startup

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost Title summarizes the road I've traveled… consultant → intelligence community/SEAL Teams/Special Operations → director of research at a well known hedge fund → tech...

06 Jan 2022

My wife held positions at different tech companies (from early-stage to ipo) and is currently a senior recruiter at google. While on maternity leave, she helped 3 former colleagues of mine transition from IB into tech. One as cfo at a series a funded e-mobility startup, another as director m&a at a...

16 Dec 2021

Long time member of WSO here, I just created a new username for this post. I'm a former investment banking analyst at a bulge bracket in NYC. I've been pursuing my real estate tech startup, Zenly, for almost a year and will be launching it in a few weeks. I co-founded Zenly to address the nightmare...

16 Sep 2020

First and foremost I would like to apologize for the heinous clickbait title. I had to get your attention somehow, and quite honestly, the title isn't far off from how I feel. I finished my freshman year at a CC in Los Angeles and was offered transfer admission to Cornell Dyson and USC Marshall...

24 Jul 2022

Hey everyone, I'm an intern at Google deciding between starting as a SWE vs in the APM program after college. I'm interested in tech entrepreneurship, specifically creating or joining a startup 2-6 years after graduating, and I wanted to hear others' opinions on what route to take. I have a CS...

09 Jul 2022

Hi everyone, I currently work at one of the tiger cub spin offs (D1 Capital/Anomaly Capital) and was wondering if I could get career advice from anyone of the older audience on here. I was able to join one of these funds at the ground floor. I'm currently an analyst and have a clear path forward...

27 May 2021

I started a company my senior year of college in the CPG food space. Long story short is we spent a lot of time and money in R&D and by the time we launched Covid-19 hit and everything went downhill from there. My startup was largely unsuccessful from a sales standpoint, however we did accomplish...

20 Aug 2020

Hey guys, In a nutshell, this is my dilemma, I'm on a road to what I've unfortunately grown to see as a golden cage and I'm not sure if it's what I really want out of my career and life. For background, I'm a twenty-something working at a wealth management practice on the west coast. Over the last...

17 Jun 2021

So I've been in the industry for about a decade and have established relationships internally with colleagues over that period, while my client relationships are almost as old. Now that I'm senior and my partner and I went independent and started our own boutique a while ago, my work hours have...

14 Jun 2021

Hello. New user is here. Quick background: two friends (one is a CEO of a large telco Company and the other is a Ph.D. in Physics) are about to start a small trading shop. Have algorithms (developed/ tested/ deployed) that are currently running on TS (plan to move to NInja) utilizing 1 sec data for...

30 May 2018

Hi all, I've been working at a T2.5 consulting firm for the past 3 years and have been thinking to start my own venture at some point. In parallel, I've also received an invitation to interview at an MBB (from pre-covid time that are re-starting). Therefore, I'd be curious to have your opinion on...

08 Dec 2020

Over the last year/two years myself and two partners built a startup in California. Raising several million in capital and now operational. This has started a fire in me to want to refocus to a career in the financial world. I do not have my bachelors. I dropped out of college while studying History...

12 Apr 2020

Hi everyone, I'm from EU in my sophomore year and I received two different internship offers for the Summer, very different between them: The first one is in in one of the most important luxury motorcycle manufacturing companies in the world, the brand is highly recognised globally. The internship...

24 Mar 2022

Need some career advice. I am considering leaving my quant role for a startup. I have 2+ yrs of experience as a quant working at a single manager fund. I am considering leaving for a startup that has a product that I find really interesting. The startup has had a strong funding round and they are

21 Dec 2019

Hey WSO, I recently finished my MBA at Berkeley Haas and was heavily involved in the entrepreneurship program there. It's definitely a tougher realm for international students-given lack of job security (and thus visa status), but I wanted to encourage applicants to think about discussing...

15 Jun 2022

I am working on a start up with some friends and am trying to model out a scenario for our cap table. Let's say we are taking in investment for the first time ever and that we are raising at a $10M valuation and are offering 20% equity for $2M in capital. Let's assume our valuation doubles in 12...

11 Oct 2021

Earlier this year, Inc.com released a list of sectors to consider going into if you were to start a business. The list included some pretty interesting ideas: Disaster Relief, Alternative-Protein Food Products, eSports, Influencer Agents, Beauty Tech, Women's Reproductive Health Care, Canned Wine,...

22 Sep 2018

Read part 1 here: //www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/the-complete-coward%E2%80%99s-guide-to-sta… Like many of you, I side with those who scoff at the amount of time the developed world wastes in formalized education - i.e., reading and studying rather than doing. In the startup world, this disdain for...

04 Apr 2014

See Part 2 | Part 3 It's the ultimate American success story: A boy grows up dirt poor and leaves home at 18 with nothing to his name. He can't afford college, but he teaches himself to code and starts a business. Through perseverance and determination he builds it brick by brick before selling his...

24 Apr 2014

Hey just hoping to get peoples thoughts on the pros and cons of a potential move. Currently have 2 opportunities: 1) IBD Associate at MM firm (Not my preferred location or top-tier firm) 2)COO of 2-year old healthcare company ($3M revenues in 2016, and rapidly growing) that is aiming to acquire and...

18 Mar 2017

Anyone know of any helpful resources for startup accounting/ modeling? Recently find myself dealing with a company that is just starting to get revenues with a highly volatile cash burn and trying to leverage some other resources out there to see if I am missing anything in the way I am thinking...

09 Mar 2022

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24 Jan 2022

Recently quit my FT IB role to build out a startup I've been working on for 1.5 years. The co. is in the tech / media / crypto space and has raised over 7M so far. We've been having a lot of trouble building out that initial team of high performing generalists (our package is 130K base + ~300K -...

24 Oct 2021

It seems like the career paths in real estate PE and capital markets are pretty clear cut...acquisitions, asset management, investment sales, debt brokerage etc. What about those that love real estate but are interested in the startup world (RE fintech, proptech)? Is there a potential path to...

29 Dec 2020

Posted with permission from Leveraged Sellout. I emailed my 22 year old cousin Eric, who's graduating Summa in Economics from Harvard, to see if he needed any help getting interviews at prestigious financial institutions. I was sure there would be recruiters on campus, but I didn't want to run the...

22 Feb 2014

Hi there, I'm a freshman at a target and just got notified that I'd be advancing to the 2nd round for AKKR. Being AKKR is literally the first and only firm for whom I have ever interviewed, I'm sort of going in the dark with this one and hope to optimize my chances of receiving an offer. The first...

07 Jan 2022

Part 1: here. Part 2: here. And now for the finale. Yes, the picture is a penguin with a blade riding a shark bear. #5: Integrate into the Community In most places around the world – possibly excluding Silicon Valley, NYC, Boston, and Tel Aviv – the local startup scene is a fairly small and...

12 Apr 2014

Hey all, Some of you may have seen my post/q&a/whatever about being a VC intern here. I talked broadly about what the VC side of things is like, but I didn't go into much detail about the startup side of things. I've seen a fair amount of posts about startups vs corporate or how to start a company,...

25 May 2014

http://lehmanbrothe.rs Just saw this start up out there trying to sully the Lehman name. From their website: "We are the other Lehman Brothers. You may not have heard of us, but you know us, that which has always been here, not in the board rooms of banks but in the heart beat of the greatest city...

11 Jan 2015

A quick web Execu|Search will tell you that there are only a few basics to getting into an accelerator: a big problem, an innovative and superior solution, a large growing market, and a great team. Last fall, I applied to an accelerator with a foolproof plan. I had a product that is by definition...

09 Feb 2014

Hello everyone. Ill keep this short and sweet (the goal of Wall St am I right?) - 10 months into an ER job (learning a ton, great job, intense boss though and hours obviously) - Debating taking the CFA®. I have all 4 certs already - If so I would do CFA®1 in June. Debating if its worth it. I love...

07 Jul 2017

Hi Everyone, So I've been having some sleepless nights lately. After having finished my IB summer internship, I decided to go back to my home country during covid to finish my dissertation and apply for an Off-Cycle. After getting home I was contacted by a wealthy family friend to trade some of his...

16 Dec 2020

I work at a company with ~350 people and was granted a decent chunk of change in phantom equity. I'm trying to figure out what that equity is worth. I have less visibility into overall profitability than I'd like, but we have been growing quickly (added 80 or so people over the past year and looking...

16 Jun 2021

From an article in The Economist magazine on November 28th, 2015 titled The Rise and Fall of the Unicorns. Valuations for private technology firms are increasing at a slower rate compared to six months ago. Analyst Fred Giuffrida, at Horsley Bridge, says that the valuations in late-stage rounds of...

13 Feb 2016

Hey guys, I know this isn't the standard 'help with IB recruiting' question, but since we've got a lot of smart ppl here, I figured it'd be relevant. I've done a bunch of internships in corporate settings, and feel that its WAY too slow paced and bureaucratic for me Going into my senior year, I...

15 Jul 2018

Hello fellow monkeys, I think I'm burnt out to the point I am second guessing going into PE after my analyst stint. The hours seem the same. The work is more or less the same too, just on the different side of the aisle. I am thinking of a corporate strategy role at a tech firm, maybe one of the...

11 Aug 2021

Hey WSO, In 2008, I worked on a tiny self-owned business. I worked with 3 other people as IT consultants for a handful of business clients in NYC, all of which were engineering firms. The business was an S-corp and only operated for 1.5 years (I got my first internship in finance and decided to...

20 Sep 2012

This is Part One of an interview with Derek Sutta, author of the ebook 'BlackJack Domination' which is a fully comprehensive and interactive guide to learning to count cards. Co-authored by an MIT wizard who has been the main inspiration for several casino films and a blackjack player who has won...

26 Sep 2012

Hi, I am a final year Economics undergrad student from a tier-1 university in India, currently interning with a fintech startup called Drip Capital- a very well funded trade finance startup that aims to solve the working capital woes of SME exporters in emerging markets by using data as opposed to...

26 Nov 2018

I was preening through Quora, (Q&A community), and I found an Anonymous answer I wanted to share. Don't end up with the short end of the stick. 1. It's just not worth it - You work as hard as the founders, and put your everything into it. You're underpaid, have none of the benefits because health...

09 Sep 2013

During the unveiling of the much anticipated iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus, very few people knew about the unveiling of Apple's Watch. For simplicity and due to many Apple products, lets put an "i" in front of "Watch." Apple's iWatch is soon to be released sometime early this year. Already, some people...

17 Jan 2015

I'm going to be working abroad for a tech startup in Hong Kong, effective end of this month, for at least six months. Does anyone have experience or know of someone who went from a tech startup background/internship to IB/PE? I'm really interested in breaking in to those avenues but have had no...

10 Sep 2015

Apple, Google, Facebook, they're all technology firms and pioneered transformative ways in how our society uses information. It seems that over the past 30 years such firms have seemingly grown out of super fertile soil or by some unidentified minerals in the water supply at Palo Alto. Whatever the...

21 Oct 2012

With tech (and consumer tech - iPhones, Social Media, Video/Music Content) becoming such a big thing in daily life, how do you know if you're truly interested in it rather than just being a part of a more tech-focused generation? I mean, you see TMT groups being the more popular, if not the most...

20 Jan 2015

Hello everyone, I am a senior who has an offer from an elite boutique (satellite, not NYC). However, the group (which will remain unnamed) is doing terribly and there is a possibility it will go away in the coming years. I also have a few technology startups offers with a salary ranging in the...

25 Feb 2014

Lets say I have 5 friends who are willing to invest in my start up for a silent stake of my company. What is the best term options for me as a start up and the best term options for me if I were the investor? As the start up I can choose between giving revenue share and equity share. Revenue share...

13 Oct 2011

I have been doing consulting work for a small boutique bank for the past few months and recently accepted a full time offer with them starting next week. So far I've built models for a sell-side deal and an equity offering and I have 2 years of experience in the middle office of a bulge bracket...

24 Apr 2013

A good friend of mine used to run a successful e-commerce business selling specialized electronic products to a very niche group of consumers. He was bought out of his ownership stake almost two years ago. His non-compete runs out in a couple of months and we have discussed launching a start up of...

05 Mar 2013

Andy note: Best of WSO - this post originally went up October 2009 and we thought it deserved to go back on the homepage for those who may have never seen it. Hey guys, so I have a simple yet important question: why is it that so few students from elite schools start their own companies right after...

31 Aug 2012

Hey guys, I'm a recent Ivy-grad (bio major) and worked as a business analyst in the industry related to my startup, but was in non-competitive categories. I quit my job only after six months in because I needed to travel abroad for an extended period and work out the supply chain. It's been 6 months...

09 Jul 2018