Guide to Corporate Development in Tech | Recruiting, Interviews & Responsibilities

Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel. If you're like myself and you came from investment banking, some of the most common exit opportunities are go into private equity, hedge funds, or venture capital. However, one other really popular exit opportunity is to go into corporate development. So, what is corporate development? You can think of corporate development as an internal M&A team within a firm. Typically, only slightly larger corporations will have a corporate development team. If you think about the main function of this team, it's largely to facilitate a company with acquiring other companies, divestatures, partnerships, etc. And typically only larger companies with more capital are able to do these activities. So from an investment bank's point of view, you might be helping Amazon acquire Whole Foods, but on Amazon's team, there's also their corporate development division that's handling everything from Amazon's side. The nature of the work depends a lot on the firm that you're in. Common tasks that you should expect going to corporate development is one being able to manage an entire deal process. Whether it's an acquisition or it's a fundraising, you are going to be the core person on all of these deals. This will involve knowing tasks like financial modeling, valuation, competitive research, industry landscaping, meetings with both internal and external stakeholders, or more processor orientated activities like processing NDAs or data rooms. These are really similar to tasks that you would typically be doing in investment banking except you're doing it for the company you're part of. The other category of tasks that you'll be doing is types of strategic growth. And this includes tasks like international expansion and partnerships as well as others that might be different for every company. You'll be looking at your competitors, identifying what your TAM looks like, identifying strengths and weaknesses with how your competitors are doing and where your specific company should expand productwise and geography wise. And this will involve a lot of meetings with both external consultants as well as internally with senior leadership to decide the best path for your company to go on. Now depending on what company you join, the size of it, the industry, and overall just the people within it will determine how much you focus on each one of these categories. Next, the process of how to get the job. A major part of corp development is being able to understand the role and understand why you want to go into it. If you're coming from investment banking, for example, you can talk about how you want to get more into strategy and understand operationally how companies work. Aside from focusing on several companies and purely focusing on financials, you want to be able to design a resume that would make yourself look attractive to tech companies who are looking for people to join these business strategy roles. To the extent possible, you want to include any types of transactions you've been a part of, whether it's financings, IPOs, or M&A. If you came from consulting, you want to include real examples of how you helped certain clients. It isn't as structured as applying for investment banking or private equity because the recruiting process will differ so much amongst different firms. Certain firms will use recruiters while others will try to get referrals based off of their internal employees and others will use resources like LinkedIn. If you're interested in a business career in tech, Skillful provides online cohort-based programs for roles like business operations, strategy and operations, chief of staff, product growth, strategic finance, and more. These are all super common exit opportunities for people who come from investment banking and consulting. Skillful offers programs called skillful sprints which run 5 to seven weeks and they are completely virtual and part-time. During these sprints, you'll get the experience of tackling real business problems under the guidance of a mentor. These mentors work at top firms like Door Dash, Netflix, Uber, and Meta. Graduates of the skillful program have gone on to work at companies like Tik Tok, Stripe, Uber, Door Dash, and rapidly scaling startups. On top of the sprints, you'll also get access to an amazing community of mentors and alumni who are always eager to make introductions to hiring managers and help with interview prep. You'll also get access to an exclusive community job board that often comes with plenty of referrals and direct intros. Applications for Skillful are reviewed on a rolling basis. Seats often sell out before the sprint's application deadline. If you're interested in the program, I've included a priority application for Skillful down in my description box below. As for the interview process for corporate development, it ranges a lot from firm to firm. I know I've said that so many times in this video, but it's true. But in general, what you can expect is one, typical fit questions that you would expect for any finance strategy type interview. Two, questions on your deal experience. If you came from investment banking or private equity, you should expect to pick one or two of these deals and talk in depth about them. Or if you came from consulting, you should be able to talk in depth about a project that you worked on. Three, technical questions. You should expect them to be similar to what you would expect in an investment banking interview. Think of questions like accounting, valuation, merger models, because those are all incredibly relevant to corporate development. Beyond that, you also need to have a really good why corporate development answer. You need to have fluidity in your story as to why you want to jump from Xcareer into corporate development and have a good understanding of what the job actually entails. Next, you also want to have a bit of knowledge about the company and the industry. You don't need to be an expert at all. Do some reading on your own. Learn more about the company. Have some ideas for where you think the company can grow strategically and be able to talk about them like a conversation during the interview. And lastly, case studies. Not every company will give a case study. Like I said, these interviews really range from firm to firm. However, if there is one, it'll likely provide you with some details for an acquisition and ask you whether you think it's a good idea or not. You might have to analyze some financial statements, provide a valuation, and explain whether you think it's a good acquisition target. And lastly, compensation and hours. So, I'm going to use what I found for mergers and inquisitions as a baseline for the salary because I find that it's a good representation. So, associate base salaries are generally around 100 to 120K with bonuses worth 20 to 30% of their base salary for total compensations of 120 to 160K. Managers have base salaries of 140 to 160K with bonuses worth 35 to 50% of their base salary for a total compensation of 190 to 140k. What I do think this is missing is the equity component of it. A lot of firms if they are preipo they might give options and if they are public they'll likely provide rsus or stock compensation of some form. So there's always that component of the salary within it and that's something that you also have to consider. In general, compared with other finance jobs like private equity and investment banking, you will see a disparity amongst junior levels and even more so amongst senior levels. But my only caveat is that at the junior level, if you divide by the number of hours, a lot of the time, corporate development associates are earning similar on an hourby- hour basis. And this brings me into the number of hours that you might expect to work. It isn't always a 9 to-ive job. Some days can be. Again, it depends on the firm. Sometimes it's a 9 to7, but you shouldn't expect to work as crazy hours as you will in investment banking. So guys, that sums up the video for today. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you found it helpful. Please remember to give this video a huge thumbs up if you enjoyed it. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't already and I will see you in the next video. Bye.