23rd
Stop shitting on Wall Street
There is way too much vehement anti-Wall Street sentiment in the startup community. Not that it is completely without merit - there are tons of valid reasons to dislike many of the cultural and practical elements that give Wall Street such a bad name - a focus on wealth accumulation, an over emphasis on the short-term, positioning as value extractors rather than value creators, etc.
What bothers me most is that the disparaging commentary on Wall Street is rarely rooted in fair and objective dialogue, but rather, more often than not, merely degrades to straw-man argumentation, broad generalized attacks with no respect for nuance, and an utter lack of appreciation for the benefits, not just the costs, of Wall Street experience.
After leaving my first startup early in my career, I spent two years and a summer as a junior banker. I knew from the get-go that I never wanted to be a career Wall Streeter. I viewed my time in banking as a continuation of my education. And you know what, from that perspective it was incredible. The nearly undeniable reality is that the skills and knowledge acquired in banking are remarkably valuable and broadly applicable throughout ones career. Contrary to uninformed opinion, it is not all about spreadsheets and powerpoints - it’s about understanding flows of cash through companies, analyzing markets, thinking critically about strategy and competition, and importantly, identifying and valuing opportunities.
Don’t get me wrong - these are not the be all and end all of business intellect and knowledge. But they are valuable elements. And I would never postulate that banking is the only and/or best way to acquire these skills. But banks do a really good job of exposing junior staffers to these important issues.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, I sometimes feel a certain sense of elitism within the startup eco-system. There are those who believe that working at any institutional corporate, or even worse, god forbid, a Wall Street institution, is tantamount to killing innovation and destroying our collective productive future.
I, for one, disagree with this sentiment for two principal reasons:
- Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur or to work at a startup. Quite to the contrary, the entrepreneur is almost necessarily a unique and rare breed who is fearless in the face of uncertainty, visionary in his ability to identify opportunity, and blessed with an intuitive feel for the art and science of business. Most people don’t fit this mold. Then there are those who simply appreciate the stability of larger corporates or the unique challenges faced by large global companies. There are a million and one other valid reasons to work at a large company. And that’s totally OK.
- A career is a marathon and not a sprint. I whole-heartedly viewed the first five years of my career post undergrad as a continuation of my education. With this mindset, I chose to work at a bank after my stint as an entrepreneur to learn more of the *science* of business to complement what I perceived to be a more natural intuition for the *art*. I always knew that I would leave to return to my true passion - entrepreneurship - once I had acquired the skills I valued and deemed useful. Of course, it’s likely that I could have acquired these or similar skills through other experiences - startup or otherwise - but I am incredibly pleased with the outcome of my decision and have no regrets.
The reality is that working at a startup and working at an institutional corporate are, in many respects, completely different and the applicable learnings reflect those differences. When I was an entrepreneur, my learnings were a result of trial and error. It was a about throwing shit against the wall and seeing what stuck. On the one hand - it was fantastic because we got to hone our intuition and learn from hands on experience (and in fact, I probably learned more from my failures than from my successes). We also had broad exposure to all elements of a business from product development to business operations. On the other hand, we were constantly failing instead of just doing it properly from the start and we developed more of a breadth than a depth of experience. Learning in an institutional environment is completely different. On the one hand, you totally lack most of the independent hands on trial and error experience - with all the positive and negatives that come with it. You also are generally silo-d and become more of a vertical expert than a broad generalist. On the other hand, you glean from the experienced and institutional intellect of those around you. Look, it is true that corporates generally suck at quickly innovating, but they do many other things very very well - were that not the case they would never have become large corporates.
If you have read this far and your takeaway from this piece is that I encourage young people to go work at institutional corporates instead of startups, than I have failed. I am absolutely NOT advocating working at large corporates. I love startups and almost always encourage others to aggressively explore that path. However, I try to do so by engaging in honest and (relatively) objective discussion of the pros and cons of each option. There are tangible costs and benefits to both entrepreneurial and corporate career paths and there is most definitely no one *right* approach to developing the skills and intuition that will translate into long-term career success and happiness.
This constant shitting on corporates in general, and Wall Street in particular, annoys me. Rather than promoting a one-size-fits-all philosophy that encourages all students to go to startups, let’s take a more nuanced approach where we recognize the value and shortcomings of different approaches to career development.
