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Juan MC Larrosa
17 People Who Left Finance Careers For Startups And Will Make Way More Because Of It
If you want to make even more money, you might dump that Wall Street job for a startup.
It isn't a career path that works out for everyone. But for the founders of Wikipedia and Amazon, for example, ditching finance for tech was a smart choice.
Joshua Kushner worked for Goldman Sachs before he started Thrive Capital, which invested in Instagram and Kickstarter
Flickr via Number10Gov Instagram's Kevin Systrom (L) with Joshua Kushner (R).
Joshua Kushner graduated from Harvard and worked for Goldman Sachs. After a short stint there he left to pursue a career in venture capital.
His firm, Thrive Capital, has invested in startups such as NastyGal, Kickstarter, Instagram, and Makerbot. He also recently gathered $40 million to start a new health insurance company, Oscar.
Alexa Von Tobel was a trader at Morgan Stanley before she founded LearnVest, a startup that's raised more than $40 million to give affordable financial planning to the 99%.
LearnVestAlexa Von Tobel, LearnVest founder and CEO
Alexa Von Tobel began her career at Morgan Stanley where she rose up the ranks to become a trader. She quit to attend Harvard Business School, then dropped out to found LearnVest.
LearnVest has raised more than $40 million to tackle an important issue: there should be financial planners and advisors available for the middle class, especially with such a high percentage of the population in debt.
Whether LearnVest will succeed or not remains to be seen, but Von Tobel looks well positioned to clean up as a tech founder.
Scott Belsky quit a job at Goldman Sachs to start Behance. After bootstrapping it for five years then raising a few million dollars, he sold it to Adobe for $150 million.
Daniel Goodman / Business InsiderThe founders of Behance. Belsky is on the right.
Scott Belsky is now an angel investor in companies like Pinterest with his own, very big startup success. Last year he sold a portfolio site for designers, Behance, to Adobe for $150 million.
Prior to founding Behance, Belsky worked for Goldman Sachs. He told Business Insider about his decision to leave Wall Street for a startup.
"I figured I might just become a middle manager living a great life, but not doing something extraordinary. I came to believe that doing something extraordinary is never achieved through ordinary means. I remember that moment at Goldman where I was thinking I should leave and start something. I shared that with colleagues and they thought I was crazy. I gained confidence from being doubted."
Chris Altcheck worked for Goldman Sachs before founding PolicyMic, a media startup with more than 6 million monthly readers.
Duncan Wolfe Chris Altcheck, right, with his co-founder.
Chris Altcheck left Goldman Sachs to found PolicyMic in 2011. He's gone on to raise more than $1.5 million and his team of one dozen is pulling in more than 6 million monthly unique visitors.
PolicyMic is written largely by unpaid contributors who write analytical stories about pressing issues, politics, and entertainment.
Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky began finance careers before creating a jewelry e-commerce company that decks out Rihanna and Justin Bieber, BaubleBar.
BaubleBar via Brew PRDaniella Yacobovsky and Amy Jain, co-founders of Baublebar
Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky worked for the same investment bank, then later attended Harvard Business School together.
There, they came up with the idea to be an online destination for beautiful, affordable jewelry, the way Sephora is for makeup. But it wasn't an easy decision to give up finance for BaubleBar.
"We were at this crossroad," Yacobovsky tells Inc. "We could take this very secure road we had planned, or we could become entrepreneurs and turn this project into a real business. We chose to dive into the start-up world."
Marc Katz of CustomInk left a Wall Street career to start a business his father didn't think would be very good.
YouTube CustomInk CEO and founder, Marc Katz
Before he founded CustomInk, an online apparel retailer that generates more than $70 million in annual sales, Marc Katz was a financial analyst on Wall Street. The profitable business employs more than 250 people from its McLean, Virginia headquarters.
One of Katz's first investors was his father, a 3-time entrepreneur, who didn't think his son had a great idea.
"I told him I thought it was a terrible idea," Steve Katz tells Forbes. "Selling T-shirts on the Web, I just didn’t see how you distinguish yourself, so it would be a race to the bottom in terms of price...It’s amazing what you can do with a mediocre idea extremely well executed."
Neil Capel was initially a consultant for Morgan Stanley. Now he runs content recommendation company Sailthru, which has raised nearly $30 million.
Mashable/YouTube Neil Capel, CEO of Sailthru
Before he started personalized email and online content recommendation company, Sailthru, Capel had a number of gigs including one as a consultant to Morgan Stanley.
Sailthru's revenue grew 270% last year and it has raised nearly $30 million to date.
Before he founded Amazon, Jeff Bezos* held a number of jobs at banks and hedge funds. As a teenager, he worked for McDonald's.
Reuters
Bezos worked as a computer scientist on Wall Street after he graduated from Princeton. Then he headed to a company called Fidel, and later to Bankers Trust where he became its vice president. After that, he became SVP at a hedge fund, D.E. Shaw & Co.
He dabbled in entrepreneurship prior to founding Amazon. He nearly created a news-by-fax company with the founder of CNET, for example.
D.E. Shaw was Bezos' last stint in finance before he created an online book retailer which, coincidentally, held most of its early meetings in the local Barnes & Noble.
*Jeff Bezos is invested in Business Insider through Bezos Expeditions.
Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, attended Wharton and Harvard Business School. He worked for financial firms in between.
Fortune Live Media / flickr
Pincus' career began as a financial analyst for Lazard Freres & Co. He then became a VP of Asian Capital Partners in Hong Kong and later, was one for Columbia Capital.
Zynga was Pincus' fourth company. It was founded in 2007.
Barry Silbert was a bored investment banker with a startup idea. That led him to SecondMarket, an online hub where users can buy and sell illiquid assets.
Barry Silbert got his idea for SecondMarket, a marketplace for illiquid assets, while working as an investment banker.
He tells Inc about founding SecondMarket:
"I was an investment banker for about 5 ½ years, working on distressed type of situations like bankruptcies, things like that, and I was a bored investment banker. I'd been doing it for a while and the idea for to create this marketplace really kind of came out of a lot of the deals I was working on where I kept on seeing situations where there was a liquid assets being held by customers or clients that we had who needed liquidity. It was shocking to me that there was no one place where you could go to, an eBay-like marketplace, to sell these assets. And so I decided that I was going to leave investment banking with the big salary and roll the dice. I kind of figured I could always go back and be banker again and fortunately, I never, ever looked back."
Jimmy Wales worked at a future and options trading firm. Then he created a search engine for guys, Bomis, before founding online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Commons Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, didn't begin his career on Wall Street, but he was a financial professional. He started out at a future and options trading firm, Chicago Options Associates.
Here's how Wikipedia describes his transition to entrepreneurship: "Inspired by the remarkable initial public offering of Netscape in 1995, and having accumulated capital through 'speculating on interest-rate and foreign-currency fluctuations', he decided to leave the realm of financial trading and became an Internet entrepreneur."
His first venture was a "guy search portal" full of female images, Bomis. He used money from Bomis to launch the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
Dan Leahy and Ben McKean gave up Wall Street careers to found restaurant discount finder, Savored. Savored was acquired by Groupon.
Ben McKean and Dan Leahey, cofounders of Savored
Dan Leahy worked for Silver Lake Partners then Brown Brothers Harriman. His friend Ben McKean worked for Merrill Lynch.
The pair teamed up in 2009 and created restaurant discount finder, Village Vines, which raised $4 million from investors like Salesforce's Mike Lazerow.
It was renamed Savored and sold to Groupon in 2012 where McKean is now a general manager.
Other former finance professionals who are building even better careers at tech startups:
Twitter Olga Videisheva, Shoptiques
Olga Vidisheva, CEO of Shoptiques; Andy Dunn, CEO of Bonobos; Rob Cromer, CEO of AdCade; James Gardner, Founder of Create The Group; Andy Pickens and Moses Soyoola, founders of Jamplify.
Business Insider
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