This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
Cheran: If you think you can do that for 20 banks in three weeks and perform at your peak for each of those processes, then I want to meet you because you’re Superman or Superwoman.
James: Hello and welcome to Graduate Theory. Today’s guest is in his penultimate year of Commerce/Law at the University of Sydney. He is a former investment banking intern at Macquarie, current investment intern at OIF Ventures, and an incoming grad at McKinsey. Please welcome to the show, Cheran Ketheesuran.
Cheran: Hi James. Thanks for having me. I love what you’re doing with the Graduate Theory podcast, and I’m humbled that you’ve asked me on.
Cheran’s Intro into Finance#
James: No problem at all, man. I’ve heard so many good things about you, the way you apply for roles and how much of a role model you are for people currently going through this process. I’d love to wind back the clock and start from when you were first interested in going into consulting, banking and VC—these competitive fields. What was your introduction to this area?
Cheran: It was a bit of happenstance. Some of it was deleting options from my list of interests until I was left with commerce. In Year 12, I was applying to Sydney Uni and wondering what degree I’d do. Law had always interested me. If you read my scholarship application from back in the day, it talks all about wanting to be a human rights lawyer and help people. Commerce wasn’t even an interest in my view.
Eventually, I had some exposure to corporate law at Allens through its pre-internship programs and realised that I wanted a job where you wake up every morning and need to know what’s happened overnight and overseas in the markets. Law wasn’t going to provide that constant stimulation. I knew pretty quickly that law wasn’t going to be the path. Arguably, I should have dropped my law degree there, but that’s a conversation for later.
I spent some time in DC doing government work, which I’d always loved, and a bit of banking and finance. When I came back to Sydney, I heard about the Industry Placement Program, which Sydney Uni still runs. You do an unpaid internship at a bank, private equity firm or other commercial organisation, and it counts as one of your subjects.
I thought that was a cool process. I didn’t have connections in the industry, but I applied and got a spot at a mid-market private equity firm called CPE Capital, formerly CHAMP Private Equity. I had no idea what it was.
I remember talking to one of my finance tutors who was a few years above. He was at Goldman at the time. I said, “I’ve got this gig at CHAMP Private Equity.” He just looked at me dismayed, saying, “How on earth have you got into CHAMP Private Equity?” Then I said, “It’s through the IPP at Sydney Uni.”
From there, I thought I’d better research who these guys were. That was my introduction. We can talk about the whole life cycle of my finance journey, but I started at the place where many people end up. It’s only been going backwards.
James: That’s a surprising entry into commerce and finance. You then entered the world of investment banking and its whole internship process. I’m not familiar with this process, so could you outline the steps required for someone who wants a graduate role at Goldman or elsewhere? When do they need to start thinking about them?
The Finance Job Process#
Cheran: Unfortunately, it’s what I call the hedonic treadmill of internships. At most investment banks, both bulge bracket and boutique, there are two ways to become a graduate.
You can apply directly in the year before you start. If you were starting in February 2023, for example, you would apply for a graduate spot in February 2022. About 30% of graduate-class positions come from that route. The vast majority, 60 to 70%, come from the summer analyst role: in your penultimate, or second-last, year of university, you do a roughly 10-week internship over summer. I started in December and finished in February. A proportion of the summer interns receive return offers and start at the bank the following year.
The best chance for candidates, therefore, is to become a summer analyst. Working backwards, what do you need to become one? That varies considerably with your background and what you’ve done at university. I knew that banking experience was essential for me.
It’s common to have done an investment banking internship before getting a summer analyst or winter role, so many students intern at a boutique, which normally has five to 15 people. I went to Greenstone Partners. I was lucky that one of my best mates, who used to work there, told me they were interviewing. I interviewed alongside about 10 other people and got the role.
That was crucial to my eventual role at Macquarie because it ticked the box: you’re interested in banking. Why? You’ve spent a year in banking, so there must be a reason you stayed that long.
Outside that, much of the work involves building your core finance skills at university. There are also STEM and alternative-pathway programs. But the hedonic treadmill is usually a boutique internship, winter internship, summer internship and then a graduate role. That’s the progression you’ll commonly see on LinkedIn.
James: The first step helps you get the second, which helps you get the third. If you miss one, it becomes harder because you’re competing against people who’ve completed the steps in between. That happened to you with the winter internships. I’d love to discuss how you approached getting a summer internship afterwards.
Cheran Missing Winters#
Cheran: I had Greenstone Partners throughout this period: I started in late 2020 and stayed through 2021. By March 2021, I’d started applying for winter programs. Many banks use those programs to lock in candidates before the summer rounds. Some banks, including Goldman and Bank of America, also offered summer spots quite early.
I applied to most of the banks offering winter internships, including Jefferies, Credit Suisse and UBS. I reached the final round for most, but a clear deficiency caused each failure. At UBS, I wasn’t as on top of the technical material as I should have been. Credit Suisse said I didn’t have enough of an X-factor, which we can discuss in a second. Jefferies was a poor cultural fit. There was always a reason.
I stepped back and recognised that I still had nothing for summer and would have to apply to all 20 to 25 banks. I realised the importance of peaking at the right time. It was crucial to view those winter failures as practice, because deep down I knew I didn’t want to end up at many of those places. I think they knew that too. It forced me to identify the banks where I wanted to work and show clearly through my CV, cover letter and behaviour why I wanted to be there.
By the time the summer rounds arrived, I knew I could not have done any more work for those roles. It ended up working quite well.
Those were failures, no doubt. I tell students going through the process that, in hindsight, I hadn’t prepared well enough. There were clear areas to work on, and I asked for feedback after each failure because I didn’t need to peak in winter. I needed to peak in summer, when my future graduate role was at stake.
James: When you talk about preparing for these roles, you mention the X-factor and not knowing certain things as well as you would have liked. What does preparation involve? What do you look at when applying for these roles?
Preparing for IB Internships#
Cheran: If I take it back to a macro level, let’s say you’re applying for 20 jobs, which is what I was doing. I didn’t have a summer gig, so I was applying to all the banks, which is about 20. I had a massive Excel spreadsheet with a bank on each row. Each column was a different part of the application process. It would be the date it’s due, cover letter submitted, video submission, psychometrics, and then first round, second round, and so forth. I had a column essentially of people I knew at the bank and people who I wanted to reach out to as well.
That really grounded me in terms of: okay, here’s all the work I need to do in order to potentially get one job out of this process. It’s really important in these processes not to leave anything to your mind—make sure as much of it is down on the page so that you don’t have to remember, “Did I apply for this job? Have I done the psychometrics for Credit Suisse?” That was my big tracking ratio first and foremost.
The next stage from there, perhaps we’ll touch on the CV and cover letter side of things in terms of crafting those. The cover letter is the big chance for people to differentiate themselves. People underestimate the fact that whilst your recruiting manager may not read it, your interviewer often does. It got brought up quite a few times in my interviews.
I had a really simple structure to go through these. You get bookended by your intro and your conclusion. There are three key questions to answer in every cover letter. The first one is: why this company? The second one is: why this industry? And the third one is: why you? If you can answer all three of those questions to some degree of specificity and passion, then you automatically put yourself in the top 1 to 5% of applicants.
In terms of “why this company”—that’s the paragraph that changes for each cover letter. Even if you’re doing 20 cover letters, 80% of that cover letter stays the same. It’s just that one paragraph that changes. For that “why this company” paragraph, I really had three key reasons that I’d always try to bring out. Three is a nice round number. I always made sure my last reason was something related to being at the company for a long time or creating a long-term career out of it.
Take McKinsey for example. McKinsey have this program called the Fellowship Program where essentially after your first two years, you can go away and do a sponsored MBA or do an internship at a client company and so forth. I explicitly said I could really see myself building a long-term career at McKinsey. Whether you believe that or not, those are the things that a lot of these corporates, banks, consulting firms are looking for because churn is quite high in these industries. Therefore knowing that they can lock down people potentially for five to ten years is pretty important.
Then the “why this company” question also comes back to the research you do on the company—it needs to be super specific. 80% of candidates will look on the website. They might cite the mission of the company, which is still a lot more than a lot of candidates do, but finding a really specific reason why you want to work at that company is super important. Everyone is very aware of the fact that everyone is applying everywhere.
Specific examples: at Macquarie, I talked a lot about the head office advantage. Macquarie’s head office is in Sydney compared to a lot of the US banks—Goldman, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley—their head offices are overseas, or if it’s APAC, they’re in Singapore or Hong Kong. There’s a lot more red tape involved in getting decisions done. If you, as a potential intern, can highlight that, that’s pretty impressive to a lot of the seniors who don’t think that research could happen.
That’s really the approach to the cover letter. As to the “why this industry and sector” and the “why you”—really just linking it back to your personal experience and your skills.
You mentioned the X-factor feedback from my Credit Suisse interview. I asked, “Why didn’t I get a role?” The response was, “You’ve done all these incredible things”—which were referencing being a leader in the FMAA society, doing stuff with the Australian Army Cadets, and so forth—but they felt I didn’t have this quote unquote X-factor. What I realised was my X-factor was having done all these busy, disparate things, but linking them all together somehow in a way that painted me as a super well-rounded person. That shaped the way I ended up approaching the interviews and the process.
That’s the cover letter. The CV is similar, although you don’t want too much overlap. Firstly, keep it to one page. If a CEO can do that, so can you. A CEO has plenty of brand equity and doesn’t need to list every achievement, but I heard numerous comments such as, “A one-page CV. This is really nice to see.” Clearly it stands out.
The key sections are education, professional experience, leadership and extracurricular activities, followed by skills and interests. I have two big pieces of advice. First, quantify everything, particularly for consulting and banking. Anonymise anything that can’t be public, but write, “We advised an X-billion-dollar company on the acquisition of an X-million-dollar asset.” Show that you understand scale and numbers. If you’ve screened companies, don’t simply write, “Screened companies across the e-commerce sector in APAC.” Say that you personally screened 50 or 100 companies, whatever the number was.
The second piece of advice is to explain your personal impact. That’s where so many people fall down. Teamwork questions aren’t about the team; they’re about you and how you work within it. Focus on your specific role. That can be hard if you’re a junior or an intern at a boutique bank, but bankers and consultants can easily see when a candidate is fibbing about what they did.
My final piece of advice is that the last line of your CV, probably the interests line, may be the most important. It differentiates you from other candidates and is an opportunity to shine. Candidates are often told to keep it tame—and don’t include an inappropriate interest—but, for example, I’m heavily interested in the science of longevity and ageing and the work of David Sinclair, Peter Attia and other incredible people.
The last word on my CV is “longevity” because it’s the last interest on my interest section. In my final round McKinsey interview, we spent 15 minutes talking with the managing partner about senescent cells and zombie cells and fasting and the impacts on organisms. This was a final round management consulting interview. My point being is that you never know when these things will come up and that interest line is probably the finest line of all.
James: That is really cool. I’m taking notes because this is valuable, and I agree with much of it. Quantifying your resume and stating outcomes rather than only what you did is particularly important: “I did this, which produced this outcome.”
Cheran: And you’ll get asked that in your interview as well anyway. If you can preempt that early on, it always helps.
How did Cheran prepare more than last time#
James: I’m curious then, with all this applying for these roles, what did you do more going from the winters to preparing for summer? Is there anything that you did slightly more in preparing for summer to clear out some of the things that you maybe didn’t do as much of in winter?
Cheran: The CV and cover letter fell off pretty quickly. Once you get those in check, there’s only so much you can do. Once you hit that cap—send it to 20, 30 different people as I did, get that feedback—and then you’re done. I submitted those applications pretty quickly.
The big difference between winter and summer was essentially—sounds cringe, but—priming yourself for interview performance. In the same way that you wouldn’t rock up to the 100-metre sprint in the Olympics without a whole lifetime’s worth of running that sprint a billion times, practising interviews—especially during COVID, which was the age of virtual interviews—was super important.
Take banking as an example. Its interviews have four key buckets of questions. The first is technical knowledge. The second is behavioural questions, such as how you work in a team. The third is general knowledge: how much do you know about the world around you? The fourth is company-specific: why do you want to work here, and do you know what we do?
If I keep it specific to banking, for technicals, everybody knows there’s this Mergers & Inquisitions 400-question book that everybody has. I used that book, as well as after each interview I had during winter, I immediately—I’d go to a bathroom, I’d go to the lift or somewhere where I would be quiet—and straightaway I’d write down all the questions I got in that interview. I never left it to memory to go home and remember. I immediately wanted to get them down.
By the end I had a repository of maybe 50 questions or so, which to me were far more valuable than whatever’s in that M&I 400 book, because these were questions that were being asked. By the time I got to summer, a lot of those questions were coming up again. I made sure I practised those. In a sense, winter essentially was backwards prep.
I did the same thing for behaviourals as well. What I essentially did was have a big document where I had all the questions listed out. I’d write a little paragraph for each question. Then I bought myself a 200-pack of palm cards. This would have been about three weeks before the interviews. Anyone who is going through the banking interview process knows that the banking interviews are all over within three days—it’s a very concentrated time period.
I had 200 palm cards. On one side I’d write the question and, on the other, a dot-pointed version of the answer. I became a student of my own material for a week, reciting the cards for an hour or so each night. I became comfortable enough to know each answer and its logic, but not so rehearsed that I sounded robotic.
You need to find the balance. This is where a lot of candidates fall down: they’re either under-prepared, meaning they don’t know their content or they’re not aware of their various STAR methods for various behavioural questions, or they’ve prepared to the extreme where they’ve either memorised something and they just say it verbatim, or they hear a question that’s similar to a question they have practised and then just answer the question they’ve practised rather than answering the question they get given. You don’t want to be on either end of that spectrum. You want to be somewhere in the middle. Practising technicals and behaviourals in that manner was really useful for me.
Then the final two buckets around general knowledge and company-specific things. Firstly, on the general knowledge for banking, it’s pretty common knowledge that you will get asked, “Tell me about a deal in the market,” or “Tell me about a deal that we’ve advised on.” I chose three or four deals that covered off the majority of banks that I ended up applying to in the end.
I knew as much as I could about those deals. Top candidates offer a view on both the deal and the market. People don’t do that enough. You’re being hired as an intern or graduate analyst not only to sit at the back of rooms and take notes, but also to contribute and show that you understand what’s happening in the world. Demonstrating that when interviewing for an internship is immensely valuable.
Then the last part around company-specific. Probably two buckets to this: firstly, rehashing the similar “why McKinsey, why Goldman”—whatever you’ve written in your cover letter and CV and so forth. But more specifically, once you find out who your interviewers are, if you’re lucky enough to, do your own due diligence on them. People might think it’s stalking or whatever it is, but go on their LinkedIn, see what the news coverage has been like, what are their interests, what are their passions, which deals have they worked on quite recently.
For consulting interviews, many interviewers will have written articles and thought pieces on the company website. The cases you’re given are often problems your interviewers have encountered in real life, so you can quickly develop an idea of the problem: “Emily, my interviewer, did a banking transformation in South-East Asia. It might be something to do with banking.” That’s the preparation to do two or three days beforehand, tailoring what you’re going to say.
James: That’s really interesting and valuable. I’m not applying for graduate roles anymore, but this depth of preparation and approach to cover letters is universal, regardless of the industry.
Cheran: Absolutely. Even before I met you about a month ago, the one minute you spend finding out a person’s background makes the conversation infinitely more enjoyable. That’s a common piece of advice regardless of whether you’re applying for a job.
Importance of your Network#
James: I also want to ask about networking. You mentioned that one column in your job-tracking spreadsheet was, “Who do I know who works here?” How do you connect with people at these companies and involve them in your application process?
Cheran: I think network is a bit of a dirty word. At least it has that connotation. The word networking is seen as transactional in many cases. Yes, I think it is transactional, but that’s what I think the difference is between networking and relationship building.
For me, especially for graduate students, I think it’s super important to separate the role of networking into two different values. Firstly, you have informational value, and then secondly, you have outcome value. Informational value is unlimited. It’s untapped. There is never too much information that you can get from an individual or a group of individuals. Outcome value is capped. Once you get a particular role, that’s your outcome finished—you’ve ticked the box.
If you start thinking about network building and relationship building from an informational value perspective, that’s going to make those relationships much more valuable to you, but it’s also going to mean people are much more likely to buy into helping you out as well. Those are two big things.
I realised this the first time: people like to help other people generally. If they don’t like to help other people, that’s a good signal of the culture of the place and the individual. And secondly, people very easily get invested in other people’s success. Once you can get those connections going, it does help you out quite a bit.
I began networking around January, while applications opened in July, so I had a long runway. I looked at each bank on LinkedIn and found my first-degree connections. Most were peers who had just started as graduates or people from similar societies. I quickly built a list of two to five people I knew at each bank.
First and foremost, I made sure to reach out to all of those individuals. A lot of them I knew pretty well anyway, so it wasn’t really a “Hey, I’m meeting with you only to get something”—it was also just a friendly connection anyway. That was the first step.
After that, I think the big mistake people make is they look at networking as a numbers game. It is not a numbers game. I remember a student I mentor in the year below told me, “Cheran, one of my mates was talking about the fact that I needed like a hundred minimum connections”—absolutely not the case.
Once you get into the interviews, the network—unless you somehow know the managing partner or managing director of a company—is pretty invisible in terms of your chances. What networking does is, firstly, a safety net in terms of it makes sure that you aren’t left within the cracks between submitting an application and getting a video interview or getting an interview. But to me, the network gave me informational value. It allowed me to say really unique things that people wouldn’t know because McKinsey, for example, aren’t going to be advertising the day-to-day life of a consultant, both the good and the bad, on the front page of their website.
I could talk to a third-year consultant or a Macquarie investment banking analyst and understand what was happening day to day and which new developments were emerging. That information boosted my interview chances because I spoke as if I were already a graduate at McKinsey, Goldman or Macquarie.
I think it comes down to: after you’ve done your first-degree list, think about whether you really need to talk to more people. If you do need to talk to more people, firstly, don’t be coy about it. Feel fine to go talk to a hiring manager and say, “Hey, I don’t know anybody at the firm currently. I would love if you can connect me with someone.” That’s exactly what I did for McKinsey. I was lucky enough that one of the McKinsey hiring managers also hired me at Macquarie.
I didn’t know any consultants at McKinsey prior to applying. I said, “Hey Margarita, I don’t know anyone at the firm. Could I get connected to one individual?” Him and I had a great chat. He was like, without me even asking, “Cheran, I’ve got a really good mate. I want you to speak to him as well.”
That snowball keeps going until you’ve met five, ten people. But each incremental connection off of that needs to come from a place of: okay, we have this common background or interest, or there’s a really specific reason why I want to talk to you as opposed to the other 30 grads I could have talked to. That might be because they work in a particular team, or they may come from a similar socioeconomic, LGBTQ, racial, or whatever background. Showing that common interest is what really helps you get your network going.
Ultimately, now that I’m at the end of my grad process and everything’s done, I don’t think about outcome value anymore. I’m very privileged in the sense that I had a positive outcome as to where I’ve ended up. All of the people I’ve met are informational value people because even people at the Boston Consulting Group, where I ended up not going, a lot of the people I’ve met there are still very happy to grab coffee with me and so forth to help me as I move forward.
The value of university clubs in creating connections#
James: Can you speak to the importance of—because a lot of the first-degree connections that you had in different places you met at either university or maybe through other people—what is the value of university clubs at university? Is there value in the actual participation or is it more of just a great way to connect with people that are on a similar journey to yourself?
Cheran: I think it’s a bit of both. Without a doubt, the biggest value is the people you’ve met and the connections you make. They may be your best friend. They may become your partner. They may just be a person you work with in the future. Of course join the local business society. I’ll plug the Financial Management Association of Australia or 180 Degrees Consulting. All of those are good ways just to meet a bunch of different people in your own year group.
Being part of the committees takes you to the next step of meeting people in the years above who have been through what you’re now experiencing. Many clubs and societies run mentorship programs that connect you with people one or two years ahead at university or recent graduates. For me, that was invaluable. I would not be close to where I am now without having joined the FMAA or 180 Degrees—not because they appeared on my CV, but because I knew people who could advise and help me when the time was right.
Those connections are invaluable. The incremental step up in terms of taking responsibility—I don’t think that’s a networking thing anymore. That’s more just building your own teamwork skills and of course it gives you substance to talk about for those behavioural questions.
James: That’s interesting to hear. I was in 180 in my final year of university and I agree that the kinds of people I met there—really super interesting people—have gone on to do really cool things. It’s great to build your relationships in that light.
Common areas in job applications that people get stuck on#
James: What do you think are some of the areas of the application process that people underestimate the difficulty of? Common areas that people get tripped up?
Cheran: There are a few things. The big one is underestimating the time required to perform at your peak during each stage of the application process. Suppose summer-banking applications close in the first week of August. This may scare some people applying now, but in reality you need to submit at least two, perhaps three, weeks earlier to have a chance.
If it was me, I’d be getting it in three weeks prior. Let’s say you get it in three weeks prior. That means you have three weeks between when you click submit and when you click your interview slot, if you’re lucky enough to get one, to do your psychometrics, do your video interview, and start preparing for interviews without the knowledge of whether you’re going to get an interview or not.
If you think you can do that for 20 banks in three weeks and perform at your peak for each of those processes, then I want to meet you because you’re Superman or Superwoman.
That was the big lesson for me. I failed psychometric tests and video interviews because I rushed them and didn’t allow enough time to prepare properly.
My preparation is probably extreme. For psychometric tests, I’d identify the provider, normally Cubiks or SHL. I’d spend an hour watching YouTube videos of people solving the games, read Reddit to learn what trips people up, complete all the practice tests and then treat it as an exam. People don’t realise how competitive these processes are. The hurdle rate is so high, yet people take the tests for granted until they lose out at the psychometric stage. That happened to me numerous times before I learnt to take them seriously.
That’s the first thing I’d alert people to. The other is that, at the interview stage, candidates tend to show why they’re the best choice right now. The hard reality is that companies care about 12, 24 or 72 months from now. They’re choosing a cohort of people who will peak in the future.
That means it’s okay to say, “I don’t know the answer,” “I’m not sure,” or “I made this mistake.” Showing weakness is crucial to success in these interviews. It demonstrates coachability: most of these jobs are team-based, so employers want students who can listen to more experienced people. It also shows the potential to improve and peak in the future.
Once you get that into your head, it becomes a humbling experience, but it also makes sure you don’t fall into the trap of being too cocky or too boastful—which is where I think a lot of students fall away. They have all this knowledge in their head, they have all these experiences they’ve done, and they’re bursting to show what it means. That sometimes comes off the wrong way.
James: That’s really interesting to hear what you had to say—goldmine of information. I don’t really have much to offer. I’m just interested to keep asking you stuff.
Cheran: I say you apply for a whole bunch of stuff.
Cheran’s Biggest Learning#
James: Now you’re at a point where a lot of this time spent applying is in the past for you, at least in the immediate term. What has been the biggest learning for yourself over the last year to 18 months as you’ve gone through this journey?
Cheran: Good question. I think the biggest learning is to care less—and I’m so conscious of the privilege in this statement—but to care less about the outcome and to care more about the journey and the incremental task. That’s way more important than some job that you’re going to get in 12 to 18 months’ time.
I struggled. I was deeply unhappy at various points of university because I thought I wasn’t keeping up on the hedonic treadmill of internships that other students were. I already know I can hear my own mates screaming at me listening to this, saying, “We all wish we were on your level of the hedonic treadmill,” but there’s always someone who’s further ahead. That can eat away at you a lot if you aren’t careful with it. That would be my biggest learning.
We might end up talking about how I’ve gone from banking to consulting in the end—that last experience is probably the one that’s told me that the most.
I think the other thing is being self-aware enough to know that luck is a huge, huge factor in these processes, both on the upside and the downside. That doesn’t mean I can’t say I deserve it or I worked hard enough to get X, Y, Z. But that isn’t a mutually exclusive statement from “I was lucky to some extent—to not have been screened out, to have shown that I can do whatever it is.”
You want to put yourself in that position where you recognise that luck is a factor. Recognising that it’s a factor, you can sleep at night knowing that there’s nothing else you could have done to have influenced the outcome. If you’re at that stage, that’s all you can do. But if you’re at a stage where you’re almost having to blame luck because of an unfortunate outcome, you don’t want to be at that stage because that’s where regret starts eating away.
There’s one bank that I was interested in and it didn’t go through, but I knew I could not have done anything else I wanted to do. I knew the perception from that interview or that day was the reason why, and that’s perfectly okay. I’m at peace with that. If you can find peace in that journey, I think it helps you a lot.
James: When people get a disappointing outcome, they can blame the downside on luck while attributing the upside to hard work.
Cheran: Always happens. Always happens.
James: “I got this job because I worked hard” and “I didn’t get it because I was unlucky.”
Cheran: Oh, it’s unlucky. Yep.
James: Taking ownership of what you did and the outcomes you expected and then letting go of whatever happens after that—it will be what it will be. It can be difficult to approach things like that.
Cheran: It can be hugely difficult. After a string of winter failures last year, I wrote on the whiteboard in front of me, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” I can’t remember who said it, but I’ve applied that mentality throughout my life: be good enough, don’t make excuses and work as hard as you can. Anything else is outside your control. That’s all you need to sleep well at night—plus a loving family, friends and those sorts of things.
James: Absolutely. It’s important. We’ve spoken about the failures, the things you hoped would go well—I guess with regard to the winters and things like that—but what has been something that didn’t go to plan along this whole journey that ended up being something that really benefited you before you got to the end? Is there perhaps another situation along the way that ended up being something you were frustrated by at the time but ended up turning out really well?
Cheran’s failure that ended up being a success#
Cheran: I’m really happy talking about this one because I don’t think when I was going through this process I knew anyone else who had been through the same.
I was at Macquarie Capital over summer. Loved the experience there. I was in the TMT team—instead of Technology, Media, Entertainment, and Telecommunications team—really loved the culture and the team. I was pretty set on going back to Macquarie and most likely staying afterwards.
It was about 5:00 PM on a Wednesday, a week after the internship had finished. I was writing my McKinsey cover letter when HR called and said, “We’re really sorry that we aren’t going to offer you a graduate position at this stage.” I’d felt it in my gut for a few days, but it was still a big shock and disappointment.
The nervousness kicked in straight away. What was I going to do now? I wouldn’t have a graduate job to come back to, and exchange was off the cards. I couldn’t see myself being able to do all these things.
It took me a while to step back and say, “I don’t have a graduate job. I’m in the middle of consulting processes, and I can apply for banking graduate roles in a few weeks.” I messaged my friend Blake M, whom you’ll know from Next Chapter, and said, “FYI, I’m going all in on these consulting processes. Let’s see what happens.”
I’d never seriously considered consulting and thought I preferred banking after working there for more than a year. With about two weeks left in the consulting application processes, I committed to them. A month later, I was fortunate enough to have several offers. I then took time to consider, without rose-tinted glasses, whether I wanted to go into banking.
I did my diligence. I spent about six weeks—and we can talk about this as well in terms of post-offer decision-making—spent six weeks talking to bankers, consultants, a whole bunch of people, saying: this is where I want to be in five to ten years’ time, which is either on the investing side of things at a VC or as an operator. What’s going to be the best way for me to get there?
After a lot of conversations, I was pretty confident that consulting was the way to go. I ended up not applying to banking again for the graduate roles.
I was always going to apply to McKinsey, BCG, Bain regardless of Macquarie, but I think Macquarie—the failure at Macquarie gave me a big kick up the backside to recognise: number one, I didn’t agree with all of the reasons and outcomes that they gave me, but I learned a lot about the need for clearer communication and balancing numerous demands, working from home, saying no—there was a lot of valuable feedback I took away from the team.
But I think the other thing is that we don’t talk about failure enough. When I got that initial call, I called my buddy and I asked her, and she straightaway said, “Cheran, there are people at Goldman and Morgan Stanley and other banks who have also been through the exact same thing, but no one ever talks about it because they just don’t really want to.”
I think that’s the shame. The failures don’t matter as long as they’re manageable failures. Ray Dalio always talks about the idea of micro failures and macro wins. For me, this was a micro failure—okay, I didn’t get my graduate job at Macquarie—but I’m not looking back in five years’ time talking about it as a macro failure. It’s essentially a completely different path that might set me up better. It’s hard to put a positive spin on failure sometimes, but it was a big learning curve for me and everything happens for a reason.
James: You’re spot on there. I totally agree with what you said. It’s often, especially with these kinds of things, you look out and it seems like everyone’s just had the perfect journey, nothing went wrong, and they just sailed through and everything went exactly to plan. When almost universally, that’s not the case.
Cheran: You go on LinkedIn and you just see a progression of one thing to the next to the next. But I think if we all restructured our LinkedIns to say, “You got this job and then failed at five others in between, and then got this job,” I think everyone would be feeling a little bit better about themselves. It’s about high time that we just made that a bit more public.
James: I’ve seen this idea of an anti-resume where you have all the places you didn’t get into as a separate thing.
Cheran: Bessemer Venture Partners—one of the big SaaS investors in the US—have an anti-portfolio where they essentially have on their page a list of companies that they didn’t invest in, that they passed on. I think a lot of other VCs have tried to do a similar thing.
It reflects the same sentiment: let’s be more open about this, let’s talk about those failures, because in reality it’s not all the way up and to the right curve. Much like the market, it’s up one day, down the next. It’s good to make that more transparent.
James: You’re spot on there and I appreciate you sharing that story. When you’ve worked so hard for something, it’s hard to face that. Like you said, you overcame it really well and it’s ended up working potentially better than going down the original path.
Cheran: We’ll find out in a few years’ time.
The Post Interview Decision Process#
James: I’d love to talk about the post-interview decision process and what you went through there, speaking to heaps of people to try and work out what this looks like for you. One thing I want to mention is I think it’s really great that you have a view of where you want to be in 10 years. I think myself to some extent and many people out there don’t have that. It’s hard then to filter which opportunities are good and which maybe aren’t. If you get offered something, should you say yes or no? Having that as a filter, a way to decide things, is really cool. I just want to mention that. I’d love to dive into this process of what you did once you had some of the offers available.
Cheran: Off what you just mentioned, I’ll just qualify it to say it’s good to have a plan, but it shouldn’t be set in stone. I was fairly set I was going to end up in investment banking, and look what’s happened there. In the same way that I was fairly certain that I would end up in law and fairly sure I’d end up in politics. These things all need to be movable and flexible.
For me, the post-interview decision-making process: I have no doubt in my mind that I was probably one of the last people to sign the McKinsey contract. I took a long time, I think six or seven weeks in the end. I think candidates should feel absolutely no pressure to sign within deadlines. I know investment banking is a bit different sometimes—they give you a week and that’s it.
Naval Ravikant, a famous angel investor, talks about three big decisions in your twenties: where you’ll live, who you’ll be with and what your job is. You should take your time on all three.
As to my actual process: the first thing I did was I sat down and I thought about what mattered to me from a rubric sense and tried to rank those. It might be things like pay, prestige, exit opportunities, opportunity to work overseas, learning and development, training—any factor that you think is relevant. What you want to do is figure out what matters to you and what doesn’t matter to you.
For me—and I acknowledge the enormous privilege in saying this—pay was at the bottom of the list. It was a massive pay cut. Bankers often said of moving from banking to consulting, “You’re working similar hours for half the pay.” I was aware of that. If I’m going to experience a material change in wealth, it won’t be because I earned an extra $300,000 in my first two years. It will be because I met a certain person or started a business that created a massive change in 10 or 20 years.
Think about the factors that matter to you. This is really important for people to remember. We talk about when it comes to working out or otherwise, but short-term pain, long-term gain is a big thing. I think we undervalue the effect of compounding a lot. That’s why a short-term cash stipend or the opportunity to go overseas immediately versus training, networks, development over five years—you have to discount those back, whether you’re a discounted cashflow person or not. You have to discount those back to some present value and understand what that value means to you.
That was the first stage. The second stage then was: leverage your success—talk to as many different people as possible. I probably ended up talking to about 50 consultants across McKinsey and BCG. I had three buckets of people I wanted to talk to, and this is how I phrased it when I asked for connections.
Number one: I want to talk to people who had received offers from both firms and had chosen one or the other. Two: I wanted to talk to people who had come from investment banking or previously been in banking or considered banking and then come to consulting. And then the third bucket was: I want to talk to people who had left—alumni essentially.
Both consulting firms were happy to connect me with those people. After a while, you hear very similar things. You take everything with a grain of salt because everyone has a vested interest in drawing you towards their company.
I had like a 30-page document by the end of the six weeks with all the notes I’d taken from all those people. I sat down one Sunday afternoon. I already pretty much knew my decision, but I went through all of those notes, linked them back to my various decision factors, and ticked the box between the two firms. It came up pretty overwhelmingly clear.
That was my decision-making process. It is a very consultanty process. I’m completely aware of that. For me, it was really structured.
It links back to—this is something I’ve started only in the last maybe nine months or so—but your decision journal, I think, is so important. Whenever—say I’m at McKinsey in 12 months or 18 months’ time and I’m going through a rough patch and I’m questioning why I’m there—I can go back to that decision frame, the notes that I took, and say: these were the reasons I chose this job. Is that still true? If it isn’t true, why am I still here? And then make that decision again.
It’s so important to have a decision journal for every decision in life, whether it’s who you want to date or what restaurant you want to go to or whatever it is—but ideally it’s the bigger decisions in life. For me, it was really important just to have that bolted down.
At least talking from a consulting perspective, take your time and don’t be afraid to ask, because companies who want you and have given you an offer will be happy generally to connect you to the people you want to meet.
James: That’s really cool. It’s really interesting to hear how you approach it. Having those criteria—I know I’ve done that for the big decisions that I’ve made, like going on exchange. I did that where I was like, “What are the pros and cons of this?”
Cheran: Cons: empty bank account.
James: That was the only con: I had no money left. But I got to see the world and have all these fun experiences. I was young, so it made sense.
Cheran: Exactly.
James: Tying it to a medium- or long-term vision of what you want your life to look like gives you criteria for evaluating important decisions, including your first job out of university. I think that’s really cool.
What questions did Cheran ask in his post offer decision process?#
James: Which questions did you ask during this process? You met consultants who currently worked at the firms or had recently left. Which themes helped you learn about the company, its culture and its opportunities? I imagine you could ask similar questions during recruitment.
Cheran: When it came to post-decision-making, many of these consultants had already been debriefed. They approached the conversation thinking, “Cheran is choosing between McKinsey and X firm. I’ve got to convince him to come to X.”
That being said, the questions were still quite similar even before I had got offers. A lot of the questions were: Why have you come to X? I saw you’ve done X previously—what was the framework around that? Why did you leave that job? Why are you still here?
The value for your listeners probably comes from some of the nature of questions to ask. I had a few that I always asked, probably for conversations after offers.
The first one I always asked was: what were the decision factors that you were thinking about when you made your decision? 90% of the time they aligned with the same things I was thinking about—learning and development, offshore opportunities, pay if it was a material factor or not. But every now and then there would be one consultant who’d say some factor that I hadn’t thought of at all. Often it would be a very niche industry that they were interested in, for example. McKinsey has programs like the McK Health Institute, and there was one consultant who had come specifically for that. All those sorts of things as well.
The question I asked everyone, including during the interview, was, “What are the characteristics of the best business analysts at McKinsey?” A business analyst is the entry-level position at McKinsey. I asked the equivalent about associates at BCG or banking analysts at Macquarie and Goldman.
That question shows, firstly, that you want to be the best. Secondly, you’re thinking two steps beyond what you’re applying for. You aren’t only asking about an internship; you’re asking, “I want to be an investment banking analyst at Macquarie as a graduate. Which characteristics could I develop now to prepare for that role in 18 months?”
Most of the time that question was followed by about 15 seconds of silence because no one had ever asked them that before. Then they’d think, “Okay, well, there’s this one junior on my team who I think is really great and these are the things that he does.” That was a really nice way to get that conversation going.
Those were the main questions I asked. The rest of the conversation would riff on personal life. I’m a big Formula One fan, and there are two consultants at McKinsey—one formerly at Red Bull and one at Ferrari—so we could talk about that for ages.
James: Asking the right questions is so important. That question shows you’re interested, gives the interviewer something meaningful to answer and tells you what to develop. During an interview, you could perhaps respond with an example of when you demonstrated those traits.
What drives Cheran#
James: I want to ask—perhaps we’re getting to the end, so maybe two more things I’d like to ask you. One is: I’m interested because you’re a high-performing person.
Cheran: Appreciate that.
James: You do a lot of things really well. I’m interested to know what drives you on a daily basis? Why do you go out and achieve? Are there any reasons that you can put to that? How do you think about that?
Cheran: That’s a really good question. If I’m being completely real, it’s a fear of mediocrity. I think that’s something that a lot of people can probably resonate with. It comes from a place—my parents both came from a not-so-great time in the world and were fairly middle-class. I see how hard they worked.
There’s part of me that’s like, “Well, you better ace this life because there’s only one chance to do it.” If I were to look at myself and say—much like when we were talking about the concept of luck—luck is going to exist in the world. But if you put yourself in a position where there’s nothing more that you could have done, then you sleep well at night.
If I extend that out over my entire life, I’d want to wake up every day knowing that there have been no regrets and that I haven’t wasted potential. This is a complete tangent, but I remember in Year 5 English or something, I didn’t get the English award for something and I was pretty disappointed in it. I remember my Year 5 teacher saying, “You’ve got so much potential. It would be worthless if you didn’t tap into it once in a while.”
That’s stuck with me ever since, because that’s something you don’t really want. If you can perform at your best and that’s all you can do, then I think that’s what drives me every day.
I also get deep satisfaction from the idea of eventually having a career in social impact. Chamath Palihapitiya, an American-Canadian investor, often says that money drives the world, whether you like it or not. Affecting social change requires command of capital at some stage.
I have a strong drive to marry my interest in venture capital with my interests in longevity, biotech and life sciences. I’m not smart enough to do the chemistry or engineering, but I could help with capital allocation. That’s what drives me every day: taking my skills and using them to have the best influence on the people around me.
James: Thanks so much for sharing that. It’s interesting to hear what you’re thinking about. Having a positive impact on the world and creating the ability to do that in the future is admirable. I look forward to following your journey and seeing the impact you have.
Cheran: Come back to me in 30 years and we’ll see.
Cherans Advice#
James: Fantastic. I’ve got one more question for you, Cheran. This is a question I ask all the guests that come on the show. If you could go back to when you were first starting university and entering this journey of discovering the different opportunities that are awaiting you, what advice would you give to someone that’s perhaps now just starting out on their journey?
Cheran: I’ve always had three things—have to keep it very structured as a future consultant.
The first one would be: do things your own way. I’ve mentioned the phrase “hedonic treadmill” a few times now, but it’s very easy—and I know that I am a person who subjects this on others—you see the LinkedIns of other people and you say, “By doing this, you got to this. By doing that, he got to there.” Have a consciousness that there are a million ways to get to where you want to be. Be driven enough that you pursue goals. If you are pursuing roles and titles and whatever it is, that’s fine, but don’t be so driven that you forget to stop and smell the roses on the way.
Don’t forget about the reasons why you’ve done that journey. I’m not ending up in banking, but I’m still glad I’ve spent one and a half years in banking because that’s taught me a whole skill set of things. If I was so focused on the outcome, I’d think that was a waste, which it certainly isn’t. Do things your way.
Second thing: nobody cares. That sounds rather flippant. What I mean by that is genuinely, nobody cares about so many of the failures that we have on a daily basis. I remember seeing this visualisation once: if you imagine two concentric circles—you have one circle and then you have a little small circle in the middle of it—that small circle is how much other people think about you, and all the space around it is how much you think about other people thinking about you.
That’s just the reality. Literally nobody cares. Everyone has their own issues and problems to sort through. It’s very liberating once you realise that, because all of a sudden you’re just focused on your own happiness and your personal pursuit of your goals. That’s all you need in life. Life is already tough enough without worrying about what other people think or what’s going to be the impact of you not getting X or not being at this stage in life. Especially when you surround yourself in a high-achieving academic background of students and cohorts, as the universities you and I have been to, it gets very easy to fall into that mindset.
The last thing I would say is that life will generally be okay. This links back to “nobody cares.” I’ve said this a lot. It’s graduate season at the moment. A lot of students in the years below, some students that I tutor at university, have been really stressed and worried about applications.
Remember that everybody peaks at a certain period of time and that’s not going to be 22 for everybody. It would be rather sad if you peak at 22. Just remember that the vast majority of your listeners and the people who are part of this community have lived in a time which has never been better than any time before. Number one.
And second, generally, if you work hard enough, if you don’t let luck impact everything in your life, you will be okay. You will get to where you want to eventually. There’s no rush in life in terms of reaching certain goals. Just because it seems like the vast majority of people reach goals within a certain period of time doesn’t mean that you have to be part of that as well. There are countless numbers of people—Reid Hoffman is a prime example—who reached their peak successes and their first successes in their forties and fifties.
That would be my three pieces of advice: do things your own way, nobody cares, and it’ll all be okay, James. It’ll all be okay.
Where to contact Cheran#
James: Amazing. That’s really cool advice. Thanks so much for sharing that with us, Cheran. I think if people can really take that to heart, it’ll help set them up for a more interesting and successful life. Thanks so much for sharing that with us today.
If people listening want to go and find out more about yourself—perhaps they’ve now heard your fantastic advice on applying for roles in various different places—where is the best place for them to go and find out more about you?
Cheran: LinkedIn, my name straight on there—one letter short of dinosaurs. Please just message me if there’s anything that I can help with. Otherwise I’m on Twitter as well: CheranK7. Probably those two places.
James: Fantastic. We’ll direct people there. Thanks so much for coming on the pod today, Cheran. It’s been really cool digging into all the things you think about. Thanks so much.
Cheran: Thanks, James. This was fun.
Outro#
James: Thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want to get my takeaways, the things that I learned from this episode, please go to GraduateTheory.com/subscribe, where you can get my takeaways and all the information about each episode straight to your inbox.
Thanks so much for listening again today, and I’m looking forward to seeing you next week.