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, Steph shares his very unusual path into venture capital.

We learn how his lack of traditional background both helped and hurt him repeatedly throughout his career.

Listen to find out why he thinks he was successful and why

when you drop out of VC, it's so hard to get back in. Learn one piece of critical advice he'd give

his younger self and his future plans. Enjoy. This was a really fun episode. All right, Steph, thanks so much for joining the Wall Street voices podcast.

Such a pleasure.

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

Yeah.

All right.

So I'm a venture capitalist by training.

I've been a VC since 2013.

Before that, I worked in ING Bank, which is where I got started. And before that, I studied a double degree,

one in science, majoring in biotechnology, and another one in majoring in economics.

So that's kind of a very high level, and I'm sure we'll drill into that.

For sure. And then specifically, so when you started, like, in undergrad, was finance or VC

ever an interest for you? Yeah, so it actually took me a very

long time to decide what I wanted to do professionally and people used to tell me all the time,

you know, don't worry so much about the future. But in retrospect, the fact that I got where I did

seemed so unlikely and serendipitous that I really feel like I should have been a lot more

worried. And, you know, I tried. I spoke to career counselors, but no one gave me concrete

...