Introducing Case Studies
103 full case studies modeled after real firm deal materials, each with the prompt, the supporting materials and an audio walkthrough of how to approach it. Most also ship a banker-formatted answer deck, a tied-out Excel model and a written memo — each case says on its own card exactly what it ships.
The round nobody practices
Once you clear the technicals, the case study is what stands between you and the offer. Investment banking runs modeling tests and live case studies. Private equity runs paper LBOs, timed LBO builds and investment committee memos. Venture and growth funds send open-ended take-homes. In each of them you are handed a company, a question and a clock, and the firm learns more about you in 90 minutes than it did in three rounds of interviews.
Almost nobody practices for it, because the real materials are not public. Board books, case prompts and model answers stay inside the firms that write them. What circulates instead is a prompt with a paragraph of guidance and no answer, which tells you what the question is and nothing about what a good response looks like.
Case Studies closes that gap. 103 full cases are live today, with more added on the same cadence as the rest of the platform. Every one gives you the materials a real process would hand you, the time limit it would give you, and then the complete answer to grade yourself against.
Modeled after named firms
Every case names the firm whose format it follows. Each case is built to follow the structure, exhibit set and standards of real deal work at a named firm: the pages a special committee gets, the format a sponsor sends. When you finish a case, what you have built looks like the work.
| Firm | Cases | Disciplines |
|---|---|---|
| Balyasny Asset Management | 1 | Hedge Fund |
| Barclays | 3 | M&A, LBO, Energy & Power |
| Blackstone | 3 | Private Equity |
| BofA Securities | 2 | M&A |
| Centerview Partners | 2 | Restructuring, Media & Telecom |
| Citadel | 1 | Hedge Fund |
| Citi | 2 | Energy & Power, Real Assets |
| Deutsche Bank | 3 | Leveraged Finance, Financial Institutions |
| Dodge & Cox | 1 | Hedge Fund |
| Evercore | 5 | M&A, Restructuring, Energy & Power, Industrials |
| Fortress Investment Group | 2 | Private Equity |
| Goldman Sachs | 5 | M&A, Equity Capital Markets, Shareholder Advisory, Technology |
| Greenoaks | 6 | Growth Equity |
| Houlihan Lokey | 2 | Restructuring |
| J.P. Morgan | 3 | M&A, Debt Capital Markets, Real Assets |
| Jefferies | 2 | LBO, Financial Institutions |
| KKR | 5 | Private Equity |
| Kroll | 3 | Financial Sponsors, Technology, Media & Telecom |
| Lazard | 2 | M&A |
| Leerink Partners | 2 | Healthcare |
| LionTree | 2 | M&A, Media & Telecom |
| Moelis & Company | 5 | M&A, Debt Capital Markets, Restructuring, Private Capital Advisory, Private Equity |
| Morgan Stanley | 3 | M&A, LBO, Real Assets |
| Perella Weinberg Partners | 3 | M&A, Shareholder Advisory, Consumer & Retail |
| PJT Partners | 2 | Restructuring |
| Qatalyst Partners | 3 | M&A, Healthcare, Technology |
| Spark Capital | 5 | Venture Capital |
| TPG | 4 | Private Equity |
| UBS | 2 | LBO, Financial Sponsors |
| Warburg Pincus | 4 | Private Equity |
The companies and the numbers are ours
Only the format is borrowed; every company and every number is invented. Every company in a case study is fictional and every financial in it (the share prices, the plan, the capital structure, the comparables, the precedents, the terms) is original to IB Vine. Nothing in a case is lifted from a real transaction, a real board book or a real fund's take-home.
IB Vine is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any of the firms named above, and none of them have reviewed or approved this work. Naming them describes a resemblance in format and standard of work, nothing more. That line runs through the product itself: a firm attribution cannot render on the site without the note stating the underlying company and figures are our own, and the case studies surface fails its own build check if one ever does.
What ships with every case
Every case study includes the full set:
- The prompt and supporting materials: the brief, the company background, the financials and the market data, with the same time limit a real assessment would give you.
- A banker-formatted answer deck: the complete model answer, page by page, formatted the way the pages would actually go out.
- A fully linked, tied-out Excel model: multi-tab and built end to end, so you can trace every number back to its driver rather than take an output on faith.
- A written memo: the recommendation in prose, with the reasoning that supports it and the analysis that was deliberately left out.
- A roughly 30-minute audio walkthrough: a conversational take on how to approach the case under time pressure: where to start, what to cut, and how the recommendation gets defended.
One of them is below, in full. This is the answer set for Project Meridian — Special Committee Take-Private, a Sell-Side M&A / Special Committee case. The deck is below, and the PowerPoint, the Excel model and the memo are yours to download whether or not you have an account.
Free sample, no account needed
Project Meridian — Special Committee Take-Private
Sell-Side M&A / Special Committee · 300-minute format
Answer deck
The worked answer deck in full — a reference, not a timed submission
The model opens in Excel rather than in the browser, because tracing a number back to its driver means clicking the cell and reading the formula.
Four tracks
Cases are organized by the seat you are recruiting for.
- Investment Banking: Live case studies and modeling tests drawn from real sell-side, buy-side, financing and restructuring mandates.
- Private Equity: On-cycle and off-cycle modeling tests, paper LBOs and investment committee memos in the format buyside firms actually use.
- Venture & Growth: Open-ended investment exercises and growth equity underwrites in the format venture and growth funds actually send: form a view, price the round or the structure, and defend a recommendation.
- Hedge Fund: Fundamental equity research the way multi-manager and long-only funds actually test it: pitch a name, defend the variant view, and survive the questions that follow.
Venture and growth funds hand you a company and an open question rather than a template, so the exercise is as much about how you frame the problem as about the math. Both venture cases here follow that format.
Start with Project Meridian
The pilot case is a special committee take-private. A sponsor that already holds a large stake has proposed to buy the rest of a healthcare software company for cash, the board has formed a special committee of independent directors, and you are the analyst supporting it. You have 300 minutes to build the discussion materials the committee needs to accept, reject, counter at a price, or run a market check, and to say which analysis you deliberately left out.
It is free for everyone, signed in or not.
Who gets what
- Everyone: Project Meridian in full, including the answer deck, the model and the walkthrough.
- Free trial: a second case unlocks, Project Tallowfield — 10-Minute Verbal Paper LBO, a 10-minute Paper LBO.
- Diamond: every case study, plus Excel and PowerPoint downloads so you can work in the files themselves rather than only read them.
Downloads are Diamond only. Everyone else can read the deck, the memo and the key model schedules in-page for the cases they have access to. See pricing for the full comparison.