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, Chicago 13 shares his winding path graduating from Berkeley in 2006 and trying

to make it big by building apps and living in the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley.

Listen to why it didn't work out,

along with some words of warning, what the main turning point was, and why he ended up getting

his JD and jumping into Big Law, only to leave one year later to join a middle market

investment bank. Learn about the common associate struggles starting out in IB, why he was

screamed at during a holiday party,

and how he managed to overcome those obstacles to get promoted to VP. Enjoy.

All right, Chicago 13. Thanks so much for joining the Wall Street Oasis podcast.

Hey, thank you, Patrick. Good to join.

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

Sure, happy to do that. So I grew up on the West Coast. I went to school at UC Berkeley.

Spent some time out there in the early 2000s and graduated when

the economy was great.

Chos kind of a complete route, completely different route than what was expected.

And I went to startup route.

I didn't follow my friends into corporate or go to med school like my parents wanted me too. So I did that for a little bit. Worked for a lot of various startups. It was a pretty exciting time to be in the Bay Area. It was when the app store was just taken off. So people were creating all these kind of dorky little apps. I try to do the same. You know, their apps like, you know, message in a bottle and, you know, other messages, other ones where, you know, it would give you time to when the syrup would come in. So very uncool. Like, like the low tide and high tide when that would be. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's just an app, it's like basically a calendar. So, I mean, we kind of messed around a lot with stupid stuff like that,

but did that for a bit. The last startup that I worked at was a airline company. And I think I was

hired to kind of their back end reservation system. And they kind of moved me over to a more

project management role. So did that for a little bit. And then kind of a turning point

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