Raine Group Recruiting

I know every bank under the sun says this, but as someone who really only wanted to work at Raine, I will say that what makes the firm stand out is absolutely its culture. I was only an SA, but these are some key things I noticed over my ten week experience with the firm. 

The most important thing is that it seems that the firm is specifically searching for the people that have a die-hard passion/interest for TMT. They could honestly care less about how well you can complete a paper LBO but the reason they care so much about industry interest is because they expect you to work hard but not because you have to or because an MD is breathing down your neck. The senior guys at Raine are ex-GS, MS, and UBS (from UBS glory days) and they realized that the best way to motivate analysts is to give them work they care about, not to micro-manage.

So, hours are long (definitely had quite a few long nights as an intern, handful of all-nighters or days on 1-2 hours sleep) but that's because deal flow is always strong and as an investing shop, there's a ton of research and scouting going on. It's hard for me to assess facetime since we were all interning remotely, but the firms seems overall very understanding that life exists outside of Powerpoint and Excel. This isn't Google where you can go home at 5:00PM but you're also not being grinded down like a block of cheese on a daily basis.

One last thing I will add is that the firm does not pitch. All work you do is important and although not every deal will close for obvious reasons, you are not wasting time ambulance-chasing, as Joe Ravitch calls it.