BB TMT IB vs MBB for Software Entrepreneurship

Goal is to eventually start a software company. I currently have an offer from a strong BB TMT IB team, but I’m debating whether to recruit for MBB full-time instead.

MBB seems to offer more operational/strategic experience that might translate better to building a company from scratch - but the TMT position would help me understand the actual sector more than being a generalist consultant.

For those who’ve gone down either path (or exited into startups), which background is actually more helpful for entrepreneurship in software - curious how people think about this tradeoff?

Note: have a CS background, so that is not a barrier to eventually building anything

11 Comments
 

Associate 2 in IB-M&A

What do you think about the view that software is dead because of AI

I think people vastly underestimate how hard it is to build an actual software product that is secure, stable, scalable, and has a great and differentiated user experience - and then actually get it into the hands of users.

LLMs will definitely disrupt some verticals where new entrants can provide AI-native experiences that are actually differentiated in a useful way from the incumbents, but others are just not going to be disrupted as much. 

One example is classifieds, I think incumbents who have the proprietary data can relatively easily overlay AI-powered search over their existing data and retain the massive moat they have.

 

wuandale33

Can't go wrong with either but I would personally go for BB TMT

Any particular reason? Or just more interested in finance specifically?

 
Most Helpful

IB, the consulting problems you fix in the MBB for enterprise companies are not applicable to the operational problems you’d need to solve going 0-1.

IB teaches you the language of finance, market understanding, capital raising and negotiation. Do not be fooled, finance is the lifeblood to any successful companies and many promising technical startups kill themselves primarily because they don’t understand the relationship between optimal capital intake and ability to generate returns at every stage of a company lifecycle. Every startup raising $500M+ on hubris valuations they could never grow into is basically VC abuse at this point and starting in IB ensures you know your problems will be isolated to execution risk rather than execution AND financing risk.

 

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