Goldman Sachs analyst quits after 15 months of 17-hour days

Have the hours at Goldman Sachs gotten better than they were? Based on the firm’s own checks on working hours following last year’s complaints from juniors on the firm’s technology investment banking team, the answer should be “yes.” But based on recent announcements from the health team and a new Twitter thread from Chris Hladczuk in its TMT-funded finance team, that may be wishful thinking.

Hladczuk, a 24-year-old Yale graduate, has left Goldman’s New York office to join Meow, a financial management platform founded by five engineers from crypto exchange Gemini.

Hladczuk says he left Goldman after 15 months where he was trained to work “crazy hours (9am to 2am regularly), to “develop insane attention to detail (try correcting commas until 1am)” and to “prioritize projects with 1,000″ emails flooding my inbox.” During his year at Goldman, he says he worked on eight deals, compared to an industry average of two.

The hours, the commas and the stream of emails weren’t actually why he left. Hladczuk says he quit because he wasn’t very interested in the usual banking exit options (working for a hedge fund, working for a private equity fund, working for another bank doing the same) and because the longer he spent in banking, the more it became clear that any new skills he acquired would only be relevant to sustaining his career in finance.

“I don’t want these careers. I want to build my own startup,” says Hladczuk.

However, he also suggests that leaving a banking job for a fintech right now requires careful consideration. As fintech funding dries up, Hladczuk suggests choosing your fintech wisely. Miaow just closed a $22 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global, QED Ventures and FTX. “With a small team and 10+ years of cash in the bank, we don’t need to raise money for the next few years. And this is a huge advantage given today’s choppy economy,” he writes.

Hladczuk also emphasizes that he has “crazy conviction” in Miaow’s business model. The platform will help companies put free cash on their balance sheets to operate. “Extra yield can be up to 5% for over-collateralized crypto-lending. Or it can be traditional banking products like a high-yield savings account or direct investment in US government treasury bills….”

While other analysts are working 17-hour days to reduce bonuses, Hladczuk says he’s totally “into” working at “the intersection of crypto and fintech because it’s a place where I could see myself starting my own company one day.”

“This is like joining Facebook or Uber in the 2000s, but for crypto,” he enthuses.

After being turned into a “machine” working “crazy hours” during his time at Goldman, it’s not actually clear that Hladczuk will work much shorter hours at Miaow, where he’ll be busy with “everything but engineering. ” But he clearly believes that he will benefit from the change in the longer term.

It’s a reminder that crypto still pulls on banking analysts, despite the recent crypto winter.

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