2023 Pari Passu Year-End Letter

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the last edition of Pari Passu for 2023, our first year-end letter.

This post will not cover any investing or restructuring topics, it will be a ~fun~ post talking about our story, our progress over this year, some behind-the-scenes behind the page, and what the newsletter has in store for the future.

Our Story

Launching the Instagram Page

To understand the origins of Pari Passu, you need to understand the origins of Restructuring, our Instagram page. Back in the day, I realized no Instagram page was talking about the magic world of restructuring, and I decided to fill the whitespace by being the first page to bring educational content on this topic on Instagram. Unfortunately, the username Restructuring was taken so I had to settle for Restructuring__. On January 6, 2022, I published the first post linked here.

To be honest, the only goal of the page was to bring more awareness to young professionals about the world of restructuring. I wanted more people to appreciate the interest I had in the field and help everyone understand why some people are so passionate about this group. If you think about it, you can find people who really love restructuring, but you are not likely to find anyone who loves M&A the same way. This should tell you something right there.

Since I was working full-time at one of the big restructuring groups, I absolutely did not want my colleagues to know what I was doing, so I started (and still am) completely anonymous. This made building an audience and a following much harder than I thought. The Instagram page grew very slowly despite regular posts every other day. To be fair, I was not an expert on social media as I spent more of my time reading Moyer in college, but I will be the first one to admit that the page did not grow as fast as I expected. That said, I was having fun with it, and I had my fair share of laughs when my group would discuss the page and what the admin was posting.

Over time, I also came to an important realization. There was limited correlation between the quality of the content (and time spent working on it) and the success of the post. People are not on Instagram to learn about Section 341 Meetings, and I was not going to change that. What really bothered me was that the stupid memes I would make would get significantly more impressions than the educational posts I dedicated a lot of time to.

Therefore, over Christmas 2022, high of my 1,400 Instagram followers, I started to think about where I wanted the page to go and I quickly concluded that I should start a newsletter. This would allow me to reach the right target of people who were genuinely interested in learning.

Launching the Newsletter

On January 19, 2023, I announced with the post below that I was launching the @Restructuring__ newsletter. My lack of creativity pushed me to ask my followers for name recommendations, and I received a brilliant suggestion which was love at first sight: Pari Passu was born.

For the first few months, the newsletter was a collection of small lessons that would have been previously published on Instagram (see the first edition). To my surprise, nearly all followers became subscribers and the newsletter became more rewarding than the page. Over time, I started to dedicate all of my time to the newsletter using Instagram as a growth engine, which is how we are currently operating.

Pari Passu by the Numbers

I love numbers, and I wanted to include a few graphs to show our growth since starting the newsletter and the Instagram page alongside some commentary.

Year 1

Creating an audience starting from scratch was harder than expected. Over six months of publishing three-to-four times per week, the page only had 500 followers, and growth was basically flat. The cliché motto of “do what you enjoy even when things do not go as planned” was very real and luckily I stuck to it. Over time, bigger pages started to reshare my content and growth slowly picked up.

Year 2

The second year started very strong on Instagram, but then I got what I deserved. I dedicated nearly all my attention to the newsletter and growth suffered. I am perfectly happy with how I allocated my time and I do not plan to go back to aggressive growth on Instagram at least in 2024. While I see writing as something that makes me grow as a professional, I see the time needed to grow my Instagram page as time wasted. Therefore, I am fine with focusing my time on the newsletter and posting the occasional post on Instagram. However, I will be the first one to admit that I am a little bit of a finance hardo myself, and I have fun making memes like this one.

Newsletter

It is a shame I did not write a year 0 letter as I would like to read back what my expectations were, but I will submit that the newsletter surpassed any reasonable expectations. The newsletter has been rewarding, as I feel I am teaching and sharing my knowledge with all of you. Additionally, it makes me happy to hear readers are learning and using what they learn to get great jobs. Over this year, we published some great posts; my favorite ones were: Amazon Deep Dive, Envision Disaster Deep Dive, and TSMC Deep Dive.

On the other side, publishing weekly content while working full-time has been challenging. I plan to continue this newsletter in perpetuity, and since I do not want it to negatively impact the other spheres of my life, I am considering switching to biweekly frequency sometime in the future.

Since Founding

Overall, I am extremely happy with our performance over the last two years, and I am more excited than I could ever expected when I launched this fun project. Professionally, this was an exciting year as I moved to the buy-side, but I am glad that I was able to balance my personal life with the Newsletter / Page while having a lot of fun.

To summarize, as of today, we are sitting at:

• 6,000 Instagram Followers

• 4,200 Newsletter Subscribers

• 1,100 Twitter Followers

• 650 LinkedIn Followers

Plan for 2024

First and foremost, I want to keep having fun with the page and the newsletter. More specifically, I have a few things I would like to achieve in 2024:

• Prioritize the newsletter: working in Large-Cap PE leads to frequent brutal weeks with very little free time. Therefore, if I can keep publishing regularly in 2024, I will be happy. Additionally, I want to place the newsletter on top of my time allocation cap structure (which includes Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn). This means the newsletter will be the last thing to be cut whenever I have limited time.

• Interview people: I would love to have some guests and publish the interview with some commentary as posts in 2024. If you know anyone with 5+ years of experience working on the buy-side, feel free to get us in touch.

• Focus on Twitter / LinkedIn: many readers suggested that my content would be a really good fit for Twitter and LinkedIn, but I never took the time to commit to it and publish regularly. I plan to publish regularly in Q1 on Twitter and see how much traction I get and reevaluate from there.

Others and Miscellaneous

Launching an Investment Banking / Private Equity Course

A lot of you asked if I plan to launch a recruiting course. While this would be the best way to truly monetize my audience, I do not plan to do so. I simply do not have the time to create a great course, and I think the world does not need one more course. In addition, I do not think I can compete with my friend Matt’s Peak Frameworks course, which is the clear market leader.

Full disclosure, I just partnered with him since I consider his courses the best on the market, and I will earn a commission if you buy one of his courses. If you want to support the page, this is an excellent way to do so.

Offering Recruiting Prep / Consulting

On a similar topic, a lot of you also asked if I provide mock interviews. While I do not provide mock interviews as I would not be really more useful than a senior in college (but much more expensive), I have started doing some “consulting calls” to talk about careers, investing, newsletters, social media, etc. If you might be interested, you can find more information here.

Beehiiv vs Substack

If you have been a Pari Passu reader from the early days, you might have noticed that we switched platforms several times. For everyone not familiar with the newsletter landscape, Substack is the industry leader and incumbent while Beehiiv is the new entrant. I spent a few days reading around, and I concluded that Beehiiv was a better fit for us as it allowed more customization and that’s where Pari Passu launched.

Then, after a few months, I realized that Beehiiv lacked a very basic functionality, text indentation. Given our focus on educational content, making posts like this one would be very complicated without indenting, therefore I decided to move to Substack.

After a few more months, Beehiiv started advertising how they would find sponsors for your newsletter once you reached 1,000 subscribers. I fell into the trap and thought it made sense for me to switch back and take advantage of this. Without bothering you with details, this was not really true, but I only realized that once I was back on Beehiiv. This said, it was not worth moving back again, so I stayed on the platform for a few more months.

The second (and final) move to Substack happened when I crossed 2,500 subscribers. Beehiiv does not have a free plan and forces you to upgrade to a premium plan that I personally saw as a waste of money. Therefore, I moved back to Substack and I have no plans to move again.

If you are thinking of launching a newsletter, I would recommend Substack if you are creating educational content, and Beehiiv if you have a large amount of paid subscribers (since Substack takes a 10% cut while Beehiiv does not).

Conclusion

I feel extremely lucky to have a hobby I love and that makes my weekends so exciting. I would not be doing this on top of 80-hour work weeks if I did not love it.

In addition, I would like to conclude the year with three thank-yous to:

• All of you: seeing our community grow makes me so happy and excited for what’s ahead of us; I love hearing how our work helps people get better jobs and make this industry (and restructuring!) a bit less opaque; thank you for all the words of encouragement over these last two years

• Interns: amazing early-career professionals who have helped me with content creation and will do amazing things with their careers

• The people who know my real identity: this page / newsletter would look a lot different without you and your support

Wishing everyone a good 2024!