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, we follow Alex on his winding road through various VC and IB internships

in college, including one at Goldman Sachs, to his latest jump to the fintech space at Lex

Markets. Learn what went wrong at the Goldman internship and the

first startup and advice to some of the younger listeners trying to navigate similar waters. Enjoy.

Okay, Alex, thanks so much for joining the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Yeah, thank you for having me.

It'd be great if you could just give the listeners a short summary bio. Yeah. So I work for a real estate investment banking fintech. Previously was at a fintech debt fund kind of thing, lending operation and licensing out software.

And before that, had a string of investment banking internships and the like, both in New York and

London, a little bit of political experience earlier on, but have mostly been on the finance

track. And way back when I was at Middlebury.

Awesome. Thanks for, thanks for that. So let's talk about your time back in Middlebury. Awesome. Thanks for,

thanks for that.

So let's talk about your time back in Middlebury.

I went to Williams, so familiar with the liberal arts.

I would love to hear just, you know, when you went to, went to school, were you thinking finance?

And I know who you, I know you're, I worked with your father just for the readers to know. Alice's father was at, uh, tailwind where I worked way back, way back one. But yeah, I'd love to hear just, you know, was he an influence of you saying like, oh, you should go to finance or was there family members that were in finance? Yeah. I mean, He was definitely an influence. It was never, it was never coached, but it was one of those things of, and you probably know from tailwind of it always came home, right? It was a, it's a nonstop job. And so I was around it growing up and, you know, had a lot of exposure growing up both through my dad. And then later on in high school, I'd say, you know, a good portion of people's parents either worked, you know, in corporate law or in finance of some sort. And so there's a lot of exposure all around. I actually started interning back in high school. So my high school actually had an internship placement program. And I was, I interned at RBS in Barclays before I was 18, which was, you know, great experience just to have a foot in the door. Your high school did that? Yeah. How was that? I've never heard of that. So that young. Was it like a rotation or was it a real internship? Somewhere in the middle. I mean, look, these were, these were, you know, banks agreeing to take out a high school student for three or four weeks or whatever. So, you know, the expectations of office are pretty low. And it's, you know, you're not actually working on real stuff. But you get to be in the office and meet people and be a part of it. And you sort of get an early flavor that the school sort of organized for us. And there was still, you know, you applied, the school at a resume workshop. So I started pretty early on, on the track. Was that just special to your high school, or do you know if there's other high school programs that do that? I haven't heard of another high school that does that. I think that may, that may have been unique to my high school. And it was a great opportunity. I grew up in London and that was, you know, we just hop on the tube and go over to Canary Worth and intern over the summer. Oh, he was in London.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, very cool. So yeah, tell me a little bit about that. That's before we even dive in. What do you mean you grew up in London? And what's the, what's the background there? Yeah. So as you said, you worked with my dad at Tailwind. Um, and my dad left Tailwind, to go and take a job over in the UK and moved the family over with them.

So I went to the American School in London and dad left tailwind to go and take a job over in the UK and moved the family over with them.

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