This book is about private equity (PE) funds and decision making within those funds. Other topics covered in this study are private equity characteristics, fund life cycle, agency problems between different stakeholders and compensation of the general partners running the fund. A number of studies compare PE to public equity and the academic literature has evolved to explain performance by fund characteristics, fund investors' level of sophistication and economic conditions. However, the understanding of how existing funds invest, exit and perform under severe economic downturn is limited. In this book, I will address these three topics using data that were kindly provided by two institutional investors and includes all PE fund investments of these two entities from the beginning of 1990 to 30th June 2011. Due to there being persistent interest in PE performance, I also investigate the return in the total sample.