LionTree

The firm describes it as a realistic view of the full-time Investment Banking Analyst Program, with successful summer analysts converted to full-time analyst offers for a post-graduation start date. Summer analysts work on live client assignments alongside deal teams, complete a final-project presentation to firm leadership, and are paired with an assigned mentorship team. With a firm-wide headcount of around 100 people across its New York, San Francisco, London and Paris offices, the summer cohort is small in absolute terms, and conversion to the full-time analyst class is the only structured graduate route – there is no separately advertised off-cycle internship or insight programme to use as a backup.

A few features set the entry to LionTree apart from a generalist boutique:

• A narrow sector lane and outsized deal sheet: per the 2027 summer analyst posting, the firm has advised on more than $850 billion of deal volume across 300+ transactions since its 2012 founding, including Take-Two / Zynga, MGM / Amazon, the Athletic / New York Times, WarnerMedia / Discovery and Viacom / CBS.
• An integrated platform under one roof: Investment Banking Advisory, Public Markets / IPO Advisory and Merchant Banking Investments, so analysts see balance-sheet positioning alongside pure advisory work.
• A small absolute size – around 100 employees firm-wide – which means a summer cohort measured in handfuls, not dozens.
• Founders' lineage from a single seat: Aryeh Bourkoff and Ehren Stenzler both came out of UBS's TMT investment-banking practice when they launched the firm.

For a candidate weighing LionTree against a bulge-bracket programme, the trade is optionality for concentration: deal exposure is intense and stays inside the TMT-consumer-creative perimeter, but the secondary paths in and out – off-cycle internships, insight weeks, sector rotations within a larger summer class – are correspondingly fewer than at a much larger bank.