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, John Lefebvre, author of Straight to Hell and popular Twitter handle, GS Elevator,

joins the W-SoPod to discuss his volatile career path.

We learn about what initially drew him to Wall Street, why he left

after a decade, and what he's up to now with a variety of startups. I think John's path is a

great reminder of some of the dangers young finance professionals still face today. The temptations,

the drugs, the potential erosion of character and the chase for money is still something that I think

is very much alive and relevant. Also check out his latest entrepreneurial endeavors including the whim.com, which is a collection

of interesting content around lifestyle, finance, and travel, and brummelco.com, a fashion

startup he launched a few years ago. Enjoy. All right, John, thanks so much for joining the Wall Street Oasis podcast.

Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

So it'd be great if you could just give the listeners a short summary of your bio for the ones that don't know who you are.

Sure. My name is John Lefeb. I was an investment banker. I joined Solomon Brothers on the

fixed income desk in 2001, so right after the dot-com bubble burst, and I worked primarily in

fixing capital markets and on the syndicate desk in New York, London,

Hong Kong and Singapore through the financial crisis and then left the bulge bracket by

sell side and started the capital markets boutique in Asia. I did that for a couple years and then

kind of got bored with the industry and having always been somewhat cynical on Wall Street culture and having collected stories and notes from my experiences decided to shift over into the publishing world and wrote a book about Wall Street culture and kind of along with it set up a social media character GS elevator for the purposes of kind of promoting and building up a social media footprint in anticipation of my book coming out, which is now almost five years ago.

The book was called Straight to Hell. It was

broadly, commercially successful. I think it debuted number seven on the New York Times

bestsells list and was optioned by Paramount for a movie, which is currently in development,

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