William Blair vs. Gleacher

WB for sure. I can't speak much for Gleacher, but I know they are having problems and Mr. Gleacher also recently left. I heard they are looking into strategic options such as selling themselves and it would be difficult to know how your chances of FT would be like here.

William Blair. I may be the minority, but I've never heard of Gleacher.

if exit opps are most important to you, from what i remember from my linkedin search, even though gleacher is struggling, their analysts last year still placed really well.

Sounds like you are weighing exit opps/name recognition (though I think everyone knows Blair these days) vs. cost of living/lifestyle/people & culture.

If you are deadset on larger deals and that is very important to you, then go with Gleacher. Otherwise, you seem like you would be more happy with WB on many counts.

definitely WB

A big factor that you have going for you is that you go to school on the east coast. Let's say you took WB since you like the people/culture much more than Gleacher but through that experience you realized you definitely wanted to be in NYC and not Chicago for FT. Since you go to an east coast target you will still have plenty of NYC IBs coming for OCR next year, and WB is definitely well known name these days so you don't need to worry much about that.

This would be completely different for someone who goes to a midwest school that primarily places in Chicago. If that person really wanted to be in NYC FT then it would probably make more sense for them to go with Gleacher SA and try to get a return offer, even if they liked the people/culture at WB more.

I don't know enough about Gleacher's deal flow to make a comparison, but one thing to keep in mind about WB is the type of work you'll be doing. The vast majority of WB deals are sell-side sponsor driven deals. This means you are essentially running a process for a sophisticated client. There are two downsides to this:

1) You do less modeling. The vast majority of your work is running the sell-side process (populating the data room, responding to client requests etc). 2) Your clients are former bankers, meaning they know their shit and expect you to work your ass off just like they did. They know the job, and they know what they can and should get out of you. I don't know what impact this has on analysts at WB, but I've heard many a banker say they hate working for sponsors because of this.

Also, I think WB is pretty concentrated in a few areas (HC Services, Consumer), not sure about Gleacher.

People at WB do seem great though.

Gleacher is higher risk higher reward. Shit could hit the fan at gleacher while you're there (layoffs, sell themselves and acquirer lays off bankers, etc) but currently gleacher places better than WB and it's in NYC which is extremely helpful for FT recruiting networking that you should be doing starting in july. That said WB is a great shop, just not as good as gleacher.

Gleacher if you want to be in NYC full-time.

I don't think it's reasonable to claim that Gleacher is a better firm than William Blair. Gleacher currently has a market cap of ~$82mn and is trading at $0.69. To put that valuation in perspective, Piper Jaffray's market cap is ~$631mn. William Blair is private, but its market cap would certainly be much larger than ~$82mn. Here are Gleacher's net income numbers from 2007 to 2012 (in dollars): -19.5mn, -17.3mn, 54.6mn, -16.0mn, -64.1mn, and -78mn. They have made money 1 out of the last 6 years. I'm not surprised nobody is interested in buying them, and I would bet most of the talented people there are looking for the door.

From what the people I work with told me about Gleacher is that I heard they didn't just drop the idea of selling themselves, its basically that nobody wanted to buy them. The IBD industry is getting smaller, why on earth would anybody want to buy them at this time. Not to mention their consecutive losses, which makes it worse.

Yikes! http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-20/gleacher-sees-revenue-crimped-…