Why do so many top students end up at niche financial firms and under the radar startups?
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epxa03
Dec 28, 2018
34 Comments
It feels like you don’t see all that many people from Stanford/MIT at FB/G anymore. Relative to their size of the companies you see many more going to more secretive and niche financial firms like HRT, Five Rings, Ansatz Capital, etc or other startups that I’ve either never heard of or are moderately big like Quora. Do they know something that most people don’t? Are these sort of firms much more lucrative or better career wise somehow? Why does this happen? It seems people like they could easily work in FAANG but choose not to
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Piazza does annual surveys about this. Standard students are more attracted to startups. CMU are more of Google types. MIT is in the middle
https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2017_one_pagers/scs/BS_SCS_One_Pager_2017_%20rev.1.18.pdf
Google hires similar amounts to FB proportionally given FB is smaller than google.
And on the FAANG front, I’ve done a lot of interviewing and people from elite schools are not nearly as good as you might think
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The HFT prop shops and quantitative hedge funds all recruit heavily out of Ivies, Chicago, MIT , and a bit from Stanford/Berkeley. Some of them also have many math and programming competition people, so network effect also kicks in.
Some young but big startups like Robinhood, Flexport, Doordash have strong connections to Stanford and Berkeley and recruit heavily on campus.
Young American citizens from top schools and well off families, in many cases Silicon Valley based families, don't care much about TC, wlb, Visa sponsorship, ladder climbing, stability, etc they care more about having fun with like minded friends and tackling hard problems with small teams.