Silicon Alley Founders Pitch Pleasures (and Pains) of Life Without a Playbook to Young Wall Street Crowd
“I felt like in finance, the playbook was already written, and it was my job to execute,” said Vinicius Vacanti, co-founder and chief executive officer of Yipit, a startup that delivers personalized daily deals aggregated from other services. “Someone had done it before I did, and someone was going to do it after. In a startup, there’s no playbook. You’re making it up as you go along.”
It was Wednesday night at General Assembly, and 30 bankers, mostly young, mostly male, mostly dressed in shirts and slacks and keeping one eye trained on their mobile devices, had turned out to listen to founders from New York’s startup scene talk about their transitions from Wall Street to Silicon Alley. It was a hot ticket.
Call it a function of lower pay at financial firms amid lower profits and increased regulation, call it the Facebook Effect, in which the best-and-the-brightest dream of becoming the next Zuckerberg or Pincus—or changing in cultural attitudes, though we’ve yet to meet a young banker who said that the Occupy movement influenced them personally. Call it what you want, but if the 70 names on the waiting list for last night’s event is any indication, the startup world is increasingly appealing the to smart, ambitious 20-somethings who chart a path that starts at investment banking. Read More
