The WEALTHTECH Book

Why I Left Goldman Sachs for FinTech

By Adam French

Founder, Scalable Capital

I spent a lot of time thinking about the best title for this chapter, and I wasn’t sure if it should be “Why I Left Goldman Sachs for FinTech” or “Why I Left Goldman Sachs to Join the Robots”. Although many are fearful of our robot overlords, I was a child of the Johnny 5 and R2-D2 era and thus grew up with a love of technology. I ultimately decided that FinTech is probably the more popular option – a sign of the times. I hope my story proves useful as a source of insight for someone looking to leave the world of financial services and join one of the many innovative FinTech companies around the world. To give you some context, I studied at the London School of Economics and read Business Mathematics and Statistics from 2004–2007. Over the summer of 2006, I applied for a number of internships within the world of finance, and I was fortunate enough to spend 10 weeks of that summer working at Goldman Sachs. This is where the story begins.

By the time I started the internship in July of that year, the S&P 500 had rallied up to 1250 from the lows in 2003. I found the internship exhilarating and was excited to go back to university for the last year of my studies with a job offer under my belt. It so happened that when I joined the firm again for full-time employment in September 2006, equity markets were still firing on all cylinders; the S&P 500 was now around 1500. A personal bull-market highlight at ...