It has been the age of the financier for a while now. No, this is not capitalism at work; it is Federal Reserve policy. It allowed specially privileged entities to lever up (30x leverage in case of investment banks like Goldman or Morgan Stanley, 10x in case of hedge funds), allow them to speculate with easy money, and have them pay out huge bonuses in case of investment banks or huge carried profit in case of hedgies ... and finally bail them out when their leverage blew up on them, only to have them start speculating all over again.

I parse that history as -- the world was coming off of a golden era in productivity, wealth and economic stability. It would make sense for people from B school to make a lot of money if they started getting their chops on Wall Street, etc.

But now it's different. I think that the 10 year note has begun its steady rise again, finally (biggest acceleration since the late 60's and early 80's). But in this economic climate, nimbler business arrangements surely are more viable and better training for future business leaders.

It's just basic math -- in a 4% environment, things like SpaceX and other lighter economic models will be successful. In a 15% environment, financing itself is more useful, and, with synergy and everything, on average produces more massive individual personal wealth.

The constraints that faced those currently on the Fortune 400 list (which is really some sort of integral of the past 30 years -- as these are people at the peak of their careers) are different from those who will be on the Fortune 400 list in 2030.

(N.B. I made all this s* up having looked at an all-time 10 year note chart earlier tonight. But it's an idea.)

ETA: Although it's a bit of a project. I think it would be interesting to compile the 100 wealthiest people in the world over the past 100 years. I have a feeling that certain periods in time would've produced clusters of financiers (JP Morgans, etc.), whereas other times would produce clusters of startup founders. Would be interesting to compare them to different economic indices, etc. Then the thing would be to determine if our own present economic climate resembles others periods -- and what that means to the different types of fields you should, on average, go into to maximize personal wealth (if that's something that you're into). Or at least be aware of it.

I don't think about getting into fortune 400. I think about going from 5 figures in the bank to 8, for which I feel entrepreneurship is the best choice.

of course I've been an obsessive programmer since I was 13 (16 years now, eek) so it is a more natural path

Not to mention that all of them are now dead, bought out by bank banks or in the process of becoming so (well, that's just the big names, but as I understand it the smaller fish are very small).

Using extreme example to make my point, if 0.001% of all 'financiers' made the Fortune 400 and 5.000% of all start-up founders did, no-one would claim that 211 v 59 means much because of the asymmetrical volume of the candidate pools.

The percentages won't be that stark, of course. Are there 4 times as many financiers as start-up founder? I would suggest more (many, many more) which would indicate that being a start-up founder makes it more likely to hit that measure of financial success than being a financier, based on those figures.

I make no comment about the relevance of this to the original discussion and pg's right or wrongness, which I was not a part of.

I could look up these numbers, but they really don't tell you all that much. If you're a Xoogler with venture capital in Silicon Valley, your odds are much better than if you're a college dropout in Indiana who's playing around with Rails in his free time. It's silly to lump both "founders" into the same category.

The original thread-starter wants to know the chances of making the Forbes 400, given that he becomes a tech entrepreneur or financier. He rightly points out that this depends a lot on the denominator - but the denominator depends a lot on how you slice the categories of "tech entrepreneur" and "financier". There are a large number of factors besides entrepreneurship that alter the odds, and many of them alter the odds a lot more than the mere fact that you've started a company.

As someone currently doing two migrations from Outlook (I finally got approval to get rid of Windows on my corporate notebook and my wife is moving her Exchange-based mail to an IMAP server) I can say any shipment of Office 2010 prevented means at least one more happy person ;-)

As for the other options, making the next 10M trade or becoming a grad student, I think you should follow your heart.

Unless you've worked for an investment bank you have no idea how much money they have. It's like a giant gulf-of-mexico-style money gusher that doesn't quit.

How do they make it? CSFB flies on the bleeding edge of what's legal and always have. I was there when Frank Quattrone was involved in the IPO of VA Linux. The share allocation resulted in the US vs Quattrone lawsuit. Imagine you facilitate an IPO and you get to hand out shares at $80 a piece to your buddies on and the first day it pops up to $300/share and you can sell - right then. http://bit.ly/cBMdqb

I was also there when James Archer, Jeffrey Archer's son was found guilty of manipulating the swedish stock exchange and banned for life. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1459638.stm

In investment banks there is what's known as the Chinese Wall. It separates investment banking from the brokerage divisions to prevent conflicts of interest. Imagine you have a bunch of guys buying and selling stock for the bank's account and another group of guys recommending to customers which stock to buy and sell. They're all in the same building, using the same elevators, the same mens rooms and the same lunch hall. Quick entrepreneurial quiz: Anyone see a business model there?

They take their licks though. I was there when the LTCM fund collapsed and they lost $600M. Also when the Russian economy collapsed and they lost another $600M. Layoffs? Nah - business as usual.

If you're a developer or ops guy and get tired of startups, I strongly recommend going to work for an investment bank. It's very very hard to get your first job - you're going to have to network your ass off or have a seriously hot resume - probably both. But once you're in, provided you're good at what you do, it's very easy to move between banks and promote yourself into better jobs in other banks or divisions.

So what the fk am I doing running a startup? Good question. I ask myself that sometimes. When you look at the opportunity cost from the "I could be in an investment bank" perspective it is scary. I don't have some magic answer or a bunch of bullet points. I guess what draws me to it is the fact that I own my own business. It's also completely honest. Your success is your own and so is your failure. Working in banking feels like cheating. Perhaps it is. But it pays cash and lots of it.

From the outset I was always conscious of not falling into the same subtle but dangerous trap. I'm not sure why, probably because I never felt 100% comfortable in a corporate environment and knew a some level that I didn't want to be trapped by it. The upshot is that we don't live a lavish lifestyle such that when the income is throttled down the adjustment isn't as severe. We don't own our house, we rent (we're actually quite nomadic so this decision is only partly financially related), no fancy car, we don't tend to spend money on fine dining and entertainment or a lot of the trappings that people often face.

This has allowed me to make choices that were right for me like taking a full 3 months off on the birth of our first child and only going back to work (for an IB I contracted with previously) for 3 days per week for the subsequent 9 months. This really allowed us the time as a family to adjust to our new circumstances. It also allowed me to experiment with a few projects that had been on my mind for a while - nothing significant just the first dip of my toes into the world of startups. Since then we've had another child - again I was able to spend a lot of time with him. I've also been able to try out a few more projects which, although not successful, have allowed me to further experiment and find my feet conceiving and building products. As a result I'm now on the brink throwing myself full time into my own bootstrapped startup which is about to open to beta.

So yes, while I agree that the money to be made from working in investment banks is great, I'd warn against getting too sucked in with the cash if you ever want to keep the door ajar for other things. Well done for making the jump into the startup world, it's a brave move I hope to join you soon. Don't pine for working at a bank, if you value creativity and and the opportunity to strike out on your own (which you clearly do), you've made the right choice whatever the outcome.

The head of BizDev at the financial software startup I used to work at was one of the lucky ones who got out (and he told me the above observation). You occasionally see other ex-financiers in the startup world, eg. Jeff Bezos or Joshua Schacter, but in general you don't see very many ex-investment-bankers. Most of them seem to still be working on Wall St.

BTW, this applies to other professions as well. An engineer frequently will see "just one more technical challenge that needs solving before I can get to the good, world-changing stuff." (I'm dealing with that now - I keep getting distracted from the ideas I really want to do by the various low-hanging fruit.) An experienced teacher will think "Just one more year with the kids, then I'll retire." Startups are nice in that they have clearly delineated endgames; most salaried professions are not like that.

There are plenty of people doing it, at any start-up event I go to (in London) I run into current and former banking peeps.

That said, there are many downsides to finance as well and there are many reasons I am forgoing a $400k+ paycheck in PE to move back to SF to start a company where I am paid $0 and will have to live off of a ramen diet. The fact that I am not straight, white, and anglo-saxon however does not play a factor at all (and in fact there are running jokes at many banks and top tier consultancies that the above description puts you in the minority).

On the IBD side (M&A/CF) there's probably less diversity, but again it's not a huge issue. In IBD the division is more down to class than to race.

The trading floor is still male dominated though, although there are a fair number of female quants in the industry.

Currently my team is made up of 2x French men, 1x Nigerian man, 1x Indian Man and me (Irish man) the team leader is an English man so there certainly could and should be better female representation but that was also the case (but to a lesser extent) when I used to work in the telecoms sector.

There is a lot of arrogance and machismo on display but it's less prevalent in the back office - certainly more than what I experienced in other sectors. It is hard to stomach though.

The finance industry doesn't need as many layoffs as other industries because they solved the stick wage problem.

Finance presumably solves this by paying out the majority of compensation in bonuses, which are explicitly tied to the firm's performance. If the company does well, you do well, if the company does poorly, you knew ahead of time that you'd be taking a haircut, so it doesn't feel as much like a broken promise as when wages are cut.

They're not completely immune from layoffs though - when a firm goes under entirely, most of the employee base is let go by the acquirer. And financial firms tend to blow up completely more than other types of firms, because they operate with more leverage. That's why luxury businesses in NYC took a big hit this financial crisis.

But it's an assload of easy money, and once you're in, it's trivially easy to stay in (it's like gambling for a living, where you get a cut of whatever you win, except that you don't actually have to win consistently to continue to buy in because there's always another fool willing to trust you with his money), so it's very easy to end up deciding that there's not enough rational incentive for you to do anything else.

More than anything, I weep for the brain drain that Wall Street inflicts on the rest of the world. Far too many of the smartest people I've ever known were sucked in, people who could otherwise be creating real value doing jobs without which, the financial industry couldn't even exist. IMO, this is the great danger of having a society where the money shufflers are outpaid by 10:1 compared to people of similar ability in other jobs, that too much of our real talent will be wasted on an industry that is practically by definition (as a zero-sum plus fees industry) incapable of creating much more value than it currently supplies.

The smartest people I know care much more about tickling their brains than about earning insane amounts of money. They are happy with their middling six figure salaries doing quantum computing research and the like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines#Hedging_fuel

Shuffling money around is also useful for making public what would otherwise be private information. Greece can profess to the world how solvent they are, but the swap market tells a different story.

As a former professional poker player myself, it never would occur to me to denigrate the work of financiers or suggest that what they were doing was immoral. I was able to morally justify my occupation to myself.. and, as such, it is orders of magnitude easier to justify theirs.

My problem with Goldman and their peers isn't that they won money gambling from other people. It's that in so doing they knowingly destabilized the global economy. The actions of investment bankers have harmed every American, most of whom couldn't even spell CDO let alone know why the existence of so many of them led to Joe Average getting laid off.

I'm not some sort of moral crusader by any means. I really did mean I had less against crack dealers (in fact I think drugs should be legalized, but that's another topic entirely) because the person buying crack knows what they're getting. I don't think everyone can or should be saving lives, they just shouldn't be harming people who aren't knowing and willing parties to the transaction. If my playing poker could have caused economic collapse (in fact the opposite happened, poker became a huge industry that provided lots of well-paying jobs) there would have been an issue.

Also, many of the people being laid off (e.g., construction workers, realtors) are also complicit in harming the economy.

I'm not being intentionally obtuse, but I still don't understand your specific objecton(s). As I read it, I think it comes down to "a difference in degree is a difference in kind."

I would argue that you can't really know that your winnings never caused a lay-off, for example. Perhaps you beat Frank, the owner of an RV dealership in Eau Claire, so badly that he had to let one of his salesmen go to keep his company alive.

You can raise all sorts of objections at this point about the personal responsibility of Frank. He shouldn't be gambling with money he can't afford to lose! He should understand all of the rules before he sits down! He should have a firmer grasp of the probabilities! He shouldn't be playing with his heart instead of his head!

And those are all objections that market participants can (I believe in good conscience) make about their activities. So, I'm not sure exactly where your objection lies.

Is finance too important to be left to the market? (Let's ignore, for now, the moral hazard of current government interventions... unless that's your objection.) If not, should the markets be limited to qualified investors who have demonstrated some level of knowledge? Should market participants be required to diversify their holdings? Perhaps only a certain percentage of one's net worth can be in play?

The money supply was inflated because of the easy money policies of Greenspan and co. Attributing that solely to bankers oversimplifies things.

And let's remember that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two of the groups that originally lobbied for 'increasing homeownership' and thus accelerated the real-estate bubble, are still roaming around scot-free.

The games provide enjoyment to thousands of customers. Don't get me wrong, I'm not curing cancer, but yes it does benefit humanity.

How much? Can you be more, uh, quantitative here?

If you're on the business side rather than IT, the equation changes dramatically upwards. I have a friend who's 5 years into a front office, commodities sales job, starting from the lowest possible rank, and who's now earning £150k per year plus bonus. She started on £30k because she really wanted the job - so her salary has gone up 500% in 5 years. That's not counting the bonus either.

That's not fuck-you money. Few people earn that even at banks. But it is a very comfortable salary.

It's cheap to get that salary, too. All you have to give up is your dreams. My friend who earns £150k hates her job, and used to tell me that every time I saw her.

Don't forget the effect of compound interest: they want your soul as well, and you burn out more every year for as long as you stay.

In my early career, a headhunter came after me to interview with his London bank client. I did a few quick sums at that point, and it's not nearly as attractive a package as it looks.

I'm in Cambridge, UK, so we have quite a few guys around here who get approached by the big London banks or who choose to interview there; a few of my friends did. Without exception, the ones who took the jobs get up early, commute down on overcrowded trains, work long hours during the day itself, and then commute home on overcrowded trains. By the time they've done that, they are so tired that they often don't want to do much on weekday evenings any more. The only thing that might improve the situation is moving to London, but that pushes your cost of living way up.

I don't earn as much money on my decent IT contracts as your £150k+bonus friend, and I've been working a bit longer. On the other hand, by the time you figure out an hourly rate including things like commuting time, I bet I'm not that far off. By the time you factor in the costs of commuting or getting London accommodation, I'm even closer. Oh, and I still have a life Monday-Friday.

I can understand people who go straight into that kind of environment for a couple of years after university, when you're young enough to take it and you're basically making an investment of 2-3 years of having no life in exchange for more comfort for the rest of your life. But I can't understand why anyone would want to stay there for much longer, even with all the financial reward: money is only worth anything if you have time to enjoy spending it.

As for hourly rate, that can be computed easily. My friend works about 12 hours a day, 5 days a week (no weekends, since her work is linked to the markets being opened). She gets 4 weeks of holiday a year, and there's about a week's worth of bank holidays. So that's 47 weeks * 60 hours = 2820 hours a year, on the upper end (assuming no sick days or other unplanned absences).

That works just above £53 an hour.

You could drive that down by counting her (30 minute or so) commute in, but you won't make much difference. The fact is, she earns very good money no matter which way you cut it. And that's not even counting the (very significant) bonus.

I'll grant you that living in Cambridge and working in London is daft, but that's why they have, ya'know, houses and stuff in London. So you can move there rather than spend hours on the train every day.

Cost of living wise london isn't that expensive once you take into account cost of commuting. I'm paying £1300/month for a large two bedroom flat within walking distance of the city.

For base I think your figures are pretty accurate, although bases tend to max out at around £100k (in pure developer roles; developer management can go higher). A lot of senior devs become contractors, with day rates typically being in the £550-£750 range.

Almost half of the people I met in university are now working for banks, and you'll find them either preparing for CFA exams over the weekend or thinking about their MBA applications for next year. These include people with PhDs in Physics and who worked on cutting-edge stuff like quantum cryptography.

Broad strokes: Startups directly create new value, which by definition makes the world a better place, at least for someone. In contrast, the finance industry adds value indirectly by optimizing capital allocation. At best, finance increases efficiency, but it's very hard to measure whether it's helping or just exploiting the complex rules to skim off the top. In contrast, startups without a value proposition fail.

A B2B startup, much like finance, will only increase efficiency. If I build HRWeb (replace your human resources dept with the internets), all it does is makes a bunch of other companies more efficient.

As you say, some B2B startups sell efficiency to the organization.

But there is also good money in selling products to the employee collective, even if they decrease efficiency of the organization.

For example, you can sell employees a product that gives them job security by making them appear more valuable. You could sell them a tool that will help them get rival employees fired.

Both of these would come at a cost of efficiency, but would be excellent B2B products. In the end, it's the employees who sign the purchase orders, not the organization.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these make up a much larger portion of B2B products than most people would think.

Exactly why I moonlight as a crack dealer, with the odd stint pimping adolescents I meet at the bus terminal. Sorry for the lame attempt at the witty reply... I guess the point is that not doing something doesn't mean it won't happen, but it does mean you won't do it, and that matters to some people.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/27/business/la-fi-goldm...

Investment bankers created and sold the toxic assets (which they knew to be toxic) that caused the financial meltdown.

The top commenter explained a few more terribly evil things they do as well. For more examples, read any book ever written about Wall Street.

You can't ignore the benefits created by investment banks. Without them we wouldn't have had the financial meltdown; but neither would we have had the rapid growth of the last century which has largely been fuelled by financial markets enabling huge amounts of investment. Without the investment banking sector you would have no IPOs, no financed takeovers, no VCs, even bank lending to small business would be close to non-existent. If you want to see the impact of financing, have a look at places which have introduced microfinance in recent decades. It has a transformational impact.

But the problem is the industry has fundamentally changed as it's been deregulated from the useful industry of yore that you mention (helping to efficiently allocate capital and provide liquidity, entirely separated from retail banking) into highly leveraged gambling institutions with a small arm that still provides some of those old services.

The guys inside the big investment banks who do the things you're talking about are more or less insignificant to the results of the big banks. The traders look at them the way a programmer at Google probably looks at the cooks in the cafeteria. All of the money is on the bond floor, and that's where the damage has been (and will in the future be) done.

In a couple of those classes, for example FX, the volume of speculation trading exceeds the volume of "real" trading, but again that's not without it's benefit. FX spreads have dropped dramatically and liquidity is near instant and it's much harder for an individual company or country to deliberately interfere with the market price of a currency.

Prop trading which is essentially the gambling part of most banks generally tends to be a relative small part of most banks. When it comes to trading most banks make their money from market making rather than any kind of prop trading. Bank share holders generally don't like prop trading due to the high risks involved.

In terms of risk there are obviously cases where bankers are taking excessive risk (because there's a high personal upside and low personal downside risk) and that's one of the factors that contributes to the failure of some banks. But it's not as if the activities the banks undertake are fundamentally wrong, rather that the rewards for the bank aren't matched by the risks.

In terms of morality there's very limited number of banking activities you could point to and say "that's morally wrong". You could for example reasonably argue that a salesperson at a bank selling A* rated CMO's to a pension firm is morally in the wrong if they suspect that the default rate on the underlying mortgages are higher than the triple A* would suggest, but on the other hand it's not as if he's selling it door-to-door to pensioners, he's selling it to a professional banker representing the pension fund whose job it is to do the due diligence on the product he's buying. A certain amount of responsibility for the purchase falls on the buyer of the product. As the old saying goes "It takes two to tango".

What ended up happening is the counterparties (most notably AIG) had taken on far more in credit default swaps than they could pay out, meaning there was lots of risk hiding off balance sheet. This is why Uncle Sam had to bail out AIG. (The Fed could have bailed out all of the people AIG owed instead, but that would have been far more work for no clear gain.)

Show and tell day? :)

This is a huge simplification, but consider for every four hedge fund managers, one goes long the market, another short the market, another long volatility and another short volatility.

No matter what it's very likely one or two out of those four perform very well over one year. Start with enough hedge funds and throw on enough leverage and after a few years, there are bound to be some huge outlier-sized winners and many other blowups. It's like a big roulette table, but every possible outcome has someone betting big on it.

Contrast that with startups, where almost every startup has exposure to market beta (either in receiving funding or finding an acquirer). In addition, it's quite possible every music startup in the industry goes bust, or every PDA-maker startup, or every online poker startup, etc. The roulette wheel has an infinite number of bets, and can easily land so that no one wins.

Edit: I'm very convinced there are people with extraordinary skill in investing and/or in founding startups. I'm only suggesting how the Forbes 400 list could still exist if it was pure luck and no skill.

The "beta" of finding funding or an acquirer is a funny kind of beta--it's highly unlikely that a great company will not get their first $1mm in funding because the VC world has just been deprived of $1b in assets allocated.

The cheapest way to short a startup is to bet on whatever establishment they're taking on. You could have shorted MSFT before they were public by buying IBM; if Big Iron kept on winning, you'd keep on getting your dividend checks. But startups are more akin to, e.g., long-shot CDS trades: the people betting against them get a predictable, incremental profit, or a massive, sudden loss.

In some ways, there ought to be more variation with startups, because consumers will tend to pile onto the market leader because they're seen as reliable, which starves other firms in the industry and shifts resources onto a few big winners. The information cascades among consumer businesses can be much bigger than the information cascades among financial firms.

Also, if I think startup X sucks, it's not that obvious how I can bet against them and get rich on their dismal failure. But if I think hedge fund Y is doing stupid things, I can take the other side of their trades, and one of us will wind up rich.

Compete with them. If you think startup X sucks, then enter the same market, gunning for the same customers, but serve them better.

It's harder to do this than for a financier to short a stock, but that's because everything in finance is higher leverage than in business. The goal of an entrepreneur is to do things better than established businesses; the goal of a financier is to predict which firms will do things better, and then divert capital to them. The actual effort involved in finance is simply a decision, but that decision needs a lot of information to be correct more often than it's wrong. (None of which changes the relative likelihood of wealth concentrating at the top of one of these fields.)

At least in financial derivatives trading, there is a somewhat zero-sum aspect to who is winning and losing money. Every dismal derivatives trade should have some winners on the other side.

Unless the market collapses. In that case, all you have are losers.

OTOH, markets collapse not because resources are destroyed, but because investors realize they never existed.

And people who were short.

Finance/Investments:

  Total People: 81
  Avg Net Worth: 181.77
  Avg Age: 62.32

  Total People: 48
  Avg Net Worth: 321.47
  Avg Age: 45.43

It seems that technology > finance, in terms of net worth and number of years required to achieve that worth. While a financier may be more likely to make the list, the expected value for a tech entrepreneur seems to be much higher.

In the light of morning, I'd like to amend my statement to "the expected value for a tech entrepreneur seems to be slightly higher", based on the definition of an expected value:

  81 / 400 x 181.77 = 36.80
  48 / 400 x 321.47 = 38.57

Now for more modest monetary goals, there's still no better field than finance. The only path to the Forbes list is through entrepreneurship, but finance opens up additional paths to millionairehood. Make it to Managing Director at an investment bank? Become a successful trader? You'll get 7-figures in yearly comp. Wanna do that in the tech world? You'll need a successful exit.

That is indeed true, but "start-up" has specific technology connotations in the minds of most people here.

With Renaissance, it's even in their name - the full name of the company is Renaissance Technologies, not Renaissance Capital.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dalio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Simons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Schwarzman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paulson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Och

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shaw

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_A._Cohen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_C._Griffin

If you're curious as to whether I included any specific people please feel free to ask.

- Hedge funds and other money management

- Private equity

- Investment banking

- Leveraged buyouts

- Proprietary trading

- Traditional (retail) banking and credit cards

I did not consider heirs with investments to have gotten their money in finance, unless they increased their original sum ten-fold or more (in real dollars). I also did not consider real estate investment/speculation to be finance.

I actually counted VCs as having made their money from technology rather than finance

You know my next question then: what is the financier/founder ratio if you consider VCs to be financiers?

"Startups are a comparatively new phenomenon. Fairchild Semiconductor is considered the first VC-backed startup, and they were founded in 1959, less than fifty years ago."

Clearly, he's referring to tech startups specifically. If you consider any small company that becomes big a startup, then Rockefeller and Carnegie made their wealth in startups.

You see, while these guys are in Finance, at least 1/3rd of the above have serious hacking skills, not traditional finance skills;

  James Simons - math, but closer to hacker than financier
  Kenneth Griffin - was financial hacker , not a dealmaker
  DE Shaw - another hacker, a computer scientist/compbio

"While still at Harvard University, he started two funds from his dorm room, and he claims that in between classes he would make trades. He even installed a special satellite link to his dorm to acquire real-time market data. After graduating with a degree in economics, he won the attention of an investor named Frank C. Meyer, founder of Glenwood Capital [1]. Meyer was amazed at Griffin's success and rate of return with his investments (which at the time were largely based on convertible bonds), and provided a relatively small investment for Griffin to invest ($1 million) [2]. Griffin exceeded Meyer's expectations, and as word of his strong performance spread, investors persuaded to back Griffin. Citadel was officially founded Nov. 1, 1990 with $4.2 million; the name "Citadel" was chosen to suggest strength in times of volatility [3]." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_C._Griffin

Well, he wasn't WRONG. He just advised you to make a stronger argument, since the data is easily available.

Original Post: http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320439

  > Despite the high risk/high reward, I think the
  > expected value (in money) of going to Wall
  > Street is still quite a bit higher than that of
  > a startup.

  > The one place data is easy to find is at
  > the high end-- in the Forbes 400-- and there
  > at least that is not the case.

I think this data can also answer the question. Has any one done any calculations on this front?

http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320439

Raw data:

http://www.forbes.com/lists/home.jhtml?passListId=54&pas...

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/54/rich-list-09_The-400-Ric...

I think if economic wealth is used as a measure instead of monetary wealth, pg would be spot on. What say?

> 211 new people entered the Forbes 400 list during this ten-year period. > Of these, 59 were from finance. > 17 were from technology.

He said: 'that list (of deltas) would be dominated by Finance'

So how exactly was he wrong wrong?

pg said, in response to "the expected value (in money) of going to Wall Street is still quite a bit higher than that of a startup.", "in the Forbes 400 [...] at least that is not the case."

There's something about the way you phrased this that makes me think you were gunning for pg. It would be nice if you included the complete breakdown, as well as your criteria for determining tech vs. finance. Since you had to manually go through the entire list, I can't imagine it would have been difficult to record your results.

I was responding to him specifically, yes.

"Since you had to manually go through the entire list, I can't imagine it would have been difficult to record your results."

Not actually difficult, just time-consuming (I did it by having the two different lists, sorted by name for easy comparability, in two adjacent browser windows).