If you want to work in finance and do good and be cool and help the little guy, there is a solution. However, you’ll have to go to San Francisco to find it.
Business Insider reports that San Francisco-based Loyal 3 Securities is the new-new thing for technology firms looking to go public. It raised $58m for Go Pro and $14.5m for Virgin America. It’s worked with GoDaddy. It’s worked with Hubspot and Globant.
However, Loyal 3 isn’t your average boutique capital markets firms. Its mission is, “to make it easy and affordable for people to own the brands they love.” To this end, it sells stock not to big investors but to users of GoPro cameras and people registering domain names with GoDaddy. It’s democratizing share ownership and you can learn all about the process by which it’s doing so here.
Who works for this pillar of democratic capitalism? Ex-Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley bankers, of course. Bill Blais, Loyal 3’s executive vice chairman, was an MD at Goldman and Morgan Stanley. Loyal 3 managing director Mark Menkowski was a VP at Goldman Sachs. Chief compliance officer Dana Schmidt spent several years at Morgan Stanley. There are plenty of Harvard graduates and MBAs on the team. Co-founder and chief marketing officer Stephen Klein is a little cooler, however. – Klein once worked for Harley Davidson and spent four years running an incubator devoted to, “experimentation in technology and contemporary art.”
Separately, why bother with the crazy hours in banking when you could just make videos for YouTube. Inc has the list of the highest paid people on YouTube. They’re all under 30. One 25 year-old (Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg) is supposedly making $12m a year thanks to videos of himself playing games and swearing.
Meanwhile:
Not long ago, equity sales and trading was a problem area for Citi. In the third quarter, it was the only area where revenues in the institutional clients group (investment bank) rose. (Financial News)
The real problem area at Goldman Sachs was Investing & Lending. That includes things like the bank’s direct private investing unit, which invests in private equity, real estate, infrastructure and distressed debt, and the “special situations group”, which provides financing to mid-sized companies and invests in the energy sector. (Business Insider)
Over the past five years, Goldman Sachs shares have produced a total shareholder return of 28%. The other four big Wall Street banks have produced an average return of 49%. The KBW banks index (which includes lots of smaller banks) has returned 72%. (Financial Times)
Ex-Morgan Stanley banker lures Goldman banker to his boutique lair. (Financial Times)
Don’t expect the EU’s new securitization rules to create all sorts of new securitization jobs, warns SocGen. (Bloomberg)
Top UK bankers probably won’t be going to prison after all. (Business Insider)
You didn’t get an associate job after your MBA. Maybe you should sue your business school? (WSJ)
Nefarious hedge fund manager hides tablet computer behind ceiling tile. (ABA)
Why grit and persistence can be bad things. (Atlantic)
Computer science is now the most popular course at Harvard. (Fortune)
Photo credit: Ricardo Villar
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