Trading Places
Inside views on the jobs market
Leave Wall Street, join a startup
There’s nothing new under the sun. A decade after Wall Street’s best and brightest fled the financial industry for potentially lucrative stock option-based fortunes in the nascent dot com sector, the job market has once again full circle. Only this time, the start-ups have a massive pool of out-of-work bankers, traders and IT staff to draw from.
Venture capital firm First Round Capital is making a play for laid off financial industry workers, asking them to “Leave Wall Street, Join a Start-up.”
These days, startups are more stable than Wall Street (seriously). And while a startup probably won’t offer the creature comforts of a job in the financial services industry, startups offer different benefits. You get to participate in the creation of something new. Your work makes a direct (and clear) impact on the success or failure of the company. No more politics, endless meetings, or multi-layered organization structures. Plus, you’ll likely get stock options to share the upside.
The site lists a few dozen jobs from First Round and other VC firms like Union Square Ventures.
