it, as well as there is a lot of new companies that are coming out that are realizing the markets are good and they want to -- they're looking for more money so they can grow into new verticals, and someone to kind of sponsor them. I'm on call like 24/7. I mean, it's better. When you're not on a live deal, it's not as bad, you probably work somewhere around 50, 60 hours. But when you're on a live deal, I mean, you're on call 24/7.