MS, GS, Qatalyst Tech Groups
Does anyone have some newer thoughts on MS Menlo, QP and GS TMT in the bay area? What caliber of talent do these two groups typically attract? If you're interested in tech to an extent, but your primary interest is investing, what are the pros and cons of these groups? Understand this is a very general question, but go to school on the west coast and am thinking about the pros and cons of options in NYC and SF.
These are all fantastic groups, but they are definitely not "all doors open" places. The reason has nothing to do with the firm or the group -- everyone knows these are hard jobs to get. It's more the nature of work as a tech banker. You simply don't get much exposure to debt and cash flows. If you go to one of these groups, you'll definitely wind up somewhere good but it will most likely have a tech angle to it. It'll be pretty hard making the transition to a non-tech exit where there is a lot of emphasis on the balance sheet.
I have a generalist M&A background and am in non-tech l/s equity now. You should be good for l/s equity given that every large fund invests heavily in TMT and your industry experience would be highly relevant for that. You will get some exposure to debt in tech, but it will be light compared to someone coming from a restructuring group, M&A group, or traditional coverage group like media/telecom, industrials, etc. I think that tech banking is very exciting to work in, but I personally don't think it provides the best foundation to learn traditional finance. I tend to advise people to do something more technical for their first job, like M&A or restructuring, to learn the hard skills upfront.
To present the other side to this - I worked in tech banking and spent my time almost exclusively on highly levered M&A transactions, mostly with strategics but including a few LBOs. The high profile, high growth tech companies with massive cash balances rarely pursue M&A of any serious scale (mostly just acquihires with a few exceptions), and a huge amount of M&A volume has been driven by waves of large-cap and mid-cap consolidation across hardware and enterprise software (mostly legacy software companies trying to annex high-growth SaaS businesses), most of which have been financed, at least in some portion, with debt. The best banking groups (Q, MS, GS, etc.) work almost exclusively in this space, so the analysts will get plenty of high quality exposure to debt products.
I don't really know how tech banking would directly compare against the groups you listed, although I don't believe I was behind at all when it came to the technical aspects of debt modeling, especially from an interview perspective (excluding distressed/bankruptcy modeling, which I had zero exposure to).