Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and Chief Monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general. Let's get to it.

In this episode, Brian shares his path from undergrad in the U.S. to working straight for a new

venture capital fund in Tokyo. Learn why he turned down his return offer in investment banking after his

junior year summer at Jeffries and what the biggest challenges were as a junior employee in a sink or swim role. Enjoy.

Brian, thanks for joining you joining the Wall Street Oasis podcast.

Of course. Thanks for having me, Patrick.

So it would be awesome if you could just give the listeners a short summary of your bio.

For sure. So I started my career, I guess you could say, as a summer analyst and an investment bank.

I guess that's where a lot of people kind of start their careers in finance. So I worked at Jeffries for a summer. I spent most

of my time there, you know, cycling around with a couple different teams, but probably most

of my time with the tech banking team. I kind of had a preexisting sort of interest in technology, and they were pretty busy that summer,

so got looped in with the team there.

Ended up actually taking a different path, ultimately, and maybe we can kind of touch on that later,

but ended up getting an opportunity to join kind of an early venture team that was

forming in Japan, of all places. So I actually graduated. I moved to Tokyo. I worked for a VC there

for a couple years, transferred to another team in the same BC covering kind of Europe and Israel,

and then ended up finding a startup I totally fell in love with and joined just two months ago.

So that's kind of my long mark from kind of finance to VC to tech.

Great. So let's start all the way back in undergrad, were you always kind of focused on finance or kind of how did you fall into this internship? It was assumed it was a junior year internship. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, I had... Is it because... I mean, because where you went to school wasn't like a, it's not a super finance focus.

Yeah, that's right.

So I went to Johns Hopkins where, um, that's right.

We didn't have like an undergraduate business program.

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