In this episode of Careers in Finance on FinPod, we chat with Chris Stanley, an experienced finance professional turned successful business founder, about his journey to where he is today.

During this episode, Chris shares how he has found that leaning into the network you have at an early age, no matter how big or small, is the best way to scale your career. He studied Economics at Yale University and landed his first job in Sales and Trading at Nomura in New York. He credits this experience with establishing the hustle, work ethic, and resilience required to be an entrepreneur.

Today, Chris is the Founder of Patterns.app and is passionate about leveraging AI to boost productivity and accuracy and transform the workflow of financial accounting in today’s data-driven world. Join us as we chat through all of this and more.

Transcript

Meeyeon (00:13)
Welcome everyone back to another episode of our FinPod podcast. Today we’re doing a careers in finance series with none other than Chris Stanley. So welcome, Chris.

Chris Stanley (00:25)
Hi, Meeyeon. It’s great to be here.

Meeyeon (00:27)
I’m super excited to be sitting down with Chris because his career path from the beginning to where it is now is something that a lot of our listeners really aspire to. And so, we’re going to get right into it today.

One of the questions I always like to start off our interviews with is just very basic, which is, know, how did you get your career started in finance? Was it super intentional? Or was it more accidental as accidental as it can be, because it is a very focused path. Because, yeah.

Chris Stanley (01:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, so it was definitely very intentional to start. You know, I, I always wanted to make a lot of money. So I think like, that’s one way to just jump straight to it. And finance is a great way to do that. Because yeah, you manage a lot of money, and you see that the money flows. And so,

Meeyeon (01:17)
I love that. That’s such an honest answer because that’s like, at the end of the day, one of my reasons why I started where I did too.

Chris Stanley (01:24)
yeah, I know. like, my path had been I mean, I worked at Nomura Securities, before that I was at Yale. And I mean, really followed networks in my my whole career. So I went to Yale through a strong alumni network from my high school and then transition that onto Wall Street where I worked at Nomura Securities and follow the network of Yale football alumni. And I feel like this is a very strong piece of career advice is

like where you have powerful networks, they’re small enough that you can have a position in it. Like you should follow that. And, I think there’s a lot that I took away from my experience in Nomura, which I mean, transitioned quite dramatically into now I’m a startup founder for a company named patterns, we’re applying to AI and finance and automating workflows and reporting. but that the path had been, the path had been a lot in between my experience at Nomura, all the way through to what I’m doing now.

But yeah, I mean, it was intentional to start from the very beginning. And I kind of way found my way to where I am now.

Meeyeon (02:29)
And when you were at Yale, how did you decide what you were going to major in?

Chris Stanley (02:34)
Yeah, I mean, Yale just has an amazing economics department and it was a pretty clear decision from, from day one. so I majored in economics and psychology economics because I needed to get a job in psychology because I was genuinely very interested in it. and it actually ended up being a pretty awesome combination. yeah, there’s a lot of research in behavioral economics that, was really dear to me. And I did a lot of, my own writing around that as well.

Meeyeon (03:02)
And right after, did you do any internships while you were there or was it that in your fourth year you decided, okay, like this is the path that I want to take, like I have some network in it, I’m going to kind of pursue that route. And then you went through the kind of, I forget what it’s called nowadays, but it’s like called like Super Saturdays or something. I forget what it was called, but where you do, you know, like all of the interviews with every major firm and then you get called back.

Chris Stanley (03:22)
Mm-hmm.

Meeyeon (03:28)
Second and I believe the third which is kind of where you do more like rigorous Excel-based testing and what-not.

Chris Stanley (03:36)
Yeah, yeah, so I definitely did a fair bit of that. However, yeah, my work opportunity came from personal networking. Like I like went and sought out people that were in roles that I wanted to have and asked them for advice and took the trip down to Connecticut to New York multiple times every summer to develop relationships.

Meeyeon (03:43)
Amazing.

And like that is so I remember doing a similar thing when I was in living out in Toronto and like doing the kind of I had one internship and from there I had a great mentor who introduced me to other people that kind of expanded my network. But it’s the process of going actually like physically going and starting to meet these people and then trying to see like, this person has the job that I would eventually like to get into would love to learn from that

and see how they got there, how they’re enjoying it today, and what it’s like. It’s very different today because people could do it via Zoom. I can’t even fathom the idea of doing that back then.

Chris Stanley (04:31)
Yeah, I mean, think that’s one of the best ways to think about where you want to be in the next year, two years is to get as close to that role as possible. Talking to people, even doing the work. Yeah. I when I, when I, when I took the jump from Namor to go work at startups, I probably applied to man 50 or a hundred startups and for a product manager role. And I would just do the project manager role. And I would send like a three-page document of a writeup of a feature to the PM at the company that would be the hiring manager.

I mean, really just understand, get their feedback on what it would be like to work there. And I feel like that is such a good way to go about, well, first for your own personal development, to actually see if you want to be a product manager, but then it just puts you in the position to be top of mind for when they are hiring.

Meeyeon (05:25)
And that is like the most entrepreneurial skill that you can ever practice from day one. And you’ve had this largely, I guess, like since high school, because in high school, you’re not necessarily even able to kind of like verbalize as like a 15-year-old, you know, I have this like network, and clearly I have some strengths that I can play to. And then you just went right down that path right from the very beginning.

Chris Stanley (05:50)
Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty lucky to have strong role models. Like some people would come back that like went to Wharton and then also, yeah, played football at U Penn and like they would speak to us when we were students in high school. And so it was really nice to have a role model to kind of drive your career against.

Meeyeon (06:08)
And you went to high school, was it, in California?

Chris Stanley (06:12)
Yeah. So I up in Los Angeles, went to Loyola High School. and yeah, just an amazing experience there. And then, yeah, I went to Connecticut. I, when I, when I accepted my offer, I honestly couldn’t tell you where it was on a map. but that was a completely, yeah, I mean, a completely new experience for me to, live on the East coast for, for eight years. Yeah. So four years at Yale and then four years in New York afterwards.

Meeyeon (06:25)
Hahaha.

Yeah, it’s such different kind of vibe, I remember. So I grew up in Vancouver, which is the western part of Canada, and I went out to Toronto for school. And I just remember it being such a shocking experience, not in terms of just weather, but culture and just kind of everything. But lo and behold, I’m back, and you’re back on the west coast as well. I think we always kind of end up venturing back.

Chris Stanley (06:59)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I will say the time though was, I mean, yeah, change, like, change my personality changed my entire experience and outlook on the world. I think the one thing that I really appreciate is just the East Coast grind, like waking up. Yeah, so I worked on a sales and trading desk at Nomura Securities.

Meeyeon (07:13)
Yeah.

Yeah, so take me through a day in the life of your first year at Namura because that’s an intense job to have straight out of university.

Chris Stanley (07:27)
Yeah. So first thing I grab coffee for the desk and hope I got the order right.

Meeyeon (07:32)
How many did you have to get? Like 20.

Chris Stanley (07:35)
Yeah, it would scale depending on the time of day and everything but yeah, so Do initial research on what happened overnight connect with the London desk. Is there any orders that we’re watching? Yeah, so I was on a sales desk and supported an amazing group of colleagues Thank you for putting up for me for three years there guys and yeah, so I mean,

full sales trade support, eyes fixed on Bloomberg terminals. Trade comes in, you got to execute it, you got to price it. So it was very, very, it was a very, very high stakes role where you got to be fixed at your desk from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. If you’re not executing trades, you’re doing research or figuring out trades for some of your clients, frankly. But yeah, I mean, just the sheer amount of professionalism that everyone brought to the desk and to the trading floor is,

it’s so admirable. And it’s been, I mean, it’s been with me ever since then. And I take it with my day to day here, I still wake up at 7am and I grind it out because it’s just, it’s just the way I am.

Meeyeon (08:45)
And when you were on the training floor for those three years, did you have any kind of like real like formalized training? Did you go through like the before? I remember when we were kind of around we are similar age, I by the same age. So I remember when I started, I had a I was an off cycle hire, meaning I didn’t start directly out of school with like the rest of the with the rest of the crew.

I started out as an investment manager and then in the new year in January I went. So I had to wait six months for any sort of training program. But I did eventually join one. Did you have one right from the beginning to start off with?

Chris Stanley (09:29)
Yeah, so prep from prep from honestly, when the job offer came through, they sent a bunch of materials over. And then they had a global arrangement of all of the interns or not the interns, the new hires went to London for a whole month, they put us up in an apartment building. And we had hands on training for four weeks in London. And yeah, to just meet everyone else from the same class. And

Meeyeon (09:48)
Amazing.

Chris Stanley (09:58)
just get to know people. really what they wanted. mean, like half of it is sales and relationship building. And so it was a, yeah, kind of a great introduction into like what it means to be in this role, but also a great introduction to everyone else in the firm. So you can collaborate and communicate and yeah, I mean, still have friends from Nomura today. Yeah.

Meeyeon (10:20)
Yeah, I was going to ask you, do you still find yourself keeping in touch with the people that you started off with like 10 years ago?

Chris Stanley (10:27)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, whenever I go back to New York, I always link up with with my old bosses, and keep them posted on everything that I’m doing. And, yeah, I mean, circling back a little bit more to that world with with patterns and kind of where I see the future of finance. And I mean, hopefully be able to leverage those relationships again in the future.

Meeyeon (10:45)
Yeah.

And then from where you started in sales and trading to where you are today in patterns, there’s been a really, really kind of, when you look at the bookends kind of, to speak, you can see from the very beginning that you are very entrepreneurial. there’s probably, from people that knew you as a young, young Chris, they probably thought entrepreneurship was going to be somewhere in your path in the future. Take us through, like the gaps,

the big gap in between from sales and trading to patterns today, because you founded several companies along the way, but also what led you to go from sales and trading to product management.

Chris Stanley (11:33)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I’ve pretty much been at all points of the capital structure. So from straight sales to early stage venture to, yeah, working at Square when it right went to IPO. But yeah, I the transition from Nomura over to, yeah, I moved back to the West Coast and landed in San Francisco and worked at Square, the payments company. And, yeah, I always wanted to be,

I just saw my friends working at like Airbnb and Uber and they’re the same age as me and they were managing 500 people. And I mean, it’s because rising tides floats all boats. And yeah, unfortunately, just the role that I was in and in sales and trading and automation was coming and the GFC had just happened and there’s just an imbalance of supply and demand for those seats, frankly. And so I kind of saw that there’s, yeah, maybe an easier path.

And so yeah, took the leap. was hard. I mean, I was thinking about taking a leap for, for almost two years. my first year at, at Nomura, I applied to Square. didn’t get the job. but I, yeah, but I kept at it. And so about three years in, started a company with my, my roommate at the time. Honestly, completely unrelated to finance. It was a three design, platform for furniture and that was really my introduction into developing tech. So,

I became a, yeah, my co-founder, probably wish I was a little bit more technical at the time, but I was able to help with the web application, learned all about client-server frameworks and building web apps. And I mean, that just kind of opened up a whole new area of interest for myself. And so there’s a significant, I’ve probably been

unemployed the equal amount of time that I’ve been employed in my professional career, because as a startup founder, like a lot of times, you’re toying on ideas, you’re re-educating yourself, you’re trying to find something to do. And so yeah, after I left Nomura, I’d been almost re-skilling myself for about a year. Yeah, this was web development. This was learning how databases work, writing SQL, doing data science, writing Python, just all self education. And that was really the foundation for…

yeah, I guess my career in San Francisco afterward, I crushed a technical interview at Square without ever having written SQL in a professional manner ever before. And yeah, I took a role on the risk and business operations team in Square, which was a pretty cool experience having seen, yeah, the company a scale, but yeah, reported to the CFO at the time, Sarah Friar, who’s now the CFO of OpenAI.

And the network that my personal network that I get from Square is all my friends today and business relationships and colleagues. I mean, that’s another thing that I’ll go back to that I mentioned before, like I followed my alumni network, but the network here at Square is, I mean, really what, you know, provides all my friendships and business relationships in the city here. And so, yeah, finding these small networks where you can be enough, like a small enough person and a small enough or a big enough person in a small enough network is a very powerful thing.

Meeyeon (14:53)
And as I wanted to touch on a point that you mentioned earlier, because I think it’s really important is as an entrepreneur, there’s, you don’t generally hit it out of the ballpark in one go. And the, that kind of process of growth that requires unemployment at some point is very, very challenging for people. And it’s generally a tough economy. And I see a lot of people today on LinkedIn that

are more kind of open than ever before, especially on a social platform like LinkedIn, and talk about the difficulties of unemployment. Even if it’s chosen, even if you decide to leave a well-paying job in a great field and decide to say, you know, I’m going to scale up on something completely different and go somewhere new, it’s a really, really tough, challenging time. For you, what was it like? Was it like more fun and exciting because you decided like, this is the path that I want to go down?

Or was it, you know, that in the beginning, but then it became like intensely stressful? And did you, what kind of kind of personal growth did you take from that?

Chris Stanley (15:59)
Yeah, it was, was very hard, frankly, like you’re, you know, you’re banging your head against the wall trying to get this web page to load and you don’t know what the problem is. And I mean, honestly, with AI these days, like the, it’s a tutor for everything. So, I feel like self-education just got revolutionized overnight. But it was it was very hard. But I mean, I was early enough in my career. And I’m a very persistent person. And I knew that it would pay off in the long run. And so…

Yeah, I mean, didn’t go like the full route and have a career in software engineering. I’m not a software developer, but I understand how to build technology with a team. And I think that that’s the most important part of the takeaway. Yeah, how to stay energized.

Meeyeon (16:43)
And that’s where you were able to really understand more of the financing behind the business as well. It sounds like you were almost in kind of, like a investor relations role a little bit.

Chris Stanley (16:52)
It was actually more operations. I did report basically all of our risk metrics up to the office of the CFO and then they would have the interface with investor relations. But I’d say the most like the takeaway from the corollary of finance in my time at Nomura to Square is you’re just an extremely analytical person.

Meeyeon (16:54)
or like CorpDev.

Chris Stanley (17:17)
Like I’m not applying bond duration and convexity to my time at Square, even though I like thought about like, do they need interest rate swaps? Could I sell them? But like, yeah, but I mean, it was like, like for for Square risk management, we’re talking about payments, we’re talking about merchants. I mean, this is not like selling interest rates to hedge funds. And so it was very different, however, equally, if not more analytical, because the way that you apply yourself.

Meeyeon (17:22)
Yeah.

Chris Stanley (17:47)
And also, you’re in a different domain because you’re not in the markets domain, you’re actually optimizing company performance, which is the biggest difference between like being on a finance team and being in financial services. But yeah, the takeaway of just like all fans, people are analytical and you could probably apply yourself is very true. And

I think this is why, I mean, there’s been a ton of people in finance that have come to do product management and work in Silicon Valley because they are genuinely very analytical people, and it’s a very analytical job.

Meeyeon (18:20)
Yeah, and like a lot of it just comes with, think, especially being in finance very early on in your career. It, like you said, builds that professionalism from very, very early on. it also, especially if you stay at least kind of like three years or so in the beginning of your career, there’s a lot of like endurance and like persistence and being able to just kind of like put your head down, do the work and get through periods where

it’s challenging and it might not be the most exciting time. You might kind of like question like, I doing the right thing? But to be able to stay in a role that maybe is like a little bit punishing in the beginning for three years, you learn a whole lot, not just about the field itself, but about yourself, what you bring to the table and you really get to kind of see like, hey, I could take this kind of anywhere I go. And like that brings you to like patterns today. There’s like some in between between Square and Patterns today, but…

Chris Stanley (19:10)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so thematically similar in the sense that like business operations, internal company analytics, but I went to go work at a company called Cover after Square, which was a Series A company in the car insurance space. And there I implemented their CRM implemented their ERP built all the data analytics, help them raise a series B did all the boardroom reporting and everything. And I mean, I was basically a mini-CEO in that role

Meeyeon (19:19)
Mm-hmm. Thematically similar, exactly.

Chris Stanley (19:47)
which was, again, like a pretty amazing experience to be at an early-stage company and having the trust of the CEO to wear that responsibility to do all those things for them.

Meeyeon (20:00)
And then how did you come up with patterns?

Chris Stanley (20:05)
it’s like the aggregation of all my professional experience. I think that the, I mean, I had been, I’ve worn many different roles, from processing accounts payable, to, doing compensation to reporting the board metrics out to building automations to this for the CRM. And Patterns was, is my,

it’s basically, well, so Patterns in a nutshell is an AI analyst. But what it does for the finance team is from an operational and reporting perspective, meaning like the AI will look over data within your accounts, your accounts payable or reconcile those accounts. You will work with it to reconcile those accounts. You can ask it questions about your company’s financials. It will produce financial reports. I mean, it’s really meant to be like,

Meeyeon (20:39)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Stanley (21:04)
an individual’s assistant, like a coworker that just knows SQL and knows how to pull data from databases and knows how to compute like in an instant. And so, I mean, I did all this work back at Square and at Cover. And then also, I think that the most interesting and coolest thing about

and if you think about like, if AI has the ability to kind of automate all the back office stuff that I think financial operations teams don’t like, you can compress that role. And then you can have people forward-looking. mean, finance and accounting has been historically backward-looking. And I think that that has been a lot of things it is. I mean, at least from an accountant’s perspective, accountants want to do FP &A so they can be forward-looking. And I think that, like what

the promise of AI and automated back office operations. And so these teams can be much more forward-looking, but the output, the output of the platform, I mean, it’s dashboards and numbers and everything, but these dashboards and numbers are completely auditable, which makes it puts the product in like a very interesting perspective of like, if you want to raise capital or if you need credit and you need to have an investor monitor the credit portfolio of this account.

Like what does it mean to have real time analytics on a company’s performance? If you can get rid of all the paperwork that require you to close at the end of the month and you can daily close and stream real-time data, I think there’s a whole new area of capital unwriting for private companies that there’s just a ton of potential for. I mean, the government has been trying to get people to write SMB loans more and more forever.

From since like the 1960s, there’s been, you know, tons and tons of, yeah, good regulation for people that will write loans for mid market and SMB companies, but it just hasn’t fully penetrated. And even with the financial crisis, there’s been a pullback as well with, yeah, with that type of credit. And so I think there’s a massive opportunity to just have complete business observability over a business and then to turn that into capital opportunities for those companies as well.

Meeyeon (23:21)
Yeah, I love how you mentioned, I’m gonna get the saying wrong, but being kind of like a decent size fish in what is at the time, like not too big of a pond. I’m like not getting, I’m butchering the saying. But when you were at Square, it’s looking on Valley, when for like Airbnb, that was just coming out, or like Spotify was just coming out.

Chris Stanley (23:33)
Mm-hmm.

Meeyeon (23:45)
It’s kind of being in the right space at the right time. But it’s also really interesting how you’ve developed your like portfolio of skills and your career in kind of like the perfect sequence that leads you to square because not square, sorry, but patterns because you’ve had the experience of being sales and trading, which also not just develops your worth ethic, but also like you understand sales, which is one of the most important parts of having a successful business.

But then being through risk and operations, being a product manager, being a founder of a very technical company, learning the, becoming like a full-on software developer, but becoming very robust. And it’s certainly more than the average CEO, founder often is. But it’s so interesting how that has all come to fruition and like come and worked and built up to what you need and what you are in patterns today.

Chris Stanley (24:41)
Yeah, you know, it’s somewhat planned to be perfectly honest, like I knew when I was leaving Amora that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I mean, maybe maybe a founder if I could if I could cut it. But I knew before I was able to do that, I needed the experience. And the experience came from one getting our network at Square and then to having that like almost founder like responsibility at at cover the series a company afterwards. And like the aggregation of that experience gave me the confidence to do this frankly.

Meeyeon (25:16)
And like with data analytics, it’s like just from my personal experiences. So I worked at a place called Restaurant Brands International previously. It’s this Brazilian private equity-owned company that has Birking, Tim Hortons, Popeyes, and whatever they continue to grow with. But I just remember like through emergency acquisitions and consolidations, there is a ton of data integration that happens. So like after the Tim Hortons acquisition, there was a ton

of data work that needed to be done to really consolidate and absorb the company. And then it happens again, but just before we’re able to even like get on our feet. We have another company, Popeye’s coming and that’ll continue to happen and happen. And so with things like patterns, I just realized I was like, like that is a perf, this is the perfect time for companies like yours to come up.

Chris Stanley (25:56)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, there’s there’s two really cool pieces of technology that that kind of underlie patterns at the moment. The first one is a data cleaning data reconciliation project product, where you effectively, you know, point this AI at two tables in a data warehouse. And it will read through just call it an invoice that has maybe 100 different columns on that one invoice, and determine the differences and discrepancies between you know, what your vendor sent you and what you recognize internally

that can be generalized to and then also on the back of that taking action on it. like filing is a dispute with the vendor or asking for a refund. I mean, the same thing can be used in your example of like an M&A where you’re trying to aggregate data from two ERP systems and you want to do like a customer dedupe exercise. You basically have one data table of external companies, customers, and one internal table and join them together, find what the differences are and resolve those.

And so it’s a really cool data cleaning and data automation engine. The second point is the data query. So once you have clean data, which is I think what everyone in the world wants. Yeah.

Meeyeon (27:17)
Which is the biggest task. Yeah, like it is like the most monumental task you need to have like, as you say, a blessed data set.

Chris Stanley (27:26)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

So once you have that blessed data set, then I mean, it’s, it’s somewhat trivial for AI these days to write SQL queries against that to retrieve the data to interpret the data and to give you results. So I mean, I, I fundamentally believe that these two, I mean, general technologies are going to change the ways that we work, it will not only change the human software interface, like like what the human is doing in the software will obviously change what the human is doing.

But if you consider that the software is going to change and the human’s role is going to change, like, I feel like incumbencies or incumbent products are going to have a really hard time adapting to these new interfaces and the new ways that people are going to work. And so I think that a lot is going to change. mean, absolutely a lot will change on a 10 year horizon. Yeah, whether or not that happens in one or two years is to be determined. But I mean, just looking at the co-gen,

code-generation products that you can start to build your own web application with. It’s moving quite fast.

Meeyeon (28:31)
So, you clearly have such a deep subject matter expertise and you are the CEO and founder of your own company and you are in a place where a lot of our listeners will strive to be in the future or are currently trying to work towards. Would you have any

little nuggets of advice or if you were to kind of like look back over the past 10 years of your career, are there any key sound bites that you can give our audience that might be inspirational or encouraging? Things that you wish that if you were your own mentor, could say.

Chris Stanley (29:08)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just had a discussion with my little brother the other day about this. He’s, he’s graduating college this year.

Meeyeon (29:16)
My gosh. So, he’s a little little brother. wow.

Chris Stanley (29:19)
Yeah.

I basically told them to simulate the role that you want. And like, look at a job description. That’s an opportunity. What do they want you to do? Go to their website and, like, simulate that role, because it will get you closer to actually doing that work to learning what it’s like. And then you just send the hiring manager an email being like, I wrote this three-page document about how you should maybe, you know, redesign your website or something like that

or how you should build a feature. Or I remember one of the things that I did was there’s a company named BuildZoom. They were a construction marketplace. I thought that they were not having very high close rates because they were not offering insurance related to the projects that they would staff. And so I wrote up a whole new PRD, a product requirements document, for what it would look like for BuildZoom

to sell an insurance product alongside their construction marketplace. And didn’t get me the job, but it got me four interviews at the company. So, and this was, this was, this was right out of the morrow. This was like one of my first experiences.

So yeah, my advice is simulate the job and make sure you really want it because yeah, if you do that stuff, I think there’s a much higher likelihood that you get it. I just, it’s not my personality to apply to 200 applications and like,

Meeyeon (30:23)
It’s amazing.

Chris Stanley (30:45)
like maybe get a couple interviews. I’m more of a type of person that will like take control of the situation and be, I mean, super extroverted about trying to get that role. And also use it as an opportunity for learning.

Meeyeon (30:56)
The most apparent part is Square, right? That’s the prime example of that, at least that’s what I glean from it.

Chris Stanley (31:03)
No. Yeah, yeah. I was very lucky about the whole interview and everything there. Yeah, I used my network as well to get that interview. So I think making these major career decisions is, yeah, being intentional about maybe where you want to end up, but then knowing that there’s some stepping stones and to take every stone, yeah, pretty intentionally and making sure that you’re going to secure it because you can.

Meeyeon (31:33)
Yeah, and all the different places that you can work in finance, whether you’re directly in investment management or securities versus where you are today. There’s just so many different places that everyone can be in. There really is a spot for everyone in finance.

Chris Stanley (31:51)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you could like, maybe if you’re in, yeah, you know, investment management right now, yeah, maybe there’s a fintech company that’s doing a new thing with personal wealth management, like you’re gonna be working in finance or rather on finance in a completely different environment. And that is, yeah, I’d say that’s, that’s another large piece of advice is you really do want to compound your skill set. So, the first company that I started furnish up, it was a 3D design platform for shopping for furniture.

I personally, in retrospect, was not super passionate about the problem of interior design. And when I was sitting in my New York City apartment writing a blog about the five best couches you can buy this fall, I realized that this job was not for me. And so I think that being able to have a story on like how you compound your experience and what puts you in a really good position for the next time around, like when you’re looking for your next role in the storyline, is very important. Yeah.

Meeyeon (32:49)
My god, I love it. And like, what a way to close out our podcast that is just such a great piece of advice for everyone to continue, regardless of, you know, where you start and what your kind of next steps are. They’ll always just keep in mind that like every step in the journey is an important piece and that you are always compounding your skill set and to make sure that like,

you are consciously doing that because where it leads you eventually is, you know, one can tell where it’s eventually going to lead you. But the story of being intentional, being persistent, being able to connect your network piece by piece will ultimately lead you to success.

And so I hope that everyone has found this episode to be informative and inspirational. I know that I have, and I’ve certainly learned a lot from Chris.

And for now, we’ll say goodbye for now. And I will see you all in another episode very shortly.