Long-Term Banking in Chicago: Lincoln or WB?

TLDR; I don’t think you can go wrong with either. Here’s why I think that:

Lincoln - there is more complexity / hand-holding on smaller sell-sides but I think that becomes less “painful” as you move up. I lived with a Lincoln analyst during our analyst stints and we’re still good buddies. He learned a lot and it’s served him well in PE thus far.

Rob Brown was very nice to him which makes me feel good about their leadership (2nd hand fwiw). I also have a friend at Director/MD level in their Chicago office and if I was ~23 again, I’d work for him all day. / awesome guy.

He works hard (he can’t help it) but he’s really enjoyed Lincoln and built a nice life for himself. Similar story on a senior VP. Lincoln’s “Head of Talent” or something similar (plane WiFi stinks), is also a great person that moved to that role after some time in advisor. I did banking elsewhere but he went out of his way to be helpful to me during my IB recruiting and I’ll always remember that.

I’ve also actually liked their bankers I’ve met along the way when looking at one of their deals. Just good people.

For WB - my closest connections are ex-WB but have worked with many times both normal course sell-sides and engaged them as buy-side advisor a number of times on tech assets. Huge fan of the ex-WB folks culturally and professionally, some humble studs. They have good things to say about WB; something I have much less of when reflecting on my old bank.

What WB has done in tech is very impressive; they are GOOD. Their MDs seem cordial with their juniors; there was a tiny tiny mistake on a page and the junior on the call started apologizing and the MD jumped in and took full ownership. That’s how it should be done. Initials are JD - that man is a smoooth operator and thoughtful partner.

I’d consider targeting tech group at WB for your career if somewhat interested in tech. My investing career has been 40/60 time in industrials / tech. I think once you get up the learning curve in tech, the business models are much more simple than industrial business models. Of course, there are bunch of ways to drill down to make tech more complicated but getting to that level of granularity usually is not required for the bankers.

In industrials, I found that I needed to look at a lot more macro data, input cost curves, pricing curves, capacity related data from disparate sources, etc - which is all good stuff just a heavier burden. Just my 2c but think upside for WLB is higher in tech.

On both - comment above on WB having better exit ops is true but don’t think that really matters unless you want to more into PE. I think more frequent “hand-holding” with smaller clients at Lincoln could make exiting to smaller corp dev at a client a nice, steady plan B if you eventually want even more WLB.