"You get to brush up on your soft skills while picking up technical skills like financial modeling. The biggest lesson I learned from my time in investment banking was how to perform a wide variety of tasks efficiently. It also taught me how to ask the right questions when evaluating businesses. Working on deals honed my intellectual curiosity and sharpened my judgment when making investment decisions."
"I considered starting my career at a tech startup instead. What held me back was my own aversion to risk. I studied at the University of Minnesota, where few people would take the plunge into entrepreneurship. Investment banking was the safer and prestigious path to take. I figured that I didn't have any tangible skills to offer if I wanted to build or join a startup."
Varun Agarwal, 25, spent three years as an investment-banking analyst at Piper Sandler and JPMorgan before leaving JPMorgan to join OffDeal as a founding employee of an AI-native investment bank. Investment banking delivered strong pay, exposure to executives, and technical skills like financial modeling while teaching efficiency, business-evaluation questioning, intellectual curiosity, and investment judgment. Time in the Bay Area exposed him to startup culture, but personal aversion to risk and lack of tangible startup skills initially steered him to banking. Joining OffDeal was a calculated risk intended to accelerate practical dealmaking experience.
Read at Business Insider
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]