William Blair has been getting some great reviews and sentiment lately on this site. How does insight into performance and environment shape up compared to some of the reviews a year ago when the market was hot?
Does anyone think they are approaching closer to EB status on deals, with many still undisclosed, or is that not the case, given a resilient mid-market software market?
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At a competitor bank so here’s my opinion -
They kill mid-market, PE backed software deals. If you have some obscure enterprise software business worth $500M-$2B, they run the market and are probably the best banker in this space. They have great sponsor relationships (look at tombstones on their site).
They don’t do as much of the VC-backed high flyers (that’s much Qatalyst, GS, MS) and are not as good at anything other than sell-side deals to PE firms. Focus is very much on boring, steady growing, profitable firms.
At the low end of the market, they’re competing with HW, RJ, HL, etc. At the higher end they’re definitely competing with (and sometimes winning) vs those top BBs and EBs. Jeff and Gugg big competitors as well. They’ve been doing this for a while and do a lot of repeat business, and the massive tech tailwinds are helping a ton - my bank has lost a few mandates where WB sold the company to a sponsor for a smaller number, and then they win the mandate selling them again for $1b+
It’s a great analyst experience given deals quantity (have friends there) and there are decent analyst protections and good culture. I obviously would take Q/GS/MS/EBs etc over WB, but think their tech group is a really great place to be if you aren’t at one of those top tech banks
Exit opps have lagged the reputation (WB analysts historically haven’t gotten the same looks as say, a JEF analyst even though deal quality is very similar), but heard recent placements have been way better (some really solid UMM exits on top of the usual MM list)
This is really accurate. Only thing I would add, I was in the group—exits I have found were more interest driven versus due to a bias in the market. For reference, of my class I think about half didn’t recruit either staying at the bank or bugging out of the industry entirely. Those that did recruit seemed to land just fine with insight, marlin, GTCR, AKKR, WCAS, Sumeru, turn/river being recent exits. One of my biggest shocks was the amount of great analysts that seem to leave the industry for startups or more low key roles/ corp strat or finance. I think because the analyst experience is, as you correctly mentioned, largely doing sell-sides for obscure $400m-$2B tech companies, many analysts get enamored with going to a startup and chose that route instead of recruiting. This is also combined with what I would describe as non-existent pressure to recruit. Meaning, I didn’t hear anyone talk about recruiting and while it wasn’t discouraged, you were strongly encouraged to stay on as an associate and those that did recruit, did so secretly.
This contrasts with other firms where it seems like some analysts get destaffed functionally during on-cycle and MD’s strongly encourage exits.
Personal take, almost no one I know who exited that group regrets the experience or had difficulty exiting, so it’s a job you should take if you can get it.