This forum helped me go from Blackstone to Facebook to YCombinator startup founder (rebrand.ly/getourchat). Ask me anything!
Wow does this forum brings back memories! WallStreetOasis was a welcome discovery my freshmen year in college and I checked it religiously back then - trying to gauge the relative prestige and status of different firms and sucking in all the hilarious and offensive terminology along with it. Honestly WSO was probably the thing (other than the school I was at) that first made me really think about finance. It guided what I knew about the right way to do things (along with the Vault rankings of course); what I knew about interviews - banking culture - exit ops - everything haha.
Anyway, my story is: I did a summer internship in S&T at Citi and a spring internship at Disney Corporate and leveraged those to get a full time offer at Blackstone (which was my dream job at the time) out of college. I got there after finishing my C.S. degree my senior year... and just hated it. An opening came up at Facebook in November after I graduated aaand I took it.
Quitting 6 months in did NOT go over well. I'm pretty sure I got thrown every insult and threat there was in the book, a choice few of which include: - "You'll never get into HBS if I have anything to do with it." - "Do you know how many kids we rejected to give you this job? THOUSANDS" - "Of course we're enforcing garden leave. Facebook is a DIRECT COMPETITOR." And of course I paid back my signing bonus... which pretty much emptied my savings. Lovely. Also my parents stopped talking to me. Fucking amazing.
Four years later it turns out joining Facebook back then was a fantastic choice LOL. And after having built products on News Feed, Messenger, and a few other teams, I decided it was finally time to leave and to build an idea my best friend and I had had years ago when we first met. We wanted to buck the trend of technology apps that focus on getting you to spend more and more time staring at phone screens, and focus on getting people to spend more time in the real world with the people they might not always hang out with.
Last month we were very lucky to get funding from YCombinator (an accelerator in the Bay area) - and that's the end of my story so far! Thanks for reading if you got this far and please ask me anything you're curious about.
Also - check out the app if you get a chance and give us feedback! Our current version is a location sharing app that lets you share your location with exactly who you want for exactly how long you want. Go ON to notify and share your location with selected contacts. When people in your contacts and network are ON and hanging out, you’ll get notified with a party emoji!: rebrand.ly/getourchat
You're looking at it.
M&A haha sounds like a fun group
The week we left Facebook together we applied to YCombinator via their standard interview process - not really hoping for much since social is kind of a crazy category to apply in (it's one of the few categories where you're basically saying you're better/smarter than the 10,000 similar things that came before you.... versus a category that's more IP protected like biotech or AI or some shizz).
The week before we were supposed to launch our product we heard back from them and moved our launch to interview.... for 10 minutes. No joke, they do 10 minutes per company with the partners with the strongest background in your area. We interviewed with one of the founders of Twitch - and boy did he tear us apart. Quotes include: - "No I know what you're saying... I just think it's not good enough." - "...ok like literally everyone's tried this. Are you saying you're better/smarter than all those people?" - "But what does it really DO?"
We walked out of that and basically agreed that we were totally fucked. We actually rode back in an hour-long Uber from Mountain View to SF in complete silence. That night we got a call at around 10PM (was in an Uber to a date....) telling us we got in from the CEO of YCombinator and that he was going to be our partner. I was in an Uber Pool and literally yelled / got asked by the other riders if we'd gotten into YC haha.
Now that it's started the value is pretty incredible. We were initially a bit skeptical because having been at Facebook the past 4 years - we had reasonable connections to good founders and VCs. YCs a very different experience though. Just the access honest explanations from phenomenal founders coupled with crazy access to people and ex-YC companies (DropBox, AirBnB, Reddit, etc.) has proven to be invaluable. We have no regrets on taking YC at all!
Happy to answer more specific questions if you have any.
Re: Blackstone - On the good side, my peers (the people in my class) were amazing. I'm still really good friends with several of them even though it took some of them a bit to come to terms with my decision to leave. On the bad side... honestly it was kind of like hazing (I was in a fraternity at college). I don't by any means claim this was unique to BX - but there were MDs there who would throw your life into complete disarray just to fuck with you. As in - claim there was an emergency meeting that you needed to work all night to finish the deck for.... and then there wasn't a real meeting. Or even something scheduled. And he'd stop returning your calls. Like I said - not the worst story I've heard by far, but I had a bit of optionality due to my CS degree so I just took it an ran haha
Re: Technical Ability - I actually think I learned more after I left college than in college. Technology's funny that way - new languages, coding patterns, frameworks, etc. evolve at a pace that at least my college education in CS couldn't keep up with. A good example is today, to run my company - I've had to be very proficient in Swift/iOS and at least passable in Javascript (our backend are servers on Heroku running Node.js) - neither of which I learned in school (Swift wasn't even released when I was in college). So tl;dr - it's never been about recalling our using my previous technical talent - it's always been about powering through learning whatever I need to technically to build what we're building. Oddly that's more an exercise in self confidence and pure grit than anything about innate abilities.
Re: Talent War - I have mixed feelings haha. I really do believe that many of my brightest peers are in finance - and some of their experiences in banking and PE have given them tremendous business acumen and the ability to break down any business in the world to it's foundational pieces brilliantly. That's a skill I admire and a path I chose not to take. On the flip side being in tech puts you on the very cutting edge of what's driving society forward today and let's you build something from nothing - something that never existed before. So at the lowest level it's a question of life style, personal lean, etc. At the mid level it's a question of what you believe in more. At the highest level for me it's the question of what impact you really want your life to have - and who you want to be for your kids and grand kids. Sounds cheesy for sure - but I think most people (my college self included) never really get past the lowest tier. Tech was initially much more about life style and personal lean for me - about the immediate comforts. There I do think it wins pretty universally but that's just funneling pretty smart people who will go wherever the tide's high (metaphorically). I think you have to decide for yourself what really matters to you, versus what happens to be the hot thing today.
Caveat - all my personal opinions and claims across the board here lol.
Hmm - I think breaking into tech companies versus startups end up being pretty different beasts. Tech companies (especially large, mature ones) recruit much more like consultancies or investment banks - high GPA (preferably CS instead of preferably Econ), some interest in tech.
For startups it's usually much easier to break in - especially if you're really persistent. One of my first jobs was at a startup and I only got it because I emailed and called the guy every couple days until he gave me an interview.
The VC lean here's kind of interesting too - in my experience different VCs have completely different models of investing and skillsets they look for. For example - Kleiner acts much more like a classic bank - big growth investments in SaaS or enterprise businesses. And so they recruit from Goldman TMT and the like. Sequoia is almost the entire opposite - they keep things super small and love hiring ex-founders with strong analytical backgrounds; they also do a lot of consumer app investments (YikYak, Houseparty, WhatsApp). YCombinator is a bit extreme and basically only have ex-founders who sold companies investing. So all I'm saying is that there are actually a lot of disparate paths in VC (probably more so than other areas of finance) based on what type of approach you want to take to investing.
This is a fantastic story, well done & congrats.
Will check it out when I can.
Quick question. I am currently within Finance/trading with a degree in Engineering. Self teaching Python. While I love trading I won't do it for life.
How crucial is the CS degree vs. self teaching.
Which languages do you work with the most/recommend picking up? I'm really enjoying the ease of python in the first instance, I'll soon be applying that within the workplace in a new role to build some analytical tools.
This guy fucks.
Aaaand this is now the highest voted response. Well done. I will say Silicon Valley on HBO is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the Valley...
Ah I think this actually highlights a particularly interesting difference between finance and technology.
Generally I found most, but not all of my co-workers in finance worked to accumulate wealth. The faster the accumulation, the earlier the retirement age.... but then what? Will you then chase what you really want? Or will you layabout on a beach? Neither seemed particularly logical to me IF that's your primary reason for being in finance. You should chase what you really want now if you have something in that category - if your goal is to layabout on a beach maybe it's the right call, but for most people aggressive and ambitious enough to make it there, I think they'll find themselves imminently bored (or at least I would).
That, I suppose, has indirectly answered your question. I love taking beautiful vacations as much as the next guy, but as I've gotten a bit more experienced (at the ripe age I'm at haha) I've found that the spectrum of life for me is much more fluid. When I was at Facebook I had a lot of freedom - and so my job was mostly whatever I felt motivated to do. By the end there was little of a superior commanding me to do things and a lot of me working together with my managers and peers to jointly agree and guide technology products forward.
Today of course, I literally do almost exactly whatever I want to do each and every day. There are times when I'm tired obviously, or stressed, or angry/sad/frustrated - but a big part of starting a company for me was believing in putting something that is a representation of what I believe out in the world (and seeing if that's valuable). That comes with bearing the responsibility that any failures or missteps are also wholly your fault (there's no managers to blame or bureaucracy or anything else anymore really) - which is the major difference between starting a company for me and working at Facebook.
So all of that's a long-winded way of saying, I think if I hit it big I'd take a few weeks or maybe a month off - and then start building something else I really believe in. Over the course of my admittedly short career, I've found that the difference between "working" and "retiring" (which I've defined as just having the freedom to do whatever I want to do every hour of every day) has entirely blurred - and I find myself very lucky to be able to live life like that now!