Barclays Menlo vs Lazard SF vs PWP SF
Grateful to have offers from these places - all 3 for their Tech groups. Would appreciate some insight to each of these groups, especially in terms of deal flow, culture, trajectory, and exits into both buy-side as well as CorpDev.
Would not include Barclays Menlo within the conversation if I were you. They just lost their 2 primary dealmakers.
Lazard's a good office but they're a bit less of a traditional IB office. They do a lot of consulting-like work on retainer for corporates and are effectively outsourced corp dev for those clients. They get on some pretty large deals but a large portion of your time there will be spent on one-off projects or case studies for those clients. The group also cross-staffs with the Boston office. Culture there is relatively good. The group definitely has strong exits, a bit more oriented towards growth (TCV, CVC), but some top buyout as well (Thoma, Silver Lake, Clearlake).
PWP SF is the smallest group out of the 3, but seems to be on growth mode (added Dunn this month as well as a partner last year that's based in LA but works with the SF team). Like Lazard, they're not as active on pitching and largely focus on covering repeat clients, with quite a lot of non-M&A strategic advisory work for large corporates. Deal flow is pretty good and is largely concentrated on software (very little exposure to semis and hardware), and the juniors there are also cross-staffed with the NY Tech and FinTech teams. Culture there is pretty chill, probably the best out of the 3. Exits historically have been good among buy-side (Sixth Street, EQT, Francisco), and the office seems to have strong corp dev placement as well (lots of FAANG and unicorns).
Overall, I'd probably go with Lazard.