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Good luck, everyone on here claims they got a 200k+ strat fin job right out of being an analyst. Maybe if you're set on SF you'll find one of these series C startups that are paying like 250k+ all-in...otherwise be prepared to take a huge paycut, particularly if you're in a HCOL. IB exits outside of PE/HF or adjacent front office high finance roles are not good.
I don't know how many times I have to say this but the pre-2022 finance job market is not coming back and I've urged people to not pursue the finance career path
Ok - if you’re advising people against pursuing a career in finance, what alternative paths would you suggest?
If they are lucky enough to still be in school and young, medicine.
Learn to sell
Medicine. The swinging dicks clinicians have grow bigger by the day. Their degrees are licenses to print cash
IB exits are just cooked in general. There are way too many people in IB desperate for exits and on top of that you have the same with tons of people over at MBB.
However, while the consultants are also affected by a slow-down in PE hiring they are not as hard hit as bankers. For almost any corporate role consulting > banking so I've seen plenty of friends from MBB landing nice exits in corp. strategy/dev. because thats like their bread and butter business.
See plenty of bankers struggling atm and realizing that there is not really a great exit path into corporates. For "finance" roles in particular why would you hire an analyst with 1.5-2y tenure when you can hire a Big 4 transaction advisory/corp fin manager with 5-6 years experience at the same (if not) lower pay?
Surprised you got any SBs on here tbh. People are in denial on this site about this. Either that or the Millenials/GenX haven’t found this post yet. They’ll wag their finger and tell you how grateful you should be despite them literally working in the age of finance where you just needed some decent work ethic to succeed.
The math is just lost on these guys. You have to compare the number of analysts coming out of school and into IB/ER/S&T programs every year versus the headcount for the number of decent exits out there. Once you exclude buy side roles from the picture, the math gets even worse with the limited number of decent seats across corporate or startups that will pay you anything decent. The math just doesn’t work anymore for the limited number of seats out there. May do an actual full post on this if people are interested.
I'm a 2nd year at a BB and just signed a fully remote job with a startup without taking a paycut ($125k base + $25-50k cash bonus + RSUs). If you know you wanna be in startups/tech/VC, I'd strongly consider expanding your search beyond just "strategic finance" roles. There are a lot of startup jobs that will take bankers outside of "finance" roles that I'd argue would set you up better for more diverse exits down the line. In the new AI wave, startups are simply not hiring junior finance people (and are actively trying to automate them) so those roles only really exist at maturing Series B/C+ companies.
I've gotten final round interviews for strategy/bizops, Chief of Staff, and growth/GTM roles at some T1 VC-backed startups - all they really care about is that you're smart, personable, and can stomach the "startup grind", which IB pre-qualifies for pretty well. Just takes some digging on Linkedin. YCombinator also has their own job board for all their portcos which i highly recommend as it landed me some interviews with cool companies.
Sure ur taking a risk by going early stage. Your equity might go to $0. But if you diligence the founders and are decently confident they'll at least be able to raise another venture round, being the 10th employee at an a16z backed company that makes it to series B in a few years > being the 100th employee at a later stage "safe" company imo. From a branding perspective, even if the business ultimately fizzles out you can very feasibly hop to a mid-level VC after as a fallback. Life's too short and the world is changing too fast not to take risks
Could I pm you?
Why isn't there a startups/entrepreneurship/tech forum on here?
This is very helpful, thanks! Can I PM you to chat further?
for sure
appreciate this
lol
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