How did you pick your exit opp?

So I will be starting in IB soon at a firm that has strong placement in PE, PC, HF, etc. Assuming that I don’t want to stay in IB for long term, how were you able to figure out if PE, PC, VC, GE, or HF was for you? I’m struggling in figuring out what I want to do after two years in IB and I know that that timeline for on cycle happens fast.

For those that were in my shoes, how did you figure out what you wanted to do as an exit opp? Were you open to whatever landed or did you have a specific reason for wanting to do one thing?

I know that there is a possibility that I stay in IB but I just want to make sure what my options are and it’s right decisions.

Thanks for the help!

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I personally struggled to figure it out early on as well - I would just emphasize that you're not entering a life long contract to any single industry/job.  Plenty of folks are gung ho about PE and end up hating it despite running at on-cycle extremely hard. 

Would suggest you a) focus on the analyst job at hand and try to soak up as much as possible, b) once you're fairly proficient, take careful note of what you like vs. don't like about the job (public market analyses, research, diligence, the rush / stress of a deal, sales-y pitch work, etc.), and c) talk to as many people as you can about their career paths (not just the guys in your bullpen). 

Would caveat that I know on-cycle is significantly accelerated vs. when I was an analyst so may be harder to balance - I don't think it's uncommon for many to take a third year (esp. with the pay bumps) and would stress that it's better to make an informed decision vs. blindly following the crowd. 

 

My .02 is that if you ultimately can't decide / want to preserve optionality, and you're cool with tech, do tech LBOs. Doing so will preserve optionality the longest if you are unable to make a firm decision in what you want to do next. You will have access to PE, VC, GE, HF. I don't know anything about PC so won't say. If you are doing some vanilla industrials PE it may be hard to move to GE or VC. But if you're at TB doing buyouts of large public tech cos, for sure you will get looks at GE and VC.

 

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