At the time of this interview, Varun worked as a Managing Director for Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs. Prior, Varun worked as a Trader for Louis Dreyfus, a Manager at ICICI Bank, and an Executive Director of Investment Banking at JP Morgan.

Where do you work (or where have you worked) and what is (or was) your position? Tell us a little bit about your career path or intended career path.

I work at Goldman Sachs in Investment Banking; I am a Managing Director. I did my MBA from UVA, Darden Business school. I did both undergrad and graduate studies in India, after which I worked for a few years, before coming to the U.S. and UVA.

I did my summer internship in investment banking at J.P. Morgan coming out of Darden back in 2006, joined them as a full-time associate in 2007, was there for 11 years, and moved to Goldman Sachs four years ago. My focus throughout my career has been on debt capital markets. I lead our media and telecom leveraged finance practice.

What does (or did) your position entail? What, essentially, do you do on a daily basis?

As is very typical for investment banking (and hopefully this helps most of the students who are looking at this), investment banking largely has three components. So, I’ll try to keep it simple for people who don’t know what investment banking is.

One part of it is M&A advisory. You’re primarily trying to advise a company on strategic and financial matters: what sources of cash and capital they have access to, how to sell their company or an asset within their company, how to structure buying a company (and even what assets to buy), shareholder advisory and activism. So that’s the advisory part of it.

The second bucket is raising capital. Whether it is in the form of equity or debt, you are trying to solve for getting the company or financial sponsors cash to do things. Companies need capital for refinancing existing debt that is maturing, making capital expenditures, acquisitions, paying dividends etc. The financial sponsors need to raise capital for acquiring companies (e.g., LBOs), etc. The first time a company raises equity via a listing on an exchange is an IPO, which Im sure most people have heard of. The process to issue debt for the first time has many similar steps to an IPO including working to prepare the company and frame the story to investors.

The third thing I would say is, when you think about investment banking in general, there are some now unique solutions you provide. For example, derivative services, transaction banking services – which means making global payments more seamless, liability management which means helping a company buy back debt or equity in a cheaper, smarter form. There is a lot more to this bucket than I’ve listed.

What I do is a bit of all three buckets for anything related to debt. I am in leveraged finance, which basically means I advise companies that are non-investment grade, which includes strong companies which have relatively more debt, or are in growth phase or just been acquired by financial sponsors. It’s a huge pool of companies like T-Mobile, Twitter. At some point, not in distant past, Netflix and Dell were also non-investment grade.

I work with companies in the TMT space, which is Media, Telecom, and Technology space. So I advise CEOs and CFOs on how to structure debt and distill key selling points, and then we help those companies, who are looking to raise capital, by connecting them with debt investors looking to invest capital. We’ll help the company present their business/financial trajectory to investors, after which we negotiate with the investor base on behalf of the company to achieve the best terms possible.

We also underwrite debt, which basically means we make a commitment to the sponsor or company that we will raise debt capital at certain pre-agreed terms thereby capping the market risk for any M&A, including LBO, or other financings for companies and sponsors by using banks own balance sheet.

What did you study during your time at UVA?

It was a full two-year MBA program. In my MBA, my concentration was finance; it was largely finance and a little bit of general management and a little bit of marketing. But it was all encompassed as part of the MBA program. I lived in Charlottesville for two years and loved it. We still go back couple of times a year.

When and how did you know you were interested in pursuing a career in investment banking?

Great question. So when I did my undergrad and graduate studies in India, I was working there as a commodities trader, and somebody said, “hey why don’t you join us and become a corporate banker”. And so I did. I was working at one of the big banks in India at the time, and I soon realized that corporate banking jobs are very interesting, but I wanted to get into more of an advisory role and become a consultant to the company on its capital structure. For that, I needed to move into investment banking. That’s why I joined Darden.

Now of course if you think about Darden or UVA or the Darden business school MBA, you will realize that it is not truly a finance school. Darden prides itself on being a more general management school, and now it’s becoming more of a consulting school so now if you look at the population that goes into consulting and general management, it far exceeds the population going into finance. But what I’d heard about the case study method, what I’d heard about small classes, what I’d heard about the relationship that Darden has with Wall Street, those were the reasons why I chose Darden.

Are there any particular internship positions you would recommend as good preparation for a career as an investment banker?

I think the interesting thing about investment banking internships is, the sooner you take a summer internship, the better as those most of the times leads into a summer internship for the following year and then into a full-time job. If you want to do investment banking, there are avenues open to you to start early, maybe in your sophomore year as a summer intern, then junior year, and then come back full-time. But if your question is specific, like hey if I don’t know if I want to do investment banking but I want to do something else or I want to keep my doors open to get into investment banking, then I do think there are a lot of jobs. At the end of the day, one part of investment banking is finance knowledge but other part of it, depending on what your interests are, can be in product knowledge, as well as in industry knowledge. So if you want to try something of that sort and get into investment banking later, that’d be better. I tend to see people who know they want to get into investment banking try to do it sooner rather than later. But there is no hard and fast rule like you need to do x, y, and z to get there. At the core of investment banking is sound judgement and problem-solving skills, so in recent years many investment banks have recruited from various specialties (not just finance or economics) e.g. math, philosophy, history, etc. so you don’t necessarily need to start in investment banking to be successful.

I do think, by the way, from a technical skills perspective, I have always found UVA kids to be at par with best of the best in terms of technical skills. Because you are selected amongst best-of-the-best to get into UVA, you already have that threshold intelligence that is needed to do this job. And the rest of the technical skills are taught to you in the classrooms by one of the best professors. So I don’t think you need a specific technical knowledge or a book knowledge to be in investment banking. I think you get that from attending the right classes, and you have the opportunity to attend a bunch of classes – like you have a lot of finance classes and econ classes to be able to do it. And two years later, if you want to be hardcore, you can always join McIntire. You don’t even need to join McIntire, and by the way there are a lot of UVA students who are in investment banking who didn’t go to McIntire, who stayed in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Do you recommend attending graduate school? If you did attend graduate school, was it a useful experience? If you did not, do you wish you had?

I’ll give you a very cliché answer: it’s a matter of personal choice. I can tell you the reason why I did it but everyone needs to find their own reason. Part of it is I had a necessity to do it because I was based in India, and while I was working at a large Indian commercial bank, it was still an Indian bank in India. And it was more than 15 years ago! If I wanted to be in Wall Street back then, there was not a natural progression to get there from that position. It would have taken years to get there and so Darden MBA significantly accelerated my path.

And so the benefit of graduate school in that sense, just to elaborate more, is if you are a career switcher, if you want to switch your career (you’ve done something, now you want to switch your career; if you were an investment banker, and now you want to be a consultant or you want to join general management or you want to go into private equity or you want to go into venture capital), graduate school allows you an opportunity to switch your career and get there. But that’s a need kind of thing, not a want kind of thing. Like, you need to go there if you want to switch your career so you go to graduate school and it helps you.

But putting my specific circumstance aside, I do think graduate school expands your horizon from multiple perspectives.

Firstly, you get to learn a range of topics such as marketing, of course finance, but also math, organizational behavior, business strategy, accounting, and consulting. You see multiple aspects of doing business and that opens your horizon.

The second way it opens your horizon, and I think Darden does a really great job of that, is it brings in a very diverse class – not diversity only with respect to somebody’s religion, gender, race or geography, but also diversity of thoughts, diversity of their jobs, diversity of where they are in career cycle, and everything else. And when you put all those people together in a classroom, what you find is those classroom discussions become really, helpful for you, to understand somebody else’s perspective.

Growing up in India, I thought I was good in math, so my problem was somebody gives me a question and I immediately go and answer it; I thought there was only one way to answer it and there was always one right answer. Darden taught me lot of times, there is not one right answer. You’ll find a lot of people who come from a very different background, maybe teachers for example. They approach the same problem in different way, and still make get to the same answer, which was good to see, because that, opens your mind to interesting thoughts, perspectives, and ideas.

What parts of the investment banking industry do you see as being trend-setters and what parts do you see as being increasingly less relevant? In other words, what trends have you observed?

Wow, you did throw a curveball. You kind of threw soft ones until now and threw a curveball. Look, I’ll say, if I am in your spot or if I am in a position where students are at UVA trying to determine whether the industry is going to survive in five, ten years or not, I think it’s a very hard judgement for anybody to make today. There will always be legacy businesses and there will always be disruptors. It has happened time and again. Think about time when people used magnetic tape and walkmans and when music became digital, suddenly no one was using those things anymore. But that does not mean that the music producers did not have anything because the medium changed; Lot oof music companies upgraded their technology to be with the times and be relevant. So, I do think that any field will always have disruptors but there will always be a way of evolving ourselves to find our career goals. Some of the fields will wither away. But, at end of the day, people will retool themselves and find a way forward.

Right now it’s easy to say, I want to be in tech industry as its cutting-edge and as Technology as that will disrupt everything. But tech is such a broad industry. There are multiple aspects of tech that are there; there are people in hardware, there are people in software, people are in fintech, people are in internet digital media. Good thing is that all are adding value to the broader ecosystem. Same way with investment banking. Yes, investment banking will probably not stay in the current shape or form five, ten years down the line. It will go through an evolution, but that evolution does not mean that you will be left without a job. I think that evolution means that you will have a place, it’ll just look slightly different than what it does today.

Given that these careers are often very demanding, what is lifestyle like? How do you balance personal and professional life?

Great question, and that’s an ongoing debate always. Look, I would say that investment banking has done a phenomenal job on work-life balance compared to 20 years ago. There is a lot more work-life balance, there is a lot more ability for people who have personal time, there are banks like ours which say you can’t work starting from Friday night till Sunday morning. More often than not, you have protected weekends. And senior people generally tend to be cautious of not giving anybody work over the weekend unless it is super urgent. That movement and progression has created a lot of positive.

But I would say that investment banking jobs tend to be demanding, but any job can be demanding. In other jobs, it may come in a longer sine curve or a longer cycle. For investment banking jobs it is very quick. And the reason for that is we try to do a lot more with less time. The transactions that our clients are doing are game-changing transactions for them. So, for example, if you want to raise equity, you want to raise debt, you want to sell your company, you want to buy a company – these are not everyday activities for a company but are very critical for every company. And to make them happen, the timeline tends to be compressed as there can be a lot of risk that can sweep in. Lot of times these transactions fallaway if the timeline is longer.

So, from that vantage point, yes, an investment banking job will be challenging, and it will always be challenging because we must meet tight timelines. Now people do a good job in these environments to still provide some work-life balance, and that balance will also improve as you become more experienced in your role (versus in your first year on the job, every process, system and direction is new).

Any other advice or recommendations?

My three recommendations for every person who is thinking about investment banking is:

First: Talk to as many people as you can in an investment bank before you make this a career. It helps in you getting recruited, of course, but it also helps you understand what the investment banking job entails. Getting surprised is never a good thing for any job.

Second: When you are meeting people in investment banks for interviews, you’re going to find a lot of questions are technical. I would recommend taking one of those breaking into Wall St courses on (for example, to learn valuation methods). Ultimately, what we (as interviewers) and you (as potential employees) should be trying to figure out is if the other person is a thoughtful person who is good to be around, and wont capitulate under pressure. So, dig into yourself to understand what the behavioral questions are and be prepared to answer them, as well as understand what you need from a banking perspective.

The third thing I will say is, make sure, when bank events come up on your campus, attend! See different banks, because that will also give you an idea of the personality of each and every bank, what they do, what they do differently, what they are doing great. Additionally, go attend career fairs for other industries so you have more comfort on which career and lifestyle path is right for you.