Business Insider's 2026 Rising Stars Of Wall Street

Maya Venkatraman is helping create the blueprint for Wall Street's data-center debt boom.

Venkatraman, a managing director, played a leading role in structuring a novel $3.2 billion bond for data center developer TeraWulf, with credit support from Google.

"There wasn't really a playbook that existed," said Venkatraman, Morgan Stanley's US head of transportation and infrastructure leveraged finance. Traditional project financing couldn't meet the industry's enormous capital needs alone, so her team developed the structure last fall, which has since served as a template for a market she said has generated roughly $45 billion in high-yield bond issuance over the past year.

Venkatraman also had to educate investors and ratings agencies about the emerging asset class, swapping traditional roadshows for visits to data-center project sites, steel-toed boots and all.

The deal was "really defining" for Mumbai-born Venkatraman, who joined Morgan Stanley in 2013 and was promoted to MD in January 2026. She's led the structuring and execution of more than 110 transactions throughout her career.

It also wasn't the first time dealing with unconventional financing solutions. Newly promoted to vice president when COVID-19 brought travel to a halt, she worked with her team around the clock to help airlines and cruise operators secure liquidity, including raising billions for Royal Caribbean.

"People were asking, are we ever gonna get on an airplane again? Are we ever gonna take a cruise again?" she recalled.

The crisis accelerated her career, giving her "multiple times the reps" of others at her level.

Venkatraman discovered finance and her analytical side at the University of Virginia. She credits her love of literature and history with helping her translate complex financial concepts into compelling stories for investors.

Outside work, the longtime distance runner finds that her best problem-solving happens on runs, sometimes accompanied by her 4-year-old daughter in a stroller. She's expecting her second child in the coming weeks.

Theo Saarinen's career path is more akin to that of a high-flying tech founder than a hedge fund researcher.

The 27-year-old is the chief research officer for Bridgewater's AIA Labs, the internal AI research unit run by the $102 billion Connecticut-based hedge fund giant. The unit's AI-powered fund is up nearly 16% through September this year, outpacing the S&P 500 and the average hedge fund over the same period.

While Saarinen is checking his fund's performance "returns all the time — it's a very important piece of feedback," he approaches his role with an almost academic mindset, befitting his background.

He joined the AIA group in 2023 while pursuing a doctorate in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. He became one of the group's first hires, thanks in part to a relationship with his academic mentors Bin Yu and Jasjeet Sekhon, the latter of whom co-founded AIA Labs at Bridgewater with the firm's co-CIO Greg Jensen.

Now, Saarinen is focused on connecting "the frontier of AI" with markets. He spends a lot of his time deconstructing the decision-making of the strategy — "peeling back the machines' thoughts to understand why they're doing what they're doing," he said.

And, on top of his role, he's kept a foot in academia — he's writing his dissertation and plans to complete his doctorate soon, while keeping tabs on new developments across the AI space.

He's also a player in the hedge-fund talent war, saying they're always looking for talented people at rivals, but also at Big Tech companies and high-flying startups.

He believes the firm is doing just as interesting work as the frontier labs, with a much more concrete goal — generating returns.

"Markets are an extremely hard problem — the ultimate challenge," he said.

People might think Diana Liu had some foresight when she started working on financing data center deals 12 years ago. But really, she was just starting out in structured finance at Deutsche Bank and found that because data centers didn't fit neatly into traditional real estate or infrastructure portfolios, they created an opportunity to earn "excess returns" relative to the risk.

More than a decade later, Liu said the sector still offers outsized returns — not because there aren't investors, but because hyperscalers can't stop growing.

In her role as a Principal at Blue Owl, she helped develop the novel JV structure behind the financing for Meta's $50 billion Hyperion data center in Louisiana, dubbed Project Beignet. Conversations about the deal began when Liu was still at IPI Partners, the data center specialists that Blue Owl acquired in 2025, and she had been at since 2021.

The deal, financed 80% by Blue Owl and 20% by Meta, raised more than $27 billion and pioneered the use of 144A bonds in data-center financing at an unprecedented scale. The approach gave them access to a wider pool of institutional investors without requiring them to register the securities.

While some may have criticized the deal for taking some of Meta's AI computing costs off its balance sheet, she said it is "the most public deal ever done in data centers" because of the novel use of public bonds.

"It's always been a progression of trying to become a mainstream asset class and be recognized and be able to access traditional forms of markets," Liu said. "This was a push towards that, not trying to hide something."

The business growth has come from a pretty simple investment thesis: supporting the biggest tech companies, the Princeton grad said. It's "a bet that these really financially healthy companies" will continue to support "diversified users of the internet" alongside AI. Massive AI campuses require underwriting AI monetization because of their size, but the core bet is still on big tech.

"Still to this day, we're a little bit indifferent as to what their use cases are because we think these are some of the best credits in the world," Liu said.

Mike Washington says he still feels the glimmers of imposter syndrome.

The 32-year-old managing director has been at Goldman for over a decade, but says it's the same feeling that used to hit him as a college intern — and gets at an ethos behind his success: a comfort with discomfort.

"There's different parts of your life where it comes back up," Washington, the co-head of Goldman's Americas Equities High Touch Sales Trading business, said. "You train it. You have to push yourself to be uncomfortable."

Executing trades for Wall Street's biggest investors means market volatility often creates opportunities that can double or triple market volume. When markets were thrown into disarray during the pandemic, he said it felt like "drinking from a firehouse."

Amid the "saaspocalypse" chaos early this year, Washington brought in sector specialists and colleagues to build customized stock baskets to help clients find investments insulated from the market turmoil.

"The days blurred together," he said. "I came to appreciate the intensity and responsibility that come with being a trusted advisor during periods of uncertainty."

These experiences ultimately accelerated Washington's career and helped him develop his ability to lead under pressure, he said. Over his tenure, Washington has earned top equity broker rankings at some of the world's largest asset managers, according to Goldman. He said that if you ask his clients why they keep coming back, it's because they trust him to put their interests first.

"It's because I know if I'm calling Mike, my best interest is always going to be at the heart of whatever the outcome is," he said.

Washington credits his drive to a few sources. One is his D1 basketball career at Princeton, which instilled in him an enduring work ethic and the ability to take direct feedback.

He can also speak to the power of a good connection. Washington met one of his trusted mentors, York Capital founder Jamie Dinan, at an NBA game in college, who provided him with the support he describes as having a "butterfly effect" on his career.

He's now heavily involved in Princeton's recruiting efforts and regularly connects top talent within the university to the bank.

At 33, David Bessel has helped lead TPG's investments in three of the hottest companies of this era: OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX.

Over 11 years at TPG, Bessel has worked across the firm's large-cap buyout business, its middle-market growth platform, and, for the past five years, its technology-adjacent investing efforts.

He helped lead diligence for TPG's investments in OpenAI, beginning with the company's $300 billion valuation round last summer, followed by a secondary transaction at a $500 billion valuation and another investment earlier this year at an $852 billion valuation. He also worked on TPG's investment in SpaceX, where the firm completed a secondary transaction at what he described as an opportune time.

The relationship with OpenAI has gone beyond buying shares. As something he's most proud of, Bessel points to TPG's investment in the OpenAI Deployment Company, a new enterprise-focused business majority-owned by OpenAI. Bessel helped with early business design, financial planning, and connecting OpenAI with TPG's portfolio companies.

"It's something that we feel like we were uniquely positioned to help put together," he said.

The Dartmouth College graduate has lived in San Francisco through multiple cycles since joining TPG in 2015 and says he wants to be cautious around AI hype.

"I've tried to approach this newest cycle of AI with a degree of humility," he said. "One of the things that I appreciate most about TPG's strategy is we've been doing tech investing for 30-plus years, and so we know how to play aggressively, but also know when to pull back when it's seeming like the music is going to stop playing."

Asked if the music will stop playing anytime soon, Bessel says it is only the first act, but that does not mean pain is not coming too.

"We're still very early, but the internet became a big thing, and the dot-com crash also happened, so I think it'll be an interesting moment," he said.

Some people take a winding road before ending up in the career they were always meant to be in. Sahil Singhal is not one of these people.

"I knew by sophomore year that I'd be trading fixed income and macro markets one day," the 31-year-old portfolio manager said.

Singhal's drive comes through quickly in conversation. He codes to relax. He found time to get both an undergraduate degree, in finance and engineering, and a Master's, in applied mathematics, in his four years at the University of Pennsylvania. By 28, he was a portfolio manager at Dmitry Balyasny's $37 billion hedge fund.

Singhal said he was first drawn to the industry when he attended talks by asset management executives while in school.

He interned two summers at Ken Griffin's Citadel, working for teams trading bonds, before joining the firm full-time after college.

While hedge funds have since expanded their talent pool to recruit more fresh college grads, Singhal was often the youngest in the room when he started at Citadel. He credits his experience at Penn's investment club, the Wharton Trading & Investment Group, for helping him hit the ground running.

He left Citadel as the pandemic was beginning in early 2020 and eventually joined Balyansy Assest Management as an associate PM under David Levary, who taught him "the value of patience."

"Let trades come to you so you don't force them," he said,

His time is now split between tweaking his portfolio of bonds, currency plays, and commodities-related wagers, and researching his next big idea.

"It's important for a PM to be equally in the weeds as their analysts," he said.

His advice to anyone trying to break into the hedge-fund game is to be a self-starter, regardless of how much experience you have or where you went to school.

"The most important skill in markets is the ability to learn on your own," he said.

Cody Kiechle grew up milking cows and driving tractors on his family's dairy farm in a small town near the Canadian border in northern New York. Now, he's helping finance the biggest infrastructure buildouts in technology history.

The 33-year-old Bank of America managing director has helped execute more than 400 bond offerings that raised over $1 trillion over his career, including more than $200 billion in 2026 alone.

He's at the center of an unprecedented borrowing spree as technology giants race to build AI infrastructure. Historically, these companies used relatively little outside financing. But Kiechle recognized a turning point in late 2025, when it became clear that their businesses were becoming far more capital-intensive and would turn to debt.

"There was a pretty massive shift happening," he said.

So far in 2026, nine bond offerings have reached $25 billion or more, compared with a previous full-year record of just two deals that size.

Kiechle has led and advised on four of these megadeals. He expects the AI borrowing boom to accelerate into 2027 and believes this period will be remembered as a "seminal moment."

Kiechle's recent deals include helping Alphabet raise $32 billion from investors, securing $25 billion apiece for Oracle and Salesforce, and leading SpaceX's first public bond sale, which raised $25 billion. The Oracle deal attracted a record amount of investor orders for a bond offering from a highly rated company, Kiechle said.

The complexity of these megadeals can be "stressful at times, super exciting at times," Kiechle said. The Alphabet transaction happened over a couple of days, and he worked across multiple time zones to raise money in US dollars, British pounds, and Swiss francs.

After attending Harvard, Kiechle joined Bank of America in 2015. He spent three years in debt capital markets, moved into investment banking, then returned, taking primary responsibility for technology clients in 2024.

He credits his rural upbringing with teaching him "work ethic," "comfort with unpredictability," and "an ownership mindset."

Now a mentor himself, Kiechle previously oversaw professional development for more than 50 junior bankers. He typically passes along advice he received early in his career: "Be comfortable being uncomfortable."

When Kate Casey joined KKR's infrastructure team in 2018, the sector was not yet the industry's starring player. Energy was also particularly out of favor following the mid-decade price collapse.

"It was almost like nobody wanted to talk to you if you were working on energy in California," she said of her time in Menlo Park. "Now I have my friends from California who work at VC funds that call me all the time to help figure it out."

Today, Casey is a director in KKR's infrastructure group, helping lead large energy deals that will power hyperscale data centers. The assets her team manages have grown to $119 billion from less than $10 billion when she joined.

This summer, she helped lead KKR's participation in a $5.3 billion investment into a joint venture with energy company Williams to develop natural-gas electricity projects for data centers and other high-energy users.

She works closely with the firm's digital infrastructure team to accelerate data center development, because "increasingly, the ability to deliver that power quickly is what determines how fast a project can move forward."

"I jokingly call our team the data center support team," she said.

Before she specialized in energy, she helped redefine infrastructure investing beyond traditional assets like toll roads to businesses with contracts, inflation protection, and real assets.

One of the first deals she led was KKR's $8 billion investment in Refresco, the world's largest independent bottling company, in 2022. Casey called it a "defining infrastructure deal," because it showed how a business traditionally viewed as private equity could qualify as infrastructure.

She decided to specialize in energy, and eventually move to Houston, because of James Cunningham, leader of KKR's energy practice and the only other Texan on the team when Casey joined. As an associate, she was "almost in disbelief" that the MD spent the time to model a gas investment with her.

Asher Hecht learned the value of thinking several moves ahead long before he became a principal at General Atlantic in 2017.

Hecht started playing chess at 5 years old, was a competitive player growing up, and still reaches for a quick game on Chess.com when he needs a mental reset between calls. He says chess shares the skills crucial for being a good PE investor: a mastery of calculation and strategy.

San Francisco-based Hecht focuses on technology investments across infrastructure software, cybersecurity, data, IT, DevOps, and AI. His deals have included Slack, Opendoor, Crowdstrike, and the hottest company of the moment, Anthropic.

General Atlantic invested in Anthropic across its past three rounds, and Hecht helped lead due diligence on those massive financings. He also serves on the board of Ode, Anthropic's services business, which General Atlantic helped form alongside other private-equity firms.

"It's both fun and sometimes scary to have a big position in something that is so public," Hecht said. "We're thrilled to be part of the story."

With an investment in a company as massive as Anthropic, Hecht says he has little say in the business and is "largely along for the ride." He values his work with other portfolio companies in which the firm holds more substantial stakes and can shape their businesses.

"I do not believe that this job is about big accomplishments," he said. "It's about stacking a bunch of small things."

Hecht's team conducts around 150 sourcing calls every week, something he says has been streamlined by AI.

"Now we have an automated email that lists them all out, notices trends, ranks and stacks them, and suggests next steps," he says. "It is making everyone a lot more effective and smarter at their job."

For those trying to break into private equity, Hecht says sharp analytical skills matter more than ever. And it's important to avoid the trap of overly romanticizing the job.

"It's not as glamorous as it used to be," he said. "You have to really love the work."

When Bridget Chaudhry travels, she usually asks a friend or relative to embark on a "retail tourism" journey at a local retailer or brand event.

The experience gives the investment banker a fresh perspective on the packaged food and beauty industries as a managing director in Goldman Sachs' consumer retail group, the same group she interned for in 2012 and joined the following year. Banking offered a chance to marry her analytical and social selves, and consumer retail a chance to advise the companies she interacted with daily.

Chaudhry's years as a vice president were in part defined by breaking up the Kellogg Company into Kellanova and WK Kellogg, and selling them to Mars for $35.9 billion and Ferrero for $3.1 billion, respectively. During the roughly three-year process, which ended in late 2025, Chaudhry worked closely with two of Goldman's senior partners.

"Navigating how to step into the role that the team needed me to play in order to support those three very high-profile public deals was a step-change in my evolution," she said.

Since then, she helped private equity investor Advent International acquire a majority stake in the body care brand Salt & Stone, and the beauty conglomerate Ulta acquire British beauty retailer SpaceNK. The deal was valued at around £399 million ($533 million), according to Ulta's SEC filing.

Her success lies partly in combining technical prowess and strong relationships with both clients and colleagues. When Chaudhry started at Goldman, a boss advised her to cultivate a personal "board of directors" rather than a single mentor, which has been "immensely valuable" in making career decisions.

Chaudhry has found that having a robust life outside the office reinforces her abilities at work. A big wino and foodie, she explores New York City restaurants with friends, walks in Central Park, or reads fiction, all of which she can discuss with clients outside dealmaking.

"That is fundamental to supporting the idea of you also being a holistic advisor to someone in this job," she said.

Rex Johnson has taken advantage of a pair of trends that have reshaped trading and supercharged his career.

The 32-year-old is the head of equity volatility at Walleye Capital, the $17 billion hedge fund that began as a Minnesota-based trading shop. His career has coincided with a surge in assets for multistrategy managers, fueling Walleye's growth, and a boom in retail trading on platforms like Robinhood, which has given volatility traders like him plenty to do.

But Johnson's success is about more than just being in the right place at the right time. The University of Chicago grad has been studying market volatility — and how top players make money from it — since his first job at Goldman Sachs in 2016.

Volatility trading is less about predicting which direction an asset might move, and more about where the waters might be choppiest, he said. Macro events, company announcements, weather patterns — all can inform a trade.

"We are betting on how much something is going to move every day versus if something is going to go up or down," Johnson said.

He spent nearly three years at Goldman on an equity derivatives desk before moving to the buy-side, becoming an analyst for volatility portfolio manager Bill Hillegass, an LMR trader whom he still considers a mentor.

He made the leap to portfolio manager when he joined Walleye at the start of 2022 as the firm's first Miami-based employee. A rough stretch in the markets at the end of his first year at Walleye was formative for his growth, he said, and he was helped by the advice of more experienced investors at the firm.

"They told me I was just paying the market tuition," he said.

Now, he's passing those lessons on to the next generation. He's now a player-coach, managing his own book while also recruiting and training young talent.

The firm had its first crop of volatility interns this summer, with seven young traders working under Johnson in Miami.

In late 2024, Mussie Tizazu left JPMorgan, one of Wall Street's top arrangers of collateralized loan obligations, to help build a rival business at Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.

Tizazu had spent nearly eight years at JPMorgan, coming up in the world of CLOs, arranging bundles of corporate loans into bonds to sell to investors. He was the head of US CLO structuring at JPMorgan.

"There's only a few times in your career when you have an opportunity like the one at SMBC to be part of a real business build," Tizazu said. "I've always had a bit of an entrepreneurial inclination."

Among the bankers who went with him to SMBC was Christine Ferris, his former boss and mentor at JPMorgan, who hired him and was featured on Business Insider's inaugural Rising Stars list.

Within a month, Tizazu had secured his first mandate, winning the trust of a client he'd worked with at JPMorgan. In 2025, it jumped 17 spots to fourth place in CLO refinancing rankings, according to Bloomberg, and has more than doubled its CLO structuring team to 12.

Tizazu has worked on more than 80 transactions at SMBC, while also recruiting bankers and building the infrastructure needed to compete with established CLO arrangers.

Over his career, he's worked on more than 200 transactions totaling more than $80 billion in CLO issuance. The memorable ones are those where he's had to devise a new solution for a client or find common ground between parties at odds, often under intense pressure.

He also loves a difficult market because "the quality of your work comes through more when you're able to do it in more challenging environments."

Tizazu, who grew up in Ethiopia, originally envisioned a career in medicine or science. He discovered finance after moving to the US to attend Franklin & Marshall College in 2010, when an economics class sparked a "genuine curiosity" about markets.

Now, Tizazu spends much of his time managing his growing team and talking to clients. But as a self-described "deal junkie," he still makes time every day to get his hands dirty and dive into the details of transactions.

In an era where AI agents are talking to each other, Ryan Febles' world is still about the human connection.

The 31-year-old Virginia Tech grad is the global head of equity capital markets for Capstone Investment Advisors, a $15 billion hedge fund manager. With mega-IPOs like Anthropic and OpenAI in the pipeline, Febles is his firm's point person for getting access to the biggest public debuts.

That access, in part, comes from reputation and connections, which are highly valued in the ECM ecosystem, where bankers connect asset managers with companies in need of capital.

"You're talking with CEOs and founders of companies," Febles said.

"These peer-to-peer connections are very valuable."

He began his career on Bank of America's ECM desk in 2017, where he worked on "hundreds" of equity offerings over 3-and-a-half years. He said his role was both simple and complex: "Understanding how companies raise capital, and how institutional investors evaluate opportunities."

He made the switch to the hedge fund side in 2021, joining Segantii Capital as an analyst before jumping to Jain Global as a senior analyst at its launch in mid-2024. He joined Capstone in early 2025 as the global head of ECM.

"The underlying thread between all various points of my career has been getting closer to the investment decision-making," he said.

His day typically starts with an early-morning review of the news and an evaluation of its impact on the portfolio, followed by a game plan with his team for the day. His focus is on creating a repeatable evaluation process for all investment ideas. He repeats the mantra of "stick to the process and core values" a few times during a conversation with Business Insider.

He still does plenty of his own research, which includes calls with banking partners, corporate executives, and third-party experts — which he considers the "highlight" of his workday. And he still appreciates the "surreal moments" of meeting with top CEOs and visiting factories in person.

"High school or college me would be amazed that we are sitting down with these management teams," he said.

Kevin Curtin's background as a theater nerd has come in surprisingly useful in his current role as an investment banking powerhouse. Pitch day for a big deal is like his "Super Bowl," with investors replacing the audiences that filled his high school auditorium.

He's spent more than a decade at JPMorgan, interrupted by a stint in private equity. He's now head of AI infrastructure investment banking, making him the firm's point person in one of the hottest sectors. Yet Curtin wasn't a "born-to-be-banker." Realizing he'd have student debt after studying economics at Wesleyan, he looked for a way to pay off his bills. Curtin stumbled upon Wall Street Oasis, which said banking could be a pragmatic solution.

His first deal in 2013 was pitching a merger of data center companies DuPont Fabros and Digital Realty. By 2017, the companies had merged, and Curtin had found a rhythm with his teammates. A managing director advised him to branch out, but he doubled down after Microsoft inked a lease for a 400-megawatt data center in 2021.

"I knew that that was going to be a $4 billion construction project and a $5 billion or $6 billion asset. That is bigger than the companies most investment bankers go their entire careers without selling," Curtin said.

Curtin has since broadened JPMorgan's financing toolkit for large-scale digital infrastructure builds by tapping new sources. His team helped data center developer Hut 8 raise $3.25 billion through a 144A bond offering, allowing it to tap major institutional investors to fund construction. He also worked on a first-of-its-kind $1 billion financing for AI-cloud computing company Lambda, backed by contracts with multiple customers, and helped arrange the largest unrated loan ever for AI chip financing: a $5 billion deal for Volta.

Data center financing requires capital from nearly every market, so Curtin is constantly talking with colleagues on other teams.

Around 16 months ago, Curtin stepped into another 24/7 job: raising his first daughter. They ate too much frozen yogurt this summer, between the singing and reading that goes on in their household in both English and Korean.

Allie Becher stumbled into a Wall Street trading desk on a whim. Nearly a decade ago, she met her first finance boss while mingling at a restaurant where she knew people in the industry congregated. Shortly after, the University of Florida grad landed a role as an equity derivatives analyst at Wells Fargo.

Becher says the opportunity was a stroke of luck, but her approach reflects the persistence and alacrity that's brought the sales trader to the forefront of Citadel Securities' equity derivatives sales team, which she joined in 2021.

Over the last 12 months, she's helped the market maker's unit for institutional clients in the derivatives market more than double in Europe and capture more than 15% of international market share, according to the firm. She leads the team's marketing and content efforts and has played a major role in the team's approach to using proprietary data in its products, including Retail Detail, one of Becher's widely circulated notes.

Becher says it's been rewarding to help shape how Citadel Securities serves its clients.

"We were able to take a firm that was built to accommodate a retail trading customer in the options landscape, and then say, what are the best parts of this experience and what can we do to apply it to an institutional customer?" she said.

Becher describes herself as a "big yes person," with a tendency to pursue goals doggedly. She's also a big people person, often hosting client events that range from dinners to community gardening parties to group Barry's Bootcamp workouts.

Becher is also heavily involved in mentorship through Citadel's Thrive Scholars program, which supports high-achieving students from low-income communities. She credits her own growth to mentorship, stretching back to when her high school AP US History teacher persuaded her to stick with the rigorous course even when her parents asked for her to be taken out of the class.

"I found a confidence in myself at 17 years old that was like, 'Oh, maybe I could be really good at something, and I should broaden my horizons,'" she said. "I try to be, where I can, that person for people who reach out to me."

Even with the stunning growth of multistrategy hedge funds, a $1 billion portfolio is still a big deal — especially for someone not yet a decade out of school.

Ben Atlas is a macro investor mostly focused on trading instruments related to global interest rates, according to two people familiar with his strategy. He was poached at the end of the summer by Michael Gelband's ExodusPoint Capital to manage money for the $15 billion firm under his own internal banner, Atlas Capital.

ExodusPoint declined to comment. Atlas did not respond to requests for comment.

Atlas is a significant hire for the fixed-income hedge fund — in his last year at Michael Platt's BlueCrest Capital, he generated more than $50 million in profits, a person familiar with the results told Business Insider.

Originally from California, Atlas went across the pond for school, graduating in 2017 with a philosophy major from the University of Cambridge. He stayed in the United Kingdom after school, joining the rates trading desk at Barclays.

He made the jump to the buy side in 2020, working at prop trading firm DRW in New York. After three years, he joined BlueCrest, the onetime multi-strategy hedge fund that now trades only Platt's billions, where he was a senior portfolio manager.

Jake Epstein started his career at Blackstone in the summer of 2020, when the pandemic had brought dealmaking to a standstill. Instead of being in the office, his fellow new hires studied a textbook Blackstone sent by mail and completed the associated online course.

Once they were in the office after Labor Day, the market quickly heated up. His cohort of hires jokes they've experienced "the most compressed economic cycle in history," he said.

Epstein started working on deals across asset classes before Mike Forman, now the digital infrastructure real estate head, recruited him to help the business shortly after Blackstone's purchase of QTS, its US data center platform.

It's been a whirlwind ever since, with Epstein playing a key role in the firm's $7 billion joint venture with Digital Realty in the US in 2023, and on its $16 billion acquisition of Australia-based data-center provider AirTrunk, the following year, alongside his colleagues in Singapore and Sydney.

"We had 9:00 am and 9:00 pm meetings every day, passing the baton back and forth to get that one over the line," Epstein said.

He now leads a team overseeing major data-center deals, from due diligence and financial analysis to presentations to Blackstone's investment committee. He's also led negotiations on billion-dollar development contracts and leases.

This year, Epstein joined his team to ring the New York Stock Exchange bell for Blackstone's Digital Infrastructure Trust's IPO, which raised $2 billion in the largest-ever blind-pool REIT offering. He was instrumental in developing its novel strategy to acquire stabilized data centers.

As far as AI's impact on the world, he's most excited about potential scientific advances, citing a recent Blackstone paper about AI making phase one clinical trials faster and more successful.

"We're investing in this space to help create new technological and scientific breakthroughs, not just to create AI-generated videos," he said.

The energy sector is booming in 2026, and banker Alex Winrich is working to meet the moment.

The Jefferies managing director has spent a "tremendous amount of time" this year building relationships with energy companies in Europe and Asia looking to invest in the US, a trend accelerated by the war in Iran and between Russia and Ukraine.

"We now have buyers from all over the world competing," the Houston-based banker said.

Winrich is one of four managing directors on Jefferies' upstream banking team, which has advised on more than $40 billion in M&A since 2025, including the $4.1 billion sale of WildFire Energy to Magnolia Oil & Gas.

Winrich initially envisioned he'd end up in asset management. At the University of Dayton, he started a student-run fund and, with the help of alumnus and investment strategist David Kudla, even landed an appearance on CNBC.

After graduation, a former soccer teammate introduced him to the world of investment banking, and he quickly became part of the Houston energy scene.

"It was speaking a totally different language," Winrich said. Luckily, Jefferies' Houston team includes not only corporate finance bankers but also petroleum engineers, geologists, petrophysicists, and other specialists. Winrich said he spends about half his time working with those technical experts.

"I always joke I've got a major in corporate finance and a minor in geology," he said.

He attributes his rapid rise to managing director in 2025 to seeking out complex, time-consuming assignments in a group where "everyone works insanely hard." He volunteered for challenging work, including joint ventures with international partners, even when the deals weren't the most glamorous.

As an associate, he was asking himself, "How do I raise my hand and go do what a VP and an SVP were doing?"

Outside work, Winrich is a new dad and lifelong soccer fan. This summer, his family came to Houston for the World Cup, and they attended nearly every match played in the city.

Fiona Ismail thinks she might be the only person who works in Midtown who gets excited when the UN General Assembly meets in New York City, bringing traffic to a standstill. It appeals to her longtime interest in international affairs, which once led her to consider a legal career.

Instead, Ismail started her career at JPMorgan in 2013, figuring that banking would still let her think about international affairs. Last October, she became the global head of investment-grade private credit.

Her work has focused on digital infrastructure this year, as she's applied her experience from large-scale infrastructure projects to AI's tremendous capital needs.

Throughout the past 12 months, Ismail has spearheaded multiple new types of financings for data center and AI buildouts, including the first 144A financing for a fully completed data center, backed by QTS and Blackstone — a structure that allows companies to raise money from large institutional investors without the traditional securities registration process. Her team worked with QTS and Blackstone for months, considering many different markets, until Ismail realized that the investment-grade public bond market was the best fit. The transaction eventually "unlocked the public markets for QTS," she said.

"With these financings, you do need a little bit of imagination, and that's one of the things that not having a typical background helps with," Ismail said. "You obviously have to back that up with knowledge of the sector and the industry."

On that deal and others, Ismail often meets the client's needs in innovative ways. In 2023, for example, she led a rare $900 million private placement for a port in the United Arab Emirates, betting that investors would embrace a financing structure rarely used at that scale in the region.

The Cornell alum believes in the power of a long walk, which "can solve all of your problems," whether in work or life.

"You don't have to listen to music. You don't have to do anything," she said. "Even if I'm not thinking about it as I'm doing it, I come back, and I've achieved clarity."

Jim Tilson grew up "watching ESPN and CNBC," fitting for the son of a financial advisor who would go on to play defensive end at Middlebury College. Though one detail about his college years routinely shocked Wall Street interviewers: He had passed his Series 7 before his sophomore year of college.

Tilson, now a senior managing director at Evercore, has advised on more than $30 billion in secondary deals since becoming a managing director in 2022.

His ascent has coincided with an explosion in secondaries, once a niche corner of private markets involving the buying and selling of existing stakes in private companies or assets.

When Tilson joined, most deals involved fund investors selling their stake, but he helped popularize deals allowing private equity firms to retain assets while giving investors a chance to cash out.

The deals used to be seen as "breathing life into dying franchises," but after some of the deals Tilson worked on as an associate with Oaktree in 2019, the concept caught on. The market reached $116 billion in deals last year.

Tilson only landed in the industry because a fellow Middlebury alum suggested he give it a chance.

"I certainly didn't predict a 10x-ing of the market over the course of my career, but I could see that the market had logic and it was a derivative of what was a fast-growing private market," he said.

He started at UBS, before following banker Nigel Dawn to Evercore in 2017, where Dawn's now co-president. It's the largest secondaries advisory firm, advising on over $120 billion in transactions last year, nearly half of the industry's total volume.

Tilson said his biggest impact has come from developing colleagues as the team has grown from 30 to 180 people in his tenure.

He's earned the nickname "Coach" around the office, first because he told fellow junior associates he dreamed of professionally coaching football, but now because people would line up around his cubicle for his "office hours."

"My gag gift for Secret Santa one year was a whistle and a clipboard," he said.

A phone call a decade ago changed Matthew Caltabiano's life.

Caltabiano was drawn to investing for its problem-solving nature, but he didn't come from a family connected to finance. "They still really don't know what I do," he joked about his parents.

While at the University of Pennsylvania, Caltabiano got a call from Steve Schurr, a New York-based investor at Brahman Capital looking for a college student to do some part-time data work. He started commuting to New York once a week from his college campus in Philadelphia during his senior year, and the pair has been working together ever since.

After graduation, Caltabiano joined Schurr full-time, first at Steve Cohen's Point72 Asset Management, then Balyasny Asset Management, and finally at Millennium, which poached Schurr with a pay package that could reach $100 million.

At Millennium, which he joined earlier this year, Caltabiano is a portfolio manager under Schurr, managing an equities portfolio with a quantitative twist. The scale of Izzy Englander's well-known firm was "very compelling", he said.

"This is a great opportunity for me," he said.

Currently, the 31-year-old is spending a lot of time perfecting his and the broader team's research process to make it "as fast and complete as possible."

Naturally, artificial intelligence has been key to doing so, and Caltabiano said the technology has allowed top flesh-and-blood traders to create "parallel versions" of themselves, without any biases that might trip up a human investor.

It's made the "needle-in-the-haystack search" for top ideas a more systematic process, saving time and busywork.

"That's where I've invested a lot of my time in iterating," he said.

Early in his career, David Oppenheim, a managing director at Evercore, found an area ripe for opportunity in the M&A market: life and health insurance distribution. It's specific, but don't call it a niche.

"On the contrary, I found that there was just this massive space to cover where there's just all this investor activity and interest," he said. "Every deal I worked on just felt quite different."

Oppenheim joined Evercore out of college in London in 2012. He moved to New York in 2015, when he identified life and health insurance distribution as a "pretty poorly understood" corner of the market. He persuaded his bosses that Evercore should spend more time there, and it paid off. Evercore has advised on 15 transactions in the sector worth a combined $12.5 billion. He became one of Evercore's youngest managing directors in 2023, at 31.

One relationship he helped build was with insurance marketer AmeriLife, which Evercore has advised on four sales over more than a decade.

Oppenheim believes executing a deal well is "table stakes." The goal is for client relationships to stop feeling "transactional" and start feeling "organic," by sharing relevant opportunities and industry news, being available when a CEO calls, and giving honest advice.

That trust matters when transactions get complicated. During the $7.75 billion sale of McGriff Insurance Services in 2024, Oppenheim and his team worked with tax specialists to confirm the value of a roughly $500 million tax asset, then used competition among bidders to push them to reflect that value in their offers.

If you want to drive the best outcome for clients, "there's no such thing as a sort of cookie-cutter vanilla approach," he said.

Oppenheim credits his rise to opportunities to "take on more responsibility than my title might suggest." Now, as his team has grown from six people to more than 20, he tries to do the same for junior bankers, empowering them to take on more responsibility and serving as a sounding board.

Daniel Borkenstein buys and sells businesses for a living as a private equity principal at Apollo Global, but he said his first personal investment left him "completely wiped out."

While studying at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, he decided to take a "big personal position" in retailer GNC, convinced that the market was missing something, and negative sentiment was overblown.

It turns out he underestimated GNC's debt load, so he lost it all when it went bankrupt in 2020.

The experience taught him the difference between "speculating" and "investing," he said, a lesson that now informs how he applies Apollo's "contrarian lens" to "find value where others don't see it and then create it."

"We are never buying a business because we think it's going to grow," Borkenstein said. "If that's the case, a lot of other people probably think it's going to grow as well." Differentiation comes from doing things differently, like Apollo's 2021 decision to give up control of its $6 billion investment in IT distributor Tech Data less than a year after investing, so it could lock in returns through a merger.

"That's a crazy thing to do in private equity only nine months into our hold period," Borkenstein said.

For Borkenstein, doing things differently has meant combining businesses from the outset instead of following the traditional buyout playbook.

"It's very hard in today's market to steal companies from the public markets," Borkenstein said.

In 2025, he helped combine International Game Technology's slot machine business and gaming fintech Everi in a $6.3 billion deal to create IGT. This year, he helped create events company Forge by combining Emerald and Questex. Borkenstein now serves on both boards.

"I never thought I would necessarily work on a two-for-one, but I was able to apply the learnings of one onto the other," Borkenstein said.

For a few months this year, John Ballard's life was "all Dominion, all the time."

He was part of a small team at JPMorgan working on Dominion Energy's roughly $67 billion merger with NextEra, which, if approved, would create the world's largest electricity producer. As an executive director in natural resources investment banking, Ballard served as a quasi "project manager" for JPMorgan's banking team on a larger scale than he had in the past, navigating all of its work for Dominion and often delivering it to the client.

"If I think about where I do best, it's probably boiling down pretty complex analytical concepts, but presenting them in a way that's digestible," he said.

He used the same skills as a peer tutor in music courses at Amherst College — understanding dense information, breaking it down into simple parts, and communicating it clearly.

Since he became an executive director at the beginning of 2026, Ballard has been spending more time in utility sector boardrooms, where many employees have been with their companies for decades — he said he's still learning how to command the presence of those senior leaders, given his age.

"There's always a challenge of commanding a presence and being confident in your ability to deliver advice," he said. "I'm obviously still growing in that, but I've really enjoyed that challenge."

Ballard, who enjoys playing the board games Codenames and Coup with his close-knit college friend group, thinks of his career progression like clearing levels in a video game, with each new role bringing distinct challenges and goals.

Right now, he's focused on building relationships across the utility sector.

That relationship building has also been key to his rise at JPMorgan, since he thinks "interpersonal awareness" is an underappreciated skill.

"No one's really there telling you here's what to do, when to do it," he said. "It's figuring out how you fit into the broader team, what you should be doing, and what styles people like."

Andrea Pascual said she'd be "laughing hysterically" if someone had told her before college that she'd one day be named a rising star on Wall Street.

"The last thing I thought I was going to do was work in finance," Pascual said.

Pascual, now 31, arrived at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School with "no idea" of what she wanted to do after graduating. After some soul-searching, she decided to pair her business degree with her lifelong love of sports. (An athlete and a devoted baseball fan, Pascual grew up watching her younger brother play and went on to manage Penn's baseball team.)

A college mentor pointed Pascual to The Raine Group, a sports- and media-focused investment bank. Pascual got a summer internship at the firm before landing an analyst position. Before turning 30, she'd worked her way to VP, working on more than $5 billion worth of deals.

At Raine, Pascual led the negotiations and sale of the NWSL's Seattle Reign, helped orchestrate a $1.6 billion minority investment in English football giant Manchester United, and oversaw the deals for the Madrid Open and Miami Open tennis tournaments. She's also advising the NBA as it considers starting a European league.

Her proudest accomplishment was selling the Seattle Reign to owners including private equity giant The Carlyle Group for $58 million — more than 16 times the $3.5 million the team had been valued at less than five years earlier.

Pascual said her days are packed with meetings with clients and investors. She commutes about 30 minutes from Tribeca to Midtown East and passes the time by playing Sudoku or reading fiction books — some of which are in Spanish, which the Atlanta native learned from her Colombian mother and Puerto Rican father.

Outside work, Pascual enjoys cooking and spending time with her husband. She also breaks away from the office for Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, which she said is a "non-negotiable hour" of church, no matter how busy her schedule gets.