Interview with Take the Leap

Take the Leap interview about Wall Street Oasis: http://taketheleap.creativehub.com/patrick-curtis-because-of-the-monkey…

Patrick Curtis is the founder and CEO of WallStreetOasis.com, one of the fastest growing, most entertaining finance communities online. The goal of WallStreetOasis.com is to help educate young finance professionals and students as they approach critical career decisions while simultaneously providing an outlet that can make them laugh. The site has over 200,000 posts to date, 2.5 million page views and over 500,000 visits a month.

Patrick told us a story about starting the company:

Out of undergraduate, I did investment banking for 2yrs. I worked between 90-100 hrs per week, consistently. Then I switched over to private equity, and I was working 60 hrs a week, and I felt like I had free time! At that time, I remember reading the “Top 30 under 30” article in BusinessWeek; they were all entrepreneurs. I remember thinking, these people weren’t so special, they were just executing well. So I started brainstorming on what I could do, and I quickly decided to start an online business so I could manage it while working full-time on the side. I knew a lot about investment banking, but I felt that there was a lot more I wished I had known. I had a mentor at Rothschild at the time, and he helped me come to the idea behind WallStreetOasis, a source for inside information about the financial services world. I launched with a partner and gave him equity, but he got too busy to work on it so I had to buy him out in 2006. To build the website, I got so much help from my friends at Wharton; they taught me everything from how to think about site layout to the size of ad units.

I think half the battle of this type of business is figuring out what your users want. As part of WallStreetOasis, I’ve started a few other business offshoots, including a GMAT tutoring business and a publishing business (focused on interviews) – that one is doing well, we now have a small library of books that we’re selling to university career centers. I try to expand by trying new things, seeing how they’ll work – some things take off, others fail. I originally wanted a job board, but now I’m going to partner with Doostang to do that. Entrepreneurship online is about testing things; if I had done a ton of research before launching WallStreetOasis, I may never have done it. Being naïve as an entrepreneur is kind of a good thing. Truth is, I think my site got popular because it was a little more fun than other sites – I think it was because of the monkeys.