Why I Turned Down My Investment Banking Offer to Launch a Startup
Last semester at 6:00AM, forty hours into studying for my asset accounting final, I realized I had completely lost control of my life. I was bleary-eyed and breaking myself to perform well in a class I was taking only to fill the “Relevant Coursework” component of my resume. Barely twenty years old, I had structured my entire life to impress a future boss I hadn’t met. Freshman summer at Wharton I worked at Citigroup. Sophomore summer I worked in investment banking at Credit Suisse. These are opportunities most students at school only get in the spring of their junior year. Resume building was a strategy that had undoubtedly served me well to date. And at the end of last summer, offer in hand, I was lined up for a rigorous and rewarding career on Wall Street.
But last week I did the unthinkable. I declined my bulge bracket investment banking offer to launch a tech startup. Here at school, it is inconceivable that a level-minded Wharton student would ever turn down such an opportunity. But for me, this was the right choice and one that was a long time coming.
My entire summer at Credit Suisse, I would come home most nights around 3AM and code until 4:30AM, before finally falling asleep from exhaustion, laptop on my pillow, only to wake up a few hours later and repeat the cycle. In retrospect, it’s obvious that my subconscious was trying to tell me something. You cannot escape what you love.
I am a self-taught programmer. I was born in New York City but I moved to Seattle after eleven months because of Dad’s job at Microsoft. Both of my parents are immigrants who came to America with nothing – Dad is from Ireland and Mom is from Barbados. I admire their work ethic more than anything. Just like how HP seeded an entire generation of Valley technologists, there is no doubt in my mind that my early years around Microsoft did the same for me. I started coding in 5th grade and I’ve loved technology my whole life.
I started working on Airtime for Email with Dan Shipper in November 2011*, but intellectually, I had been straddling the fence between those two worlds for months, exactly as I had in the depths of those early summer mornings. Last week, as on-campus recruiting went into full swing and all of my friends started putting on suits and ties for banking interviews, I turned my theories about love into practice. I quit finance and decided to build businesses for the rest of my life.
I made the decision with complete confidence. When you do what you love, I know you can not go wrong. I have committed myself fully to something and every day, I experience the most satisfying feeling in the world. I love every moment of my new life. It’s like I’ve discovered a wellspring of pure happiness. A salary is nothing more than time you spend in a structured fashion for somebody else. When you don’t own your own time, no matter what the paycheck, you are not free and you will not be happy.
The consequences of this decision will be especially arduous for me. I have paid for every cent of my college education. My parents made the best parenting decision of their lives by making me do this. It taught me independence and dispelled any and all sense of entitlement. I live on an especially thin budget. I am not financially free as yet but I am wealthy in that I craft every moment of my new future. I have complete and full ownership of my life. Nobody else does.
I am a member of the one industry in the world where the boundaries between imagination and reality are utterly nonexistent. I actualize my thoughts on a daily basis. I can barely describe the satisfaction that gives me every second of every day. I could not be happier.
* We launched Airtime for Email last Monday (Jan 30) and had a great first week, going from 19 customers pre-beta to over 70 this morning. More information in my post “We Just Launched Airtime for Email!”
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