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, member Philly's finest shares his path from a liberal arts college to working in Numero's

structured products desk, how he got promoted to associate, how much he was paid, and why he

decided to leave it all behind to start his own company.

Enjoy. Philly's finest, thanks so much for joining the Wall Street Waces podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Patrick.

So it'd be great if you could just give the listeners a quick summary of your background.

Sure, so I went to, I guess you called a non-target, small liberal arts school, and jumped into an internship in sales and trading, which converted

into a full-time offer at Nomura.

So I joined their structured products desk for to be a sales guy, spent, I guess, three

and a half years doing that before leaving to

start my first startup and have been in the startup world ever since.

Cool. So let's go back to the liberal arts college, because I went to one as well. I was at

Williams, so we have a little bit of common there. So was there any, in terms of like how you landed

that internship that

turned in, that sales and trading internship that turned into a full-time offer? Can you tell me a little bit about that? Was it junior year, typical, you know, did you start your sophomore year? How did you know, like, trading was something you wanted to do?

Yeah, and I actually be curious to hear your thoughts about this because I think that obviously Williams, you probably consider a target school at this point.

But we did have a bit of an on-campus presence.

So I started sophomore year and got an internship in private equity just basically through networking.

But, you know, one thing that I've kind of seen is as recruiting

cycles moved earlier and earlier, you know, it's almost that kids at liberal arts schools

...