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Back in 2010, when the flow of hiring by investment banks had been reduced to a meager trickle of new faces in the wake of the economic downturn, Aneal Vallurupalli walked through the doors of San Francisco\u2019s Union Square Advisors.    

For Vallurupalli\u2014a recent graduate of a Bay Area college not necessarily known as a feeder school for investment banks\u2014the job offer from Union Square seemed to validate the notion that banking was meant to be his career lane.

Still, Vallurupalli tells us that from his early banking days forward, he always viewed investment banking as a place to learn but not necessarily his ultimate career destination: \u201cInvestment banking, to me, was kind of like a physician\u2019s residency\u2014it put the foundation in place.\u201d  

At the same time, the firm\u2019s unmitigated drive to serve its clients provided him with many \u201clearning moments,\u201d including one client assignment that remains particularly salient.

According to Vallurupalli, a private equity client with an appetite for leveraged buyouts asked Union Square to provide a rundown on 30 different companies and brief its investment committee on the results when it met 4 days later.     

\u201cOver those 4 days, we literally did not go home\u2014I slept under my desk for a total of 2 hours and worked straight through in order to try to meet this deadline,\u201d recalls Vallurupalli, who after 2-1/2 years with Union Square joined Guidewire Software to start up the developer\u2019s post-IPO corporate development team.

 Along the way, Vallurupalli became increasingly interested in the day-to-day operations of the company and began to seek out opportunities beyond corporate development in order to ease his growing operations itch.

Says Vallurupalli: \u201cI\u2019ve never thought about titles, to be honest. I always asked myself: \u2018Where could I go next? What would be interesting? How do I take my prior experience to the next opportunity and allow it to be leveraged?'\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney