Investment Banking interview preparation
Every question below is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it. Answers are written the way you would actually say them out loud — answer first, then the mechanism, then the limitation.
100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them
- Questions
- 100
- Traced to a firm
- 100
- Firms
- 46
- Updated
- September 2026
034How would you value a pre-revenue healthcare company?Piper SandlerInvestment Banking · New York · 2026Moelis & CompanyMergers and Acquisitions · Los Angeles · 2022
Say this
A risk-adjusted DCF built asset by asset. For each drug candidate, forecast peak sales after launch, discount back, then multiply by the cumulative probability of clinical and regulatory success for that phase.
Then walk it
- Value each pipeline asset separately. A Phase III candidate and a preclinical one are completely different risks and cannot share a discount rate.
- For each asset: estimate the addressable patient population, penetration, price and duration of therapy to build peak sales, then shape the ramp and the patent cliff.
- Apply probability of technical and regulatory success. Industry benchmarks run roughly 60 to 70 percent from Phase III, around 30 percent from Phase II, and low single digits from preclinical.
- Discount at a high rate, often 10 to 15 percent, and net off the cash burn until launch. Then sum the assets and add the cash on the balance sheet.
- Cross-check against what the market pays. EV per pipeline asset by phase, precedent biotech M&A, and the last private round. And say plainly that the answer is a wide range, because a single readout can move it by a factor of three.
Where candidates lose it
Reaching for revenue multiples when there is no revenue, or building one DCF for the whole company. The technique is per-asset and probability-weighted. If you cannot name roughly what a Phase II success rate looks like, you have not prepared the sector.
Expect next
- What probability would you use for a Phase II asset?
- How do you handle the patent cliff?
- What would you cross-check this against?
Reported by candidates at Piper Sandler (Investment Banking, New York, 2026); Moelis & Company (Mergers and Acquisitions, Los Angeles, 2022). Source: Wall Street Oasis.
Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.