Our Origin Story
Let's rewind to Monday, September 13, 2021.
It was 1:30 a.m. One of our cofounders found himself alone in a small conference room — with nothing but a laptop that was wiped of all programs except Microsoft Excel and cut off from the internet. He had spent months practicing LBO modeling. He had done the guides, the courses, the generic practice tests.
He was nearly two hours into an LBO model test for a fund we'll call Whitepebble (a name we have changed beyond all recognition for legal reasons), and none of it was helping. Cash-free debt-free or not? Are these realistic operating assumptions? And how, exactly, was he supposed to fund the add-on? He was exhausted. He answered what he could but knew he wasn't going to hear back. He sat one more process at another fund that night, with the same result. Then he was out of on-cycle entirely.
That same night, probably just a few blocks away, another one of our cofounders sat down to his own model test. He had prepared just as hard. But he had prepared with different material. Friends a year or two ahead of him — bankers, new associates, people barely out of their own processes — had passed along the same model tests, case studies, and interview questions they had been tested with. He was not smarter than our first cofounder. He was not faster in Excel. But he was ready for all the tricks and quirks that were thrown his way — and ultimately signed with one of the top megafunds that night.
That's the little dark secret of PE recruiting.
Preparation matters, but access matters more — access to what these tests actually look like and the two or three things a given fund keeps circling back to. Some candidates inherit that access through their analyst class, their school, or a friend of a friend who happened to owe them a favor. Everyone else walks in half-blind, and the industry calls the difference talent.
That's why we created 10xMultiple.
Today we're a team of three — two former bankers and one former consultant (gross, we know) — who all successfully recruited to work in PE (even our Whitepebble casualty, who ultimately got his offer during off-cycle recruiting).
We know the recruiting process inside and out. Between us we have sat through dozens of processes, built more models than we care to count, and spent the years since on the other side of the table — reading candidate models, running cases, watching bright people make the same handful of mistakes we made. We know what gets tested and what gets waved through.
Over the years we've assembled a collection of model tests and case studies funds have actually given, sourced from candidates who've been through the processes. Every one is solved end to end before it goes up, and we're constantly adding new ones from the most recent cycles (we've got a backlog of 50+ we're working through right now).
For obvious reasons, we choose to remain anonymous, but that doesn't mean we aren't reachable. If you've got a question on how to solve something, if you want a firm we haven't published yet (odds are it's sitting in the queue waiting to be solved), or if you just want a second opinion on how to prep — get in touch.
We can't promise a response in 15 minutes, but we can promise that one of us will get to it in between the perpetual "pls fix" comments, and will actually try to help.
