PE, IB & VC

Recruiting into private equity, investment banking, and venture capital — and how each business actually makes money

IB, PE, and VC get talked about as one blur when they're three different businesses sharing one seam — banking is the training ground private equity overwhelmingly recruits from, and almost nothing else. Covers investment banking as the best-documented, most standardized funnel of the three (the summer-to-full-time pipeline, real technical/behavioral interview content, and a real 2021 hours survey sourced honestly rather than romanticized or exaggerated); private equity's on-cycle recruiting gauntlet (the paper-LBO-to-modeling-test sequence, and the management-fee-plus-carry economics that explain why a PE firm optimizes for different outcomes than a hedge fund); and venture capital treated as a genuinely different business rather than 'PE but earlier' — fund economics and the power-law return distribution, why VC hiring has no on-cycle process at all, and a dedicated module on Y Combinator sourced directly from its own current deal terms and application mechanics rather than secondhand blog summaries. Closes with an honest three-way comparison of entry difficulty, compensation, and lifestyle. Seven modules, thirteen lessons — a widely-repeated '85% of analysts quit within two years' claim traced to an unsourced blog post and named rather than repeated.

54 min of reading