We have put together the following ten oberservations to give you a better sense about our philosophy and opinions about the private equity market place. We love it when people contact us about our list of ten things to tell us why they disagree or have an eleventh idea!

1) Networking is the key to finding investors.

The majority of money raised by small private companies is from friends and family. However, any manager should know that they will get a better price for their product if they have buyers competing to purchase it. Therefore, when manager turn to the decision of how to raise capital for their company, they should invest time in going beyond their immediate relationships to tapping into the network with the largest number of qualified private equity investors.

2) Be the best at what you do.

PESE's database contains more private companies and more private equity investors than any comparable web site. There is a reason for that: there is no pay to play policy (companies list for free and there is no charge to qualified investors for membership). Instead, good companies are encouraged to provide detailed and accurate information so that our search algorith can provide investors with what they are looking for. There are over twenty web sites doing what we do, but nobody brings private capital and unregistered companies together as well as we do.

3) More is better than less.

All investment bankers on Wall Street will tell you that they have great client lists, but how many will show who's on that list? PESE is willing to show you limited data on all of our investors so that you will know that we have the largest database of qualified institutional buyers in our industry.

4) We strive for meritocracy, not exclusivity.

We have found that many private companies have images of "smoke filled rooms" and "exclusive access" when imagining how successful deals are completed on Wall Street. However, the trend in finance is the same as in other markets: the internet changes everything. More information leads to better screens that leads to better results. We seeks to create a place where all companies, not just those that "know someone", can have access to the hundreds of billions of dollars currently flowing into private equity funds.

5) Facebook has more members than Match.com.

Internet models drive traffic, not brand names. Charging companies to list their information leads to fewer companies, which leads to few investors, which leads to fewer companies, etc. We built it and they came, we have more companies and more investors than any other internet site.  

6) You can make money on Wall Street without being biased.

Our business model is based on providing free listings for businesses and free access to investors. When we charge companies for financial products or services, we disclose this investors and allow them to decide whether the information is value added. Every opinion has a bias, the secret is knowing who paid to create the opinion. We believe in full disclosure.

7) Information is difficult to find in private equity.

Public companies are required to file quarterly financial with the Securties and Exchange Commission. These 10-Qs and 10-Ks are primary documents for a vast amount of the information that is available for listed stocks. Sarbanes-Oxley has improved the quality of this information by increasing the penalties for financial fraud. However, private investors have a much more difficult time in finding information on private companies. We are part of the solution for that problem.

8) Private equity is a global market place.

Private equity is best defined as the absense of regulation. This makes a private company in Europe or Asia much like a private company in the United States. The same cannot be said of public companies, which have to comply with the regional reporting requirements. We hope to take advanatage of the lack of structure in the private equity marketplace to create common fields of information that investors can make use of apply quantitative strategies for finding investment opportunities.

9) Private equity for the next generation.

We live in a world where people get ahead with information. The internet has changed the way we buy products, meet each other, and answer questions. Computers now regularly beat Grand Masters at chess and decide stock allocations. Over half of all trades on the New York Stock Exchange are program-driven trades. Private equity has in the past been different because of the lack of information. But with better information comes better decision making. We hope to be part of the aggregation of information on private companies.

10) Being great isn't good enough.

Too many great private companies are spending too much time looking for capital while too many private equity managers are dealing with inflows of capital that are coming too fast to invest. Why is this happening? Because private equity remains an inefficient market place where a general partner of a private equity tech fund on 57th street can be unaware of a great new device being developed by a private company in Silicon Alley. Providing a environment where capital can find opportunity efficiently is PESE's goal.