The Story Behind the Script
Where unlikely worlds collide, something new emerges
If you’re reading this, I hope that means you had a recent positive experience with me as your instructor in a Wall Street Prep seminar, or have a friend that did. To the 60+ amazing summer analysts I’ve trained since early June who subscribed before my first post, thank you for your trust in me. It’s been a long time coming to get The Shukla Script out of my head and into reality.
Those who’ve had me as their instructor know why I created this platform, but my hope is that soon enough, The Shukla Script will reach folks far outside the walls of my classrooms. So for them and anyone else coming across my work for the first time, I want to answer the two questions that are top of mind right now:
Who is Rohan Shukla?
Why should I care what he has to say?
I’m so glad you asked :)
Buckle up for a little story time.
I went to Haverford College, where I studied Computer Science and Mathematics. Even though Haverford is a great school, it’s far from a target school for finance. But as a freshman, I learned that if you made enough phone calls and emails to the right people, it just became a numbers game until new doors opened. So through a mix of consistent networking and self-study of finance (shoutout to the M&I 400 guide), I landed some great internships, culminating in Morgan Stanley’s technology investment banking group for my junior summer.
That MS internship converted into a full-time job and became the springboard for my adult life. While I was grateful to be in such a strong investment banking group, I did have longer-term sights set on the buyside, and my 22-year-old self felt the peer pressure to pursue private equity. So just four weeks into my first year at MS, when the notorious on-cycle PE recruiting process kicked off, I decided to partake and gave it my best shot. I only interviewed with one firm, but that’s all it took. After an intense 12-hour superday, I was extremely fortunate to receive an offer from TPG Growth for their software & enterprise technology team in San Francisco. So all of a sudden, I had the next four years of my life predetermined — two years as an analyst at MS, and two years as an associate at TPG.
On paper, I had “won” the junior finance game. But reality wasn’t going to let me off so easily. A few major plots began to play out which would materially impact my early career development, each one of increasing importance:
At just 22, I had too much of my life mapped out before I even knew who I was. Early certainty is a double-edged sword. It did give me a sense of peace while navigating the harder analyst days, but it fundamentally changed the mentality that I brought to work every day. I looked at banking through the lens of what would be most useful for my next job (which, mind you, I realistically didn’t know that much about…because of on-cycle recruiting happening entirely in one day). Meanwhile, my banking peers who didn’t go through on-cycle approached work with a more holistic lens, without any preconceived notions of what they were “supposed” to care about or be interested in. They soaked everything up and used banking as a tool to objectively identify their likes and dislikes, and then used that data to make more informed career decisions as our analyst program wrapped up. That is not a jab at on-cycle PE recruiting, but rather a recognition that embracing uncertainty is a major catalyst for maturation and personal growth. Everybody ends up having to face uncertainty — I just had to wait a little longer.
I lost ~20 months of this four-year window to COVID-induced remote work. Over half my MS experience and the first six months of my TPG tenure were spent working remotely, eliminating a high percentage of the enormous learning benefits that come from spending those crucial analyst and associate years in-person in the trenches. Keep in mind that before COVID, the thought of remote work in any investment bank or private equity firm was laughably foreign. My cohort’s era was the first in industry history where junior talent experienced any semblance of remote work, let alone nearly half of our analyst-associate days. Of course, I appreciated some of the flexibility and lifestyle benefits that this remote period offered, and nowadays it’s an essential skill to be able to operate in remote and hybrid environments. But when I look back, I so clearly see that I had brilliant coworkers at MS and TPG, and it would have been amazing to have gotten more of their in-person mentorship. They were a huge reason why I wanted to work at those great firms in the first place.
I suffered a series of injuries during these years that made it impossible to work at peak productivity. Between my second year of MS and my first year of TPG, I partially tore my right Achilles tendon and herniated two discs in my back (and they say Excel isn’t a contact sport…). I’d been a lifelong athlete trying to maintain his college training regimen under an IB workload, and my body eventually broke down. I was absolutely devastated mentally when I couldn’t move my body, and traditional physical therapy wasn’t helping me heal at all. I was unwilling to accept a life spent permanently in pain — and as more time passed without improvement, I had no choice but to rework my life priorities to solve this problem for good. So, for a large percentage of my time at TPG, I dedicated every free moment I had to studying biomechanics, anatomy and physiology, and ran different training and rehabilitation experiments on myself until I had reverse engineered my body into a pain-free state. By the end of my associate program at TPG, I had completed extensive coursework in human performance, earned a personal training license, and developed a “bulletproofing” training system for the demanding PE lifestyle. I had doctors turning their heads when X-Rays and MRIs revealed that I had healed my torn Achilles tendon and realigned my spine without surgery or traditional physical therapy, but rather with my own innovative methods. It was one of the most rewarding journeys of my life, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But from a traditional career development standpoint, this time and effort came at the cost of extra time and effort I could have been putting into PE (as many of my peers were doing). Furthermore, it’s quite hard to do your best work when even walking is painful and you frequently break out into back spasms — your work product feels these effects. So while I consider my physical resurrection a major life success, the journey did come with some costs to my finance-specific learning.
Upon the completion of my TPG associate program, I relentlessly followed the momentum that came from healing my body. I started a training business sharing my methods with other finance professionals suffering from chronic pain. I spent close to a year running this business, and developed some incredibly meaningful client relationships in the process.
But this is also when I realized that some of my missed learnings from MS and TPG were coming back to bite me. Running and scaling a one-person business is hard work, and I began to feel lost and in over my head. I started to see concepts that I had heard about in these jobs, which I used to just think were buzzwords and corporate jargon, actually becoming real to me through my very tiny business. I gained a deeper sense of appreciation for how lucky I was to be around such incredible business minds from 22-26, and how much more I would get out of that experience if I could do all it again — in good health, (mostly) in-person, and with the practical context of my own business to apply those learnings to. This realization changed everything for me.
I knew in my heart that I wasn’t done being around finance just yet, and that I had so much more to learn which would help me become a better entrepreneur later in my life. Over the next few months, I tapped back into my finance network, which led to two really important career developments:
Wall Street Prep offered me to join as a PE instructor to run training programs at different business schools and investment firms.
Main Street Capital offered me to join their lower middle-market PE team, focused on industry-agnostic recapitalizations of founder-led businesses.
I accepted both offers, and all of a sudden, my physical training business took a backseat, as I rejoined full-time PE in-person through Main Street and spent my weekends studying and teaching finance through Wall Street Prep. To ensure I didn’t repeat the same mistakes as my younger self, I approached this new chapter of my life in a completely different way — one with no ego, where I went back to square one. I worked harder than I had ever worked in my career, going back to fill in the gaps that should have been filled long ago. On this path, I closed two deals, managed nine portfolio companies, taught hundreds of students, and most importantly, rediscovered my passion for finance.
Working in industry while teaching at the same time was a rare and valuable opportunity. It pushed me to distill my experiences into weekly stories that made my coaching more practical and context-rich, and my students absolutely loved it.
As the dots connected, I also found myself better understanding elements of my prior jobs that I never fully appreciated in the moment. Old lightbulbs from MS and TPG started to turn on — conversations and requests that I remembered from years prior were now making sense in a way they never had before. It’s hard to overstate how potent of a feeling it was to rebuild my base and look back on my career with fresh eyes. The saying “knowledge is power” became an unforgettable tenet of truth for me.
Importantly, this feeling was only possible because I recognized honestly that I didn’t get enough out of my initial analyst and associate years, and then went and did something about it.
It was never my plan to stay in PE forever — I always have wanted to run my own business and build something that I’m proud of. So earlier this year, I decided it was time to return to entrepreneurship.
Today, I run training programs at many of the largest private equity firms in the world through Wall Street Prep, and I am building my own education company, R21 Performance, focused on serving the full development (mental, physical, and technical) of the modern investment professional (stay tuned for more information on our Fall 2025 product release).
I am far from having all the answers — if anything, quite the opposite. But I have had an undeniably unique combination of experiences that’s led its way to hundreds of powerful coaching relationships over the years, and I’ve wanted to curate a space for sharing my best insights more broadly.
I would have benefitted tremendously from more mentorship when I got started on this path, and I still vividly remember what it felt like to be lost. So the spirit of my content, more than anything else, is to be the older brother I wish I had when I was a confused 22-year-old at Morgan Stanley. Even if just one extra person can benefit from these messages, that’s a win.
I genuinely value different perspectives. If you ever disagree with something I share or see a problem from a different angle, please speak up — it helps all of us grow. In an industry where we’re always expected to look buttoned-up and in control, I want this to be a space where it’s okay to admit when something doesn’t make sense or sit right. That’s how we’ll level up together.
I truly believe you’ll find the insights I share to be both unique and useful. I promise I worked hard for every single one of them.
FYI: Most of my content will be shorter than today’s piece, but I want any newcomer to have this post for undiluted context on why The Shukla Script exists.