“What's your most unconventional advice?”
The GCI Podcast has only one, incredibly strict tradition. At the end of each episode, the host asks their guest to pass on their most unconventional advice. As you can imagine, over a year of podcast episodes, we’ve gotten quite a lot of words of wisdom. One of our guests suggested creating a “cheat sheet” with all of the advice that got accumulated. We thought it was a fantastic idea so here it is -- we’ll be updating it with every new episode.
Jobs Applications, VCs, & Time Management with the Co-Founder of Intern From Home, Chuck Isgar
“Optimize for being imperfect. I think we live in a day and age where everyone wants everything to be perfect or ideally grayed into the best of your ability. What I have learned from Intern From Home, prior entreprenurial experiences, and VC experiences, the most successful people are never perfect. They’re never 100% of the way there. No project, or company is ever finished. That end state doesn’t really exist. The only end state that exists is when something shuts down, probably because you optimized for too much perfection in the first place. And I would go on to say that, especially for students going on to internships, not even just internships, think about anything, think about school work: it’s so important to remember that you’re human, you’re not expected to be perfect. Anyone that expects you to be perfect is being unrealistic and is probably not someone you want to work for. I think back to Intern From Home, the last two years building it, we’ve probably done so many things wrong. And had so many opportunities to have done things better. But that’s probably the case for so many founders, including those of super successful companies. It’s important to remind yourself that you can try to take advantage of those learnings if you want to. Steve Jobs famously said in his Stanford Princeton Address, ‘You can’t connect the dots looking forwards, you can only connect them looking backwards,’ and I think that’s certainly true. I think that building BrainChain was not a waste of time, but that was something that didn’t work. It was over a year of that and I never knew when that would come in handy. But those experiences were pivotal in me being able to make my contribution in building Intern From Home. That’s just one example of this. Taking the pressure off of yourself, that everything has to be great, that you have to have the perfect resume, or have the perfect cover letter. At the end of the day you don’t. You want to put your best foot forward. You want to be professional in nature, but if you’re a founder sometimes it’s actually the mistakes you make that end up leading you towards the right path. We’ve run newsletters for Intern From Home where we didn’t do the formatting how we wanted to. We accidentally sent them out and we quickly learned: oh my goodness, that actually yielded better rates of people reading it than before. The point there is reminding yourself, we don’t know everything, in fact we know very little, and we’re constantly learning. If you have this mindset towards perfection, it’s really hard to keep learning. This constant growth mindset of learning and imperfection, is what I would like to leave everyone with.”
Investment Banking Debrief: Summer Internships with the GCI Board
“So remember in high school when you would pull out a pack of gum and everyone would be like can i have a piece. If you do that at work, either with gum or with something really simple you become a go-to person for gum or whatever it is for you. That’s a really easy way for you to build a connection with people and have people go to you for the smallest things.” — Kristina Yarovinsky
“For me I would say my most unconventional piece of advice is to list something on your resume as an interest that nobody else would have. For me, as an interest on my resume I always list fashion and clothing. That’s not even something where I’m interested in trends in the clothing industry or fashion or anything like that. But I always talk about how I like having a unique sense of style or having particular brands that I like to follow and wear. Just finding something that is an interest that you can talk about that nobody else would have and that differentiates you as a candidate. That’s important because it builds a closer relationship with the person you are interviewing with. The amount of times that I have been asked about that interest on my resume is just very high, it shows up in half of the interviews I have had.” — Steven Skomra
“My unconventional advice to anyone listening to this podcast is don’t be a hardo. The stereotypical people working in finance is that they’re very intense. Often, that’s not very likeable. When you’re in the workplace, or when you're even a student at Georgetown, I really encourage you to not be extremely hardo.” — Anjunae Chandran
“I’m not sure how unconventional this is but I think it's really important in life and just in general not just in working, to enjoy small things in your life. For example, I really like coffee so I always try to take time out of the day to just go get coffee, and enjoy my coffee. I think that’s really important to kind of ground yourself and improve your mental health if you can really focus on those little things in your day that make it enjoyable, even if you are dealing with a lot of things that you don’t want to deal with that day.” — Rob Mortimer
“I would definitely echo Rob. I think working in banking and working this many hours can be really tough on your mental health. At the beginning of the summer on my walk to work, it took me about 20 minutes to walk to work, I used to listen to podcasts or try to figure out the news or read the news on my phone and I would already be in the working mindset. I realized this wasn’t actually good on my mental health. Instead I would call Kristina. Kristina did S&T so she was up way earlier than I was and I would walk to work around 7/7:15. We would talk about non finance related things in the morning and then if Kristina was too busy I would listen to my favorite music. Either talking to Kristina, or listening to my favorite music, or listening to a podcast I’m actually interested in, I walk into work ready to learn. You’re going to be there 12-14 hours and you’re going to be reading and working the entire day. Taking your commute time for yourself, as opposed to another way to work, is so important to start the day with the right mindset.” — Elle Gaffney
Quickfire: Senior Recruiting & Fixed Income Research with Phil Salandra, GCI Alum
“Don’t be afraid. I think a lot of the time, we go with what seems to be really good, that’s closest to us. Say you’re looking at a fruit tree, obviously you’re not going to pick a small apple, but you’re going to go for a good sized apple that’s within your reach. As cliché as this sounds, one thing that I recommend is seeing all the opportunities you have and spending the time to do that because you might find something that you really like that you didn’t know existed. So don’t just say oh hey this group is interviewing on campus, let me go and just go to that. Watch as much as you can and pay attention as much as you can because there is a better likelihood you are going to find something you are really interested in. You may have a lot of friends applying to bank XYZ and you can also apply to bank XYZ, but make sure when you talk to people at bank XYZ, find out what the opportunities are, you don’t just apply to consumer investment banking.”
From GCI Co-Founder to Head of Global Capital Markets @ Goldman Sachs, Eric Jordan
“I like to make pizza. I like to make pizza because I found that if you don’t go through the second amazing step of making your own dough (which is great if you can find the time) and you go to your local pizzeria or any place where you like the crust, they will sell you the dough. You can generally, if you already have the dough and a jar of good tomato sauce, and whether it's shredded cheese or whatever you want to put on your pizza, if you have those things in your refrigerator, this is like a good lunch or dinner that you can make any time very quickly. You don’t have to wait for delivery, or if you’re on a budget, it's a great tool. But the most annoying thing about pizza is working the dough, and for years you have watched movies of people throwing the dough in the air. And so, the most unconventional advice I can think of and give you is: if you’re making your own pizza you do not need to spend a tremendous amount of time with a big bowl, all you need to do is one it’s helpful to have it at the right temperature if it's too cold or certainly if it’s frozen it needs to be thawed. If it's too cold it's hard to work it so let it get to room temperature. But then, even if it's a little cold, if you stretch the dough with your hands, in roughly the shape that you want, and then you put heavy things on it, like full bottles of water on it or something like that. Leave it for a couple minutes while you prep the rest of your pizza. You don’t have to struggle with the dough and toss it in the air and do all that goofy stuff you see on tv.”
Microcap Investing Strategies with Hedge Fund Manager Connor Haley, Alta Fox Capital
“I don’t know if this is unconventional or not, but: regardless of the industry you are studying or aspire to be in, I would encourage people to study the winners, both the people and the businesses. Study who you want to be, how they got there, and come up with your own formula that plays on your strengths and weaknesses, and don’t leave it up to chance or a mentor. I hate the idea of people saying investing is an apprenticeship business. That may have been true during the Benjamin Graham days, or even the early days of hedge funds when information wasn't out there. Nowadays, there's so much out there. If you are passionate about investing you have so many tools to get better and more knowledgeable every single day. If you truly study and get better every single day, you can teach yourself the great principles and not rely on others to spoon feed their own method.”
Bankruptcy, Valuation & Investment Strategies with Kate Waldock
“This is not unconventional. You probably ask for unconventional advice and receive very conventional advice, so this is going to be one of those instances. Having been an academic student my entire life, I didn’t really figure out my schedule until after college. I’m a night person. It’s annoying because I will wake up late and not be in the zone to do work and will then feel like oh my gosh that I will not have enough time to do enough work. What works for me is: if you know you can’t start real work into 12:30pm or 1pm, you need to work through dinner. If I interrupted my work for dinner, I would start reading or watch a TV show and I wouldn't keep working.”
Investment Banking vs. Private Equity with PE Associate Michael Li
“Something that I think Georgetown does a bad job of is to emphasize: you are going to get so much more out of life if you embrace things that are unfamiliar to you. The worst thing you can do is surround yourself with people who think like you, have the same background as you. There is one matter to surround people with the same mindset, attitude, and approach (hardworking and driven) but it's another matter to surround yourself with people who think the same way and surround yourself with an echo chamber (all finance people- same job and career trajectory). That’s incredibly dangerous and you close yourself off.”
The Wisdom in Finance with Prof. Vladimir Mukharlyamov
“I will leverage a chapter from a book that talks about CS and human decision making called Algorithms To Live By, which talks about the parallels between Finance and CS. One of the chapters is called Explore vs. Exploit. Once you run a podcast, you will figure out what works for you. Once you figure it out it will be the exploit element. You will be able to exploit what makes you successful. At the same time, you will not know everything so there will be room for exploration. Maybe you try something new, experiment with a style of questions, and that experience will be valuable because you will see what works and what doesn’t work. So once you see that something works, it will go from the exploration realm to the exploitation realm. Imagine you move to a new city and you have no information currently so you cannot really exploit, but you can explore. You can go to different restaurants every day or every week and you will eventually find the restaurants that you like and engage less in the exploration and more in exploitation and imagine you end up at the very end of your city. On your last day, you will do more exploitation, you will go to the restaurant that you like to make sure is your last day in the city. The value of exploration is low on your last night. We can apply this example to the movie industry. If you think about all of the endless sequels that Hollywood is putting out, all the avengers, all the spiderman movies, these are purely exploitations of what the movie industry knows already works. The movie industry has curved into an area where there isn’t much exploration going on. This is what Martin Scorsese wrote in his op-ed in the fall of 2019 when he said the movie industry isn’t what it is before. There’s no more risk. You are all young, so the value of exploration is high, you will stumble on good ideas and you will be able to use them far into the future.”
Personal Branding & Organizational Behavior with Marketing Prof. Christie Nordhielm
“The first thing to remember is that no matter what you do, whatever choice you make will be the right choice. It'll be fine, you guys are all choosing from amongst wonderful opportunities and if you don't know what to do, you’re probably listening to too many different pieces of advice from outside. So it's a time to become mindful and pay attention to responses to things, what’s currently turning you on and not turning you on. It’s not like you have to work in finance for the rest of your life. You have the ability to change so quickly, you should take advantage of that and just take whatever's in front of you, put your heart into it learn from it, and then just go to the next thing from there and don't get so caught up in your underwear about making the exact perfect decision for the rest of your life. Nobody has any idea of what's the perfect decision so the perfect decision is the one that you execute well and with passion.”
MBA Prof. Arthur Dong: Warren Buffet Valuations & MBAs
“When you enter a partnership, do your due diligence. Understand that it's just like in a personal relationship: ”get to understand and know and understand who you are getting in bed with”. Get to know the person's character whether or not they have integrity, are they representing themselves accurately, are their interests aligned with yours etc. Make sure that if things go bad that you actually have a sort of a safety valve baked in. Warren Buffett's expression is “always understand how to cover your losses and that you have a margin of safety” so a lot of that comes down to sometimes common sense but also your ability to probe character. A lot of that comes with life experience unfortunately and sometimes you have to be burned a few times to really understand how to evaluate character. In the end, those are some of the most important lessons we will learn when we interact with unsavory or questionable people.”
CIO Panel: Value Investing with CIOs Michael Keane & Alexander Jaros
“We can give some good resources if that's adequate. In terms of websites and newsletters to jump on to learn regularly, there are the Axios News newsletters that come out every morning on everything from energy investing, to what they call their Wall Street Daily Breakfast, to M&A News etc. Others include finviz.com which is a great screener and visualization tool, there's guru focus which is a similar tool made for Value investors and incorporates a lot of value investor Theory. Aswath Damodaran’s valuation videos on YouTube are excellent. In terms of authors, Howard Marks, Seth Klarman, Benjamin Graham Warren Buffett, Joel Greenblatt. I also recommend looking into behavioral finance/behavioral psychology and suggested reading things by the researchers like Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman and others who wrote in that field.”
Interviewing & Networking with GCI's COO: Andrew Siegelin
“When you are sending a networking email to an alum, always end it with Hoya Saxa and then your name. For some reason, I have a much higher response rate when I send that.”
The Back Office with GCI's CFO: Jeff Eaton
“This comes from one of my favorite movies, Field of Dreams, and that's “if you build it they will come”. It's tough when you're struggling and when people don't want to follow you, but you believe you have a great idea, it's tough to sit there and just be like, “Okay, I need to wait this out” and if you hold fast to that and persevere I think that the results can be limitless. I think that's particularly important if you want to start a new company. It'll take some time for it to catch on, it's going to take some time for your vision to be realized but if you build a solid framework, people will come.”
A Fireside Chat with GCI's CTO: James McCarey
“Mentorship takes a lot of effort, the thing with being mentored is that you can't expect people to just come help you. Everything is a two-way street. You have to reach out to your mentors and then ask questions. I think that I was always waiting for people to come into my life and be like “I am your Mentor, let's go, I tell you everything to do” but in reality mentorship happens when people say “if you ever need anything ask me” and I think people really mean that. I think that you should change your definition of mentorship so that when someone says that to you, you're like “okay this is this is a mentor, this is someone that I can ask for help and should ask for help” whenever you're coming across a decision. So I think that helps with understanding that you probably have more mentors and you think, and that’s really crucial.”
Leadership with GCI's CEO: Eman Rahman
There’ll be times where I write something and think “God damn these two sentences are fire, this is so nice, so great” but sometimes you realize that might detract from your argument. Yes, there can be nice language in there to make those points but if something is not making the point, it can be trimmed as fat. You must Kill Your Darlings no matter how much you love those sentences. If they don't add to the whole then just cut it out. Sometimes you need to do that with life too. If you spread yourself too thin like butter scraped over too much bread, obviously the bread isn’t going to taste as good.”