An interesting story came out of the Wall Street crash that made me pause for thought: Silicon Alley Tells Wall Street: Send Us Your Resumes. For a few venture capital firms and startups in New York, this is a chance to make their pitch to newly laid off bankers and traders:
Please consider joining a start-up. The pay probably isn’t as good, but the equity can be valuable, and I promise that the work environment is more enjoyable and that our companies don’t operate at 30x leverage.
I got to thinking whether the personalities that succeeded in high finance would do well in an unstructured environment like start-ups.
I'm sure there are functions that deal with quantitative analysis similar to the financial engineering found on Wall Street amongst tech companies, but the core value propositions – in engineering, in product, and in business development – I highly doubt that bankers can make an easy switch.
And of course, vice versa.
I'm a big believer that a person's identity should be tied to what they primarily do in life. If not, then what's the point? I've heard that some people work to "pay the bills", so they can do what the want the rest of the time. Consider that people work, what, at least 70% of their productive waking hours, that's only 30% where they can focus on what they like to do. That equation is ripe for burn-out and midlife crises.
So what's a banker's identity? Rigorous. Aggressive. Methodical. The stereotypes hold true. Traders are the same. They (traders) may be more risk-happy than corporate financiers in their day-to-day jobs, but both types operate their lives with a very risk-averse schema. Finance, with all of its sexiness, is not much more than glorified basic math. And math has to make sense. There's a sense of finality in that quantitative careers. My friends who are in finance operate on the assumption that if they put in x effort then they get rewarded y results.
Careers in technology, specifically start-up settings, require different identities. More leeway is given to risk-taking, idea generation and a sense of comfort with unknown variables. A competitor can come out with a game-changing product; funding may dry up; a brilliant idea has to be weighed against larger goals. Put in x effort and you're not sure of getting any results.
In finance, execution is key: the financial instruments are the same -- it's just a matter of sales and plugging in the right numbers to bump up the end results. In the start-up world, the biggest skill is in prioritization -- and that requires putting on a different set of hats.
I don't think most people who succeed in start-up environments do well in banking. They don't sustain focus long enough to punch through a deal. And bankers are tapped out of the kind of crazy creativity that drives the insane asylum of start-ups.
Questions:
- What happens when a person's identity doesn't match what they're doing?
- Can a person be good at their job if it doesn't match their identity?
- What kinds of jobs don't require a strong relationship with a person's identity?