Hi everybody, if you're new to the channel my name is Ben and I'm a former
JP Morgan Investment Banking Analyst. So normally I actually make videos about
investing but today I wanted to actually talk about why I left
finance, and share a little bit of my reflections on
what I learned from leaving the industry. Alight, so let's jump straight into it.
Let me just start off by talking about why I left. Now first off to provide a
little bit of context I joined the JP Morgan San Francisco Healthcare Team
in 2015, where I covered a lot of biotech,med
tech, and digital health companies. I worked there for a little more than
two and a half years and although investment banking has a pretty poor
reputation, I actually had a pretty positive
experience. Now in banking, it's often that you work 80 to 100 hours
a week and so it's hard to have a really good lifestyle,
but I kind of went into the experience thinking that I knew what I was signing
myself up for. I knew I was going to be working hard, and I felt like I was
learning and growing a lot throughout my two and a half years when I was working
at JP Morgan I wasn't necessarily interested
in healthcare, but the group had a really great culture
and really strong deal flow and so that's kind of why I decided to join
that group. But back to the main topic the reason I left banking
involves a pretty personal reason and story, but I don't mind sharing it
publicly in the hopes that it eventually helps someone,
whoever you are that is watching this video. So basically, in 2017
my mom was diagnosed with ALS which is the same disease that Stephen Hawking
had and it's a terminal illness in which all your muscles start to slowly
deteriorate over time. Now I won't go into this too much
because I really don't want to make this video like a sob
story, but basically that diagnosis made me rethink
about my entire life and what was truly important to me. When you work in banking
or any kind of high paying job, it's really easy to get lost in the mindset
of thinking a lot about compensation and getting used to a certain lifestyle. And
I really fell into that whole mindset of needing to make
a lot of money and holding on to jobs; not necessarily because I was super
super passionate about them but just because
i was used to living a certain way. I know this might be of interest to some
of you guys watching and so just to be totally transparent
and you know kind of give you guys some
information that maybe most people in banking wouldn't tell you. My second
year out of banking, including some investment gains
I reported around 170,000 in my income. So second year out of college, that was
how much I was making, and over the next few years I was
thinking of joining either a private equity firm or a hedge fund where the
compensation can easily reach the two to three hundred thousand
dollars in annual income. Joining one of those industries was
really really tempting for me, but as I said when my mom got sick,
it made me really recalibrate and think about what was important to me
and I always had two really big life long dreams that I wanted to pursue ever
since I was young. The first one was backpacking across the world,
and then the second thing was to start my own business. So in the beginning of
2018, I quit my job and started a six month journey where I was backpacking
across South America, Asia, and Australia, and throughout that
time, I was also kind of thinking about the next business
that I wanted to start building. The company I ended up starting was called
Aesthetic Studio, and it was a fashion brand
where we partnered with artists pretty much from all over the world.
We had some artists from Russia, Chile, the UK and the US.
And our goal was to just create really high quality garments with artists,
kind of hoping to be like the nike for creatives.
I'll leave a link in the description below. But to be completely transparent,
you know I'm really not trying to push any products, I'm not working on the
brand anymore, but if you want to check out what I
worked on um just feel free to check it out. So that's why I left investment
banking, it was really to just kind of pursue my own passions. I would
say my experience is pretty abnormal most of the
analysts that I knew went into industry jobs or
the buy side, and like private equity or hedge funds. Now in my opinion, there are
three normal quote unquote reasons why
analysts leave their jobs in investment banking, and the first
one is that the lifestyle just gets pretty unsustainable over a long period
of time. You know working 80 to 100 hours a week,
that's bad in itself, but you also have to factor in your
oftentimes canceling plans with friends, not able to spend a lot of time with
family, and you can't go on as many vacations as
you want to or even when you do go sometimes you do have to do a lot of
work during those vacations. Um so that lifestyle is just something
that's really hard to keep pushing through over a long period of
time. The second reason is that the work tends to get really
repetitive over time, if you're working 70 to 100 hours a week
pretty much in anything in life, then you'll start to get really good at it
but it might start to get a little bit boring, unless that's what you're like
born to do. And for most analysts, they're not born
to just crank out financial models and build presentations, right? Some people
eventually want to pursue other things in life. And
so a big reason that a lot of analysts leave is because
once they become an associate, you're still doing a lot of financial
modeling and presentation building. A little less so,
you are starting to meet with clients a lot more, and you're not doing all of the
grunt work yourself, but banking tends to be kind of the same thing,
when you keep doing deal after deal. The third and related reason to what I just
kind of talked about is that you eventually want to gain some more
exposure to different industries or gain a new set of skills. And so
that's why a lot of analysts leave in order to
pursue an industry job or go into the buy side, with that said, now that I've
left banking for a few years I've had a lot of time to reflect and I
just wanted to share two really important lessons that I kind of picked
up. The first one is pretty cliche, but it
really is that money is not everything. I grew up in a solid middle class family
and my dad was an entrepreneur, and there were times when business was going
really well and life was pretty good, but there are also
times when the lights wouldn't turn on because the electricity bill wasn't
being paid. And I remember back in 2008, when my
dad's business kind of crashed and burned, there was a
guy who came in the middle of the night, who took our car away because it wasn't
being paid for. I think all of this is what really kind
of pushed and motivated me to work really hard to land
a really high paying job out of college. And that's
probably a big reason I chose investment banking beyond me
also kind of being interested in finance, and financial modeling. And so when O was
in banking, I was making decent money buying a lot
of things that I wanted, living in a decent apartment in San
Francisco, and when I left, my life kind of did a
huge 180, where I was losing a lot of money, because I was investing in the
business. In addition to that, my lifestyle also
changed pretty dramatically. I went from being able to buy pretty
much any meal I wanted when I was at JP Morgan. For example,
and as an entrepreneur, I had to save money wherever I could, so I was eating
like the same Costco chicken and spinach meal for
weeks on end. Maybe varying it up a little bit here
and there, and sometimes even when my friends
asked me if I wanted to hang out, you know, sometimes I would say no
because I didn't want to spend money going out. I was also driving this really
old beat up 2002 Toyota minivan, which
honestly was like kind of embarrassing for me, even though
I'm not really a materialistic guy. But it was just so beat up and disgusting,
but anyway, I think that's a part of the whole entrepreneurial lifestyle, that
looking back to now, I think it's pretty hilarious and
I enjoyed even kind of just going through the struggle of that whole start
of life. And so I don't really have any regrets
about any of that I think I just think that a lot of times
entrepreneurship life tends to be or sound really glamorous,
but in actuality, there's a lot of like
grinding and small details that are not really shared, because you
normally hear a lot about the success and what's also really important to note
is that I felt so passionate about what I was working on.
And each day for two plus years, I really never felt like
I was working ,quote unquote, on work. It really just
felt like a fun project where I was meeting with artists, talking to
suppliers, negotiating costs, just learning so much about a lot of
things in business I just could never have learned in banking
or through my business degree. It was such a valuable experience for me
,and I really really have zero regrets, even though it kind of
set me back a little bit financially. Okay, not a little bit, it set me back a
lot. Now, I know I probably could have stayed in finance, saved up for a little
bit, and maybe started a business when a
little bit older, but it just seems like for me, a lot of the
people I speak to that are in their late 20s or 30s and 40s.
You know, when I talk to them, it gets harder and harder to actually just risk
more because when you get to that age you might have a family and kids. And at
that point, starting a business is really really
difficult, and so that's why I have no regrets for starting Aesthetic
Studio, and this kind of leads me to my second
point. The second thing I reflected on a lot was my perspective of short-term
risk versus long-term risk. Back when I was in banking and also in
college, I feel like a lot of my perspective was really focused on the
short term. You know, in the next few years,
what do I need to do to get this job or this promotion?
and I kind of just left everything else in my life beyond the next.
Let's say two to five years, just in the back of my head, thinking everything will
eventually work out and I'll eventually pursue all
the dreams that O have in my life. I also placed this really
heavy emphasis and value in the short-term risk
of giving up what I had in finance. Starting a business because of the
potential opportunity cost, and that really changed for me when,as I
mentioned, my mom was diagnosed, because I started doing
this mental thought experiment in my head where I
was just thinking if I were in her shoes, if I was 55 years old.
Looking back in my life, would I regret not starting my business
or pursuing any of the dreams I had? And that was the kind of mental exercise I
kept thinking to myself. As throughout the year of 2017, I was
debating whether or not I should quit, and so when I did this mental exercise,
you know every time I thought of it, I would just think
if I was 55 or something like that, sitting on a porch and
reflecting on my life. If I had never started business,
I just felt like I would be filled with so much regret and
seeing my mom lose control of her limbs one by one,
all of it was just not only heartbreaking but also just
made me realize that life is super super fragile.
And the short term risks that I was thinking about was not really as
important as the long-term risk of never doing something that I truly cared about
and feeling like iInever really followed my
gut. Alright, so I feel like I kind of rambled on, and I don't
honestly know if any of you guys want to hear about this stuff, but I
hope it was helpful to some of you in some way, and if there's
some other kind of topics or questions you guys have, that
you feel like you want me to cover, then feel free to leave it in the
comments below. I also want to caveat everything by saying that I don't
actually advocate for everyone just quitting and pursuing
whatever they want without a plan, or really thinking things through in
some way, but I really do think that if deep deep down in your gut something is
telling you that you need to do something,
then I think it's really important to focus on listening in on
what that little voice in your head is telling you and making some moves in
order to pursue whatever that is. But of course, I'll leave that decision
to you, I'm just a random guy on youtube and so you
don't have to take any of my advice. But that's just something,
or this all is just something I wanted to share. So thanks so much for
tuning in, and as usual, I'll catch you next time. Thanks so much for
watching, peace. [Music]