They also do things like if a restaurant chain owns the building and the land, they split them into separate businesses, sell off the company that owns the land and increase the rent making the restaurant itself unsustainable.

Then you have leverage buyouts where the PE firm loads the company with debt to make money for themselves and let the company rot.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-11/simon-schus...

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/private-equity-rol...

https://prospect.org/2018/10/16/vulture-capitalism-killed-se...

This is a different strategy than VCs like YC, they invest money because they want the company to grow. As an employee, a PE firm isn’t going to pay employees of the company it owns well or give good benefits.

Now outside consultants who are hired by the PE firms can make good money. I was first exposed to (in hindsight bad) cloud consultants as a dev lead who didn’t know AWS at the time. I saw what they were making and worked on pivoting to cloud consulting focused on app dev “application modernization” shortly after that.

I’ve been in cloud consulting since mid 2020 and recently I have worked on one project for a PE backed company