John Gilligan has worked in the private equity and venture capital industry for over 30 years. He started his career in 1988 at 3i Group plc as a financial analyst. He was a Corporate Finance Partner of Deloitte and latterly BDO for over twenty years. He is the Director of the Oxford Saïd Finance Lab at Saïd Business School, a non-executive director and Investment Committee member of Big Issue Invest, one of the largest social impact investors in the UK. He is also a Visiting Professor at Imperial College Business school and has degrees from Southampton University, Nottingham University, and London Business School.Mike Wright pioneered research into management buy-outs and private equity. He founded the Centre for Management Buy-out Research, CMBOR, in 1986. He was Professor of Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School and Chair of the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies. He published extensively on entrepreneurial ownership mobility and finance in leading academic journals and has over 75,000 Google Scholar citations. His books include Accelerators: Successful Venture Creation and Growth (2018), The Routledge Companion to Management Buy-outs (2018), Student Start-Ups: The New Landscape of Academic Entrepreneurship (2019), and How to Get Published in the Top Management Journals (2019). He was a member of the British Venture Capital Association Research Advisory Committee.

• Preface to the Fourth Edition 1: The Private Equity Market 2: The Private Equity Fund 3: Measuring Private Equity Performance 4: Doing a Deal: The Process of a Private Equity Transaction 5: Financial Markets, Financial Instruments, and Financial Engineering 6: A Detailed Worked Example of a Leveraged Buyout 7: The Private Equity Critics and the Research Appendix 1: Detailed Data Appendices Appendix 2: Summaries of Peer-Reviewed Studies of Buyouts and Private Equity Bibliography Glossary

Mike Wright was one of the towering figures in the field of private equity. He pioneered rigorous data analysis of buyouts and private equity a long time before it became fashionable to do so and stimulated a vast body of research on the subject as a consequence. This book exemplifies the major contribution that Mike made to the field.