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, Joe shares his non-traditional path from a non-target school, the University of

Wisconsin, to breaking into investment banking at Merrill Lynch right before it was acquired

by Bank of America. Perhaps more

impressive than that feat was his ability to land a highly competitive by-side associate role

straight into Bain Capital Ventures and then break into Harvard Business School a few years

after that. His latest move was to pivot after several years at Samsung's venture arm to

found his own venture capital firm. Not surprisingly,

that is also going well for him. Learn what he thinks set him apart and why he spent an extra

year in college. Enjoy.

All right, Joe, thanks so much for joining the Wall Street Oasis podcast.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

It should be great if you could just start out with a short bio for the listeners.

Sure. So I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and attended University of Wisconsin, where I studied

business, dual major in finance and real estate.

Yeah, I was kind of a badger since I could walk with all my parents and grandparents having

attended the university. So I was super proud to call that my home for five years, which we can get

into later. But yeah, so went from there and was fortunate to land an

internship at Merrill Lynch M&A in New York City, where I ended up summering and then spending

two years in the banking world and jumped from that to Bain Capital Ventures in Boston.

At the time, kind of the Boston office was the main office. There was less of a presence

...