How To Sign New York Banking Living Will

How to industry sign banking new york living will

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 all right 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 jpmorgan 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 jpmorgan 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 studios 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 and 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 i 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 jpmorgan 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 um 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 um 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 um 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 studios 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 i 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 i never 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 uh 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 um but that's just something or this all is just something i wanted to share and so thanks so much for tuning in and as usual i'll catch you next time thanks so much for watching peace [Music] you