Where did your most competent associates come from?
Which bank & group typically send the most competent associates from a technical perspective? Which ones are usually the worst?
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Evercore
Any difference between M&A and Rx?
No. I’ve worked with several groups from Evr and all have been really good. That’s why I mention them. I’ve had standout ASO from many banks, there’s no real common theme. I’ve had multiple bad experiences with MS, but I don’t think that’s a rule necessarily, just the opposite experience to evr. The top 5 ASO I ever worked with, and this gives you a sense for how there isn’t a common theme necessarily:
Evr, evr, jpm, piper, Jeffries
Any RX (PJT, HL, PWP) and specialized selective boutiques (Q, Raine, LionTree, Dyal, M Klein)
No common themes. Much like college, we've found that top performers at any IB are generally better than mid-performers at strictly top banks (or top universities). In tech, we've seen those with prior mid-market tech experience hit the ground the fastest (WB, HW, etc.) but plenty of success with consultants (MBB but also LEK/Parthenon/etc.) and all sorts of mid-market/bulge bracket banks, so again, hard to draw any discernable patterns.
One trait I noticed is the GS people are amazing at managing the internal politics of a private equity fund...
Agree!!
Can only speak for tech / media PE since I've only worked at TMT funds.
1A: MS M&A, MS Menlo, GS TMT
1B: EVR M&A, GS FIG, MS M&C
Would say the absolute sharpest PE associates I know / worked with are generally from group 1A. Group 1B is also solid.
Have you noticed the drop in the quality of EVR M&A analysts that people on this site say?
Echo above good associates come from anywhere. Have also noticed that sometimes the MM bunch is able to hit the ground running from doing more relevant work/deals and having more responsibility as an analyst (at a MM fund).
EVR and MS M&A
Any EB
What is it about a group that might have correlation with quality of analysts? does it have to do with the type of work they do compared to "lower profile" groups or just the nature of students who get into these groups and how they are competitive / driven / have higher standards.
The top groups attract the top prospects, and it’s a self fulfilling cycle. Literally just selection bias
PJT RSSG / EVR RX. If you’ve worked with these guys you’ll know. It’s just that there’s very few of them, especially in buyout, so you likely haven’t unless at H&F / KKR / BX / APO.
GS TMT alone has a larger class than these two groups combined, let alone all of EVR M&A.
Evercore, MS, and sometimes specialized industry boutiques
Definitely ubs tech
How come MS M&A is seemingly over represented in this post? Not much discourse about this group other than being a “top group” that runs models etc. but that can be said about a lot of banks/groups
Networked with an alum (H/S/W) in the group during recruiting a few years ago. From what I could tell it was amount of responsibility given to analyst that was the difference maker. Yeah they run the model, but seemed like they were expected to do all the process stuff, associates would normally be responsible for on top of it. Also, made it sound like coverage was non-existent when they were working on deals so the analyst in the group get first take on nearly every work stream.
Said hours and culture were terrible.. weekends weren’t respected, unrealistic deadlines, toxic seniors, 100+ hour weeks, etc.
I.e. they got an EB experience?
It’s just one of the classic groups that WSO collectively gets a hard-on for. Most of the boutique coverage groups have analysts help run processes end-to-end - that’s an expectation. There’s just smaller class sizes and fewer alums to tout this.
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