Our People

John Maldonado

John Maldonado smiling

John Maldonado joined Advent in 2006 and is a Managing Partner in Boston. He advises on buyouts in the healthcare and business & financial services sectors. John has advised on 25 investments during his career, 22 while at Advent.

Prior to joining Advent, John worked in private equity at Bain Capital and Parthenon Capital. He began his career as a Consultant with The Parthenon Group, a leading strategy consulting firm.

John earned a BA, summa cum laude, from Dartmouth College and an MBA, with high distinction, as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School.

What drives Advent’s strategic goals?

There’s a good saying that sums this up: shoot for the stars, and even if you miss, you’ll land among the clouds. If you only set your ambitions to target middling-to-good outcomes, you won’t produce a great product for your customers and investors. We’re in the business of doing two things – making investments and cultivating amazing talent. They’re the yin and yang, and they’re symbiotic because great deals are born from great talent, and great talent doesn’t want to shoot for the middle of the fairway. We create a culture that wants to shoot for the stars, and that’s how we keep the best people in our orbit.

What’s special about being part of a privately owned partnership?

Once you go public, the demands that the public shareholders place upon your organization become challenging. You need to deliver growth in earnings per share, and the public markets want you to generate fee-related earnings. The way you do that is by raising more dollars, pure and simple. It doesn’t matter whether the dollar that you raise gets turned into $1.50 or $3; you just have to get more dollars. At Advent, as a privately owned partnership, we have the flexibility to focus on what we do best – building great businesses in collaboration with management teams and founders.

What mistakes have you made in your career, and how did you learn from them?

When I think about investments that didn’t go well, more often than not they came down to the people who were put into a leadership role at a company and were unsuited to what needed to happen at that time. Some of my biggest mistakes came from not recognizing that we’re not all good at all things. We all have spikes and deficiencies in different areas. You can have a well-intentioned leader who has high strengths in some areas, but when you map them to a role that demands a different set of talents, it can be a recipe for trouble.

“We’re in the business of doing two things: making investments and cultivating amazing talent. They’re the yin and yang.”

John Maldonado
Managing Partner, Advent International
Since you began your career, what has changed most about private equity?

If you break the 50-year history of private equity into two, the first half was a nascent industry in which leverage and a hands-on governance model were all it took to perform well. Today, private equity has evolved into an investment and business-building industry. You can see that in the way firms have evolved their capabilities over the last 20 years. Once, there were only deal makers: people who sought, made, and sold investments. Now there are many people in a firm like ours whose role is not focused on that, but on developing the capabilities of portfolio companies.

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

I love what I do. What I find most motivating is helping those around me achieve their goals at Advent. My role as a senior dealmaker and a leader of the firm is to cultivate an environment where teams can succeed and thrive. I want the VP that works down the hall today to have every bit as much opportunity as I had 15 years ago, and I want to ensure the amazing talent at Advent can flourish for many years from now.