No buy-side experience before H/S/W MBA?

Why wouldn't you just make sure your second job is an investing role? If you're smart (or connected) enough to get a strong job out of college, that should also apply to any next job which would be the role you leave for business school.

One easy path would be to work your hardest to focus on tech, media, or healthcare in your ECM job. That way you ideally develop a set of valuable relationships, and at minimum, enough experience to use as talking points to help you interview for a venture capital or growth equity role.

You could easily recruit for traditional West Coast firms, but if you felt you could speak to it more easily, there's so many U.S. firms that like APAC and invest in the region either out of a dedicated fund or a commingled flagship fund that does U.S. deals as well.

Keep your GSB acceptance on your resume. Tech investors will value that, it means you're going to the school that's perceived as the hotbed of all things investable. 

Do two years in the first role.

In the first year, focus solely on developing a primary thesis (e.g. infrastructure for the creator economy, institutional adoption of crypto, telehealth and digital therapeutics, whatever) and get smart on it.

By smart I mean you should know every incumbent working on an initiative related to your thesis, all the late-stage well-funded companies who already own a chunk of the space, and the exciting new startups who have raised a seed or A or B and are poised for breakout growth - and ideally have spoken to one or more people at each of them such that you have an informed sense of whether or not the company is smart about the market, what holes exist in their strategy, how the team might be stronger (missing a certain skill-set or know-how), and so on.

In the second year, begin your networking campaign to meet all the investors who cover the space related to your thesis. Make a matrix:

• the humans at the big generalist names (A16Z, Kleiner, Sequoia, etc.) who focus on the relevant space
• the humans at the generalist names the same size but less flashy of a brand name (Norwest, Canaan, Sapphire, etc.) who focus ...
• the firms who focus on a specific stage, are smaller, but punch well (First Round, Initialized, etc.)
• the firms who care less about stage and more about a theme (if you picked the creator economy, Li Jin at Atelier)
• and so forth

If you spent the better part of a year just adding investors to the ongoing mix of conversations you started with operators and founders relevant to your lane, you would have a whole bunch of conversations going simultaneously where you'd be surprised how organically job opportunities come up. 

You: "Well, I'm coming up on the end of my analyst stint in six months. It's been really interesting learning so much about X, I'm about to put my thinking hat on and figure out what's smartest to do next."

Them: "Well, I've enjoyed our conversations so much. Can I introduce you to some of the other people on our team? You'd fit so well here!"

(or): "I have to introduce you to Y. I meant to do it last month but I forgot, we saw his Series B but didn't win the deal. He's super smart, you'd get along with him well, and it's an amazing company."

The point here is you can easily create any narrative you want, any network you want, any opportunity you want. The best jobs don't come from a linear "I have to apply here now" approach. They come as a natural evolution of you pursuing and spending time on the things you find most interesting.

You have amazing b-school acceptances. It takes a lot of the pressure off. If you're interested in any kind of role related to new economy industries after school, whether as an operator or investor, it's pretty easy to get yourself a role for before school that will set you up for after.

Good luck, and congratulations.