Alexandre Peisse

 This teaching is an invaluable gift to your entire life and saves you a lot of time at the beginning of your career 

I was born and raised in Paris and after school I did 2 prep years in order to get into the ‘Ecole des Mines’ from which I graduated three years later with an engineer degree. Parallel to the HEC program, I also did a Master in Research in Organization Theory at Dauphine University, which leaves the door open to research and potentially teaching one day. I chose HEC due to its outstanding quality of teaching. The teachers have the relevant experience and are recognized at what they do. This teaching is an invaluable gift to your entire life and saves you a lot of time at the beginning of your career.

Today, I work in a team of two people doing private equity and merchant banking for one of the largest private investment firms in Europe, Stanhope Capital in London. My time is split between directly investing and managing our interests in non-publicly quoted companies (and in some private equity funds) and advising ultra high net worth individuals on corporate strategy and M&A situations relating to their family businesses. I have worked in across Asia, Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, so it’s very international.

Private equity is a fascinating world but very specific and very demanding. It is a sub-segment of finance and you have to have a keen interest in working hand in hand with entrepreneurs, other private shareholders, management and employees in order to accomplish something great.

In my opinion, HEC definitively empowers students over time, providing them with an outside perspective on events, giving them confidence in their own analysis capacities and helping them make the right decisions when times are tough.

The entire academic world leaves its fingerprint in your mind but I have to say that the best memories I have from this period are with the people I met who soon joined the circle of my best friends and have remained in it until now and will for a long time still.