How to Prepare for an Investment Banking Coffee Chat

Let's say you only have 10 units of mental processing power.

During a live coffee chat, that capacity gets spent on two things: forming your next question, and responding to what the other person just said. Here's the trap. If forming the question burns all 10 units, you have nothing left over to actually respond. You acknowledge what they said with a quick "got it," then move on to your next question. Do that for thirty minutes and you haven't had a conversation. You've run a Q&A. And a Q&A will not result in a referral. Ever.

The entire point of preparation is to move the mechanical work off the live call and into the hours before it, when you have unlimited time and zero pressure. Prepare the repeatable parts in advance, and during the call those 10 units are freed up for the thing that actually earns referrals: listening closely and responding like a colleague. A pure Q&A runs about an 80/20 split, them talking 80% of the time and you 20%. A real conversation is closer to 60/40. Preparation is how you buy back that extra 20 points of airtime.

I'll be honest about how far I took this. I brought 2 laptops to school with me every day so I could have as much information at my fingertips as possible. Was it overkill? To most people, yes. To me it was simply doing my due diligence. Most of the time the setup didn't change the outcome. But for the 5 or 10 chats where it did, that extra effort was well worth it.

None of this is theory. Across my own recruiting I did 300+ coffee chats. I've since listened to 150+ of my students' chats, and I've been the one doing the coffee-chatting 50+ times. The clearest pattern across all of it: the students who win prepare exhaustively, and then hold that preparation loosely. They prepare so thoroughly they can afford to forget all of it on the call. The students who lose do the opposite. They under-prepare, then cling to the little they have like a bible they're forbidden to deviate from. Welcome to Q&A-land.

So this is the tension to keep in your head through everything below. Prepare like your offer depends on it. Then, on the call, be ready to throw the whole plan away.

Build your prep dashboard

Before any chat, I'd open the exact same set of documents and windows. Here's the full list:

• Their LinkedIn profile

• Your Resume

• Your TMAY & "Why this role?" answers

• Personalized question list (mid-chat & chat-end) & small talk (chat-start)

• Technicals (i.e., ibvine.io – ALL topics, List view)

• Notetaker (Excel, Docs, Notes, etc.)

• Other scripts (intro, transitions, questions, responses, etc.)

Most of these (your scripts, your personalized questions, your recruitment questions, your notetaker, and your behavioral answers) lived on a single tab of one Excel workbook that I'd open before every chat. That workbook doubled as the repository for all my coffee chat notes: one tab, one place, with every person I'd chatted with given their own section. Name, title, firm, and office pinned up top in yellow, followed by my prep notes, my live notes, and anything worth following up on.

The rest (their LinkedIn, my resume, and my technicals reference) lived in a web browser. I split everything across 2 laptops specifically so I'd never have to Alt+Tab between windows mid-sentence. It was all visible at once. Here is what each screen held, and why.

Screen 1: your notetaker and their LinkedIn

On the left, my Excel notetaker. On the right, their LinkedIn profile. Together, everything I needed to drive the first 10 to 15 minutes of the chat, visible at the same time, no Alt+Tab required. The notetaker itself held five things:

• Small talk topic (e.g. a news article). A few articles I could use to open the chat. In one case it was Bain's annual Private Equity Report. More on how to source these in the next section.
• Live notes. Where I took notes as they introduced themselves and answered. Any question that popped into my head, anything notable I wanted to circle back to, and any key facts worth following up on (a personal interest) or worth knowing for recruitment (timelines, group-specific processes).
• Personalized question list. The questions I'd written for this specific person. We'll build these below.
• Scripts. My behavioral answers and their role-specific variations (an IB TMAY versus a PE TMAY), plus scripts for starting the conversation, transitioning out of my TMAY into theirs, transitioning out of their TMAY into my first question, and the "time check" transition into recruitment questions. Before chats where I was extra anxious, I'd rewrite all my behaviorals as if I were speaking directly to that person, just to calm my nerves.
• Recruitment-related questions. Three to five, asked at the end of the chat, formed before it.

Their LinkedIn stayed open on the right screen as a constant reminder of their background. I wasn't staring at it every second, but I'd glance over periodically, especially as they answered, to see if I could pick anything out of their background that connected to what I was about to say. Those "one-uppers," ingrained over time, are ultimately what won me referrals to elite boutiques like Perella Weinberg Partners, Moelis, and Evercore. My resume sat one Alt+Tab away from replacing their LinkedIn. The notetaker had to stay open throughout, but their LinkedIn stopped being useful around the 10 to 15-minute mark. Past that point I'd swap in my resume, so I always had everything on it in front of me.

Screen 2: a research browser and your technicals

On the left, a blank browser tab for any intra-chat research: industry headlines, valuation trends, interest-rate news, the consensus around notable macro indicators. One important caveat. This only helps once you can already carry a conversation comfortably across the 20-minute mark. If you can't yet have a conversation (that 60/40 split), there's no point making your answers sound smarter, because you're not getting the referral anyway. Preparedness and personality. Remember that.

On the right, my technicals reference. For this I used ibvine.io: select "ALL" and put it on "List View" so you can Ctrl+F any concept instantly. I tried a combined PDF of the BIWS guides once and found there were too many mentions of any given keyword for Ctrl+F to be useful. It's very rare you'll get asked a technical on a chat, and if you do, take it as a good sign. They only test candidates who already look like they deserve a first-round interview. Having ibvine.io open let me focus on the conversation itself instead of listening anxiously for a technical question to land.

If this all sounds like a lot, it is. But notice what the setup buys you: every mechanical thing you might need is in front of your eyes, so your 10 units stay free for the person on the other end of the line.

Research the person

The single most chat-specific piece of prep is researching the human being you're about to talk to. Start with their LinkedIn, then spend around 30 minutes researching the industries, asset classes, markets, firms, or geographies relevant to them.

Let their LinkedIn point your research. If their profile tells you their coverage or product group, go read up on the market trends and M&A activity in that space. If it tells you where they're based, search for notable headlines in their city. Mine were usually Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco. Keep a few general news articles handy too, the way I kept Bain's annual Private Equity Report on hand, so you always have something current to open the small talk with.

The real payoff of all this is the "one-uppers." When you have their background fresh in your mind, you can connect something they say in the moment to something specific in their history, and respond in a way that proves you were actually listening and actually did your homework. That skill, built one chat at a time, is what separated me from students with stronger resumes. Many students who landed excellent offers built entire interview industry pitches out of their pre-chat research alone. As tedious as those 30 minutes feel, they compound. Use them wisely.

Write and rehearse your introduction

The "tell me about yourself" exchange happens in the first 2 to 5 minutes of every single chat, and it is your single best opportunity to prove how much of a colleague you are. Get it wrong and you've eliminated your chance at a referral before the conversation has even started. Your introduction is the lens through which the other person views you for the rest of the call, and if it's clumsy, the unspoken reaction is: "This student can't even introduce himself properly. This is going to be a long thirty minutes."

Two things matter equally: content and delivery.

On content, your TMAY should encapsulate everything you want a stranger to know about you professionally. It is the highest-ROI activity in all of recruiting, because everyone in a position to give you an offer is currently a stranger, and this is their first impression of you.

On delivery, script it and rehearse it until it's clean. Aim for about 60 seconds on a chat. Around 90 seconds is fine for an interview, but on a chat, especially when they can't see your face, time passes a lot more slowly. There should be no "um," no "you know," no "...annnnd..." Your introduction is a constant. You deliver it in every chat you do, so a flubbed TMAY tells the other person one of two things: either you aren't doing enough chats, or you aren't taking this seriously. Neither is someone they want to work with. Other students, some with worse resumes than yours, will deliver theirs flawlessly. So form your Coffee Chat TMAY before your very first chat, and keep it on your dashboard.

This extends to the rest of your Core 3 Behavioral Questions: TMAY, Why This Role, and Why This Firm. Script all three. During my penultimate-summer recruiting I recited my Core 3 answers 100+ times over roughly 3 months. That sounds excessive, and in terms of learning anything new, it was. But measured on retention, on being able to deliver those answers smoothly under pressure, it was some of the most productive work I did. Going from good to great always takes a disproportionate amount of effort, and your introduction is exactly where that effort pays off.

Prepare your personalized questions

This is where the 10-units idea becomes concrete. The whole reason you write questions in advance is to take the burden of forming them off the live call, which frees you up to develop intelligent responses instead. Responses are what build rapport, convey understanding, and signal that you're already a colleague. Students who skip this step spend all their processing power just keeping the conversation alive, and end up acknowledging answers instead of responding to them. That's a Q&A, and a Q&A never gets the referral.

Here's the rule I followed:

Before every chat, I'd aim to craft 5 – 10 personalized questions based on their background. Expect to ask only 1 – 2 of them.

That ratio surprises people. Why write ten questions if you'll only ask one or two? Because you don't know in advance which one or two will fit the way the conversation actually unfolds, and because the act of preparing all ten is what frees your mind to be present. Those one or two well-placed questions can genuinely tip the scales in your favor.

The quality bar for "personalized" is the name-swap test:

Create at least 5 questions specific to this person (i.e., if we replaced this person's name with someone else's the question would no longer make sense).

Like everything else, this is a skill that compounds. I spent around 30 minutes preparing questions for my first couple of chats one cycle, and that was already after 100+ coffee chats over the prior ~6 months. By the end of that cycle I had it down to about 5 minutes.

Scripts you can lock in advance

Beyond your TMAY and your questions, several pieces of every chat are repeatable enough to script ahead of time. Scripting them is not about sounding robotic. It's about removing them from the list of things competing for your 10 units in the moment.

Small talk. Prepare jokes, questions, and responses in advance. Small talk should last about 1 to 3 minutes, and you extend it until you can tell the other person is losing interest, usually around the 1.5 to 3-minute mark. The goal is to show personality fast. Don't settle for the flat default:

"it was busy, I had exams, but they're all done now, so things are looking good"

Prepare something with a bit of color instead:

"it was busy, and I've really been missing the golf range now that it's all snowed up, but this weekend with exams finally over my friends and I had teppanyaki for the first time, which was pretty cool, so…[chuckle]…it was pretty good"

The specific activities are arbitrary. Swap in whatever is true for you. The point is that a few seconds of genuine, specific detail is how you show personality in an extremely short window. For a fuller breakdown of how to handle this part of the chat, watch the How To: Small Talk video.

Transitions. A handful of transitions happen in essentially every chat, which means you can confidently script them and make them as smooth as your TMAY. The four to write out: starting the conversation, moving out of your TMAY into theirs, moving out of their TMAY into your first question, and the "time check" transition from the conversation into your recruitment questions. How you deliver and sequence these live is its own subject. For prep, just make sure they're written and rehearsed so you never fumble a handoff.

Acknowledgements. It's easy to forget to vary how you acknowledge someone, and very noticeable when you don't. Repeat "got it" ten times and you sound like you're going through the motions, even when you're genuinely engaged. The fix is low-hanging fruit: keep 5 acknowledgements on your dashboard so you can glance up and grab a different one without much thought. The ones I kept on screen:

Prepare your three recruitment questions

A secondary objective of every chat is to extract concrete information: job openings, the status of a process, advice for the interview. Your focus narrows dramatically once you're live and fighting to keep the conversation going, so you form these questions before the chat and keep them in front of you. Prepare three essentials, plus any others you think are appropriate, for a total of three to five:

1. Interview Timelines — when applications open and when interviews are conducted.
2. Teammate Connections — who else you could be introduced to or reach out to.
3. Staying In Touch — whether you can follow up with questions later.

The one that requires real preparation is the Teammate Connection. Have an idea of who you'd want to be connected with and why, prepared in advance. Around half the time, the person responds to that question with "What would you like to learn more about?" or "Who would be good for you to speak to?" If you don't have a reason ready, you get caught flat-footed at the worst possible moment. Any reason, however simple, beats fumbling.

These questions get asked at the end, around the 20-minute mark, and at the very least by the 15-minute mark. Exactly how you transition into them and phrase them live is a separate skill. For now, the prep job is simply to have all three written and a teammate-connection reason loaded before you dial in. It never hurts to ask, and because you're not asking for a referral directly, you're never putting anyone in an awkward spot.

Be ready for an evaluative chat

For ultra-competitive processes, where more candidates are networking than there are first-round slots, firms will sometimes run "evaluative" coffee chats that double as interviews. You cannot tell whether a chat will be evaluative until you're already on it, and there's no real difference between preparing for one and preparing for an interview. The only reliable defense is to have your interview materials ready before any chat.

Here is the set of documents and websites to have open before any chat so you're never caught flat-footed:

• Pre-written Behavioral Answers (TMAY, Why this role?, S & W, etc.)

• Scripted Deal Walkthroughs & Stock Pitches (the ones on your resume)

• Your Resume

• ibvine.io (select "ALL" and put on "List View" for Ctrl + F accessibility)

The deal walkthroughs matter more than people expect. I had around 5 deals on the resume I used that cycle and was always a little scared someone would go really deep on one, which is exactly why I made sure I could answer any walkthrough question without scrambling. For the underlying technicals, I leaned on ibvine.io and re-read each of the BIWS guides roughly 5 times. And if a technical does come up on a chat, remember: it's a compliment. They only bother evaluating candidates who already look the part.

If you're also tailoring to who you're talking to

One last layer of prep, secondary to everything above but worth a mention. Tailor your materials to the specific person.

If you're networking for more than one role, IB and PE most commonly, then the TMAY you use and the way you describe certain resume experiences should shift depending on who's on the other end. If you don't already have role-dependent versions of your behavioral answers, build them now and run through this adjustment before every chat. Where you can, augment your TMAY with the person's own interests that you found online.

Prepare harder, too, for chats with senior employees. Think of a conversation with a VP, Director, or MD as a levered-up version of a chat with an analyst: their impression of you, good or bad, carries outsized weight on your candidacy. The importance of preparing for those calls can't be overstated. The flip side is that senior chats are the best training ground there is. If you can hold your own with the most demanding audience, everyone else feels easy afterward.

The whole point of all this

That's why the grip has to stay loose. Prepare exhaustively enough that you could forget all of it, then on the call, let the conversation lead and trust that the work is already in you. I'm deeply introverted and these chats genuinely scared me at the start. I had 15-second awkward silences early on. The reason I got good wasn't talent. It was reps, on top of a foundation of preparation that freed me up to actually get better each time. Prepare the mechanical, protect your 10 units for the human, and do enough of them that the skill compounds. If I could get there, so can you.