Left Wall Street career in early 30s to build an independent consulting/advisory/venture practice and spend some years in Europe @thejunteau @thegoodsletter
USA/EU
Joined December 2020
- Tweets13.5K
- Following2.1K
- Followers24.9K
- Likes34.6K
About 18 months after I left the sellside.. so mid 2022.. I was feeling a mix of boredom, dejection... and nostalgia for the world I had left.
I was leading 3 huge M&A deals (for me) and they were all falling apart for various market and non-market related reasons. Rates surging and the market tanking certainly didn't help. We all remember this chaotic period.
I was also near peak loneliness. This is always an issue but it has peaks and valleys... mid 2022 was brutal because people were still not "getting out there" and my work was slowing/paused.
It was right in the middle of this maelstrom that an old PM client reached out and asked if I'd consider joining his pod. I met with the team and everything.
I almost did it... I really wanted to... but the deal-breakers were they were fully remote still and I wasn't willing to give up my new independence and freedom to just continue working on a computer with no people around to collaborate with or talk to in real time.
I suspect this is still the reality, but I don't know.
I recall this from time to time because I've always wanted to work at a hedge fund or a long only, especially to cover the consumer space... which is my specialty. But the time has to align to my "season."
I feel like this season could be now, or soon... but then I hear about how these guys... some (but not all) of my friends included... "hate" their seats regardless of the size+return of their book.
Is professional happiness possible in these seats? in research, asset management? You rarely hear about it.
the more common route that I know of seems to plucked from single manager for an amount that is out of context (like 3-5 guaranteed for 2-3 yrs). never really earn the guarantee but do well enough to not get shut down. then another shop gives them similar guarantee with the first 9 months on garden leave and the next 9-12 spent building your team (uninvested). then you hope you can do the same thing one more time.
i came from large tiger so maybe not representative. but its been a pretty great trade for the people i know of.
that said, they all HATE their jobs.
do i have a misrepresented sample set?
I think $1-3MM is no man’s land.. a tighter band.
Level 4 (1M–10M) really is the no-man's-land of wealth.
For example, going from $100k to $300k can change your life. You can quit a job, move somewhere else, or take a chance on something of your own.
Going from $5M to $5.2M? You're richer, but you don't notice the increase anymore in the same way. This is where the diminishing returns start to show.
Back in 2021, when I went from $500k to $1m, I felt like on top of the world. It was a big change for me. A little backstory: in Feb 2021, I quit my 9-5 job with $500k NW, and it felt like a huge achievement. I knew it wasn’t enough to live off forever, but it was enough to dare to bet on myself.
During the years after 21’ there have been periods where my NW has increased a lot, and periods where it went a bit down or barely went up at all.
So I can very much relate to what Nick says: at some point, you could “work” twice as hard and barely notice the difference in your life. Your portfolio grows. But the extra money buys you less, while the time it costs you stays the same.
This is where I think a lot of people in crypto get stuck. You know how to make money. But unless you increase the risk, your NW will only go up linearly.
Because you might have to risk money you no longer want to lose. So you end up in the middle, the 7-figure hell (no man's land).
Imagine spending another year glued to crypto to make an extra $200k on a $5M portfolio (4% increase).
Don’t misunderstand me, that’s a lot of money, but many people don’t want to risk the big gains they’ve already earned, and since they don’t, their NW will barely move, and they’re forever trapped in the 7-fig hell.
I have a friend who’s worked at a sort of IT consulting company for almost 10 years.
Makes almost $300K/year now.
But he doesn’t really do anything. Says he “manages clients” and “puts out fires” and is exceptionally good at it… that he’ll never be replaced by AI… that management just leaves him alone.
Gets 5-10% pay bump every year and works maybe 1-2 hours a day top. He’ll take vacation with his family and not even tell anyone at work… all remote now. Says he can handle any issue from his phone.
I fear the future of W2 / white collar employment is just going to be putting bodies in seats based on some combination of social currency or popularity, corporate inertia, and “culture”… basically a mass UBI scheme disguised as meritocracy.
Might be cooked. Not sure!
Looking at houses for sale back in the states... NJ/NY/PA suburbs... and it's fascinating that homes are selling at all at these $1,000,000+ prices when they were $500-600K pre-COVID.
One one hand, you can just suck it up and pay 6-7% rates on a massive mortgage.
On the other hand, some folks seem resigned to the idea of just buying all-cash... being extremely house poor as a result... and betting/hoping that two things happen in their favor.... that the stock market stays sideways for longer (i.e. that they don't miss out on equity upside deploying all their liquidity into a house) and that rates will eventually fall back down to the 3-4% range and they'll quickly refinance.
Both strategies are painful.
Who is buying these properties? and which strategy?
Why not just rent instead until conditions improve? Because they won't?
VEO retweeted
Very hard to see how even 50% of today’s 18 year olds create an independent economic existence for themselves by the time they are 25.
I'll be 39 imminently.
It's just a number, for sure, but then again... it's the last year you can ever do something "in your 30s."
Like telling someone.. "In my 30s I did XYZ."
If you're 40+... is there anything you wish you did in your 30s rather than in your 40s, 50s, 60s, etc?
I still have a LinkedIn. On my desktop. Because people message me there. It's frustrating but necessary, sadly. But literally every single time I open it lately, the feed shows me people dying. Like a spouse sharing how his/her other half had a great career cut short and now has a terminal illness. Often there's a link to a gofundme page. Or someone's child who is sick. Or a friend posting on behalf of someone who has died. It's purely the algorithm because I have no idea who these people are.
Pure macabre.
Why is this happening?
I find it interesting that nobody ever models their own financials as they would a business. At least I never hear about this.
You Inc.
You have your topline "gross" revenue, then "net sales" after income tax.
Then your COGS... the expenses required for you to generate those sales... like your commute, your clothes, maintaining your social and professional networks (i.e. memberships, dues), etc.
Then your fixed overhead costs.. your house, personal vehicles, insurance, property tax, etc.
Then you have your actual real "earnings."
One of the most gravitas-filled moments I remember working on Wall Street was... one morning years ago we had a top well-known economist in the room and someone was peppering him with questions about his past views/analyses and how they square with the latest data releases... seemingly trying to put him on the spot.
He calmly looked up and said the following 6 words.
"When the facts change, I change."
Such beautiful, simple elegance in it.
I think about this moment all the time.
What's cool/creepy about Claude lately is...
You'll be working on something and Claude will tell you that it's having trouble pulling certain data from the web... and you'll move on and go about it a different way...
... then you'll notice that Claude is suddenly now grabbing the data it said earlier that it couldn't access...
... as if it was never a problem... it's as if it launched an agent in the background to brute force attack the problem, solved it, and just never told you it solved it...
My parents want us to come back to the US, as you'd imagine.
What's funny about it, though, is they complained about "how far away" we lived even when we all lived in NJ.
My parents live in North Jersey and we were living in the central NJ area... they'd complain about the 45-60 minute drive and how they can't "just swing by."
I guess the lesson is that unless your kids live next door to their grandparents... they'll always complain about where you live!
Good morning...
This account began as the "Virtual Executive Officer"... VEO... a parody of the COVID-era virtual assistant or "VA" trend.
The first thing I pursued going out on my own was small business brokerage, so I used this account and fun provocative rhetoric like "performative careerism" and "humiliation rituals" to push people toward buying small businesses, the trades, or otherwise betting on themselves... especially young fathers.
If I'm honest, I was also a little lonely... self employment was an unknown forest and I wanted some company. I've made so many incredible friends from here over the years.. and I even sourced a couple engagements because of my content. Remarkable looking back at it all.
Over my first ~2 years I sold nine SMBs... to strategics, PE, and even to corporate executives looking to "escape the matrix" as they say... what a run it was.
Anyway, I've always said my audience is very specific. I've rarely ever looked at X analytics but it seems to hold... mostly American men, 25 to 34. Exactly who I was at 32 when I resigned from Wall Street.
I was on the doorstep of a big career but felt a deep lack of "real economy" experience, despite growing up in construction. I felt there were still far too many boxes I needed to check.
So I left... and after SMB brokerage came much larger deals closer to M&A advisory, building a venture portfolio, and building a data and strategy consultancy... all while being present for my wife and two young kids in their early years and then moving the family overseas in yet another wild adventure. It was the craziest challenge I could conceive of at 32, and it's been wonderful.
That's what this account has really been about... encouraging others that it's OK to think this way and execute against their ideas or dreams. Be "agentic"... build confidence, ignore the expected path and what others think. You only get one life.
What's changing now is that I'm almost 39 and aging out of that window myself. The kids aren't toddlers anymore. I have far less to prove... I feel like I've climbed a humongous mountain, and now I'm looking across the horizon at what comes next.
After more than five years of the so-called "portfolio life", I'm itching to consolidate all my energy into one focused pursuit. And with AI and other tools especially, there's so much deep work that can be done now, believe it or not... whether that's the kind of work I did on Wall Street or going much deeper with the clients and projects already on my plate. Less context switching. More committed depth.
I've always said there are seasons to life and you're in charge of how you spend them...
VEO out.
