Molly Breen on Building a Career You Can’t Plan

Most career advice in finance assumes you know what you’re aiming at. Pick the desk. Pick the product. Build the ten-year arc. Index on the right skills.

Molly Breen would tell you to throw the roadmap out.

You’ve watched the people around you build careers like they were following a recipe. Equity or credit. Buy side or sell side. Banker or investor. Pick a lane in your twenties and protect it. The version of Wall Street that rewarded that linearity is gone, and pretending otherwise is how you end up an inch wide and a mile deep at exactly the moment the firm needs the opposite.

The real skill is staying nimble enough to recognize the right opportunity when it doesn’t look like the one you planned for. That’s harder than it sounds. Saying yes to the wrong thing kills momentum. Saying no to the right thing usually means you stop getting asked.

Molly Breen, Head of Capital Markets at Permira, joins Jenny Bain on the first episode of People You Should Know season two. She has done the equity syndicate desk at Morgan Stanley, the leveraged finance desk under Dan Toscano, two years inside management as the firm rebuilt itself out of the GFC, and now sits on both sides of the table at Permira raising the debt and equity that funds the firm’s portfolio. She also sits on the Octus board.

What stuck with us is the consistency of her answer to the question of how any of this happened. It didn’t. She got pulled, again and again, by people who saw something in her she hadn’t yet seen in herself. A senior woman she’d never met walked up after a recruiting panel and told her, dead-eyed, “you belong on a syndicate desk.” Molly didn’t know what a syndicate desk was. Four years later she was on one. Then Dan Toscano asked her to move into leveraged finance, a product where she didn’t know what a credit agreement was on day one. She said yes. Twelve days after her daughter was born, Permira called. She said yes again.

The throughline isn’t ambition. It’s that she keeps her hands open.

Hear the rest from Molly. The story about her then-boyfriend, now-husband becoming her live-in credit agreement tutor on date four is the kind of thing that doesn’t translate to a recap.

Have feedback? Email the team at [email protected]. Hosted by Jenny Bain. Produced and edited by two-time Emmy Award-winning producer Tanya Hubbard.

People You Should Know is presented by Octus and part of the Octus Podcast Network. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.