Growth Equity vs. Investment Banking for Undergrads - Thoughts?
What are the pros/cons of interning and potentially starting a career in growth equity at a place like GA, TA, Insight, Summit vs. one of the larger investment banks?
Any word on what next steps from growth equity internships can look like?
If you can get a job from undergrad at one of these places congrats dude. They really just take a couple kids every year so the process is ultra competitive.
If you understand GE and find it interesting go for it 100%. Lots of focus on sourcing and less on modeling... A good friend of mine started at a big GE shop and he absolutely loved it. Culture tends to be better, work is more interesting (according to him), comp. differences are insignificant, hours are less.
Go IB if you are set on working in traditional PE LBOs. But it better be a top bank if you’re picking it over one of these GE places.
can you provide any more clarity on the comp? and do ya know if it varies a decent amount across the top shops?
deleted
Are you just randomly saying this or do you actually have an offer from vista and some bank?
The biggest drawback to taking GE is that your optionality becomes incredibly limited. I interned at a growth shop (not one of the ones mentioned), and found the biggest drawbacks to be an overemphasis on sourcing, and a lack of proper training. I love growth equity as an investment model, but hated my internship because of the bullshit work that growth shops make analysts do, and the difficulty I faced moving into more technical roles for FT.
So many growth shops take analysts to be cold-calling machines. Basically, you'll reach out to thousands of companies per year, and once they indicate interest you then push them up to an Associate/VP who takes over the modeling and diligence. Even if you're at a shop where you get to work on the modeling, it's inherently quite limited in growth equity, and valuations are based primarily off of comps and whatever random multipled the Partner on the deal team decides on. To summarize, technical experience = basically none.
Beyond that, it's so much more difficult to move to banking or traditional PE after starting in growth. After interning in growth and realizing I had no interest in doing cold-calls for the first two years of my career, I planned to move into IB. Now, I came from a target, had a good background/gpa, and networked my ass off (literally every waking minute when I wasn't at the office, and even sometimes when I was at the office lol). Even then, it was unbelievably difficult to get into banking FT. After an absurd amount of networking, I managed to land some interviews and super days, but I attribute that mainly to my target background tbh.
To summarize, a Growth Equity internship will provide very few hard skills and will largely close doors for your FT recruitment, beyond other growth shops, VC, and tech. If you want to get into growth in the future, tech IB, tech consulting, or MM PE is a great way to do that without limiting your optionality.
Feel free to PM me if you have more questions. Happy to help and shed light on my experience.
I interned at a place in the same ballpark as the ones you listed and, to be completely honest, I hated it and recruited for IB.
They basically had me and a bunch of other interns sitting in cubicles doing cold outreach all day long. I know it sounds pretty interesting (looking at companies, learning about what they do, evaluating them as an investment), but I found it mind-numbingly boring. 90% of your time will be spent combing through spread sheets and sending cold emails and cold calls that will rarely get a response. If you do find anything remotely interesting or get a response, an analyst or associate will step in and take over.
Even during the non-sourcing work, I found the tasks that were expected of me were very dull. There's a little bit of market research (which I found to be the most interesting part of the job), and for me personally there was 0 modeling at the intern/analyst. The seniors might do a little bit, but like other posters have mentioned, it's basically just taking the company's absurd revenue projections and multiplying them by some made up multiple.
While this post makes it sound like a hate growth equity, it's actually my career goal at this point. I just want to do my 2 years IB then go into GE. At the shop I was at, about 25% of analysts get promoted to associate, and that takes anywhere from 2-4 years, whereas I could come in after 2 years in IB as an associate. Also, while the firm wouldn't admit this, A2A promotes are generally more focused on sourcing even after a promotion, and all the modeling/market research/diligence stuff is done by the associates with an IB background. If you are at a halfway decent IB job, GE recruiting is supposedly relatively straight forward according to people I've talked to (much easier than PE), so I personally thought it was smarter to just go to IB, keep my options open, and recruit for GE if I still wanted it. Feel free to ask any other questions about my summer in GE
Went through this myself, chose the BB route for a few reasons. 1. Growth shops at the Analyst level will be highly sourcing oriented work. Even at GA, you will be doing mostly sourcing 2. Once you're in growth doing minority investments, it's harder to switch to other types of PE if you want. There's less mobility. 3. There's a slight chance you might not even want to be in finance in the long run. In that case, IB will be a better brand to exit to the outside corporate world and beyond.
Repellat consectetur facilis harum et doloremque et ad. Rerum et molestiae reiciendis qui facere est. Totam excepturi aspernatur nulla. Similique architecto commodi aut architecto. Molestias minus enim dolorum laborum. Repudiandae ut rerum libero adipisci id deleniti repudiandae.
Blanditiis qui dolor minus. Dolor rerum est nulla et ipsa sed. Ad ipsum qui et quas quis. Voluptatem omnis sit odit corporis ut eveniet minima. Sed amet dolor qui.
Iste at et error ea. Est est aut possimus quia corporis. Saepe voluptas voluptatem maiores occaecati. At consectetur dolorem qui ad totam ea incidunt.
Ipsa nobis voluptatem quis voluptatem corrupti rerum ipsam. Aut voluptas et velit nostrum aspernatur. Ullam est commodi non doloribus aut est. Iure occaecati facere architecto ut. Et quae omnis autem reiciendis laboriosam.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...