These are the young professionals turning the uncertainty in today's economy into an opportunity, the trailblazers developing trends into tomorrow's hottest asset, and the influencers setting new playbooks for deals and trades.
Whether they're building out burgeoning private markets businesses within the world's largest bank, have a hand in financing some of the biggest deals of the past few years, or are providing an edge to top investors with complex and innovative products, these are the Wall Streeters to watch.
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Insider tapped its contacts for ideas about individuals to include and received recommendations from bosses, colleagues, recruiters, and financial industry peers. We asked that nominees be based in the US, be 35 or under, and stand out among their peers to be eligible. The editors made final decisions.
Insider talked to these rising stars from leading firms like JPMorgan, Bridgewater, and Apollo, to reflect on their successes, challenges, and best career advice.
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Andrew Almeida, 35, Thoma Bravo
Thoma Bravo
Almeida took a shot in the dark when he cold-called the CEO of a small venture-backed security startup called SailPoint in 2014.
He was a budding associate with little background in the technology industry, but he knew he'd have to be creative and forge connections to make it far at the tech buyout giant Thoma Bravo. Several years later, that connection paid off.
Thoma Bravo took SailPoint private in a $6.9 billion acquisition last August. The deal represents one of the most important lessons Almeida has learned in his career: feel empowered to think outside of the box, make decisions, and spring into action quickly.
"It's not every day that you get calls from a public company CEO asking you to take them private. It's a special phone call."
It was a lesson Almeida said he learned by watching and mimicking his mentors — Orlando Bravo, Scott Crabill, Chip Virnig, and Seth Boro — as they pulled together complex and sometimes "absolutely bonkers" ideas.
Thoma Bravo's acquisition of Compuware, led by Virnig, involved taking Compuware private, splitting it into two companies, IPO-ing one, merging the other with an existing portfolio company, and selling the company headquarters.
"I would just try to emulate their thought process and just really kind of be a parrot of them. Eventually, if you adopt enough of their style, it kind of becomes your own as well," Almeida said.
Almeida has cultivated Thoma Bravo's cybersecurity portfolio into one of the largest in the private-equity industry, totaling nearly $40 billion in enterprise value. His focus in the security industry has helped Almeida — the firm's youngest partner — become a key leader of its flagship strategy. Beyond SailPoint, Almeida co-led the portfolio company Imprivata's 2022 purchase of SecureLink, in a deal valued at $3.5 billion. He also helped source and execute Thoma Bravo's $12.3 billion acquisition of Proofpoint in 2021, the largest private-equity cloud deal at the time.
- Bianca Chan
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Anne-Victoire Auriault, 35, Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs
Raising their daughter in Paris, Auriault's parents thought she might pursue a creative career. As architects, they had instilled in her an appreciation for the arts.
So when Auriault, now a partner in Goldman Sachs' trading division, showed proficiency in math and computer science, her parents were initially surprised.
"When I told my mom I wanted to do math, she looked at me like, 'What did we do wrong?'" Auriault said with a laugh, during an interview at Goldman's Manhattan headquarters.
Her family must be smiling now. After getting a degree in math and computer science at one of France's prestigious grandes écoles, and then a master of finance at Princeton University, Auriault joined Goldman in 2012.
After a stint on Goldman's hot commodities team, Auriault joined the equities trading team, and an internal program that encouraged those with a quantitative background to take a bigger role in Goldman's trading operation. She joined program trading, one of the bank's most lucrative desks, where algorithms are used to trade large baskets of stocks, particularly around index rebalancing events.
When she made partner in 2020, at the age of 32, Auriault became one of the youngest women ever to enter Goldman's elite circle. She now runs the team globally, and oversees the Americas ETF business.
Auriault attributes her success to learning coding skills that brought more technological heft and scale to the program trading desk, staying cool under pressure when handling large trades, and showing up day after day. Like any good trader, Auriault has also notched big trades during her career, but she declined to disclose them.
She described her job as akin to overseeing a big machine that needs tending. "Having a process and being extremely rigorous is a big part of success," she said.
Auriault hasn't entirely abandoned her upbringing. She's a huge film buff and credits theater and other cultural institutions with opening up her mind to the world. She serves on the board of Film at Lincoln Center and Film Forum, focuing on improving access for students.
"Culture," she said, "should be accessible to everyone."
- Dakin Campbell
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Benjamin Kiflom, 29, Goldman Sachs Asset Management
Goldman Sachs
Commercial real estate values have been upended by rising interest rates and a tightening loan market, leaving trillions of dollars of debt tied to these assets in peril.
Kiflom, a 29-year-old vice president at Goldman Sachs, is at the front lines of the dislocation. The young executive is a portfolio manager on the investment firm's securitized products team, where he helps oversee a $7 billion portfolio of commercial-mortgage-backed securities on behalf of major institutional clients, including insurance companies, pension funds, and corporate clients.
CMBS bonds, particularly those with lower credit ratings, have traded among investors at a discount, reflecting the chaos. Kiflom said he's now on the lookout for distressed buying opportunities for investors eager to place their bets.
"Volatility will present opportunity to those who are able to dig deep into the weeds and uncover value," Kiflom said.
Kiflom didn't imagine a career in real estate. He grew up in Logan, Utah, the son of parents who immigrated to the US from Ethiopia and studied chemical engineering at Brown University. He applied for an internship at Goldman Sachs on the advice of a friend and has spent the entirety of his young career at the firm.
The securitized market, although esoteric, offered Kiflom the chance to gain expertise in multiple disciplines, including financial structuring, the performance of specific real estate assets, and the overarching objectives of investors.
"I think that kind of explains a lot of the reasons why I'm still here," Kiflom said. "I'm still learning and still contributing."
Kiflom serves as a mentor for Goldman's One Million Black Women initiative and for the HBCU Alliance.
-Daniel Geiger
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Chris Dell'Amore, 34, Blackstone
Blackstone
The transition away from fossil fuels and toward environmentally sustainable energy sources has taken shape as an enormous, competitive target for private investment firms.
Dell'Amore plays a key role in investing around the energy transition at Blackstone, where he is a principal in the infrastructure group. Dell'Amore, who joined Blackstone in 2021 from Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, has already been involved in major deals and efforts at portfolio companies like Tallgrass Energy and Cheniere Energy Partners.
He helped lead Tallgrass's efforts to recycle waste heat from its Rockies Express Pipeline to generate decarbonized power. This year he was also instrumental, working along with the wealthy Benetton family, in the firm's €50 billion buyout of the Italian infrastructure giant Mundys, formerly called Atlantia.
"There is effectively no commercial blueprint for any of these projects. Carbon capture, hydrogen, ammonia, all of it — it's just being developed in real time," which is the fascinating part of his job, he said, referring to the energy transition. "The societal good behind it is obviously pretty interesting, because you get to change the impact and trajectory of humanity."
Key mentors to Dell'Amore have been John Kwaak, with whom he worked closely at Fortress Investment Group and Morgan Stanley earlier in his career, and Matthew Runkle, the head of renewables and midstream in Blackstone's infrastructure group.
Outside the office, Dell'Amore volunteers with America Needs You, a nonprofit that provides mentorship and career development for first-generation college students. It's a mission that's personal to Dell'Amore, as he was the first in his family to attend college. He studied economics and Spanish language and literature at Colgate University and later earned an MBA at Wharton and a master's degree in international studies with a focus on Latin America from the University of Pennsylvania.
"I find myself very thankful every day for the seat that I sit in because I have a front-row seat to effectuating the energy ecosystem of tomorrow," he said.
- Rebecca Ungarino
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David Trinh, 33, Bridgewater Associates
Bridgewater Associates
A politics junkie from rural Minnesota, Trinh grew up "far away from the land of hedge funds."
After stints interning for two congressional representatives from his home state — including now Sen. Amy Klobuchar — he found his way to the world's biggest hedge fund, the Westport, Connecticut-based Bridgewater Associates, thanks to the debate team at his alma mater, Yale.
"There were some people who went to this hedge fund called Bridgewater," Trinh said about his debate teammates. He found it was a place that "attracted a lot of debaters and still does" because of the firm's unique culture — known as radical transparency — that founder Ray Dalio has chronicled in books and interviews.
Trinh, a portfolio manager leading a research team focused on currencies, has the ability to allocate tens of billions in capital. Bridgewater is the only place he's worked since graduating from Yale in 2012. He counts Karen Karniol-Tambour, the firm's co-chief investment officer, as a mentor who pushed him to develop unique trade ideas.
As a macro investor, Trinh thinks less about individual companies or industries and more about the big trends shaping the world. A good example is the firm's decision to go long on all types of assets in early 2021 as a response to the unprecedented fiscal stimulus from governments to combat the pandemic — and the subsequent pullback when inflation creeped up later in the year. That trade was supported by research from Trinh and his team.
"I read thousands of pages of research every week and go through that and think about what trading strategies people are incorporating that we aren't using or are using incorrectly," he said.
"It's a lot of going out into the world every day, reading what people are writing, paying attention to what people are saying, watching the markets, making sure the price changes make sense, and then trying to figure out what's going on."
- Bradley Saacks
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Dominic Rizzo, 30, T. Rowe Price
T. Rowe Price
Rizzo took over T. Rowe Price's $3.7 billion Global Technology Fund last December, just a day before the release of ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence chatbot that sent investor interest in AI skyrocketing.
Given that tailwind, the fund has delivered outsize returns. Through August 31, it's up over 43%, helped by positions in firms like Nvidia, Microsoft, Taiwan Semiconductor, and Advanced Micro Devices.
Rizzo attributes the fund's performance to a four-step method that includes looking for "linchpin" companies that are "mission critical" to their clients, companies that are innovating in a market seeing secular growth, those with improving fundamentals, and those with "reasonable" valuations.
"If you go back to December 1 when I became portfolio manager on this strategy, and you look at a lot of the semiconductor names, they actually fit that framework extremely well at the time," he said. "Names like Nvidia or AMD really fit what we were looking for."
Rizzo manages $7 billion in total for T. Rowe. He started at the asset manager as an intern before being hired as an associate analyst in 2015, and then moved on to an analyst role in London. From the Baltimore and Washington, DC, offices, he now manages a team of more than 20 people around the world.
He said his intellectual curiosity and intellectual flexibility — or a willingness to change his mind — have fueled his success and he believes those are qualities that investors can benefit from.
- William Edwards
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Jack Dillon, 35, Vista Equity Partners
Vista Equity Partners
Dillon is a senior vice president at Vista Equity Partners, where he helps manage the portfolio encompassing some of the firm's largest technology investments. He was instrumental in two of Vista's most recent and highest-profile sales that totaled more than $10 billion.
But excelling in the financial world didn't necessarily come naturally to Dillon.
As a junior studying finance at Notre Dame, Dillon didn't land his dream investment-banking internship on Wall Street. He found himself writing a letter to Thom Browne, the American fashion designer, after reading in a GQ profile that Browne, who was being celebrated as the fashion designer of the year, also went to Notre Dame.
Dillon offered to move to New York to work for Browne. One thing led to another, and Dillon found himself assisting Browne with everything from running errands to helping backstage at New York Fashion Week. Dillon was a fly on the wall, absorbing as much information as he could as he watched a master at work.
"When you get access to surround yourself with people trying to be at the top of their game in any industry, it's worth taking that chance," Dillon told Insider. "Just try your best, take what opportunity comes your way. It'll all work out in the end."
When Dillon graduated and was offered a position at Vista at the firm's analyst program about 15 years ago, he was drawn in by the same allure of working with "the best of the best in software investing," he said.
Dillon led Vista's sale of Apptio to IBM for $4.6 billion, which closed last month. He had helped the software company double its revenue after it was acquired in 2019 for $1.94 billion. Dillon was also instrumental in Vista's sale of Datto to Kaseya for $6.2 billion last year, Vista's first sale of a publicly traded company.
- Bianca Chan
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Katya Brozyna, 33, Jefferies
Jefferies
A few clues from Brozyna's upbringing point to her path to becoming a leader in Jefferies' aerospace and defense group globally. Her father was always a big aviation buff and her favorite movie growing up was "Top Gun." She also used to be a competitive skeet shooter.
Brozyna has been at Jefferies covering aerospace for her entire career. One of Jefferies youngest managing directors, she started at the firm in 2011 as an intern based in Washington, DC. A year later, she joined full time in New York as the aerospace franchise was being rebuilt.
"We've been able to create a name for ourselves where we didn't really have one as early as eight years ago, and I think we are very well regarded for our expertise in those sectors," she said. The most rewarding deals, she said, have been working with founder-owned and -controlled businesses — like Gama Aviation's sale to the private-jet charter firm Wheels Up in 2020 and Delta Air Lines' acquisition of a majority stake in Wheels Up this month.
Covering aerospace and aviation during the COVID pandemic was "fascinating," she said. The pandemic forced her team to be creative in finding ways to be helpful to companies in the sector.
"Now we're at a point where everything is going gangbusters, and the investment that was made in the time that nothing was going on is benefiting us," she said.
Brozyna believes that her willingness to "run through a wall" to get things done for clients and her attitude have taken her far.
"There are a lot of long nights, there are a lot of difficult conversations and developing personal relationships with our clients. Letting them see who you really are and having a positive attitude all the time goes a long way when those difficult situations arise," she said.
Brozyna is also known in the office for her affinity for furry friends. She's "obsessed" with her shelter mutt named Enzo and has been "striving to make Jefferies a dog-friendly office" but admits she isn't sure how far she'll get on that.
- Emmalyse Brownstein
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Kristen Powers, 31, Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley
Powers' first foray into the world of banking left her, in her words, "out of my element."
Rotating through different sales and trading teams at Barclays the summer after her junior year at Cornell, Powers didn't feel as if she had a true home. Still, she returned to the firm as a full-time employee on its investment-grade bond-syndicate team the following year, which packages clients' debt for buyers and sellers, despite never having worked with them as an intern.
There, with a small team and a growing sense of confidence, things clicked for Powers. She spent seven years at Barclays in New York, eventually rising to the director position, before joining Morgan Stanley in 2021 as an executive director.
Working in syndicated bonds isn't as prized as other parts of the business, but Powers views it as a mix of the skills that traders and investment bankers use.
"You are responsible for advising clients on pricing, on strategy, on financing, but your role day-to-day is similar in some ways to trading," she said. Clients have included Lockheed Martin and Volkswagen.
For young bankers looking to make a mark quickly, she recommends a path similar to hers in the syndicated market.
"The size of the deals are pretty large, and the frequency of the deals is pretty often, so your exposure to different companies is high, and the people whom you're working with on the deals are very senior," she said.
"I was a little bit surprised at how early I made an impact, and I think that's partially a product of being on a team of five people responsible for billions of dollars of issuance for companies."
- Bradley Saacks
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Lillian Qian Lin, 34, Pimco
Pimco
Lin has been used to success from a young age. Among all high-school students in Beijing in 2007, she had the top score on China's Gao Kao national university entry exam.
She capitalized on that success, writing a book describing her study habits that sold more than 100,000 copies in mainland China and Taiwan.
At Pimco, things have been no different. In her role as a portfolio manager for the investment-grade corporate-bond team, she helps manage billions of dollars by conducting research and executing trades for the $1.5 trillion asset manager.
She said the three qualities drive her performance are persistence, conscientiousness, and eagerness to take on challenges. Lin told Insider that she believes persistence "is more important than intelligence when differentiating between those that had potential and those that truly succeeded."
Lin joined Pimco in 2014 after completing her MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management. Lin interned at Harvard University's endowment and was a fixed-income, commodities, and currencies derivatives trader at UBS in Hong Kong.
A portfolio manager early in Lin's career at Pimco made an impact on her when she saw how he made "significant moves with extreme accuracy" even though he had the same information as everyone else.
"The difference between those that could not invest well and those that seemed to always get things right was simply that the latter had spent an incredible amount of time thinking about fundamentals, geopolitical factors, and market sentiment to really understand how all these factors affect asset values," she said. It gave her the confidence that with hard work, she could "eventually become an accomplished investor and so could anyone else with a strong understanding of mathematics and enough persistence."
Lin also has a passion for helping students and mentors both college students and colleagues early in their careers.
- William Edwards
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Luis Arteaga, 27, Barclays
Barclays
Growing up in the United Kingdom, Arteaga had two passions: a love of golf and an entrepreneurial itch he inherited from his father, the head of a travel company. Those interests merged when he was around 14. Arteaga started an online retail business buying golf supplies in bulk and selling the merchandise to individuals — he would come home after school, check his orders, and then fulfill them.
"It helped me understand microeconomics within a company," Arteaga told Insider.
It was an admittedly small-time operation, and Arteaga closed it down when he left the UK for the US in 2014 to pursue his dream of becoming a professional golfer, albeit while earning an education. But his playing career topped out as varsity golf captain at the University of Rochester, and then it was back to business — but this time in finance on the sales and trading floor at Barclays.
Arteaga advanced quickly on Barclays' Delta One desk — which provides hedge funds and asset managers exposure to stocks, indexes, and exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, using derivatives — taking responsibility for building out its "US custom basket" product. Essentially, this is a group of handpicked stocks tailored to a client's specific needs and wrapped into one derivative contract, providing a more efficient hedge than a generic ETF might. Arteaga developed strong relationships at top investment firms, such that portfolio managers now regularly ask Arteaga directly to devise hedges for stocks they own.
"When you see these well-regarded hedge funds putting money to work and investing in a strategy you came up with, that's something that keeps me going every single day," Arteaga said.
The business has grown fivefold since Arteaga joined in 2018, helping earn him an accelerated promotion to vice president earlier this year, and he's been tapped to help grow the custom-basket business in Asia. Moreover, he regularly gets to flex his golf skills — which he credits for teaching him to stay focused, patient, and grind out results at work — with clients and colleagues.
- Alex Morrell
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Luna McKeon, 35, Blue Owl Capital
Blue Owl Capital
McKeon joined the fledgling private-credit firm Owl Rock seven years ago. Today, she leads healthcare underwriting at the $150 billion publicly traded firm, now named Blue Owl Capital. Her team has deployed $10 billion in capital in the past four years, with healthcare investments representing 20% of Blue Owl's direct-lending portfolio.
Since May, she has provided financing for Warburg Pincus and Advent International to acquire the medical-device maker Baxter International's biopharma unit and led two debt-financing deals, including one for TPG's buyout of OneOncology.
McKeon, who immigrated with her mother to New York City from Beijing when she was 10 years old, was interested in finance since high school.
"Everything about finance is a jigsaw puzzle in some way," she told Insider. "It's about finding the right piece of information or seeing all the pieces of information, just like a thousand jigsaw pieces, and being able to take a step back and say, 'OK, what is the bigger picture?'"
She interned with Citigroup's sales and trading division before graduating from New York University during the Great Recession. After spending two years at Wells Fargo, she joined the asset manager Fifth Street and learned about private credit.
McKeon left Fifth Street for a corporate strategy job at a baby-clothing company but departed for Blue Owl less than a year later to return to private credit. The granddaughter of a neurologist, she had always been drawn to healthcare but didn't pursue it as a career because she couldn't stand the sight of blood.
Her role has taken on new significance in the past few years due to the pandemic and the emergence of private credit as an asset class. The attention from the mainstream media has been encouraging, McKeon told Insider.
"It's been exciting to say, 'Hey mom, look at this article. I helped finance that,'" she said.
- Hayley Cuccinello
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Michael Dunn Goekjian, 28, Apollo Management
Apollo Management
Since the London native joined Apollo in 2018, Goekjian has worked on transactions totaling more than $50 billion in deal value, according to the firm.
A principal of the financial institutions group, he was the day-to-day lead in purchasing the bulk of Credit Suisse's $75 billion securitized products business, which sold bonds backed by mortgages and other debt.
Goekjian compared inking the deal to solving a Rubik's Cube. Apollo had six weeks to reach an agreement with Credit Suisse and had limited insight into the unit's loan book. The Swiss bank also had a complex wish list, including ongoing income from some assets.
"These priorities emerged as the deal process went on," he told Insider. "We were in this position of constantly adapting our proposal to where Credit Suisse wanted to focus and what they were solving for."
The acquisition closed in February for an undisclosed sum. He helped build the unit into a stand-alone franchise named Atlas SP Partners. The private-credit firm has raised $40 billion in assets, and Goekjian is working to raise more. Other notches on his belt include investing in the fintech CAIS, an alternative-asset-investing marketplace, and acquiring a majority stake in the consumer lender Aqua Finance at a $1 billion valuation.
The University of Cambridge grad chose to pursue a career in finance after deciding against becoming a math professor. After spending three years with Goldman Sachs' mortgage-backed securities division in London, he left for Apollo's principal finance group in Europe. Now based in New York, he enjoys the complexity that comes with the financial institutions group, which he joined two years ago.
"There are a million different ways to finance a loan-origination business," Goekjian said. "It's not like in private equity where financing is one piece of the puzzle. In financial services, you're selling a financial asset, so your raw material is really what you're able to borrow."
- Hayley Cuccinello
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Michael Wilkinson, 35, Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo's Wilkinson is expecting to have a busy next few months.
A financials investment banker, Wilkinson's sector coverage is oriented toward alternative asset managers — think Apollo, KKR, Blackstone — and the affiliate entities they manage. From 2022 through mid-September 2023, Wilkinson has advised on $4.7 billion worth of mergers-and-acquisition transactions and on $6.2 billion worth of equity capital markets, or ECM, transactions. Some of those include Man Group in its acquisition of Varagon Capital Partners, Ready Capital in its acquisition of Broadmark, and Simon Property Group in its acquisition of a 50% interest stake in Jamestown.
As investor appetite for private markets grows, he expects more well-established players to buy up mid-tier private markets managers, he told Insider.
Wilkinson joined Wells in 2010 as an analyst in the financial institutions group in the firm's office in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he's stayed, climbing the ranks to director. While he graduated from a dual-degree finance program at the University of Florida on the heels of the financial crisis, the tumultuousness of the financial-services sector still intrigued him.
"It was where all the activity was happening from a deal perspective, but it also helped me realize that financial-services firms are the heartbeat of an economy."
Wilkinson said part of his path to success has been emphasizing a team-based approach.
"It's really better to have your teammates and colleagues empowered, in the loop, and fully plugged in because you can only have so much time, attention, or requisite knowledge around the specific subject, and you have to tap into what others bring to the table as well," he said.
And Wilkinson might be one of the busiest bankers you'll meet — he leads weekly prework pickleball matches for his team, and he and his wife just had their seventh child.
-Emmalyse Brownstein
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Nadim Laiwala, 35, Moelis & Company
Moelis & Company
Laiwala is a managing director on Moelis' technology team, where he spends about half his time covering hardware. The other half is focused on what he calls "deep technology" — think disruptive innovations like autonomous vehicles, quantum computing, and robotics.
Notable deals he's advised on include the Danish hearing-aid maker GN Store Nord's $1.3 billion acquisition of the gaming-accessories company SteelSeries and General Motors' $3.5 billion investment in the autonomous-vehicle company Cruise.
Laiwala earned a dual degree at UC Berkeley, in electrical engineering and computer science and business administration. But he knew he wanted a career in investment banking when he finished his first postgrad deal transaction while at Houlihan Lokey.
"It just felt like the right fit and immediate impact coming out of the gates," he said. "That first deal was what made it very clear that I liked what I did irrespective of the time and energy, a lot of the challenges that junior bankers faced."
Some of his advice for today's up-and-comers has to do with what he believes has made him successful: drive and respect for time and people — sending that extra email at the end of the long day, for example.
"Treat every interaction as an interview — coming in prepared, coming in with purpose. You want to make sure that when you're spending the counterparty's time, whether it's internal or external value, it's worth it," he said.
"You have to be a good guy. I don't mean it to be self-serving by any means, but I just think you've got to treat everybody with respect."
Outside of his regular MD duties, Laiwala is also responsible for junior-banker talent management in Moelis' San Francisco office and is a sponsor of the investment bank's Asian and Allies network.
- Emmalyse Brownstein
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Neil Kamath, 28, TPG
TPG
Savvy private-equity dealmakers know their industries inside and out and are shrewd at spotting opportunities and executing strategies. But it's unusual to have launched a business themselves.
Yet early in his career, Kamath, now a vice president at TPG focused on tech deals in San Francisco, helped start the EQT Ventures-backed last-mile logistics company Darkstore. That's given him an edge in working with company operators.
Kamath's parents, who had immigrated to the US from India, always encouraged him and his sister to be entrepreneurial, and they did things like start a lemonade stand when they were growing up in Tampa, Florida.
Kamath focuses on growth-stage companies across software, enterprise tech, internet, and digital media. He works on TPG's tech adjacencies team, which makes minority investments in tech firms like the software companies Kajabi and Zenoti, two deals Kamath helped lead. He joined TPG in 2021 from Spectrum Equity and was quickly promoted to vice president after sourcing or leading TPG's involvement in over $1 billion of new deals.
"What drew me to the industry at the onset was really the idea of business building, which has almost been thematic for me career-wide," he said.
Outside his direct investment-related work, Kamath has been closely involved with two firm-wide efforts. He helped launch an initiative to explore how TPG might use artificial intelligence in the investment process, and he is part of the integration team focused on TPG's planned acquisition of credit and the distressed debt investor Angelo Gordon.
A key mentor for Kamath has been Gokul Rajaram, a DoorDash executive who sits on the boards of Pinterest and Coinbase and who had invested in Darkstore. When they catch up, Rajaram always seeks thoughtful ways to support him, Kamath said. "Within 30 minutes, I'll have intros or some form of support," he said. "There are Silicon Valley connectors, and I think he's one of them."
- Rebecca Ungarino
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Patrick McGoldrick, 32, JPMorgan Asset Management
J.P. Morgan Asset Management
Most executives at elite Wall Street firms like JPMorgan can say they've raised their hands for opportunities to get ahead in their careers. But only one volunteered to work as Pat Patriot, the official mascot of the New England Patriots, who gets the crowds going in his signature red, white, and blue costume.
More than a decade ago, McGoldrick was a Bentley University freshman and marketing intern for the Kraft Group, which owns the Patriots. The National Football League team needed a mascot substitute for a few games, and McGoldrick stepped in. It was the first of many times that McGoldrick, now a managing partner in JPMorgan Asset Management's growth equity business, would jump at something new early in his career.
McGoldrick, who joined JPMorgan in 2013 as an analyst in the private bank, has been critical to the firm's private-markets business. Two years ago, McGoldrick helped found JPMorgan Private Capital and now oversees technology and biotech growth-equity and venture investments for the group. He played a key role in raising some $1 billion for the group's inaugural growth-equity fund, including investments in Plaid and Airtable.
He was previously the global head of Morgan Private Ventures, working with some of the private bank's wealthiest clients on direct and coinvestments in private companies.
"A big thing I learned early in my career is: Don't be afraid to build those relationships. You see someone who's three times a serial entrepreneur, who's made billions of dollars from nothing — those can be your most powerful relationships and allies as you build a business," McGoldrick said, referring broadly to client relationships.
McGoldrick's mentors include the former investment-banking head Carlos Hernandez and his mother, who worked several jobs to support their family after a drunk driver crashed into McGoldrick's father's car, which left him unable to work.
McGoldrick is passionate about helping younger colleagues advance in their careers. He created an early-career mentorship program within the private bank to provide advice and access to senior leaders, leading to an increase in associate promotions.
- Rebecca Ungarino
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Peter Gylfe, 35, Millennium
Millennium
Gylfe has always been an investor — literally. An uncle gifted him a few shares of AT&T when he was born, and his exposure to the markets were the quarterly dividend checks from the telecommunications giant that often didn't break a dollar.
"I remember that was just the coolest thing," he said.
A Tampa Bay native who studied finance at the University of Florida, Gylfe has never been confused about what he wanted to do. After starting his career in Citi's investment-banking program, he joined Izzy Englander's Millennium as an analyst in 2011, his first stint at the massive hedge fund.
He has worked for some of the biggest names in hedge funds, including Ken Griffin, Dmitry Balyasny, and Neil Chriss, thanks to roles at Citadel, Balyasny, and Hutchin Hill. Gylfe even ran his own fund for a short period. In 2021, a decade after starting his first job at Millennium, Gylfe rejoined the fund as a senior portfolio manager, running a team focused on industrial and material companies.
"I think I have a very good relationship with management, that's been fantastic. The firm is a great partner for the teams," said Gylfe, who oversees five analysts.
While Millennium declined to say how much capital his team runs, Gylfe's profile continues to grow in the industry, thanks to an inclusion on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in 2018. But he's far from complacent.
"You have to constantly be learning, always trying to tack onto your skill set," he said.
"Learning has a great compounding effect, especially in finance."
- Bradley Saacks
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Rachel Barry, 31, BlackRock
BlackRock
Wall Street job interviews are nerve-racking. But imagine you're straight out of college and the person sizing you up has been among the most influential women in finance for decades.
In 2014, Barbara Novick, a BlackRock cofounder and a powerful force in Washington, DC, interviewed Barry for a public-policy analyst role at the world's largest asset manager. Coming from Duke University, where Barry studied public policy, economics, and political science, she said it was "the perfect combination of my interests."
Barry joined the company that year and has quickly advanced in a critical area — how BlackRock positions itself to the public, including with policymakers — at a time when it's drawing more public scrutiny than ever. She's now chief operating officer for external affairs.
Barry led US retirement-policy efforts for several years, lobbying for pieces of legislation and regulation, including what's become known as the Secure Act and the Secure Act 2.0. These expanded retirement-savings options in the US and ultimately allowed BlackRock to sell retirement services to more people.
She ended up working for Novick until her retirement in 2021. "She is still an extraordinary mentor for me today," Barry said. That year she helped build out the 70-person external-affairs group, which encompasses the global public policy, social impact, corporate sustainability, and academic engagement teams.
Barry has earned promotions quickly within BlackRock's ranks — analyst, associate, vice president, then director — in a firm known for its rigorous promotion process. "I have always been excited about learning about new issues and taking on new projects, even if it is something I haven't done before or is outside my traditional scope of role," she said.
- Rebecca Ungarino
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Rachel Hunter-Goldman, 33, KKR
KKR
Hunter-Goldman fell into real estate by accident during a summer internship at Morgan Stanley but now expects to stay there. Her reason? Real estate has its financial components in underwriting and investment, but given real estate's fundamental role in pretty much everything, it's also a physical manifestation of the "macro and micro" trends going on in the world.
"You're able to express a viewpoint on where the world is going by investing in a physical property," Hunter-Goldman, a director on KKR's real-estate team, said.
Across her career, she's had many opportunities to express these viewpoints, first as an analyst on a commercial-mortgage-backed securities team at Morgan Stanley. Then during a seven-year stint at Apollo, where she sourced and executed real-estate credit investments. At KKR, which she joined in 2021, she's closed over $3.5 billion in loans across 30 different transactions, from Atlanta to New York, across many of KKR's investment vehicles.
Hunter-Goldman works across most types of commercial real estate. In 2022, she helped finance a $376 million industrial portfolio that spanned the US and originated a $212 million loan for a Doral, Florida, multifamily property in 2021, which she refinanced in 2023.
Alongside her role in originating loans, she also manages the associate class at KKR, teaching a new generation about real estate.
Her favorite loans to broker are for new developments, because she gets to watch entirely new structures rise out of the ground.
"Some of the most satisfying deals of my career are construction loans that you see when they're just a piece of dirt, and you can watch as it builds step by step, see how it's progressing until it gets leased up and comes to life at the end of the day," Hunter-Goldman said.
- Alex Nicoll
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Tori Gilliland, 30, Point72
Point72
Gilliland is one of the top young players in capital introduction and investor relations. She developed connections with institutional investors on both sides of the Atlantic while working on both the buy side and the sell side.
Gilliland attended Providence College to play soccer but injuries contributed to her quitting the team and shifting her energy toward her economics major and figuring out her career. A summer internship on the sales and trading floor at Jefferies gave her a taste for the structure and the competitive team environment of the sell side. Her people skills were a natural fit during a rotation on the prime brokerage team, sealing her preference for client work over trading. She took a full-time job at the bank after graduating in 2015, and then spent two years in investor relations at the hedge fund Tourbillon Capital before rejoining Jefferies on the capital intelligence team in 2018.
Her instinct to raise her hand led to a career-altering opportunity: In 2019, Jefferies entrusted her to build out the firm's capital introduction presence in Europe.
She moved to London and began tirelessly networking, taking hundreds of meetings and coffees with investors, portfolio managers, and service providers. Slowly, and then all of a sudden, these meetings began to pay off in the form of meaningful relationships.
"All the seeds I planted started to grow at once," she recalled.
She began brokering introductions that turned into sizable investments, including helping a startup fund secure an investment in the neighborhood of $100 million from an institutional investor and facilitating an eight-figure investment from a prestigious university endowment.
"When you can make a substantive introduction to someone's business, it really is so meaningful," Gilliland said.
Her success helped earn her an early promotion to senior vice president.
In May, Gilliland left Jefferies to head back to the US and the buy side, helping to manage investor relationships for the hedge fund giant Point72 Asset Management.
- Alex Morrell
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Ricky Mewani, 32, Citadel
Citadel
Mewani's dinner table growing up always had a familiar guest. While his family was in the jewelry business, his dad was obsessed with the markets, which meant Mewani's childhood meals included a large helping of Jim Cramer.
"I joke that my dad was a jeweler by trade but an investor by heart," he said.
He grew up in Jamaica before moving to New York for high school and stayed in the city for college, attending Columbia University to study finance. From there, he went to JPMorgan's healthcare-investment-banking group, where he worked on massive deals like Actavis' $66 billion purchase of Allergen.
After two years in investment banking, Mewani joined the buy side, first working at Visium Asset Management before moving to Citadel in August 2016, after his former employer collapsed.He's risen through the ranks at Citadel, moving from associate to analyst to portfolio manager. He now runs a healthcare-investing team of six within Citadel's global equities unit.
"It's such a dynamic space that's always growing and evolving," he said of the healthcare industry. He said his investing process comes from a blend of two portfolio managers he worked under — taking notes from one on building out ideas and fundamental analysis and evaluating risk from the other.
While his sister ended up in the medical field, Mewani's exposure to the sector comes from his experiences as a banker and now investor — an advantage he thinks helps his process.
"What really drives valuations is whether a new drug or device will be viable and have a market," he said.
"The science is extremely important and drives validation, but not being as embedded in it allows me to appreciate the potential value these therapies and devices will have on the market."
- Bradley Saacks
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Shanta Wu, 31, Fidelity
Fidelity
When Wu has some free time, she heads to a driving range, tees up a ball, imagines it's a box in a spreadsheet, and smacks it far into the distance.
As a quant researcher whose job it is to stare at and manipulate numbers all day, she said that taking the face of a golf club to imaginary datasets helps her to reset and come back to work with a refreshed outlook.
"I find it to be really stress-relieving," Wu said. "It helps me to clear up my mind."
After three years as a quant analyst at Geode Capital, Wu has found success at Fidelity since joining in March 2022. She uses statistical methods to augment the firm's fundamental investment analysis.
One recent model that Wu built came after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, and others back in March. It measured the interrelatedness of the international banking system and tried to pick out which institutions were most at risk. Fidelity liked it so much that it expanded it to assess risks to firms in the tech sector.
She's also currently working on a predictive model to analyze long-term fundamentals of companies so the firm can identify opportunities to outperform the broader market.
Wu is originally from Taiwan and came to the US to earn her master's degree in financial engineering at New York University. She said the 2008 global financial crisis inspired her to shift her planned career path from medicine to finance.
"I just wanted to understand how a financial product could cause such damage for the entire world," she said.
- William Edwards
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Sarah Sigfusson, 34, Bank of America
Bank of America
Sigfusson grew up in the suburbs of Chicago with dreams of going into the medical field. Upon arrival at Indiana University as an undergrad, she started as a biology major. But a class she took in the university's Kelley School of Business piqued her interest — so much so that she switched her major to finance.
While getting her MBA at Indiana years later, Sigfusson landed an internship at Bank of America, which turned into a full-time position in the financial sponsors group. She's since been rising the ranks of the team, which advises institutional investors like private-equity firms and pension funds on capital raises for their portfolio companies.
Some of her biggest deals include her role as joint financial advisor and lead financing provider of Medline's $30 billion leveraged buyout by Blackstone, Carlyle, and Hellman & Friedman and as a lead underwriter of Platinum Equity's $1.7 billion LBO of Club Car.
Sigfusson said that by "being intellectually curious, a team player, a collaborator, I was able to get these deal opportunities, which essentially allowed me to continue to work with the same deal team, for instance, on the next transaction."
She's the mentor for summer interns in her group each year, a member of the Bank of America Junior Investment Banking Advisory Board, and a campus liaison for MBA recruiting at IU. One piece of advice she shares with young bankers: Don't be afraid to speak up.
"I always advise, 'We want to hear what you have to say,' and I live by that philosophy, too. I know that I bring a diverse background, so I'm not afraid to speak and provide opinions," she said. This wasn't always the case. Earlier in her career, she wasn't as confident and held back, but "the more deal experience you get, the more and more comfortable it is."
- Emmalyse Brownstein
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Yi Yi, 31, Citadel Securities
Citadel Securities
Early in her career as a fixed-income trader at Barclays, Yi felt the siren song of exotic and trendy trading products, and she considered moving into interest-rate options or credit derivatives like some of her peers. Instead, she decided to specialize in one of the most vanilla and liquid products on the market: US Treasury bonds.
Today, she's one of the most prolific interest-rate traders on Wall Street, serving as Citadel Securities' top trader in 20- to 30-year US Treasuries. Yi joined the firm in summer 2021, not long before the Federal Reserve began raising rates and spurring volatility in the Treasury market. Notional trading volumes at Citadel Securities for long-dated rates were up more than 35% in the first half of 2023 compared with mid-2021, according to people familiar with the matter, and trading counterparties — which include central banks, institutional investors, and hedge funds — have increased as well.
Trading profits under Yi have climbed and her responsibilities have expanded. She now trades the 10-year Treasury note, too, and she's taken point on launching new trading products. In September, Yi led the company's launch of STRIP bonds.
When she was younger, the notion of working on a trading floor seemed far-fetched, given how shy and introverted she was. She signed up for speech and debate in high school to challenge herself and improve her public speaking. That helped when she landed an internship on Barclays' trading floor in college.
"I thought if I could make it on a trading floor, I could make it anywhere," Yi said.
She immersed herself in becoming an expert in US government bonds, and it paid off. She was trading her own interest-rate book within three years and earned an accelerated promotion to director in 2021.
"A lot of traders can fixate on the 'big' or 'exciting' trades, but you need to be able to focus and execute on the day-to-day. The trust with clients builds from that, and they'll naturally come to you with bigger and more complex trades," Yi said.
- Alex Morrell
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