Cascadia Capital - Gaslighting to the Maximum

Greetings to all:

First of all, I am really sorry for what happened to all the interns and all of the past employees at Cascadia Capital. I was an ex-employee there and I made a bad decision to pursue them versus somewhere else. My learning lesson is that “Do not let the money cloud my judgement. Look at the potential career that someone can offer for you. Money will come”.

During the past few years, Cascadia Capital tried to poach employees from many established banks such as Lincoln, William Blair, Baird, Jefferies, Lazard, and so on. Their main strategy is offer a lower base salary but a higher total compensation, and many people were fooled: Cascadia Capital would let someone go before the bonus date if you were not able to provide any contact names from your previous firm for them to poach or they could not win any potential mandate against the established banks of all tiers, hence you were let go because they could not maintain the deal book as they “thought” they would get their hands on. They totally forget that they no longer play in their sandbox and it is not doing well for them, by the market reaction.

Second of all, I would say that their deal team is quite mediocre at best in terms of marketing the deal / the company, go to market strategy is quite immature and some senior bankers involvement with the deal is quite minimal. What that means is that they let the VP and the junior bankers handle most of the work-stream until the clients jump on them, telling them that the memorandum looks like they were talking about some other company and not their company, not capturing the essence of the business after various calls with management, etc. Unfortunately, they do not have a solid junior team: the VPs are quite incompetent and they do blame on juniors bankers for not being able to simplify complex and to decode confusing concepts into the marketing materials - the question being asked here is if the ideas are confusing and complex, obviously they are to other team members, hence why does such a person make a statement to blame others while they have no intelligent capacity to do so? 

Furthermore, please don’t get on the M&A hype when you saw the press release that Cascadia Capital acquired Threadstone. The reason why they had to acquire another firm is that they could not attract talents, have had constant issues with poaching and recruiting (hence paying fees to the 3rd party recruiting firm). Hence, the quickest way for them to get people is to acquire another company. Their Consumer and Retail team was mostly comprised of three people prior to their acquisition of Threadstone, just for your information. 

As of 2024 update, my ex-coworkers called me to update me on Cascadia Capital. They have let go several employees including VP, Associate, MD levels. Their goal is to become the next Lincoln or William Blair or whatever business model they envision themselves to become and hence, they are executing on that vision. 

My thoughts should be ended here. I have no hate for them. I do wish them well. They have been experimenting on human capital and we all know that experiments do come with success and failure. Unfortunately, we have to accept that we were in the game that we participated in and hence, we had to accept the consequences.

For all future readers of this post, though you have not asked for my advice, I will just say it: take your time to understand your employer. Pay attention to the way they talk to you and to the message they try to deliver to you. Vet them thoroughly. Make sure you have a good vibe with them. Do not let the money cloud your judgment. I don’t want to bring this person up but if you feel like you are talking to a Donald Trump version, you know you need to walk away. Where there is smoke, there is a fire. 

I wish everyone all the best in their recruiting journey!