Road to Duke
The Peters family had Ivy in their blood and Duke in their hearts. Casey Charles Peters was born August 13, 1988 in Livingston, New Jersey, into a household where every dinner table conversation eventually came back to college sports. His mother Sharon McCloskey was a 1980 Duke graduate, an attorney who would later enroll in the Columbia School of Journalism. His father Kurt had played both baseball and football at Columbia, where he was a first-team All-Ivy League selection — and broke Lou Gehrig's single-season RBI record at the school. His uncle Rex Peters had been an All-America baseball player at Lafayette and a first-round draft pick by the Chicago Cubs in 1971. The genetics were elite. The school was Duke.
Casey grew up in Red Bank, New Jersey, attending Red Bank Regional High School in nearby Little Silver. He was a 6'4" guard with a strong work ethic and elite academic credentials — the kind of player who can score a perfect 800 on the math section of the SAT and have Ivy League coaches calling. By the time he was a senior, he held offers from Yale and Dartmouth. The path was laid out: Ivy League scholarship, Ivy League education, Ivy League basketball.
He turned both schools down. He had wanted to go to Duke since he was a kid — his mother was an alum, the program had always been the dream — and he made the call most recruits never make: he chose to attend Duke as a regular student, hoping for a chance to walk on. Before he even arrived in Durham in fall 2007, he learned the basketball program had no roster spot for him. The coaching staff offered him something else: come work as a team manager. Towels, water bottles, equipment, scouting tape. The behind-the-scenes job that nobody outside the program ever sees.
Peters took it. "Personally, I'm pretty confident," he later told WRAL Sports. "I thought I'd be on the team. At practice I saw how those guys worked and that drove me."
For two seasons — 2007-08 and 2008-09 — Casey Peters was a Duke basketball student manager. He folded uniforms, set out water bottles, kept managers' time during scrimmages, and watched the practices that he would have given anything to be running through. In the offseason, he stayed late and worked out alone. He treated the manager job as the world's longest tryout. He was a 6'4" Duke student who walked into Cameron Indoor Stadium in his official manager polo and dreamed of trading it for a jersey.
In July 2009, two years after he had arrived in Durham as a student manager, Mike Krzyzewski called Casey Peters and told him there was a roster spot for him as a walk-on for the 2009-10 season. The student manager became a Blue Devil. He was issued jersey No. 53 — the kind of high number that signals a walk-on. He was the only player at Duke ever to go essentially "from water boy to the layup line," as FoxSports later put it.
At Duke
The 2009-10 Duke season was the one. Jon Scheyer at the point. Nolan Smith and Kyle Singler on the wings. Brian Zoubek and the Plumlees in the middle. Coach K's first national championship since 2001. The team that broke the long Duke title drought of the early 2000s and announced a new era of Blue Devils basketball. Casey Peters was on it.
He didn't see major minutes — walk-ons in their first year on the roster rarely do. But he got onto the floor during the championship season, and he got onto the floor during the championship run. He played in the ACC Tournament against Virginia Tech on March 12, 2010 — a tournament Duke won. He played in the NCAA Tournament against Hampton on March 18, 2010 — a tournament Duke won, defeating Butler in the title game on April 5, 2010 in Indianapolis. The kid who had spent two years as a manager was officially a 2010 NCAA Champion. He didn't take a shot all year. He didn't need to.
Most importantly, Peters had built the kind of relationships in the locker room that the box score never captures. His best friend on the team was Kyle Singler — the All-American forward who would be named the Most Outstanding Player of the 2010 Final Four. Singler and Peters became roommates. They worked out together late at night. Singler would later credit Peters for some of his success. "Casey's always around for that work that we want to put in," Singler told FoxSports. "And since he's my roommate, he's the one that I usually bring with me to the gym. He's always around, and it's good to have someone on the team that is willing to do that sort of work."
In the spring of 2010, Coach K rewarded Peters with what he called "a lot of money" — Krzyzewski's wry way of acknowledging the value of a Duke scholarship. "He's making a lot of money. His dad and mom better give him a good graduation present," Krzyzewski joked, before getting serious: "Casey is an amazingly hard worker and is a good player. He's a heck of a competitor and does a great job for us." Peters had earned a scholarship for his senior year, 2010-11.
The senior year was the lap of honor. Peters played in 17 career games across his two seasons on the roster, accumulated 4 total rebounds and 1 steal, and never attempted a shot in a college basketball game. His career-high in rebounds (2) came against Colgate on November 19, 2010. His one career steal came against Miami (Ohio) on November 16, 2010, in the second game of the O'Reilly Auto Parts CBE Classic. The most meaningful minute of his career came on March 2, 2011 — Senior Night against Clemson — when Coach K let him onto the floor to share the night with classmates Nolan Smith and Kyle Singler. "It's going to be a culmination of a lot of things," Peters said before the game. "Getting to share it with Kyle and Nolan will be pretty special."
There was a family element to that senior year too. Casey's younger sister Haley — a 2010 McDonald's All-American who could have gone anywhere in women's basketball — chose to follow her brother to Duke. She joined Joanne P. McCallie's Duke women's basketball team for the 2010-11 season and started seven games as a freshman. The Peters siblings became the first brother-sister tandem to play basketball at Duke. Casey claimed he hadn't tried to recruit her. He also said this when she committed: "We're best friends. It's been great having her around this year."
Peters earned Academic All-Conference honors in both 2010 and 2011. He graduated from Duke in May 2011 with a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy. The 800 SAT math score had been honored. The Coach K relationship had compounded. The walk-on years were over. The next career was about to begin.
After Duke
When asked in late 2010 what he might do after graduation, Peters had floated two options: coaching, or "something in investment banking." Investment banking won.
His first job out of Duke was as an Associate at Crestline Investors — a global alternative investment firm — from July 2011 to August 2012. From there he moved to Mercury Capital Advisors, a private equity placement agency, in 2012. He stayed at Mercury for nearly seven years across four titles: Analyst (2012-14), Associate (2014-15), Vice President (2017), and Principal (2018-19). In between Mercury stints he spent a year and a half as Assistant Vice President at Pinnacle Trust Partners, LLC (2015-16). The Mercury years were where Peters became an expert in the niche he would build a firm around: emerging private equity managers and independent sponsors — the smaller, hungrier funds operating in the lower middle market.
In March 2019, Peters founded Pacenote Capital, a boutique private equity placement and advisory firm headquartered in New York with offices in Austin, Charlotte, and Los Angeles. The firm focuses on what Peters calls "the emerging manager segment" — partnering with newer, hungry private equity sponsors who want to raise institutional capital but lack the legacy infrastructure of mega-funds. Pacenote's pitch is that smaller funds with concentrated portfolios can outperform massive funds with bloated portfolios — a thesis that has, by 2026, paid off impressively.
In the seven years since Peters founded Pacenote, the firm has grown to a team of five and has raised approximately $1.75 billion across 10 oversubscribed fund raises on behalf of seven general partner clients. The firm also operates Pacenote Equity Fund I, a roughly $90 million vehicle launched in 2024 that invests directly with independent sponsors on pre-fund opportunities — letting Pacenote put its own money where its placement business has its mouth. In February 2026, Pacenote closed Pacenote Equity Fund II, growing the LP base to 10 from the four original backers of Fund I.
In 2025, Peters was named to the 2024 Chief Investment Officer Knowledge Brokers list — an industry honor recognizing him among the leading capital allocators and advisors in private markets. He has also been a recurring guest on the Fund Flow podcast and has written extensively on the rise of "PE Democratization" — the trend of retail capital entering private markets through new digital platforms. Pacenote's published commentary, much of it under Peters's byline, has become a respected voice in the emerging-manager segment.
The Mike Krzyzewski joke from 2010 — "He's making a lot of money. His dad and mom better give him a good graduation present" — turned out to be prescient in a way Coach K probably didn't intend. Casey Peters did, in fact, end up making a lot of money. He just had to graduate first.
Where Is He Now
Peters is the Founder and Managing Partner of Pacenote Capital, based in Austin, Texas. As of early 2026, the firm has $1.75 billion raised across 10 oversubscribed fund raises and has closed Pacenote Equity Fund II following the 2024 close of Fund I. He was named to the Chief Investment Officer 2024 Knowledge Brokers list. He is married, with offices in New York, Austin, Charlotte, and Los Angeles. The kid from Red Bank who turned down Yale and Dartmouth to walk into Cameron Indoor Stadium with a manager's polo and a dream took the long path through the locker room — water boy, walk-on, scholarship player, NCAA Champion — and emerged at Duke graduation in May 2011 with two degrees, two Academic All-Conference honors, a championship ring, and a perfect 800 SAT math score still on his transcript.
The basketball career was a footnote. Seventeen career games. Zero shots attempted. One steal, four rebounds, no points. The career that followed — Crestline, Mercury, Pacenote — has produced the kind of compounding outcomes that Casey Peters's parents and uncles would recognize: the All-Ivy father, the Duke graduate mother, the All-America Cubs first-rounder uncle, the McDonald's All-American sister. The family that took elite athletic skill and matched it with elite academic and professional ambition has produced, in Casey, the most quintessentially Duke version of itself. Two years as a student manager. Two years as a player. One national championship in between. And now, sixteen years after he last wore jersey No. 53, $1.75 billion in private equity assets running through his firm's books.