IFB51: Investment Banker Turned Entrepreneur Talks Financial Freedom

 

You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast, finally step-by-step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern. To decode industry jargon silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers. Your path to financial freedom starts now.
Welcome to Investing for Beginners for podcasts. Today we have another great interview for you today our guest is Alex from Wall Street Oasis.
Andrew: Wall Street Oasis is a website that’s been around for a very long time it’s one of the top websites out there. Resources for people who are looking to get into the financial world particularly when it comes to investment banking, venture capital, kind of that whole space.
That website has a ton of resources about you know whether you want to get in as for your career and like interview tips and all these sorts of things and they really cover just a ton of topics related to investing finance Wall Street and so I’m really happy to bring Alex on the show today. Alex thanks for coming on
Alex: yeah thanks for having me Andrew happy to be here.
Andrew: can you talk about your background for a bit and your role over at Wall Street Oasis to give our listeners some context for our interview today.
Alex: yeah sure happy to I let’s see I recently graduated from Business School I got my MBA from UCLA Anderson last May so almost a year ago. In so now my life’s been pretty different after school but let me tell you what I did before school.
So I’m 31 so for seven years I worked in investment banking at. First I worked for JP Morgan and then for Houlihan Lokey it’s kind of a smaller investment bank, but I focused on what’s called restructuring Investment Banking where you’re working with distressed companies and bondholders.
And so did the investment banking stuff for a while and then I actually left to go work for a digital media company. essentially just doing internal investment banking you know buying and selling websites stuff like that setting the strategy for the for the business.
And those were cool jobs but I always wanted to do something more entrepreneurial, and so I thought Business School would be a good way to kind of bridge my two worlds the finance hardcore finance stuff and then kind of my passion and work in startups and for myself. Not get told what they do all day long I mean I like working hundred hour days like you do in 100 hour weeks like you do in banking but I wanted to be doing those for myself.
So I went to business school try to find that entrepreneurial spirit that was somewhere inside of me, and now I’m finding it. And let’s see I went from making lots of money and Investment Banking to now I literally make hundreds of dollars per week in the start-up world.
That’s a change but in terms of fulfillment in terms of like career goals and objectives on checking off every single box right now.
Besides the money one so I’m confident that the money will come soon and as far as the Wall Street Oasis in business school one of the entrepreneurial things I did was I started the podcast and the guys on Wall Street Oasis heard it, and they liked it and they said why don’t you just come make a podcast for us and so now my podcast where I speak with top business leaders, CEOs, investors bankers, all that kind of stuff founders.
We have it it’s called The Wall Street Oasis podcast, and it lives there and we kind of talk about the ups and downs of someone’s career how they got to where they are the cool stuff then not cool stuff and kind of you know tip what tips they would have for trying to follow in their steps.
Andrew: that’s awesome you know I love the idea of kind of pursuing your own path and obviously you kno...