Question for Patrick - Info

D M:

Any chance you could link us to Gekko's article?

not sure if he ever posted it but here was a draft of the article:

The Oracle for Wall Street Wannabes With users ranging from retired commodities traders to Wall Street Wannabes, Wallstreetoasis.com (WSO) has become one of the most powerful resources for learning about a career on Wall Street.

Family relative: What do you want to be when you get older? College student: I want to do investment banking. Family relative: Oh, and what does an investment banker do? College student: ??????

This conversation plays out on college campuses all across the country. Attracted by the prestige and the promise of being a millionaire by their late 20’s if they work hard enough, many of America’s youth dream of getting a job on Wall Street. Sadly, unless a student attends one of a few top tier universities where investment banks actively recruit, they will have to work a lot harder to get the same job on Wall Street as their target university peers. Thanks to WSO the playing field is being leveled.

The site began after Patrick Curtis, the sites founder, transitioned from the grueling 100 hour work weeks of restructuring at Rothschild to the more manageable 60 hour work weeks of private equity. “Coming from a liberal arts background, I knew nothing about investment banking or moving to private equity,” said Curtis. “If it had not been for a fellow analyst who took me under his wing and told me how to network and what to say during interviews, I would never have gotten a private equity job.”

It was his own recruitment experience along with reading a Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 article that inspired Curtis to create Ibankingoasis.com. Originally starting out as a simple message forum, Curtis wanted to create a fun site that would provide career advice and entertainment to current analysts and associates in investment banking.

“I used a lot of my friends and banking contacts, but then I also had a more focused approach,” said Curtis. ”After work, I would spend hours looking at investment banking club websites from different schools. I would send emails to key members and say “Hey, I have this site, I think you might be interested, and there is a compensation report if you register.” I kept it very informal and through that I was able to grow the site.” While originally intended for investment banking and private equity, the site soon grew to include information about consulting, sales and trading, and corporate finance jobs. The name was changed from ibankingoasis.com to WallStreetOasis.com.

After four years of private equity, Curtis decided to pursue an MBA at Wharton so that he could devote time for developing WSO into a full time business. While at Wharton, he was able to meet other entrepreneurial like minded individuals who advised him on the site. Within a month of starting at Wharton, WSO was completely redone.

From its humble beginning of a hundred or so registered users, WSO has expanded to a community with over 50,000 registered users and many more visitors who use its information without registering. The website receives over 130,000 pageviews from over 20,000 unique IP addresses a day. Apart from the thousands of college students that use the site for information, the site is primarily driven by a core group of posters who drive content and answer a full spectrum of questions from the mundane “How do I network?” to the much more detailed questions about what a trader or banker does on a day to day basis. Many of these core users are working professionals or ambitious college students who use their own experiences to help guide students just starting the process.

“The anonymity is really a competitive advantage,” said a Villanova MBA student and frequent poster on the site. “People are free to provide real information about what a bank’s culture is really like or what he does on a daily basis. The site is also a great information tool that can tell users which banks are still recruiting and when employment offers are given.”

Recently, there has been a surge of posts from users announcing that they finally received an employment offer at an investment bank and that they could not have done it without WSO. In addition to personally thanking individual posters who routinely provide advice, they provide words of encouragement and advice of their own to other users who have not yet received an offer. If there was a slogan for posters of the site it would read “Paying it forward;” referring to the fact that this site has helped them and now they will help the next wave of students once they start working.

One of the reasons that WSO has been able to expand has been Curtis’s ability to constantly improve the site’s services. From its early days of a simple message board, WSO has expanded to provide such a wide array of services that only 30% of its revenues are generated from ad sales. WSO generates revenue from a job board, a resume review service, selling interview guides to schools and individual users, and several marketing partnerships with other organizations such as Breaking Into Wall Street, a site that teaches students about financial modeling.

For the future, Curtis thinks that WSO will continue to focus on expanding its services platform. “When we first started there was a UK site very much like WSO called IBtalk.com” said Curtis. “They expanded from finance and started doing medicine, law, finance, and other fields. The site just died. It is important that WSO continue to fill its niche.”

WSO is currently developing a mock interview service that Curtis believes has a lot of potential. WSO is offering users the opportunity to mock interview with people who have actually worked on Wall Street. The interviews will be recorded and saved in a database so that eventually a person can pay a monthly fee and have access to an entire database of mock interviews which can be sorted by type of interview (investment banking, trading, and research) and by the questions that are asked. The database will allow a user to see what the interviewer sees and be able to listen to critique. In addition to the mock interview service, Curtis is working hard to develop jdoasis.com, which he hopes will start running in early 2011 and will become the WSO for aspiring lawyers.

With the site constantly changing and attracting new users every day, no one is exactly sure what will ultimately happen with WSO; but with its experienced manager at the helm and an ever growing user base of knowledgeable working professionals this writer wouldn’t mind buying some long dated call options .