← Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Breaking Into Investment Banking and Private Equity with Max Adams of Wall Street Mastermind 4-7-26
00:26:46
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- [00:00]
A
This is the story of the 1. As a maintenance tech at a university, he knows ordering from multiple suppliers takes time away from keeping their arena up and running. That's why he counts on Grainger to get everything he needs, from lighting and H vac parts to plumbing supplies, all in one place. And with fast, dependable delivery, he's stocked and ready for the next tip off. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [00:30]
B
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity in the Becker Business Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by an entrepreneur, a brilliant person who talks about how people start to get themselves prepared to get into Wall street, to get into investment banking, analysts, private equity positions, and a lot more. We're joined today by Max Adams. Max is the head coach at Wall Street Mastermind. And Max, let me start off by asking you to introduce yourself and tell us how you got into this and about your career and what you're doing.
- [01:01]
C
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me on today. Really excited to talk. So, my name is Max Adams and I'm the head coach at Wall Street Mastermind, which is basically just a fancy way of saying that I help students land finance jobs. Of course, in order to be qualified to do that, I had to be in the industry myself. So I spent my banking years at Lazard and Catalyst in their tech groups and then did private equity at Vector Capital before most recently doing a joint degree at Stanford and Harvard for grad school. And I realized that although I really loved the finance side, I loved helping students get into into the industry even more. I remember back while I was in banking, my staffer used to get mad at me for taking so many student calls and I figured that was a good sign that I should do this full time.
- [01:42]
B
I love that. And tell us about the joint degree that you're doing now and about undergraduate and sort of your growth from undergraduate to doing joint degree now to having worked at Lazard and Catalyst Vector, fantastic firms. Lazard, when I was growing up, was the absolute top name in investment banking and remains a fantastic, fantastic firm, as are the other firms. But talk about your undergraduate and the joint degree that you're doing now.
- [02:08]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So starting out came from byu, which is, I would say, a semi target school for finance. And so when I work with students from semi target schools, I always say that it's possible, but nobody's going to come and hand you a job on Wall street on a platter. And so you have to be twice as good as the person coming from Wharton or Stern or something like that, and also more prepared on the technicals, more well networked and really just hustle. And so that definitely was a defining experience for me is coming out of a semi target school, hustling my way into investment banking. Coming from a family that knew nothing about finance. In fact, I like to joke that when I first told my parents I was going to investment banking, they were like, oh Max, you're going to be a teller, that's awesome. You're going to go work at the local bank branch. And although that's a great career, it's obviously just a very different thing. And so from there I knew that I wanted to give back. And so as soon as I hit the desk at Lazard, which is a great firm like you mentioned, I was immediately like helping with the interview processes and coaching underclassmen on how to break into the industry and things like that. And so over the past decade or so, I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of students personally. And when I went back to grad school doing an MBA at Stanford and an MPA at the Harvard Kennedy School, I was able to really take that into a larger form and get a little entrepreneurial with doing it as a full time job. And so that brings me to today.
- [03:33]
B
That's fantastic. You talk about Brigham Young University, one of the great, great schools in the country, and you're probably exactly right. It's probably in terms of top finance programs, a fantastic school, brilliant students, great work ethic, but also not one. It's, it's like almost like Texas A and M, University of Illinois, that not as much the investment banks, the big accounting firms, yes, investment banks, not as much coming to interview. So if you want to get into that track, you've got to find a way to get into that track and find a way to network, to be noticed and so forth. And probably have to do really well at BYU to get into those spots and show that you've got the right background to be an investment banking analyst and so forth. When people are students, young professionals, whether they're at a BYU or they're at a Wharton, what are some of the things they should be doing now to get themselves ready to get them here to be on that track. And the thing that I find amazing is that track starts so early in college too. Doesn't it? Talk about that too?
- [04:35]
C
Yeah, you're totally right. The track starts way earlier than most people believe. And so especially when I'm Talking with parents who like, you know, got into finance back in the 90s, early 2000s or 80s, 80s or something like that, they're like, oh, well, you just got to go to a good school and submit a resume in your junior year and you'll, you'll get a job. No, no, no, no. That's not how it works today. And so believe it or not, a lot of most of the students we work with are freshmen or even seniors in high school. And so they're preparing during their freshman years for the recruiting cycle that happens in the fall of sophomore year for an internship after their junior year. It's absolutely crazy. It's so fast. And, and it means you have to be really prepared on two things. And so the day you set foot on campus as an undergraduate, you have to immediately start networking. And so one of the things I love doing at Wall Street Mastermind is I love coaching people on how to systematically reach out to people and build relationships instead of just sending out a bunch of AI slop emails. And then the second thing that they really have to do is start building the resume. And so you know this as well as I do, Scott, but basically there's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem with experience where you can't get an internship. UN have experience and you can't get experience unless you have an internship. And so there's this little bit of a vicious cycle that you have to break out of by getting stepping stone internships at like search funds, small venture capital firms, small PE firms. And that's something that we also really help you do to make sure that your resume is going to be competitive when you apply.
- [06:01]
B
Fantastic. When I talk to somebody who's already a junior or senior who didn't land an investment banking internship early, are they sort of shot for an investment banking career or there's still opportunities? You know, I always think like, if you're coming to me when you're a junior or senior in college, the big bolts firms you've already lost out on, the mid sized firms are sort of all over the board in terms of what they're doing, depending on deal flow and so forth. But is there still hope to have a great investment banking career, great private equity career, if you didn't get started as a freshman, there must be. But, but you face different challenges, don't you?
- [06:37]
C
Absolutely. And it's, it's always harder, but never impossible is the way I describe it. And so I'm one of those optimists who like, I love to help students and if there's someone who's really determined and they just have a weird profile, they're, you know, already graduated, low gpa, bad school, like I don't care. I love to help them if they're determined. You can usually find a way, but it gets harder. And so what I usually do when I'm working with juniors and seniors and people who've already graduated, as I say there's, there's two options that you have left from here. The first is to re recruit after the junior summer internship. And this is like a little known cycle within investment banking and private equity recruiting where a lot of the jobs come from the internship, like 80 or 90%. But there's a little bit of liquidity in the hiring market after the junior summer internship where you get to play this fun game of musical chairs for two or three weeks where a couple of the banks say, hey, we need to like hire someone else or we didn't give return offers and therefore we've got to get a little bit. The second path that I help students with once they're already graduated or something like that is the post graduation lateral or MBA route. And so if they lateral, it's basically like just get them the best finance job that they can and then build those relationships, try and network and hustle your way in and convince someone to take a shot on you at a regional boutique bank or go back and get an mba, do the traditional MBA on cycle recruiting. And that's also hard, but a little bit easier than trying to break in without that academic platform and that good old school email.
- [08:02]
B
But 100 but that's really, it becomes a lateral effort to go back to school, to then reposition yourself to pivot into the career you want to pivot into. And even so, some people might not understand, but even in doing that, they still got to bulk up on some of their technical skills, some of their, what were spreadsheet skills and other types of analytical skills. Because just having a great MBA from a great school might not do it if you haven't backed it up with some of those technical skills too. Is that, is that a fair statement?
- [08:28]
C
That's totally fair because at the end of the day when you're working on billion dollar deals, you've got to be absolutely sharp on your technicals regardless of how good of a school you come from. And so just to like, you know, give you, give you an example of this, one of the first deals that I worked on at Lazard was a $30 billion plus software buyout. And this is one of the largest deals that ever occurred in that time. And everybody was 100% focused on every single number being correct. And so I thought I was like pretty good at my technicals, but they just dragged me over the coals back and forth to make sure that everything was like absolutely stellar. And I don't think they'd care if he came from Harvard or if he came from the local community college. They need to make sure on a deal of that scale that everything is absolutely perfect. And so one of the ways that we help differentiate our candidates is by teaching them technicals beyond just memorization. Because you may know this, Scott, but a lot of students when they do investment banking recruiting, they just go and memorize answers to 400 common questions or something like that. And that's fine, but it's not what actually gets you an edge in recruiting. And it doesn't work as soon as they push a level deeper than that.
- [09:36]
B
Right.
- [09:36]
C
So you got to teach the concepts
- [09:39]
B
and talk about what that you've mentioned something, that the technical interview today, what are those technical interviews look like today? And then we'll come back again to networking in a second and strategies in a second. But what is the technical. I mean, when my daughter went through the technical interviewing for the big for accounting firms, consulting divisions, I was sort of blown away at what the technical interviews look like today and investment banking through that, much more challenging, that much deeper. But talk a little bit about what those technical interviews look like today.
- [10:09]
C
Yeah, you're totally correct that the technical interviews are getting harder over time because basically there is, I would say it's almost like graded inflation, but like question difficulty inflation, where 10 years ago you could get away by just answering basic questions about accounting and valuation. Walk me through a dcf. How do the three statements interconnect? That sort of stuff. But as these banks have gotten so much more competitive, they've had to get a lot more, a lot fiercer in their actual winnowing out of candidates. And so just to give you a stat on this, do you any guesses what the acceptance rate at Goldman Sachs was a decade ago? Scott?
- [10:46]
B
You know, I'm going to guess 6% in that it's less than 1% today. But you'll tell me if I'm anywhere near. Right?
- [10:54]
C
Almost spot on. In fact, I'm actually very impressed. So it was about 5% back in 2014 and last year was 0.7.
- [11:01]
B
Right. So amazing.
- [11:02]
C
It's gotten like 80% harder. And so what we're finding in our technical Interviews is like the hardest technical questions that I asked as a technical interviewer at Catalyst, which is like notoriously difficult on technicals. That's kind of average for like a good bulge bracket or elite boutique today. And so it's just the curve is going up and part of that is driven by the fact that like students are able to use AI tools to just learn faster and learn more than they used to. So the bar just gets higher.
- [11:28]
B
Sheer intellectual power horsepower versus great personal skills. We always look at sometimes in these professional careers, someone who's great in their first few years might be really task oriented, really able to get things done. But the longer term career is that combination of great technical talent plus whether it's networking skills, personal skills and so forth. How do you sort of look at advising someone, well, to get in the door and then what does longer term success look like for some people?
- [12:02]
C
This is an excellent question and particularly relevant in 2026. And the reason I say that is because I'm sure you've been following all the hype around AI. And this is something that I hear continuously about from a lot of my students where they're like, is how's this job going to change? How's my role going to change? And my personal thesis, having seen hundreds of students recruit for this industry and having been in the industry, is that a lot of the technical skills are going to be a little bit more commoditized than they used to be. And that's not to say that you can't be whip smart and that you, that you like don't need to know numbers, you don't need to have known how to build models like you absolutely do. But your core day to day job as an analyst, you're not going to need to probably calculate the whack for too much longer. You're going to need to check the WAC and make sure that makes sense, but you're not going to need to build it from scratch. And so that means that the core part of your job over time is going to be a sales job. You've got to convince companies to trust you.
- [12:53]
B
Yes, more and more those calculations are done through AI and otherwise. How do banks judge whether somebody's got the intellectual rigor to connect dots? Because at the end of the day, be able to push something out through ChatGPT, through Quad, through whatever it is, but not being able to really deeply understand it is gonna, is gonna make you look foolish at some point if you don't really understand what you push. Like you mentioned, if you look at an ROI stat or some stat or whatever the ratio is you're talking about. If you can't sort of gut check, yeah, that makes sense or not, then you're quickly exposed as not really being very deep or intellectual rigor. But your point on this, having to combine that influence rigor with sales process, that ability to sell, that ability to connect dots, connect people and so forth. Talk a bit about that in the context of networking, both to get a job and when you get a job. Talk a bit about like you talked about, you know, people send out AI slop to thousands of people and in some ways that in that inflates or depresses these stats on acceptance rates. Because if everybody could apply to whatever school or whatever job because they've made it so easy to apply. Yeah, that means a lot of people are applying that probably shouldn't have applied or maybe wouldn't applied years ago. And at the same time there's, you know, investment banking right now the market's not going crazy. The deal market's a little bit complicated. The big deals are getting done small, mid sized deals are slower. So there's only so many spots for people talk about networking effectively because we see the whole mix of this. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on what does effective networking feel like and look like.
- [14:35]
C
Mm, yeah, well, and this is something that is shifting like as we speak. And so six months ago if you asked me, I would have said, hey, like none of the AI tools are good enough to like effectively automate outreach at scale. And so I would have said you need to be sending dozens of emails a day, but they need to be customized and they need to have a good hook and they need to be like focused on the other person and they need to have a clear ask and they need to be less than like 10 sentences long or something like that. And so there's a lot of techniques that I, you know, I regularly teach webinars about and like you can probably find my recording of that online easily. But there are a lot of techniques to like increase the response rates and get people to like really want to respond to them. But at the end of the day today the tools have gone good enough that they can do 80% of the work for you. And so I would say that we're entering an era of mass customization at scale where you still need to, of course, quality control and you still need to like make sure that all the information is correct because it hallucinates a lot. A lot of these tools but they are good enough to, I would say, get a first draft out the door and help you automate a lot of the scale. And so with our students today, for better, for worse, I'm a advising a lot of them to turn to a mass outreach approach where it's both customized, both high quality, but also extreme volume. And so it's unfortunate for the bankers because they're just going to get hundreds of really quality emails in their inboxes and they're already flooded with them. And so that sort of brings me to the next point, which is a lot of networking these days. It really can be done best in person. And so in some ways the technology is shifting us back into a more old school world where I'm advising students no longer to just send emails, but also to literally fly out to San Francisco or New York, shop, show up in the lobby of a bank and
- [16:09]
B
shake people's hands and talk about that. Because yes, everything moves towards this technology and AI and everything else. You talk about candidates adapting. And we see this because one of the businesses we're in is of course the media business. And one part of it is big events. And big events are very, very, very busy right now because people very much want that hand to hand discussions, that individual meeting people in person. And there's only so much you could do electronically. Particularly, as you say, if somebody's getting overwhelmed with emails. Well then how do you stand out in the crowd without having met that person, direct message to that person. How important is persistence today? And how do you judge a candidate or advise a candidate on persistence versus annoying? Because one of the things you have, and so many people spent so much time behind the screenshots that their actual desire to actually do that next step, which is actually talk to somebody or go see somebody or reach out directly, feels like a very binary effort. It's a win loss effort and you get rejected. But how do you advise people on persistence versus in that right balance of persistence versus oh my God, am I annoying? But, but, but if you're persistent and have the right background and the right stats, how do you sort of advise somebody there?
- [17:28]
C
Yeah, so there's, there's two principles at play here because it's a very fine line between hey, I'm annoying the heck out of you because I just reached out to you 12 times and hey, this kid is showing grit. I'm going to talk with them. And so the two principles at play here are first off, customization and second off, value. And so on the customization side of things, like, you really can't be sending the same email to a hundred different people. Like, that's just going to make you look bad. It's going to come back to bite you at some point. And the worst thing that you want if you're trying to get one of these jobs is everyone to just, like, circle up around the office and be like, oh, did you all just get an email from Max, too?
- [17:59]
B
Oh, my God.
- [18:00]
C
Okay, it's the same email. And so the customization is key, and the second is value. And you might say, well, okay, like, but what value does like, as someone looking for a job, have to provide to someone who has a job? And I'll give you an example. So last week I received an email, and the body of the email, it was like, you know, trying to. Trying to, like, get me to hop on a call with them or whatever. But at the top of the email, they had a picture of Mount Rushmore with my face photoshopped onto it. And they were like, you know, Max, you belong up there because of X, Y, Z reason. And that made me laugh. Like, I straight up chuckled as I saw that email. And I was like, okay, fine, whatever. I'll read your message. I'll respond to it. Because you just, like, lightened my day. You had a good chance. And obviously you don't want to just be spamming people with memes out there, but finding some way as a candidate to, like, either share a perspective on a deal or, like, you know, add a little bit of, like, flattery or like a compliment about their career or something that can really brighten people's days and get them to want to connect with you.
- [18:59]
B
No, I think. So important, though, in this personalization concept. So important. You're personalizing about you, but also, like you just mentioned there, you're. You're personalizing not about you, but about your audience, about the person you're talking to, you know, you mean, we all get hit with a million different emails, but there's a certain percentage of them that actually grab you that, oh, my God, I want to take that call, that I want to talk to this person. And obviously you're very tailed to this because it's very much similar. Like, I reached out to you reach out to me, or seeing what we do. And I really wanted to talk to you because what you're doing is fascinating and the way you handle yourself is so important. Let me ask you that, because you've got this great set of personal skills. How you handle yourself, how you talk to people, how you Communicate with people is just very, very becoming. How important is that in a person that they handle themselves in a way that's like in the old days in, you know, I went to Harvard Law School for better or for worse. But. But people coming out of Harvard, some of them were so aggressive in how they dealt with people. And some of those people that were so aggressive, been so successful, so I can't knock it. But. But how important is it in that right balance of aggressive versus your own personal style, your own authenticity, and hitting it down the middle so that you're showing that grit, you're showing that drive, you're showing that persistence, but it fits you comfortably. And how do you manage that in terms of dealing with. You've obviously got your own set of personal skills that you handle incredibly well. But how do you coach people on some of that?
- [20:27]
C
I really appreciate you're making me blush over here, but what I would say is I think it can work both ways. And working in finance, I've obviously seen both. I've worked with a lot of sharks that they go hard, they push hard, they do incredible deals, and they make a ton of money and provide a ton of value. And I've seen a little bit less in finance of people who are, I would say, a little less sharp elbow lead with value, and still, like, aggressive and still intelligent, but also friendly and kind. And so that's a little bit more authentic to, like, who I want to be and my personality. And so one of the pieces of advice I have to give to my students is just to say, like, what is authentic to you? Like, who are you as a person? How do you interact with people outside of work? And what's the closest sort of professional version of that that we can bring? And then the second thing that we do is we help them message. Because at the end of the day, everything that you're doing in terms of selling yourself, it's storytelling. It's coming up with a Persona of who you are and trying to communicate that effectively with other people. And so I'll sit down with a lot of our students from day one, and they'll tell me about their background. And, you know, we're working with students who, some of them are just really, really talented. Like, some of them are, you know, professional violinists, or they're also, like, doing the NHL hockey on the side of things. And they also want to get into banking. So I'm like, okay, we've got building blocks for a story here. How do we communicate who you are in a way that's authentic in a way that, like, is compelling to people saying, oh, I want to hire the guy who picked himself up off the ice 100 times because I know that he's going to do the same thing at my investment bank. And then communicating that in a way that's comfortable and authentic. Whether that's a little bit more of the sharp, sharp elbowed, hard charging approach or a little bit more relaxed and friendly.
- [22:02]
B
I'm going to give you two final questions next. I love that, you know, I've had people that have come to me that had, that were validatory in their class or straight A students or got a 1600 on their SAT. And if I get a 1600 on my SAT, it's for better or for worse. It's going right at the top of the resume. It's going someplace where somebody's going to notice it because it stands out that you're that bright. But how important is it to build a story about your candidacy but keeping it simple enough, here's three things I want you to know. Really smart, really hard working. I really mentioned, in this business, I really love what you do or whatever it is. How important is it to simplify down your story to, you know, I've seen this horrendous career advice where you gotta have 30 things on your resume. And of course, from a hiring standpoint, I'd much rather know three to five things about a person. But that shows some depth, that shows some stick with itness, some intelligence. How important is it to build that, to turn that story of the 30 things somebody's done in the background into the core things that are most important to what they're trying to accomplish?
- [23:08]
C
I love it. I'm sure you've heard the Mark Twain quote that it's like, if I had a little bit longer time, I would have written a shorter letter.
- [23:14]
B
That's 100%.
- [23:15]
C
The simplicity is at the core of everything we're trying to do, because people are going to remember maybe one or two things about you after you walk out of an interview. You got to make sure they're the right things. And so you've probably heard of an elevator pitch. I always tell my students about an elevator door pitch, which is like, if you don't even get on the elevator and the door closes, I want that one sentence that comes out of your mouth to tell them everything they need to know. And so when I'm working with students on their stories, I recommend that they just lead with value. Just like, bottom line up front, stick what they're trying to say at the first sentence. And so, for example, I would say, if I were recruiting today, I'd say, hey, I'm Max. I'm a student at byu looking to break into technology investment banking. I'm excited to talk with Lazard because you do some of the best tech deals in the industry. Right?
- [23:54]
B
I love that. I love that. And it's simple and to the point. I'm a great student at byu. I do this. I'm interested in this. This is what you do. That's why I want to be there.
- [24:02]
C
Exactly, yeah. Who you are, what you're doing, and, like, why it connects to them. And that last piece is really important because a lot of people, they forget to tie it back to their audience. And that's just. It's frankly selfish and it's frankly ineffective.
- [24:15]
B
100%. We always talked about, you have great lawyers and good lawyers. Both can be technically fantastic. The great ones are very connected to what their client is doing in helping their client. The good ones are ones that sit in their office and are very smart, but they don't really connect it closely to what their client needs or what their clients doing. And they're very different value propositions, very different impact that you can have. I've got one more question for you, Max. I know we've got to wrap up in a second, but tell us, what are you most focused on and excited about this year? The rest of 2026, where are you most focused and excited?
- [24:48]
C
Yeah. Yeah. There was probably two things that I'm really excited about. The first is just maintaining our excellence in getting students into investment banking jobs and helping them use AI tool, do this networking outreach, tell their stories, and really crush their next recruiting cycle. That's the number one thing I'm just always focused on. But the second thing that is an area of huge opportunity that I want to make sure we're helping students with is also succeeding in their careers and like their. Their later on skills. Because a lot of people that get into investment banking, they realize that they want to do like private equity or hedge funds afterwards, and they. And they need to like, make sure that they're actually succeeding in the workplace and effectively recruiting for those later jobs. And so that's something that I really want to help students crack.
- [25:28]
B
Talk about that, because I love that last point. I don't mean to keep you longer, Max. Sorry about that. But I love this concept of sort of landing the job. It's like getting into school, doing whatever you do. This is just. It feels like the end of the journey. But it's really just the start, isn't it? Because you get the job. And now you got to excel and perform well and be focused on doing a great job in some percentage of energy, 5, 10%, whatever. Think about, okay, having your eyes open to the future, too. So you have to. You get the job and you feel like, oh, my God, I came from byu. I came from Universal, Illinois, like I did. Oh, my God, I've landed. This is great. But in some ways, you're like the dog who caught the car, because now that you've got there, you've got to prepare yourself for being great and doing great, don't you?
- [26:11]
C
Yeah, you absolutely do. And there's a quote that stands out from a conductor. I'm a huge fan of classical music, and I took conducting lessons from this conductor, and he said, you know, Max, not everyone has the chance to be great, but everyone gets a shot. So don't mess it up. Once you land that job, don't mess it up.
- [26:31]
B
I love that. I actually love that because so many people think that. People think like, oh, my God, you got into this school, you got into this job, you got into that job. That's just a starting point. That's just a starting point. Now you're at it to try and develop a great, great career. Max Adams, head of Wall Street Mastermind. What a pleasure to visit with you today. Thank you so much for joining us in the Becker business. The Becker Private equity podcast. Just fant. Love what you do, and just a fantastic pleasure to talk to you. And I think you're. You're filled with great insight, knowledge, and also a great deal of common sense. It's a combination of the two that. That makes a coach so effective. So we appreciate you so much joining us today on the Back of Business, the Back of Private Equity podcast. Thank you so much.
- [27:12]
C
Thank you so much. Been a pleasure.
- [27:16]
D
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