Tech IB - West vs. East coast

This might be a hot take but I believe that if you hold firm constant, quality of exits doesn’t change that much based on the city you’re based in. What actually changes (and gives the perception that exits are better from one office vs another) is the composition of people in each office. By composition, I’m referring to people’s backgrounds and what they’re interested in.

Let’s use Evercore as an example because this is WSO and WSO for some reason is obsessed with Evercore. It is a fact that there are a lot of people in Evercore NY who exit to megafund PE each year. That’s great, but I doubt many people from Evercore Menlo want to work in traditional PE. It’s just like few people from Evercore NY want to go into VC right out of banking. Have there been cases where people from Evercore Menlo exit to megafund PE and Evercore NY exit to VC? Of course. Both cases are rare as a percentage of analyst classes, though. Same can be said for the other firms. I don’t think people at GS TMT SF would be thrilled at the prospect of working at Apollo post banking. However, with the right background (school, GPA, and non-banking experiences), megafund PE or VC should be possible from either NY and SF because your background doesn’t change depending on if you’re in SF or NY. There’s a lot of confounding variables that make simplistic associations like GS TMT NY = better exits inaccurate.

I will say, while I don’t think location matters that much, I think the group you’re in matters. This is where SF vs NY truly makes a difference as there will be differences in exits due to the sector you cover. Evercore and BofA don’t have generalist programs, but be careful about places like Centerview NY if your end goal is tech related finance. If you don’t like tech finance idk why you’re asking this question in the first place so I’m assuming you do.

Think about it this way:

• If you want to cover tech at PE, NY is better
• If you want to cover tech at hedge fund, NY is better
• If you want to cover tech at VC, SF is better
• If you want to cover tech at growth equity, SF is better
• If you want tech corporate exits, location doesn’t matter

Remember, “better exits” is in the eye of the beholder, so you need to figure out what you want vs what’s popular on WSO.

As for culture, I’ll leave that to people who actually work at the above banks. However, in general SF groups are sweatier than their east coast counterparts across the board, but this doesn’t mean they have a worse culture. Not sure if that’s still the case given market conditions, though. Split is usually hardware/fintech/media/telecom NY and software/internet/semis SF.