101–110 of 147 posts
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I have far fewer moral qualms about crack dealing than investment banking.
I know you're joking, but I don't see the moral concern about investment banking. You may not be making the world a better place (although that is very debatable), but you're not making it worse, either.
Show and tell day? :)
I used to work for CSFB (now Credit Suisse) in London's Canary Wharf. It's the most I've earned in my entire career. Unless you've worked for an investment bank you have no idea how much money they have. It's like a giant gulf-of-mexico-style money gusher that doesn't quit. How do they make it? CSFB flies on the bleeding edge of what's legal and always have. I was there when Frank Quattrone was involved in the IPO of…
I don't think if I could live with myself if I worked at an investment bank. Most of what they do provides no benefit to humanity, in fact on the whole they're probably parasitic. Shuffling money around senselessly while taking a cut might be extremely profitable if you do enough of it, but it's just a drain on modern capitalism.
But it's an assload of easy money, and once you're in, it's trivially easy to stay in (it's like gambling for a living, where you get a cut of whatever you win, except that you don't actually have to win consistently to continue to buy in because there's always another fool willing to trust you with his money), so it's very easy to end up deciding that there's not enough rational incentive for you to do anything else.
More than anything, I weep for the brain drain that Wall Street inflicts on the rest of the world. Far too many of the smartest people I've ever known were sucked in, people who could otherwise be creating real value doing jobs without which, the financial industry couldn't even exist. IMO, this is the great danger of having a society where the money shufflers are outpaid by 10:1 compared to people of similar ability in other jobs, that too much of our real talent will be wasted on an industry that is practically by definition (as a zero-sum plus fees industry) incapable of creating much more value than it currently supplies.
I used to work for CSFB (now Credit Suisse) in London's Canary Wharf. It's the most I've earned in my entire career. Unless you've worked for an investment bank you have no idea how much money they have. It's like a giant gulf-of-mexico-style money gusher that doesn't quit. How do they make it? CSFB flies on the bleeding edge of what's legal and always have. I was there when Frank Quattrone was involved in the IPO of…
It's worth pointing out that this is really only a viable career option if you are a straight, white, anglo-saxon male ready to work long hours, drink hard, and put up with a machismo-dominated culture. The financial sector and investment banking in particular, even in their tech departments, have the kind of corporate culture that sends me running.
Currently my team is made up of 2x French men, 1x Nigerian man, 1x Indian Man and me (Irish man) the team leader is an English man so there certainly could and should be better female representation but that was also the case (but to a lesser extent) when I used to work in the telecoms sector.
There is a lot of arrogance and machismo on display but it's less prevalent in the back office - certainly more than what I experienced in other sectors. It is hard to stomach though.
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Your comment reminds me of this story: http://www.astatespacetraveler.com/have-you-ever-wondered-wh... Broad strokes: Startups directly create new value, which by definition makes the world a better place, at least for someone. In contrast, the finance industry adds value indirectly by optimizing capital allocation. At best, finance increases efficiency, but it's very hard to measure whether it's helping or just expl…
Only consumer product startups create new value, at least in the sense I think you are describing. A B2B startup, much like finance, will only increase efficiency. If I build HRWeb (replace your human resources dept with the internets), all it does is makes a bunch of other companies more efficient.
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Starting salary for typical IT roles (dev, etc) are about £35-45k p.a. in London depending on how well you negotiate. That's straight out of uni. It goes up rapidly as you go up the ladder. Within a couple of years, if you do well, you should be up to £65k or so, and probably start getting a bonus on top of it too (probably about £10-20k or so in IT). It's not that unusual for the salary to go up by about £10k per ye…
I'd expect the bonus to be higher, 10k bonus is what I'd expect a new grad to get a year out of uni. Although bonus varies a lot by bank, how close you are to the money, and if you get paid out of an "IT pool" or out of the "desk pool". For base I think your figures are pretty accurate, although bases tend to max out at around £100k (in pure developer roles; developer management can go higher). A lot of senior devs b…
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That depends a lot what you consider a startup founder. If you consider a startup founder as anyone who quits their day job to start a business, I'd bet that there are many more startup founders than financiers. If you consider only people in the technology field, the numbers drop significantly. If you consider people in the technology field who start a project that may become a business, but don't restrict to those…
"- 17 were from technology." Seems like we only consider technology startups.
The original thread-starter wants to know the chances of making the Forbes 400, given that he becomes a tech entrepreneur or financier. He rightly points out that this depends a lot on the denominator - but the denominator depends a lot on how you slice the categories of "tech entrepreneur" and "financier". There are a large number of factors besides entrepreneurship that alter the odds, and many of them alter the odds a lot more than the mere fact that you've started a company.
I used to work for CSFB (now Credit Suisse) in London's Canary Wharf. It's the most I've earned in my entire career. Unless you've worked for an investment bank you have no idea how much money they have. It's like a giant gulf-of-mexico-style money gusher that doesn't quit. How do they make it? CSFB flies on the bleeding edge of what's legal and always have. I was there when Frank Quattrone was involved in the IPO of…
It's worth pointing out that this is really only a viable career option if you are a straight, white, anglo-saxon male ready to work long hours, drink hard, and put up with a machismo-dominated culture. The financial sector and investment banking in particular, even in their tech departments, have the kind of corporate culture that sends me running.
I used to work for CSFB (now Credit Suisse) in London's Canary Wharf. It's the most I've earned in my entire career. Unless you've worked for an investment bank you have no idea how much money they have. It's like a giant gulf-of-mexico-style money gusher that doesn't quit. How do they make it? CSFB flies on the bleeding edge of what's legal and always have. I was there when Frank Quattrone was involved in the IPO of…
They take their licks though. I was there when the LTCM fund collapsed and they lost $600M. Also when the Russian economy collapsed and they lost another $600M. Layoffs? Nah - business as usual. The finance industry doesn't need as many layoffs as other industries because they solved the stick wage problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment reminds me of this story: http://www.astatespacetraveler.com/have-you-ever-wondered-wh... Broad strokes: Startups directly create new value, which by definition makes the world a better place, at least for someone. In contrast, the finance industry adds value indirectly by optimizing capital allocation. At best, finance increases efficiency, but it's very hard to measure whether it's helping or just expl…
Only consumer product startups create new value, at least in the sense I think you are describing. A B2B startup, much like finance, will only increase efficiency. If I build HRWeb (replace your human resources dept with the internets), all it does is makes a bunch of other companies more efficient.
As you say, some B2B startups sell efficiency to the organization.
But there is also good money in selling products to the employee collective, even if they decrease efficiency of the organization.
For example, you can sell employees a product that gives them job security by making them appear more valuable. You could sell them a tool that will help them get rival employees fired.
Both of these would come at a cost of efficiency, but would be excellent B2B products. In the end, it's the employees who sign the purchase orders, not the organization.
I have a sneaking suspicion that these make up a much larger portion of B2B products than most people would think.
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I've contracted exclusively for investment banks in London for the past 6 years (with the exception of a brief stint at the FSA). The reason I stick with it is the exact reason you specify: the money, or more accurately for me, what the money allows me to do. The majority of the developers I work with have painted themselves into a corner with the money they've made working at banks such that they have no other optio…
So you could work for an investment bank, make a lot of money, use as little of it as possible and save the rest, then after a few years, quit and use the savings to fund a start-up? Sounds like a plan to me...
The head of BizDev at the financial software startup I used to work at was one of the lucky ones who got out (and he told me the above observation). You occasionally see other ex-financiers in the startup world, eg. Jeff Bezos or Joshua Schacter, but in general you don't see very many ex-investment-bankers. Most of them seem to still be working on Wall St.
BTW, this applies to other professions as well. An engineer frequently will see "just one more technical challenge that needs solving before I can get to the good, world-changing stuff." (I'm dealing with that now - I keep getting distracted from the ideas I really want to do by the various low-hanging fruit.) An experienced teacher will think "Just one more year with the kids, then I'll retire." Startups are nice in that they have clearly delineated endgames; most salaried professions are not like that.