By the time I graduated from the University of Arizona, I had done two internships that, between them, taught me exactly what kind of career I wanted and what kind I did not.
The internship that showed me what I did not want
The first was with United Airlines in Chicago, in the accounting and finance department. It was a fine company full of good people, and it taught me something invaluable: I did not want to spend my life inside a large, bureaucratic organization. I remember watching the accounting team work from a calendar that mapped out the entire month, doing the same task on the same day, every single month, like clockwork. It was Groundhog Day in spreadsheet form. I respected it, but I knew with total certainty that I did not want to be a cog in a wheel that large.
There were real highlights. I spent a week with the finance team in United's London office, and I was lined up to go work with the team in Hong Kong as well. I had to pass on Hong Kong only because the University of Arizona starts back in August and I needed to return for the school year. Even so, the most important thing I took from that summer was clarity about the path I did not want.
The internship that showed me what I did want
The next summer I went looking for the opposite experience: a startup, something entrepreneurial. I joined a company called Visitalk.com, which was essentially the same idea as Skype, roughly five years before Skype existed. The founder, Peter Thimmesch, became a lifelong friend, mentor, and business partner, and the people I met there changed the course of my career.
Among them were Michael Cooney, Giles Somerville, and Allan Kaplan, people I still work with and talk to today. Michael in particular would become my first business partner. He had been at Citigroup in San Francisco, where he was the first employee in their institutional fund-of-funds business investing into hedge funds. He left the bank to join Visitalk because he was living in San Francisco during the internet gold rush and watching everyone around him build something from nothing. He and I became friends that summer, and that friendship turned out to be the foundation of everything that came next.
A friendship becomes a company
Right after I graduated, Michael and I founded Blue Sand Securities together. I moved to New York City and started running from client meeting to client meeting, sitting down with early clients like John Burbank of Passport Capital. We were two people working out of our own homes with an idea and a great deal of conviction.
Mike and I worked side by side for eighteen years. Over that time we raised more than fifteen billion dollars of capital for our clients and generated nine figures in fees for ourselves and our employees. We grew Blue Sand from two laptops on two kitchen tables into a firm with offices across the United States, raising billions for some of the largest institutional hedge funds in the world. It was a fantastic business and an even better education.
The lesson
Two lessons, really. The first is that environment is everything. The same person can wither inside the wrong structure and thrive inside the right one, and it is worth a great deal to learn early which one you are. The second is that the most valuable thing you take from any job is rarely the paycheck. It is the people. My career was built on relationships I formed in my early twenties, and I am still building on them today.
The biggest thing I took from those summers was not a skill. It was the people, and the clarity about which life I wanted.